When Coronavirus lockdown restrictions were announced, Donna Porée wasted no time in fleeing her home to spend quarantine with her boyfriend on the other side of town.
Among the belongings she left behind as she hurriedly relocated was a simple bag of potatoes she had picked up from the local shop with the intention of cooking them for dinner.
She didn't give them a second thought as she happily passed the time with her boyfriend, before returning to the flat in Caen, France, for the first time three months later.
But when she opened the door she says she was left 'terrified' by the unassuming bag of spuds, which had grown metre-long pink tentacles and reached out to every corner of her small flat.
The communications manager said: "As I opened the front door, I noticed a strange shape at the back of the kitchen.
"As the light was off and shutters down, I didn't realise it was the potatoes.
"It was only after opening the shutters that I took note of this extraordinary sight.
"I was terrified at first, but after realising what it was I laughed a lot and shared a video of the plant on Snapchat.
"My friends couldn't stop laughing. They found the whole situation unbelievable."
Photos show the huge shoots to have pierced through the seal of the kitchen worktops, falling to the floor below, wrapping themselves around a broom and even reaching up to her television.
Donna said it took her hours to completely remove the potato and its army of runaway shoots - but not before sharing a photo to Twitter.
The images have racked up more than 194,000 likes and 60,000 retweets as others say the rogue vegetable left them scared.
Despite the traumatic ordeal, Donna says it hasn't been enough to put her off eating potatoes in the future.
She explained: "I wanted to extract the bag of potatoes from the counter-top seals, but it wasn't easy.
"The shoots had fixed in place in the joints and were difficult to remove.
"I ended up having to cut some of the shoots out with scissors and I had to fill in the holes they made.
"I replanted the potatoes in my vegetable patch and today they're growing once again. I'm eager to see what will come out of the ground."
