Two decades after a supposed leprechaun sighting clogged a dead-end street in Mobile, Alabama, the tiny figure that no one can quite agree they saw is still everywhere. In a St. Patrick's Day feature, the New York Times revisits a 2006 WPMI-TV segment that showed residents in the Crichton neighborhood crowding under a tree, hamming it up for the camera as a rough pencil sketch of the supposed leprechaun circulated—unknowingly helping define the early "viral local news" genre on a then-fledgling YouTube. "The leprechaun was everywhere," one local says. "On ESPN, on BET, on MTV—it was everywhere. It was a big deal. It was a real big deal."
The Times tracked down some of those community members, as well as news anchor Scott Walker and relatives of the late Demarco Morrissette—the man who said back then that he had a magic flute passed down from his Irish ancestor; the "flute" was actually garbage picked up from the ground—to reconstruct how a gag turned into a recurring late-night clip, Comedy Central fodder, and, finally, civic branding. "If you would have told me 20 years later we'd still be talking about this, I would have said you were crazy," Walker says.
Today the crude sketch of the leprechaun appears on cookies, T-shirts, Mardi Gras beads, and even tattoos, as Mobile leans into a legend that some locals admit was always more performance than paranormal. The full oral history of how a two-minute bit became a 20-year mascot—which Jimmy Kimmel has called "the greatest local news story of all time," per Adweek—can be found here, or check out the original news report. Jezebel, meanwhile, thinks that the whole viral media blitz at the time over the supposed leprechaun sighting may have been a wee bit racist.
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