part0080

This is a story about wandering garden ornaments, victims of a plot that may have been perpetrated by students in a prankish mood. Specifically, it’s a story about garden gnomes, those plaster figures wearing red stocking caps that some people use as decorations in their yards, as other people do plastic flamingos and concrete birdbaths.

These gnomes have begun to roam, down in Australia, at least. Witness this story from the 1988 issue of Australian Folklore , collected by Aussie folklorist Bill Scott in October 1986.

“Some people over on the North Shore [of Sydney] had a gnome in their front garden, one of those holding a fishing rod in the lily pond. One morning they noticed that the gnome was missing. Someone had stolen it! About a week later, they got a postcard from the Gold Coast up in Queensland. The gnome said he was on holiday up there and having a wonderful time—there were more fish there than in the lily pond at North Shore. About a fortnight later the people found the gnome back in their garden. Whoever it was that had pinched him had covered him all over with tan boot polish, to show that he’d been on holiday and had a suntan.”

David S. Hults, co-editor of Australian Folklore , has compared roaming-gnome stories from the media and oral tradition, and has found a consistent pattern. First, the gnomes vanish for a few weeks or months. Then the owners receive postcards signed “the Gnome.” Eventually, the garden ornament reappears in their yard, sometimes altered in some way by its adventure .

The Australian people whose gnomes have gone walk about have usually suspected either their co-workers or mischievous students of masterminding the thefts. But in a rash of roaming-gnome stories reported in Perth last year, postcards came in such numbers and from such long distances that reporters wondered whether American sailors may have been responsible for the pranks.

Gnome owners told of their distress on Australian news programs, sometimes referring to their lost gnomes by name (“Gulliver” being a well-publicized example). The press played an active role in elaborating the theft stories, much in the way newspapers and talk shows spread urban legends.

Evidently, the gnomes are getting restless in England, too. In an elaborate gnome prank described in the British men’s magazine Mayfair in 1986, the perpetrators were said to be oil-rig workers flying out of London’s Heathrow airport for duty stints in the Far East. The workers’ travels enabled them to send gnome postcards from dozens of exotic foreign places. “Sorry I didn’t say anything before, but I have decided I need a holiday,” one such gnome wrote home to its owners. “I’ll keep in touch.” And keep in touch he did—cards streaming in from around the world. The adults in the family didn’t know what to make of it, the Mayfair article said, but the children “thought it was marvellous and took to running out to see if the postman had another card from the gnome.” This family’s gnome showed up one morning at its usual place on the front lawn—wearing sunglasses, holding a little suitcase, and sporting a suntan.

(A nabbed gnome in an English town is used as a red-herring clue in Sheila Radley’s murder mystery Fate Worse Than Death , published by Scribner’s in 1986. As the cover blurb of the paperback edition [Bantam, 1987] says, “A treasured garden statue is held for ransom and returned smashed beyond repair.” This time it’s a plaster gnome named “Willum” who is sitting on a stone toadstool fishing in a lily pond. In a note, the thieves demand a pound of jelly babies for Willum’s safe return. But neither his disappearance nor the discovery of his broken bits turn out to have anything to do with the larger crime.)

In Australia, meanwhile, gnomes began to disappear en masse from neighborhoods and even whole communities. Months later, some of them were found in a clearing in the bush, gathered around the biggest gnome, apparently holding a meeting.

A recent letter to the editor of the Kalgoorlie Miner in Western Australia introduced a new complication: a band of gnome-nappers calling themselves the Gnome Liberation Organization, or GLO. The group threated to hold stolen gnomes for a ransom of $5 each. There was a disclaimer: “The GLO would like to reassure the owners of lions rampant, Grecian statues, birdbaths and the like that these are not at risk. We are specialists dealing in one commodity—gnomes.”

Do American garden gnomes roam? If they do, I told my column readers, I’d like to hear about it. Perhaps, I suggested, a postcard would be the appropriate way to send me their roaming-gnome stories.

One reader, however, wrote that she was irate at me for publicizing such a trivial topic and perhaps suggesting copycat gnome-nabbing crimes to an impressionable public.

I got no postcards from roaming gnomes; but, then, I own no gnomes. My lawn ornaments are living pyracan-tha topiary animals, guaranteed to scratch anyone who touches them.

Many readers reminded me of the typical, though deplorable, American-student practice of stealing signs and other public material to use in decorating college dormitory rooms, fraternity houses, and apartments. One may say that this practice itself is traditional, the idea passed from person to person with variations in the way that all folklore is.

I also learned about a couple of instances of thievery in which messages were sent to the owners, confirming that the pattern of international gnome-nabbing is found in the United States. While this deduction is not a very significant advance in knowledge, it does show how even trivial elements of tradition may reveal culture contacts. In other words, though we don’t know how or when the gnome-nabbing syndrome passed among Australian, British, and American students, we do know that these cases, both from college towns, are probably not unrelated instances of traditional vandalism with a comic touch.

On to the two reported instances of American student gnome-nabbing—except it was really flamingo-nabbing and fiberglass-entrepreneur-nabbing.

Case No. 1, sent to me by Melanie Pratt of the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus: “This friend lives out on the west side, and had pink, plastic flamingos all over her front lawn. Last October her flamingos began to disappear. Not all at once, but one by one. She called the police, but they couldn’t do anything. By the end of October, she had none left. Along about mid-December, she began to get postcards and Christmas cards from her flamingos from all over the southern part of the country. They said they didn’t like the cold and flew south for the winter. In early April, one flamingo showed up on her front lawn, and by the end of the month they had all returned.”

Case No. 2, sent to me by Heidi Beck of the Stanford University News Service: “This really happened! And though a lifesize fiberglass Col. Sanders isn’t exactly your garden variety gnome, I think you’ll agree that the perpetrators were inspired (if that’s the word) by the same spirit, or perhaps by a similar story.”

I certainly agreed when I read the articles from regional newspapers that Ms. Beck enclosed. A five-foot eight-inch fiberglass statue of Colonel Harlan Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, was stolen on Ash Wednesday 1987 from a Palo Alto fried-chicken outlet. Six weeks later on Easter morning, the statue appeared in Stanford University’s Rodin sculpture garden. As the San Jose Mercury News reported the story on April 21, referring to titles of Rodin statues, “There, in the dewy quiet of Easter morn … stood the Gates of Hell, Adam and Eve, a Burgher of Calais—and the Colonel of Chicken.” Attached to the wandering statue was a note: “I’ve seen it all—it’s not a pretty picture. Take me home!” And in a postscript to the owners of the Kentucky Fried outlet, “I never meant to worry you, Donna and Paul—I just needed some space. Happy Easter!”

The thefts, the holiday season, the notes, and the returns are details that confirm these two cases as clear instances of the gnome-nabbing practice adapted to different victims.

The irate reader who wrote me also added a postscript to her letter: “P.S. What do you teach your students?”

Why, of course, I tell them not to nab gnomes, flamingos, or innocent statues of any kind. But, if they must indulge themselves in such student rites, then at least they should do the deed in style—the right style—which includes sending good-natured notes to the owners and bringing their victims home again .

When Patrick Giblin of Carthage, New York, read my follow-up column on “Roaming Gnomes” published in the Syracuse Post-Standard , he sent me the following item from James Ehmann’s “Ehmann’s People” column of November 29, 1988:

Two weeks ago, Berkeley officials got a letter from the bear. It said he had visited Disneyland and Reno, Nev., and had attended the Olympics in Seoul. It also said he might be coming home soon .