Chuck Caspari enjoys camping: Each year, the 42-year-old property manager treks to someplace like Assateague or New Jersey to reconnect with the great outdoors. But Caspari has traditional notions when it comes to what constitutes a campground, so when his wife alerted him on Oct. 29 that there was a tent on top of their Mount Pleasant row house, he grabbed his kid’s T-ball bat before going to check it out.

Standing astride his Kenyon Street NW abode, Caspari saw that there was indeed a two-man blue-and-gray North Face tent pitched on his new tin roof. “I immediately thought it was some homeless guy up there,” he says. “We get weird people. I’ll be out on the front porch having a smoke or something, and I get all sorts of strange people coming up and bumming smokes off me.”

But the tent was empty: There was only a foam mat and a wet sleeping bag inside; a heavy motorcycle lock was weighing the setup down. Caspari collapsed the tent—”The roof, I draw the line”—and deposited it into the alley.

Now he’s trying to crack the problem of its provenance. “I walked around the block a couple times, and I couldn’t figure out where somebody would be able to climb up, much less with a tent and camping gear,” he says. But just in case there was a secret trail, he’s decided to reinforce his attic hatch with a couple of eye hooks.