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It’s Time to Retire the Crichton Leprechaun
We’ve all seen the leprechaun.
In March 2006, Mobile, Alabama news channel WPMI-TV ran a holiday-related puff story that sprouted legs and bolted out of the South like some energetic toddler fueled with cornbread and greens.
Unless you are completely new to the Internet, you have probably seen or heard of the Leprechaun from Alabama. It’s from that strange era of the internet that taught an entire generation HTML and community egalitarianism, but also tricked unsuspecting children completing homework assignments to stumble unto whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov. Memes were in their infancy and anyone could achieve internet fame from organic reach alone.
Crichton is a primarily African American neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama. It’s the neighborhood due South of my home neighborhood, which together with a few other adjacent neighborhoods make up a densely populated area in mid-city Mobile viewed as an epicenter of historic Black Mobilian culture. As some of the oldest neighborhoods in Mobile, many Black native Mobilians have ties to one of these neighborhoods.
I don’t know how the story actually came about, but as a native Mobilian, I imagine it went down like this: someone on the news staff suggested a leprechaun-spotting story in a neighborhood with an Irish name possibly because of a rumor started by some residents. Other residents in Crichton played along inserting their own playful interpretations. Mobilians of any race are imaginative eccentrics straight out of a Tennesse Williams play. Crichton residents were being average Mobilians. And this is how most Mobilians saw the news story originally. It was an inside joke about the fantastical storytelling that is the crux of Mobile identity.
Down in Mobile, they’re all crazy, because the Gulf Coast is the kingdom of monkeys, the land of clowns, ghosts and musicians, and Mobile is sweet lunacy’s county seat.
