Regretfully, the time has come for LoCO to acknowledge that Arcata Gnome truthers exist and they are having big fun on the Internet. This is our reality. 

If you don’t spend all day on Humboldt Reddit, let us try to catch you up. Last week, a since-deleted post carrying the title “Escaped Pet Monkey in Arcata?” went up featuring a picture taken of a grove of trees near the Arcata Community Center. Look at it now. 

See that orange blobby whatever in there? Here, let us help you a li’l bit. 

That thing. That unidentifiable cluster of pixels, which has been lovingly dubbed the “Arcata Gnome,” has spawned a week’s worth of merriment on r/Humboldt, with people chiming in with their theories as to what it might be and others claiming to have had their own encounters with it. One redditor piped in with the following alleged experience:

One redditor’s rendering of “the Arcata Gnome”

I saw a post made on here showing a picture of what someone thought was possibly an escaped pet monkey in Arcata. The animal in the post looked almost identical to something I had seen about a week ago in my yard at night … I had found my dog barking up a storm and jumping up on my screen door. I assumed she needed to go to the bathroom, but right as I was about to let her out I saw something moving outside in my backyard. It was a little tiny creature standing in the grass, close to my fence line. It was grasping one of the pears that had fallen from my pear tree and was seemingly munching on it … I tried to recreate the scene in the drawing above, but unfortunately I suck at drawing. Anyways, it dropped the pear and quickly took off after that. It was pretty fast too. I haven’t seen it since so I assume it must have been scared off for good.

Now, LoCO has yet to come to a consensus as to what we believe the Arcata Gnome actually is, but what we do know is that the hype around it is all very fun. Of note, instagrammer @emilycurrly has theories as to why the original Reddit post went away. Tune in below:

We’re deep into this thing, people! Don’t stop now! The actual news is super depressing. Follow the gnome. 

Anyway, we realize that this is a longer build up to our silly daily poll than is the norm, but again, the actual news is super depressing. So! Let’s get to it: What do you think the “Arcata Gnome” is really?

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