I’ve always rather liked mysteries. When I was a boy, there was a story about a boy who rode his bicycle down the old cement path behind Myrtle Street School in Waterville. The boy crashed, a sharp stick poked right through one of his hands and he went screaming into the woods.

He was never seen again.

Then there was the huge man who flooded the outdoor ice rink across the street from the armory. Word around the schoolyard was that the man had killed at least two men back in the day and that he did so with his bare hands. The giant never said much and we steered clear of him. We called him “sir” if we addressed him at all, and we always fled once our skates were off.

There was an old woman in the neighborhood who was said to be a witch. An elementary school teacher was rumored to be fresh out of an asylum.

These bits of neighborhood lore thrilled and chilled us, but alas, few mysteries ever last long. The witch was only a poor old woman with some strange habits. The keeper of the ice was just socially awkward and the crazy schoolteacher was just really, really mean.

Mysteries are not durable. It’s true when you’re a child and it’s true after you’ve grown. And such is the case with the phantoms who once enthralled me on the Twin Cities streets.

I’ve been seeing them everywhere. The phantoms of the streets I wrote about years ago are out more and more these days. They have the same faces and the same peculiarities, but most of them have identities and backgrounds now, too.

The omnipotent fellow I once referred to as the Magic Man has a real name, and I have since discovered it. He still walks the street with a stoic, steely face and eyes that scan for returnables like a pirate rooting for gold. To me, he is magic because he can be in two places at once, and I would stake my career on that fact.

But, no. He is not a Magic Man at all. He has a name that graces the police log every now and then, and one I have heard a time or two in cop circles.

He didn’t blow in from another time or dimension, as I’d suspected, but wandered here from a life of chaos to a life of street-hardened determination.

Not magic at all. He gets in arguments with store managers. He cusses at cops who arrest him and is known for a temper that rises like a tempest and blows away like a breeze.

Sometimes, revelation is not a welcomed thing. I liked knowing nothing more than what I saw in the man’s strident quest for the nickels and dimes of cans and bottles. I enjoyed the mystery and the persistent nagging at the imagination. Now my Magic Man is just another dude with a date of birth, height and weight on a rap sheet.

The bike lady isn’t some ancient visitor from Oz, after all. She is an old woman with a husband and a job and a taste for yard sales. She has a face lined with wrinkles and miles of stamina. She rides that relic bike from one city to the other and then back again. I once thought she rode off to the clouds at night when her wanderings were over. I thought she had lived a thousand years and possessed infinite wisdom in those small holes for eyes.

Imagine my surprise when I learned she works a part-time job of sweat and toil. Imagine the melancholy as I watched the bike lady engage in the mundane task of dickering over a coffee-maker at a lawn sale.

Another mystery dissolved like a sugar cube in water.

The twirling lady still twirls, but she doesn’t disappear in a whirl of pixie dust as I once imagined she did. She too has a name, a sad story and dozens of people who look after her. She twirls and fascinates me, but she is no longer an anonymous stranger spinning through downtown into enigma. I know now what her name is. I know that she likes grilled-cheese sandwiches. These small details fall into place and you have a human being instead of a phantom.

I learned their names. I learned their histories. The mystery was rubbed away like road salt from a windshield.

Ah, mysteries. Few of them last long at all. In a community the size of ours, they have very short life spans. Sooner or later, they get dragged out into the sunlight to be examined.

Except for that kid who rode his bike down the cement path back in Waterville. I’m pretty sure he’s for real. You won’t catch me going into those woods at night. The way I figure it, it’s been 30 years since I first heard that story. That kid has got to be in a bad mood by now.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.