Orange Gnomes of Arcata
First off, no, this has nothing to do with the Tennessee River Valley or the surrounding area.
I know the whole point of this page was supposed to be that it covers stuff happening that’s local to me, but I’ve already written about stuff well outside of the region, so I personally see nothing wrong with continuing to do that from time to time. If that bothers you… well… it is my website, after all.
So, this whole thing started about a year ago in Humboldt County, California. At the time, as I often do, I was wasting free time at home scrolling through paranormal subreddits. I love write-in stories about this kind of stuff. I talk about it a lot, how much I used to love those early paranormal encounter websites, and I think Reddit offers the closest experience to that that you can get. I mean, stuff there runs the whole gamut, ya know? There’s nothing quite like reading one of the best, most-likely to be real stories you’ve ever seen (that has photos and video, no less) and then, just one post down, finding a story from a guy who’s very obviously unwell and has had repeated encounters with what, to someone on the outside, is obviously a disgruntled neighbor.
Anyways, it was on one of those days where I was digging through posts, looking for good stories to share with friends, that I happened upon a story that gave me pause. I don’t want the poster to be inundated with messages (even though I’m not sure I have enough readers to actually inundate anyone at this moment in time), I’m gonna be leaving out any identifying features for these stories. His username, despite being anonymous (as it is reddit), is also something that I’m not going to be sharing. (1)
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For the experiencer that I’m speaking about, it started on November tenth of last year.
For a little while, he’d been hearing what he’d described as a “terrible chirping/screeching sound” just outside of his window. One night, after getting pretty thoroughly fed up with what he assumed was some bird that had annoyingly decided to take up a nightly residence beside his home, he went outside armed with nothing but a flashlight. The plan was to confront (and hopefully scare away) his assailant. What he found was not at all what he had expected to find.
Instead of a bird, he found illuminated in the beam from his light “…the most troubling spectacle to ever meet [his] eyes.” He’d just unknowingly interrupted a pair of diminutive, human-like creatures mid-copulation. He describes them as being orange, very naked, with beady eyes. “Their mouths were agape in the way that turtles mouths are agape when making love.” Suddenly, their eyes met, his and these little orange gnomes. They briefly stared at him before running away.
After posting his encounter on the internet, others started popping up. Soon, a whole new community was born on the site, made specifically for those in Humboldt County who were seeing these strange orange creatures (this was done mainly so that the Humboldt County subreddit wouldn’t have to deal with this any longer). Pretty quickly, a drawing was posted by another local who’d claimed to have seen one eating a pear.
This, all the eyewitnesses could agree, was one of the creatures in question:
When I went to type all this up, I couldn’t find the post where this drawing originated prior to when it was turned into this poster. The guy claimed that he interrupted it as it was about to start eating a pear and, in the shock of having been seen, it dropped the fruit and ran away.
The original poster’s encounters were far from over, though.
A couple months after he initial interrupted that first known pair of gnomes, he would begin to face a new nightly assault. Gone were the chirping sounds; the gnomes (and he knew it was them because, on at least one occasion he’d actually caught one in the act of doing it) had taken to throwing small, white rocks at his windows. It had happened so often, he claimed, that he’d already collected a decent amount of the stones that they favored.
They knew how to pick a good rock
Around this time, the new gnome subreddit was being “flooded” with supposed pictures of the creature. I’ll share some of those below.
People in and around the area were having fun with the stories. It’s not everyday some new cryptid wanders into your town, after all.
The original poster, however, was there to remind us that this was something that we all needed to be taking a lot more seriously than we had been.
Presumably tired of dealing with people on the internet (as they are so commonly of the belief that anyone posting stories like these are making them up), our intrepid experiencer purchased a security camera.
This, he says, is the face of pure evil:
Tired of dealing with these creatures, he tried to put it all aside and just live his life. No matter what he tried, though, he couldn’t ever really get away from them. Fed up, and wanting to find some form of peace, he decided it was time to divest himself of this strange infestation.
He was going to kill the gnomes.
At this point he’d already discovered he couldn’t outright attack them. He knew he’d have to be clever. His answer seemed to come to him quickly. He’d take the advice of frequent commenters and extend an olive branch… well… that’s what the gnomes would think. In his lawn, presumably in an area frequented by the gnomes, he’d left a bottle of 1800 brand margarita. The catch? He’d mixed 1000 mg of benadryl into the drink. The gnomes, he hoped, would mistake the bottle for a peace offering, drink from it, and his problem would be gone.
Of course, they didn’t fall for it. His health would begin to fail and, with nothing else to blame, it seemed pretty clear to him that gnomes had somehow cursed him. The gnomes had begun entering his house more and more frequently. So he tried looking into exterminators, he bought a cat (which didn’t really seem to do any good in aiding to eliminate the gnomes), he even considered buying a flamethrower. Nothing panned out.
Sadly, this is kind of where the story ends for him. He ended up finding love, he says, and seems to care a lot less about the gnomes than he initially did. One can’t help but wonder whether or not they still pester him, if they still throw stones or copulate in his zucchini patch. I’m glad, for him, that he seems to have found a way to deal with it.
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I’m sure there are other people out there who still claim to see the creatures, but as those pictures in the first gallery (the ones that people claim are of the gnomes) clearly prove, the vast majority of sightings aren’t real. Most pictures posted of the creatures seem to be AI fabrications or, otherwise, handmade facsimiles made in the general appearance of the gnomes (aka dolls or clay figures, I’d wager). There are plenty of people out there who I’ve encountered who believe that the whole thing can be traced back to one person (who I’m obviously not going to namedrop) that they believe created this whole thing (the belief being that this person is behind all or at least most of the original accounts posting about their encounters with the creature).
I don’t think that really matters. It’s a really good story — probably the best I’ve read on any paranormal subreddit in a long time.
Stay weird!
-Scott w/GHPR
(1) This is, of course, posted with their permission