Bangor police are on the lookout for a “bad Santa” who handed out candy canes to children in a local department store.

In a roundup of quirky police news posted Thursday morning on the department’s Facebook page, Lt. Tim Cotton wrote the “most bizarre story of the week” involved a complaint about a Santa who handed a candy cane to a young girl as she walked through a store with her mother. The mother thought nothing of the interaction at first, Cotton wrote, but became perplexed and disturbed when she ran into Santa again and he told her “good girls get candy, naughty girls get jewelry.”

“The woman immediately went to management to report that their Santa was a bad one. A veritable Satan-like St. Nick,” Cotton wrote.

Cotton said the store had not hired the Santa and could not find him in the store because he was able to “slip through ladies apparel and small appliances as quickly as prune-filled cookies go through flying reindeer.”

Cotton said police have no leads about the man’s identity or his intentions, but would like to speak with him.


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