SAANICH, B.C. –
As Connor Nijsse prepared to remove some old drywall during his garage renovation, he feared the worst.
“I found some mould at one point,” Connor says.
He even uncovered a rat once. But instead of a rodent staring out from behind the drywall, Connor recently uncovered a dozen stuffed animals staring back at him.
“You can’t wrap your head around it,” Connor says. “This is weird.”
Then his wife Brianne Hinkkuri pulled out her camera, and Connor pulled off another panel. The video revealed something even weirder.
“[More] stuffed animals!” Brianne can be heard saying in disbelief. “You can’t make this up!”
Instead of insulation, the couple found the entire wall was stuffed with stuffies, from floor to ceiling.
“If you didn’t have it on camera,” Connor says. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
They don’t know who did this or why, because they aren’t in contact with the home’s former owners. But they do know that when they posted the video of their discovery for their friends to see on their TikTok, more than five million others saw it too.
“We realized we needed to do a little more on it,” Connor laughs. “The Internet wanted more!”
So they posted another video showing the 115 cleaned stuffies freed from behind the protective plastic on the wall , and asked if anyone recognized one of them from their childhood.
“And I said, ‘Oh my gosh!” Angela McNellan, who watched the video from her home in Guelph, Ont. And recognized one of the stuffed animals from the wall “That looks exactly like my fluffy yellow duck!”
Angela contacted Connor and said that when she was a little girl she loved her Fluffy Ducky Buddy so much, all its stuffing came out, and her mom ended up throwing it away.
“I was devastated as a kid,” Angela says. “And I’ve always been searching for it.”
So, Connor and his wife agreed to mail not just one of the fluffy ducks from B.C. to Ontario, but two, so Angela’s young daughters could have one each.
“This means something to someone,” Connor says many people have shared heartwarming stories about stuffed animals that are similar to the ones he found. “It’s nostalgia.”
Now Connor has committed to getting as many of these orphaned animals adopted as possible.
“If you can make a difference,” Connor smiles. “Why not?”
So far, he’s sent recovered stuffed animals to strangers across the U.S. and to the UK.
Anglea’s duo of donated ducks just arrived today.
“Honestly it feels like the Canadian spirit to me,” Angela smiles, before showing a photo of her children hugging the stuffed animals . “Its spreading joy to so many families. It’s wonderful.”
And after who knows how many years of beings stuck insulating a wall, these animals are finally free to fulfill their destiny of comforting kids.