By Mark Wineka and Shavonne Potts
mwineka@salisburypost.com
A full moon arrived early in downtown Salisbury Thursday evening.
Going on 6 p.m., store owners and customers were out on the front sidewalks enjoying one of the last, beautiful days of autumn when someone spotted movement atop the three-story Oestreicher Building at 122 S. Main St.
It became obvious quickly there were two naked women and a clothed man with a camera on the rooftop.
“Evidently,” said Dave Loflin, owner of The Thread Shed, “it was a photo shoot.”
According to witnesses, the young moonflowers struck various poses, sometimes sitting or lying on the top ledge of the building with their backs toward the street and facing their photographer.
“Eyes all over the street went wide, heads swiveled up, and mouths dropped open,” a South Main Street store owner, who asked to remain anonymous, said Friday. “It was kind of like watching a train wreck. You could not look away.”
The women were “posing and contorting in their birthday suits right out where everyone could see,” she added.
The male photographer wore a cowboy hat or fedora.
The Salisbury Post owns the vacant Oestreicher Building.
“We knew nothing about the photo shoot and certainly don’t condone it ó with or without clothes,” Salisbury Post Editor Elizabeth Cook said. “That’s private property. It’s also unsafe for people to walk around on the roofs of old downtown buildings.”
The Main Street attractions apparently were oblivious to those who were watching them from the street. Loflin said one of the women was sitting on a towel or blanket at the top with her back to him. “You could see her silhouette,” he said.
The other naked female came running into view as if celebrating freedom and rehearsing a scene from “Titantic,” Loflin said. It was then one of the women noticed Loflin and a friend looking up at them, waved and ducked out of sight for good.
The photo shoot had gone on about a half-hour. Over time, the nearby woman store owner called the Police Department’s business telephone and suggested that an officer check out the girls gone wild scene on the rooftop.
“I’m not a prude,” the storeowner said, “but children don’t need to see that.”
Police Chief Mark Wilhelm gave the following bare-bones account of the incident.
A call about a suspicious person taking pictures of two nude women on the roof of a building at 122 S. Main St. came in at 5:56 p.m.
Officer Matthew Benjamin responded by 6:10 p.m.
His report said he talked to two females, 18 and 20, and a male in his 20s. All were clothed and apparently had come down the building’s rear fire escape.
The officer told them not to return and, if they did, he would charge them.
“They did not have permission to be there,” Wilhelm said.
The police report did not give names of the trespassers.
When asked why they had been on the roof, the chief said, the trio said they wanted some “outdoor photos.”
That seems to be the naked truth.