At first, the cute paper hedgehogs seemed like a kind gesture. An older man had crafted the little creations from donated books to raise money for charity, handing them to children in local shops.
But on closer inspection, some parents were horrified to discover the hedgehogs had been made from the pages of an erotic novel.
It was “adult content. Pure sexual stuff,” said Linda Fortune, whose four-year-old granddaughter received a hedgehog.
After posting about the unsettling encounter on social media, Fortune said at least seven other families contacted her to say they had also taken home a hedgehog made from explicit pages.
Jemma Ashby told the Wirral Globe she was shopping at a Tesco in Merseyside with her 10-year-old daughter when a man approached and offered her one of his handmade hedgehogs, complete with googly eyes and a furry nose.
He had a carrier bag full of them and said he made them at home as a hobby.
Ashby said she thought it was a “lovely gesture” and placed the hedgehog on her daughter’s windowsill.
She later came across a Facebook post about the source material and was “disgusted”.
“I ran upstairs and grabbed [the hedgehog]. I grabbed a middle page and it said something about being a legal age, and then another page saying about someone’s sister being murdered. I took it out of her room straight away and hid it,” Ashby told the newspaper.
Some parents were so concerned they reported the matter to Merseyside police.
Officers spoke to the man, who said he normally checked the pages before using them and was mortified by the mistake.
Merseyside police said on Monday the force was “happy there was no malice involved and no offences have been committed”.
A spokesperson added: “The hedgehogs were created in good faith by the individual and have been used to raise money for a local charity.”
Some appear to have been made from Nicholson Baker’s 1994 erotic novel The Fermata, with at least one containing sexually explicit passages.
Some of those who received the hedgehogs defended the man who made them, saying only some contained explicit content and it was just a mistake.
One woman said her four-year-old was “absolutely obsessed” with her paper creation, which was made using pages of Rosemary Enright’s The Walled Garden. “Oversight? Yes,” she added. “I don’t believe [there was] any malicious intent.”
Others were eager to get their hands on a hedgehog. “Who’s the old guy making them? I want one,” said one man, commenting on the Wirral Globe story. “It would be especially fun if it was made from an erotic novel. If anyone knows him, tell him I’ll pay postage.”
