As you briskly head to get some frozen yogurt on a crisp October night, the absolute last thing you expect to see is a horse playing an electric organ.

But Franklin Street never disappoints.

Around 9 p.m. on Friday night, a man sat at an electric organ just outside of The Yogurt Pump, decked out in a brightly colored poncho and donning a rubber horse mask. He calmly plucked out a haunting classical piece of music, paying no attention to the confused yet amused pockets of students who stopped to watch him play.

"I was speechless at first and had so many questions," says first-year student Mabel D'Souza. "Why? How? For what purpose?"

D'Souza's sentiments were echoed among other observing students. They giggled and pulled out their Snapchats, documenting the experience for all of their followers. Hushed whispers of "What?" "Why?" and "I don't understand" were heard multiple times over the course of just a few minutes.

And then finally, the mask came off. And the story behind the horse came out.

His name is Ian -- he declined to reveal his last name for privacy purposes -- and he's a political science and musical performance double-major at Appalachian State University.

"There's this guy, he plays saxophone down by the boutique on Franklin. Sometimes I come by and play cello, you know, just to kind of have a competition with him," says Ian. "He brought his drum set once. He was like, 'You know, I'm gonna really draw the cards with this.' And that was a couple weeks ago, and I had to find a way to one-up him."

Among the bustle of Franklin, a crowd forms to listen to Ian's story. In an area where parking is sparse and people are plenty, there were still so many unanswered questions. How do you transport such a large electric organ? Why are you pretending to be a horse?

Ian revealed that he's on fall break and resides with his parents in Carrboro. He doesn't own a car, so he had to push the electric organ roughly half a mile from his house to the location on Franklin Street. He said that performing on Friday with the horse mask was the highlight of his night.

"I probably will be here a lot more because I don't have that many classes. I'm not a full-time student [at Appalachian State], so I have a lot of days off that I could come back here."

It shouldn't be surprising that Franklin Street is a platform for unconventional artists. Home to major art museums and an eccentric ethnology, the students of UNC-Chapel Hill boast a wide understanding of culture -- they support this form of self-expression. Many students threw pocket change into a small bucket set up next to the organ as they passed, and a number more stopped to watch. The outlandishness of the performance only contributes to the free-spirited atmosphere of the college town.

The thrill of Chapel Hill stays alive because of performers like Ian. It keeps the culture of the campus exciting. Bizarre is enticing, unorthodox is refreshing.

According to Ian, the ultimate reason for the mask was to make people laugh. He asserted that he wanted his performance to be absurd and whimsical, and it wouldn't have been so otherwise. An entrepreneur in his own right, Ian was unabashedly honest in saying that the primary motive was humor. Luckily for him, he achieved exactly what he was seeking.

He flashed a grin and slipped the horse mask back on.

"Support your local artists."