Mascot Missing at Nassau Street Wool Shop

If it was a mystery story, it might be called "The Case of the Runaway Ram," but the disappearance of the taxidermied animal in front of this week is a serious matter to its owners.

"He isn’t very mobile so we don’t think someone picked him up and put him in a car," said store owner Robert Landau. "We hope someone took it as a joke."

The thick white wooly coat, bright expression and giant curved horns of the Icelandic ram have greeted visitors to the woolen imports store and inspired many tourist photos since "Lindi" was acquired about 40 years ago, said Landau.

But at over 100 pounds of taxidermied animal on a large rolling base, too large to fit in a car or for one person to handle, how the mascot vanished on Monday remains a mystery, Landau said on Wednesday afternoon.

When the store closed for the day on Monday, he said, employees did not recall bringing Lindi inside, so it might have been taken in the late afternoon.

In 1997 the ram also went missing briefly, capturing area headlines before it turned up in a parking lot in the middle of the night. That disappearance turned out to be a college prank, Landau said.

"At the time we were really offended, because it didn’t seem quite as prankish," he recalled. "There's a fine line between a prank and stealing."

For now, he said he just wants Lindi back.  Although he estimated its worth to be around $10,000, he said it "doesn't have a lot of resale value" but would be impossible to replace.

Landau said Princeton Borough police told him, "We don’t need a picture, we know what he looks like."

A prize ram, Lindi was selected by a taxidermist in Iceland and brought to the United States after the animal led a full life, passed away and then waited through months of storage and quarantine before it could take its rightful place in front of the store.

"He's seen a lot of Princeton history," Landau said. That includes such adventures as being part of wedding parties, the subject of a Princeton University senior paper, and receiving a nod in the New York Times as a photogenic site in Princeton.

"We would just like to get him back," Landau said.

Landau is the third-generation owner of the business, which was founded in 1914 in Jersey City and has been in Princeton for 56 years, selling woolen imports, coats and other clothing items.

Landau of Princeton is located at 102 Nassau Street and can be reached at (609) 924-3494.  Anyone with information about the missing ram can contact Princeton Borough police at (609) 924-4141.