Woman Baffled After She Finds Photo of Herself for Sale at a Thrift Shop (Exclusive)

Ansley Martin's sister's friend spotted an old portrait of her family at a thrift store about an hour from where she grew up

The photo once hung in Ansley's childhood home, but neither of her parents donated it and her family still doesn't know how it got there

Ansley chose not to buy the portrait because she has better family photos, but it later disappeared from the sales floor

Ansley Martin's parents have been divorced for 15 years, but somehow, an old portrait of the family was still together — sitting inside a thrift store an hour away from where she grew up. Stranger still, no one in her family had any idea how it got there.

"My sister's friend actually spotted the picture first about a week prior, and sent her a hilarious text saying she found a picture that was really giving 'Ansley and Amelia' vibes," Ansley tells PEOPLE. Once the family realized what her friend had stumbled across, Ansley says she, her sister and her mom got on FaceTime and were "literally crying laughing."

Ansley eventually went to see the portrait herself, a moment shared on TikTok with the text, "found my family portrait at a random thrift store an hour away from my house but my parents have been divorced for 15 years and no one knows how it got here." In the caption, she summed up the family's reaction even more simply: "we're all very confused."

The portrait was instantly recognizable because Ansley had spent years looking at it in her childhood home. In fact, it had been such a fixture that she never noticed when it disappeared, and she had assumed it was still somewhere in the basement.

Her mom didn't remember getting rid of it either, leaving the family with more questions than answers. "Everyone is still so confused and bamboozled by the mystery," Ansley says. "It's become a running joke."

The family considered whether the photo studio could have produced another copy, but they haven't been able to confirm that theory. Their current guess is that someone was more interested in what was around the photo than the photo itself: "Our running theory is someone wanted the frame and donated it," she says.

There was, however, one part of the mystery Ansley had already settled: She wasn't bringing the portrait home. When a TikTok commenter wrote, "i hope you bought it," Ansley responded, "the thing is... i dont want it."

Her reasoning was considerably less sentimental than viewers might have expected. "Honestly it's just not that cute of a picture hahaha," Ansley says of the portrait, which she remembers being taken during a church photo shoot around 2002.

She already has plenty of old family photos she likes better, and after seeing this particular one throughout her childhood, she didn't feel the need to add it back into the collection. "This one feels permanently engrained in my brain from looking at it for so much of my childhood," she says.

Instead, Ansley told the thrift store employees that the strangers whose lives they had been imagining were actually her family. By then, the employees had already been giving the people in the portrait fake names and backstories, and Ansley says everyone got a kick out of finally learning who they were.

One employee even suggested taking the portrait off the sales floor and hanging it in the back office now that they knew its history. That idea became more intriguing when a TikTok commenter said they went to the store a few days after Ansley posted the video and the portrait was no longer there.

Whether it ended up in the back office or went home with another shopper is yet another question Ansley can't answer. A month after posting the TikTok, she says neither parent donated the photo and the rest of the family remains just as clueless about how it made its unlikely journey.

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Ansley is happy, however, that it surfaced at Philly AIDS Thrift, which she says supports local communities affected by HIV/AIDS. She calls it an "iconic Philadelphia institution" and is glad the strange discovery has made other people laugh as much as it made her family and friends laugh.

If a stranger really did buy a portrait of a family they've never met, Ansley is perfectly fine with that too. "I'm not creeped out by the situation, I found the whole thing hilarious, and thought leaving it there was just way funnier than taking it home myself."