I'm not crazy. I don't, have never and will never use drugs - not even pot. I haven't drank since college and even then it was just with my girl because she was a partier. I am by all means sane, or at least I was before something bizarre and terrifying happened to me early morning during the summer of 2022.
I have told NOBODY about this. Not a damn soul. If I even mentioned it to anybody, they would immediately question my mental state. This throwaway account is the ONLY place this story will be. Im only typing this out on my cell phone because I need some relief for this turmoil in my head. Every time someone mentions secrets, anything paranormal, or even "you'll never believe what I saw" my blood runs cold. I get goosebumps and my eyes tear up. I'm a prison in my own mind and I hope beyond hope posting my story here somehow calms this situation I have going on. If it "helps" someone else, so be it, but I'll be honest: I'm writing this for me. Im uncomfortable with talking about this not because I'm a skeptic, but because I know beyond any shred of a doubt that something paranormal happened to me.
The backstory:
My car registration was not paid up because my state said they will not be penalizing drivers through the pandemic. Registration is very expensive in this state and my hours had naturally been cut during the pandemic, so I opted to not pay it. Well, my apartment management did not agree and decided to put a notice on my windshield that having expired tags is a violation of the lease agreement and cars with expired tags will be towed at the owners expense and RESIDENTS WILL FACE POSSIBLE EVICTION FOR REPEATED VIOLATIONS. Completely insane eviction reasons aside, I couldn't afford my car being towed if I couldn't afford paying the reggy in the first place, so I opted to park my car at my parents house, just two blocks away from my place. This made it an easy morning walk to get to my car and drive to work, which was also nearby. I made this walk for months. The walk was nice and my mom would drive me home. Don't judge me, my mom is awesome and she was happy to spare me from the 100+ degree summer heat.
The route I had to walk took me behind their house. Their backyard has one of those city-mantained cinder block walls with a major road right in the other side. One morning I was making the walk, and I randomly got the idea to hop the wall to save myself 5 minutes of walking. I wasn't in a hurry, I gave myself plenty of time. This is an odd choice since the wall isn't super sturdy and it is very tall and rough. Without second guessing the choice I grabbed the top of the wall, put my foot on it and hurdles right up and over in one motion. I even surprised myself with how athletic of a move it was. I started walking to the house and something stopped me dead in my tracks. A fucking gnome. Yes a fucking gnome. You're probably rolling your eyes and smirking right now, but I'm dead serious. I don't know how else to describe it. It was about a foot tall and waking around like it was patrolling the area. It was not humanlike at all. It acted almost like a bug or a robot. It had a little spear like tool with it and it's actions seemed deliberate and dutiful.
What's really fucked is that I could feel it's thoughts. Not telepathy, but I could just feel that it was aware I could see it. While I was absolutely frozen with fear, it opened it's mouth and silently screamed to some unseen comrades. It wasn't scared of me, but it was absolutely going ape shit about the fact I could see it. I stood there totally frozen and unable to move while it's lower jaw just silently rattled back and forth, still howling silently. It's fear turned into frustration and suddenly I was back on the other side of the wall walking about a minute BEFORE I was behind my parents house and decided to make the jump. I was fully aware of what happened and I still could feel my heart in my ears. I just kept walking. I passed their backyard completely terrified of what was just on the other side of the wall. I just kept walking. Tears were streaming down my face as I made the turn only to the small connecting street, and another right into the street which I grew up on. I just kept walking. I thought about waking up my parents and telling them what I saw. I contemplated going to the backyard and grabbing shovel and looking for that little alien gnome fucker. But instead I dutifully and automatically pulled my keys from my pocket and calmly opened the car door, started the engine, and drove off toward work like I always did. I got to work at 5:45, fifteen minutes before my shift started. I wanted to stay in my car and call my wife to cry to her and beg her to tell me it was a dream or a hallucination or something. I was beside myself. But instead I just got out of the car and walked inside to make a cup of coffee like I always do. It wasn't like I was in a trance. It was like someone else was calling the shots and I was spectating. As soon as I got to my work area and greeted my coworker, the spectating stopped and I was in full control again, but my heart wasn't racing and I wasn't horrified. I was just normal me. I can't explain it well and I know that doesn't make sense. But that's what happened. My mind and body weren't one for about 20 minutes. Then suddenly they were and it was just okay.
Now you know why this still has me fucked up to this day. What the actual fuck were those things? Why did I choose to scale the wall that morning. Sudden impulsive choices are so unlike me it's crazy to even think that I would do that. But I did do that. Wanna know how I know?
MY FINGERTIPS WERE CUT UP FROM THE TOP OF THE WALL. THEY WERE DIRTY AND RAW FROM PULLING MY WEIGHT UP THE WALL.
I'm in tears writing this. This hits home. This really happened to me and I can never tell anyone this. I finally gathered the courage to tell you random Internet strangers and it was so much harder than I thought it would be. Hopefully getting this off my chest somehow helps me get past this because I've been genuinely traumatized by this experience.
Am I really in control of me? Are there some little weird assholes behind the scenes controlling our lives? Guarding us? From what? I'm so lost and I have literally zero answers. I'm not religious and I've prayed for answers. I have nothing but trauma and anger.
Thanks for reading. Go ahead and tell me I'm crazy or I had a stroke or something let's hear it.
If it helps to hear my boyfriend is usually a very serious person, doesn’t believe in anything supernatural, like rolls his eyes at people that do.
But one day he did tell me a story where he was at home as a kid doing his homework in his room and he saw what he could only describe as a gnome walk into the hallway in front of him, look at him and then disappear through the wall. He jumped up and chased it and ran out and told his mum who just thought he was being silly/imagining things.
But then a few days later his mum was at her friends house and they were talking about their kids and she was like laughing telling her friend that her son said he saw a gnome the other day but then her friend was quite shocked and said her son has been seeing gnomes too
This is killing me bc once as a kid I swear I saw one too. I remember I was going to the bathroom and then standing there was just a gnome. It wasn’t even doing anything just standing there but for some reason it scared me so I ran away back downstairs lmao. I always thought back on it as a rly funny weird thing my brain made up as a kid but now this thread has me imaging a secret society of gnomes XD
Check out ‘Jim Harold’s Campfire’ - a podcast about unusual happenings. Callers tell their stories for others to hear- this story is perfect. Others may have reported similar events. I believe you - multiple cultures have stories that speak of similar beings.
I believe you. I've seen one too. It was a few years back and in the middle of the night. I woke up and needed to use the bathroom... so naturally I get up, go to do what I gotta do and I passed by my living room. Boom there it was, we locked eyes for maybe 5 to 10 seconds it too seemed highly stressed I could see it. I was mortified heart beating so fast I thought I was gonna puke. I literally blinked and I was instantly back in my bed on other side of house. I felt like I needed to pee and had never went. I tried to hard to tell myself it was a dream but as soon as I got to bathroom I knew it wasn't the sink was FRESHLY wet with suds even where I had just washed my hands. Little fucker teleported me. The closet thing I've ever seen to it after looking everywhere online is a duende.
I believe you. I don’t think you have a mental illness. I think we, as a species, are arrogant enough to think an incident like this is impossible. I, however, believe it is possible. I have no answers for you, but I believe you.
I saw a gnome when I was a kid at Lake Wallenpaupack in Pennsylvania. It was such a classic gnome-wore a little robe like a Jawa but much smaller. When I looked again it was gone.
As crazy as it might sound, I TOTALLY believe you. I am science man… but there are things out there no one could ever explain. I’ve gone through shit only I and my mother could ever understand no matter how much f*cking logic and cold calls we put into. My grandma even said to me when she was a child, a gnome was messing around with her.
You are not crazy, it’s just 99% of people have never experience something like that, to which I honestly envy them.
My dad told me this story years ago and still tell it now. One night he walked his gf at the time home as he did each evening they saw each other. On his way home he heard some chattering coming from somebody’s garage that didn’t sound right. Especially at the time of night it was so he crossed the road to get a closer look. What he saw was a gremlin/gnome looking creature which turned and looks at him . Made a noise and a few other of the same looking creatures came out of the dark. He ran home as fast as could.
I believe you. No I don’t think it was a psychotic break and honestly I get the feeling that if this is the one and only time you’ve experienced something like this, seeing a psychiatrist may do more harm than good. Nothing makes someone feel even crazier than being told they’re crazy and put on meds they don’t need to be on. There are far far more things in this world that we don’t know than what we do know. I think we just need to accept that many things are unexplainable and leave it at that. We don’t know as much as we like to think and as another comments said, it’s arrogant to think we do. Make peace with what you saw and the best way to do that is to just accept it and stop fighting what your gut is telling you
Anything is possible. My brother and his friends swears to this day they saw a pterodactyl lift off a tree in northern Canada. They said the tree was entirely bent over from the weight of the bird. Freaked them out so bad they ran home crying.
In my late 20s,my 5 year old daughter and I were going to my besfriends house, he was the one driving.
It was about 9 pm, and the road we were on was somewhat desolate, so he decided to turn off his headlights so we could see how dark it looked there. He turned it off for a second and turned it back on,we all screamed.
Because we all saw what looked exactly like a pterodactyl, even the damn brown spots on its chest.
We all saw it,screamed, and never talked about it.
I've told my husband,and he actually believes me.
I'll message my former bff to see if he remembers,that was 27 years ago.
My friend tried to re-post this story elsewhere as a test, copy-pasted, but swapped out "Gnome" for "Bugs Bunny", and that post had no engagement and was swiftly downvoted, so he deleted it.
Gnomes are an invention by Paracelsus in the 16th Century, so why has a Reddit post saying that a fictional character is real almost unanimously (97% upvoted as of typing up this post) garnered so many upvotes and such a weird comments section? Is this some kind of experiment with AI?
I don't usually see posts from r/offmychest , but it is my understanding that you aren't really allowed to question or try to negate OP's experience (since the whole point it to have a sub where people can vent with little judgement).
This is rule 1 of the subreddit
We are good to each other.
We respect each other. If you encounter someone breaking this rule, disengage and report them.
We do not insult, antagonize, interrogate, invalidate, or criticize the original poster (OP), even when not directly addressing OP.
So, the sub itself is not really a place to question the validity of the story. Even still, most top comments are pretty must saying OP was probably having a mental break or hallucinating, which gives you an idea that most people that upvoted don't think gnomes are real.
Gnomes are an invention by Paracelsus in the 16th Century, so why has a Reddit post saying that a fictional character is real almost unanimously (97% upvoted as of typing up this post) garnered so many upvotes and such a weird comments section? Is this some kind of experiment with AI?
"The closet thing I've ever seen to it after looking everywhere online is a duende."
I'm seeing a fair number of claims of seeing a duende, posted on some of the sketchier discussion/image boards, usually accompanied by this picture or one as close to it as makes no difference:
My sense, based on just watching how the conversation has gone over a few years, is that there was some attempt to get "seeing gnomes" to take off as a thing on these boards, and the nomenclature has switched from "gnome" to "duende" possibly on the grounds that saying "I saw a gnome" sounds like you watched the "David the Gnome" cartoon as a kid and thought it was real and gets you laughed at, while saying "I saw a duende" doesn't come with as much baggage. But that's last is my impression, take it for what it's worth.
In any case, the claim has not been an unusual one on these boards, whatever name for the critter is used.
Assuming this isn't a work of imaginative fiction, and it probably is, he may have had a transient ischemic stroke, fallen down and banged up his hands a little, and his briefly oxygen starved brain created a gnome incident to fill in the fragmentary confused sensory experiences he had during those moments.
There’s a lot of credulity out there, I was watching a potholer54 video recently and he mentioned a channel called suspicious 0bservers. The channel host believes in something called the electric universe, there has been almost daily videos for the last few years about solar flares, earthquakes, magnetic pole shift/flip, what they don’t want you to know etc.
I dipped into the comments section on a few of them, it’s not good.
My car registration was not paid up because my state said they will not be penalizing drivers through the pandemic. Registration is very expensive in this state...
Well, my apartment management...
...park my car at my parents house, just two blocks away from my place. This made it an easy morning walk to get to my car and drive to work, which was also nearby. I made this walk for months. The walk was nice and my mom would drive me home. Don't judge me, my mom is awesome and she was happy to spare me from the 100+ degree summer heat.
Their backyard has one of those city-mantained cinder block walls with a major road right in the other side.
He's in a "state", so that's likely the US. Someplace where his apartment is down the street from his parents' house. His parents backyard backs up to a busy street. Sounds urban or suburban. It gets over 100 degrees in the summer and vehicle registration is very expensive, but there was a grace period for paying it due to the pandemic.
This sounds like California. Vehicle registration is brutal and there was a grace period:
To comply with health officials’ recommendations regarding COVID-19, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is allowing customers a 60-day extension for license or registration renewals.
Lot's of urban and suburban areas with block walls separating busy thoroughfares from residential areas, and hot summers.
So, he walks form his apartment to his parents house, grabs his car and drives to work each morning, something he was doing for months.
This what he says:
The route I had to walk took me behind their house. Their backyard has one of those city-mantained cinder block walls with a major roadright in the other side. One morning I was making the walk, and I randomly got the idea to hop the wall to save myself 5 minutes of walking.
So, he must be walking along the major road on his way to his parents. If he's going to hop the wall, either he's on the major road side and is going to hop into his parents' backyard, or he's already in his parents' backyard and is going to hop over to the major road side of the wall. If the wall separates the backyard from the busy road, it's a binary proposition. It sounds like he ended up in the backyard:
I started walking to the house and something stopped me dead in my tracks. A fucking gnome.
So, the gnome is in his parents backyard, right? Then he's teleported back to the other side of the wall a few minutes in the past:
...suddenly I was back on the other side of the wall walking about a minute BEFORE I was behind my parents' house and decided to make the jump.
And this is all happening in the early morning dawn. Sunrise in California in June is around 5:40am give or take. He arrived at work after the event, at 5:45am:
I got to work at 5:45, fifteen minutes before my shift started.
That's after he drove the "short" distance to work. Say it was 10 minutes, he would be leaving his parents at around 5:35am or so. He would have had to walk from his apartment to his parents, jump the fence, then get teleported back at around 5:15-5:20am?
More importantly, if he's claiming this was a real event that caused him trauma and anger:
Am I really in control of me? Are there some little weird assholes behind the scenes controlling our lives? Guarding us? From what? I'm so lost and I have literally zero answers. I'm not religious and I've prayed for answers. I have nothing but trauma and anger.
Then the gnome is still in his parents backyard! Guess they're on their own.
My sense, based on just watching how the conversation has gone over a few years, is that there was some attempt to get "seeing gnomes" to take off as a thing on these boards
I thought "gnomes in gardens" was a peculiarly British practice. On the other hand, my mother once lived in a condo complex that had approximately as many concrete-geese-in-homemade-cutesie-outfits as they did actual human residents, so there is no accounting for fads.
On the other hand, my mother once lived in a condo complex that had approximately as many concrete-geese-in-homemade-cutesie-outfits as they did actual human residents
OT here: Ha! We lived in Chico for years, the city 10-15 miles down the hill from where we are now. One of the roads we drove to places like Trader Joe's featured a house with a large concrete goose in the front yard that is ALWAYS dressed up in seasonal outfits. From Christmas to Aaron Rodgers to 4th of July.
OT here: Ha! We lived in Chico for years, the city 10-15 miles down the hill from where we are now. One of the roads we drove to places like Trader Joe's featured a house with a large concrete goose in the front yard that is ALWAYS dressed up in seasonal outfits. From Christmas to Aaron Rodgers to 4th of July.
When driving through Parma, a Cleveland suburb that is definitely, in British parlance, "naff", I used to pass one house occupied by someone with a sense of humor. It had the anachronistic lawn flamingoes (remember those?) with long striped athletic socks held up with thumb tacks.
The book is written like a biology book, describing the habitat of the mythical creatures known as gnomes (Dutch: kabouter). In the book, Huygen and Poortvliet say they've spent at least twenty years observing them and call their study the "first work of consequence on the subject to be published since Wunderlich's bulky and dubious treatise De Hominibus Parvisimis appeared in 1580".
I often see gnomes, and when I do its usually more than one, often fishing by toadstools.
Now hopefully this ain't breaking any disclosure agreements but they tend to hang out in retiree gardens , If you also want to see one I suggest looking there
Because the cultural roots of those are easier to trace.
Time travel and teleportation and mind control are just "esoteric powers 101", and would relate to the faerie more than gnomes.
Garden gnomes are found in other European countries where bad taste is tolerated eccentric kitsch is valued, and appear to have originated in Germany, or maybe Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_gnome
Use of the term "garden gnome" may originate from fact that German catalogues sold ornaments of dwarfs under the name gnomen-figuren, meaning miniature figurines.
I have absolutely no idea what their aficionados see in them. If they woke up, looked out of the bedroom window and saw a real itinerant person of short stature with a huge beard fishing in their garden pond, having a snooze or mooning/ having a crap on their lawn (this is a gnome thing... absolutely hilarious...
...not) I bet they'd be the first to complain.
In fairness to the Reddit author he doesn't really describe an archetypal gnome, just uses that term for a small humanoid.
Until reading @serpentdebunker's post I didn't know gnomes (as a concept) originated in the 16th century.
I've never really been into the fantasy genre; I doubt I could tell a gnome from a goblin or a fantasy/RPG-type dwarf or an elf (excepting Evangeline Lilly) or a gremlin (excepting the 80's film ones) or a hobgoblin etc.; maybe the same's true of the Reddit poster.
@Ann K. has a point about gnomes in Britain; only British senior politicians have engaged with gnomes, from presumably positive
Tom Major-Ball (father of former British prime minister John Major) was the most notable [gnome] producer at that time with his company Major's Garden Ornaments.
As others have posted, the balance of probabilities must be that the Reddit poster was just posting twaddle.
I would guess (well, hope) that most of us here doubt that, even if sincere, the poster was accurately describing an objectively real event which might have been witnessed by others/ filmed.
The Reddit poster's story is of course implausible on several counts, and @NorCal Dave's identification of a possible location/ environment for the events makes it even more unlikely. Not because gnomes/ 12" spear-carriers are less common in Californian suburbia than in the Black Forest, I'm confident their population density in both ecosystems is similar (approx.exactly 0 per square mile/ km), but patrolling gnomes in Orange County might be noticed by other people.
However, @SuppaCoup's conjecture is worth considering,
...and in addition to TIAs, mentioned by @serpentdebunker, there are other possible neurological origins of strange perceptions, not least epilepsy.
In 1979 Scottish forest worker "Bob Taylor" described an encounter with a landed UFO during which he sustained grazes/ clothing tears; it's possible this was the result of an epilepsy-type event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_incident.
I sometimes wonder if a very small minority of high-strangeness reports (mainly of UFOs, alien abductions but maybe other types of weirdness- "time-slips", cryptids, ghosts/poltergeists, etc.) are due to one-off neurological glitches.
My sort-of improvised definition of high-strangeness would be (1) Inherently implausible, to a greater extent than a "straightforward" UFO sighting or "traditional" ghost/ cryptid experience, e.g. a conversation with aliens (2) Highly-detailed, (3) Apparent total conviction of the experiencer, even if they are aware of the implausibility of some elements of their story (4) No obvious causation from known drug use or pre-existing illness.
Unfortunately we don't have a way to distinguish "genuine" (subjectively believed by the experiencer) and faked high-strangeness events. Once again the hoaxers get in the way of us possibly learning something new.
Khouri's account is bizarre, and his own reported actions odd to put it mildly- but he recounts them as a real experience; had he consciously made it up I think it's unlikely he would include his cringe-inducing cannibalistic nibble.
From what was learned about Khouri it's possible that his experience was caused by a sleep disorder (and maybe analgesia).
It would be a shame, and potentially a loss for science/ medicine, if people who genuinely experience high-strangeness events were dissuaded from reporting them for fear of ridicule. The Reddit gnome-poster might be one such, he seems to realise how preposterous his story is.
Incidentally- and this is speculation, I guess- it seems to me that people who experience high-strangeness events (assuming some are honest reports of what the experiencer subjectively believes to have happened) often don't contact the police or medical services in the first instance. If I found two strange women in my bedroom, I think I'd want the police and maybe a doctor to do a quick check even if the women had vanished; Hell, I might have been drugged or something- and I'd want a doctor to know if I was ill. (Bob Taylor's wife contacted the police and their doctor).
Many experiencers seem to just carry on, even if shaken or perplexed- a bit like the Reddit poster, if his account is subjectively true. Again, just conjecture, I haven't made a list of cases that conform to this; but I wonder if some part of the experiencer's mind tells them, "...this didn't really happen as a real-world event, you/I just believe it did".
More prosaically, some experiencers might fear an unwanted medical diagnosis, which might impact their driving licence and other aspects of life (although, e.g., having one,suspected epileptiform event is very unlikely to lead to a diagnosis of epilepsy).
Edited to add: If we manage to get DNA evidence of a gnome- and their reported habit of shi**ing in people's gardens raises this as a possibility- do we send it to the Human G'nome Project?
I'm curious as to the author's age. Living in an apartment down the street from your parents and having your mom drive you home from work is conceivable for someone my age, 60 but not likely. Some of my friends like me, have lost the mom or father, while others still have both parents, but it's more the norm for us to be driving them to medical appointments or what not. I say this because when I read the authors rather vague description of the gnome a particular image jumped into my mind:
It was about a foot tall and waking around like it was patrolling the area. It was not humanlike at all. It acted almost like a bug or a robot. It had a little spear like tool with it and it's actions seemed deliberate and dutiful.
A foot tall and carrying a spear. For people of my age (let me hear for the other 60ish folks) I thought of this guy:
Granted, he may be considered a bit culturally inapropo today, but back in the '70s he scared the shit out of lots of us!
It's from a 1975 made for TV movie (US) that featured actress Karan Black in a trilogy of horror shorts, hence the clever title Trilogy of Terror. The final segment has Black playing "Amelia" a woman that typically spends her Saturday nights with her overbearing PITA mother but decides to spend the evening with her Anthropologist boyfriend so she can give him this creepy little totem/doll thing. For reasons, the thing comes to life and chases her around the house trying to kill her. You'd think she could just step on it, but that little bugger is tough.
In the end, she stuffs it into oven and cooks him, but the doll's spirit ends up transferring to her making her just as maniacal. So, she invites her overbearing mother over for a little heart to heart:
Again, scary as shit for a 10–12-year-old and was still pretty creepy in an old school way last time I saw it, maybe in the early '00s.
It is interesting the way different cultural types pop into different people's heads.
Living in an apartment down the street from your parents and having your mom drive you home from work is conceivable for someone my age, 60 but not likely.
His mom was driving him home after he had parked his car at their house, to save him from walking home in the heat. Anybody who would consider climbing a wall and pulling it off should still be at an age where their mom would be able to drive that much.
That particular usage just screams antisemitic imagery to me.
Sure enough, the most contemporaneous reference in the wiki page is to an article that begins thus:
Switzerland: The Gnomes of Zurich
4 minute read
TIME
March 12, 1965 12:00 AM GMT-5
Pince-nez aquiver on his nose, the elegant banker leaned across the wood-inlaid desk in his Zurich office last week and complained: “We have been called Shylocks, gnomes, sinister manipulators —even greedy thieves. These campaigns really wound us. At times it makes one melancholy.”
Ooh, that hadn't occurred to me.
The phrase has been widely cited in discussions about British politics over the years and is fairly well-known; I'm not aware of it being seen as, or being intended to be, anti-Semitic, but that is no excuse if it is.
The originator of the phrase, George Brown (Labour Deputy Leader 1960-1970) was married to Sophie Levene for 45 years;
Sophie's parents were Solomon (Sol) Levene and Kate Levene née Mordecai, Kate Mordecai was from a large Jewish family.
George Brown had his flaws but I don't think he's remembered as a racist (though we all know racist smears are insidious and can creep into everyday language, or can be used as "dog-whistles").
I've dropped a line to the Board of Deputies of British Jews asking for their opinion about the phrase "gnomes of Zurich".
The Zürich Money Museum displays the sculpture of a gnome - founder Jürg Conzett says that nowadays, bankers see gnome as "almost" a noble title.
The Earth is filled almost to the center with Gnomes or Pharyes, a people of small stature, the guardians of treasures, of mines, and of precious stones. They are ingenious, friends of men, and easie to be commandded. They furnish the children of the Sages with as much money, as they have need of; and never ask any other reward of their services, than the glory of being commanded. The Gnomides or wives of these Gnomes or Pharyes, are little, but very handsom; and their habit marvellously curious.[7]
The electric universe people are the ones who don't believe in gravity. Or at least don't think gravity explains why if you drop something it falls towards the center of the Earth, or why astronomical masses orbit around larger masses, e.g. planets orbiting the sun. They have nothing to back this up because gravity formulas do explain the motion of objects in relation to other masses. And electromagnetic force formulas do not.
It's on par with flat earth theory. It explains nothing, contradicts accepted theories that better explain those things, and introduces even more problems on top of the ones it already fails to explain.
The linked-to Time article seems to make a similar analogy of bankers (of Swiss nationality) to gnomes,
Something like the fairy-tale gnomes that guarded subterranean treasures, Swiss bankers speak sparingly, avoid social ostentation, and bury their money—two floors below ground level
but @FatPhil's raised an important issue, so I hope the Board of Deputies replies. -Must be very busy at the minute, though; UK General Election and issues arising from the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Edited to add: Unfortunate typo earlier, meant to say "...very busy at the minute".
I'm curious as to the author's age. Living in an apartment down the street from your parents and having your mom drive you home from work is conceivable for someone my age, 60 but not likely. Some of my friends like me, have lost the mom or father, while others still have both parents, but it's more the norm for us to be driving them to medical appointments or what not. I say this because when I read the authors rather vague description of the gnome a particular image jumped into my mind:
It was about a foot tall and waking around like it was patrolling the area. It was not humanlike at all. It acted almost like a bug or a robot. It had a little spear like tool with it and it's actions seemed deliberate and dutiful.
A foot tall and carrying a spear. For people of my age (let me hear for the other 60ish folks) I thought of this guy:
Granted, he may be considered a bit culturally inapropo today, but back in the '70s he scared the shit out of lots of us!
It's from a 1975 made for TV movie (US) that featured actress Karan Black in a trilogy of horror shorts, hence the clever title Trilogy of Terror. The final segment has Black playing "Amelia" a woman that typically spends her Saturday nights with her overbearing PITA mother but decides to spend the evening with her Anthropologist boyfriend so she can give him this creepy little totem/doll thing. For reasons, the thing comes to life and chases her around the house trying to kill her. You'd think she could just step on it, but that little bugger is tough.
In the end, she stuffs it into oven and cooks him, but the doll's spirit ends up transferring to her making her just as maniacal. So, she invites her overbearing mother over for a little heart to heart:
Again, scary as shit for a 10–12-year-old and was still pretty creepy in an old school way last time I saw it, maybe in the early '00s.
It is interesting the way different cultural types pop into different people's heads.
Saw that on TV as a kid, scared the yaa-yaa outta me. But then, Reptilicus scared me as a kid, so that may not be a strong indicator of anything.
Anyway, getting back to gnomes, I'm going to drp this link quickly, not time stamped because my point is not about any one of these 5 real gnomes caught on camera (#5 is clearly a jolly old elf rather than a gnome, and intended as a joke!) but just to support the idea that gnome sightings are a thing that is going around, and judging from how old some of these clips look has been going around for some time.
Europe has their gnomes. Hawaii has the menehune. From Wikipedia:
Menehune are a mythological race of dwarf people in Hawaiian tradition who are said to live in the deep forests and hidden valleys of the Hawaiian Islands, hidden and far away from human settlements.
The Menehune are described as superb craftspeople. They built temples (heiau), fishponds, roads, canoes, and houses. Some of these structures that Hawaiian folklore attributed to the Menehune still exist. They are said to have lived in Hawaiʻi before settlers arrived from Polynesia many centuries ago. Their favorite food is the maiʻa (banana), and they also like fish. Legend has it that the Menehune appear only during the night hours to build masterpieces. But if they fail to complete their work in the length of the night, they will leave it unoccupied. No one but their children and humans connected to them can see the Menehune.[1]
In Hawaii we were told that something like 20% (if I remember correctly) of native Hawaiians claim Menehune ancestry. We saw the fishponds attributed to them, then stopped to grab a quick hamburger for lunch. Two women who could barely see over the counter served us...
Dwarfism is a thing, and especially in long-ago times when people may have done very little traveling, a certain amount of inbreeding may have exaggerated the trait. There may be a smidgen of truth behind the legends.
From the same source:
See also
Anito, similar supernatural beings in the Philippines
Homo floresiensis, a presumed extinct species of very small bipedal tool bearers in the genus Homo found in South East Asia
