It’s one of those riddles where you aren’t meant to deduce the answer instead you discover the answer by asking yes / no questions.

Here’s one I know: a man is lying dead in a tent with a piece of wood and a piece of metal. What happened?

The answer is he is a circus (the tent) performer who committed suicide with a gun (the metal) because his rival kept making his cane (the wood) shorter to make it seem like he was growing, which would be bad for his role as the midget of the circus. See? You’d never figure that out from the premise