by Sarah A. Peterson-Camacho

“One of the most malignant of old Border goblins, Redcap lived in old, ruined peel towers and castles where wicked deeds had been done—and delighted to re-dye his red cap in human blood.”
–Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976)

Summer 2004, Porterville, California

First came the nasty little chuckle—almost like out of a bad, low-budget horror movie. Think Child’s Play knockoff. Or maybe Leprechaun.

Shifting a bulky sack of groceries from one arm to the other, Tammy scanned the sweltering rural terrain—had she seen a flash of movement near that ramshackle old barn?

The single mother and her large brood—including three children, two dogs, a cat, and a motley assortment of chickens and ducks—had only settled down a short time ago on this large country property, situated as it was near the Tule River outside Porterville, California. She had fallen head over heels for the place … well, except for that decrepit excuse for a barn, which even her domestic fowl steered clear of.

Glancing in the direction of the barn, Tammy saw what she could only describe as … a gnome. “The entity was about two to three feet tall,” wrote paranormal author and blogger Jason Offutt on his blog, From the Shadows, five years later. “Baggy black pants hung from its waist, and the ‘creature’ wore a gold-colored shirt. It had a salt and pepper beard and hair that ran from beneath a red, pointed hat.”

“That thing grinned at us,” the mom of three told Offutt, “Its teeth were a gross brown, and pointed or jagged … It had a bulbous nose, and large, deep-set eyes … I never got a closer look at it … because at that moment, I dropped my groceries, grabbed my son, and ran for the house.”

Leaving her car trunk open and the grocery bags plopped on the dusty ground, Tammy held tight to her son, then seven, and made it to the house in several long strides. She slammed the door behind them, alerting her two daughters that something was afoot. And soon they all heard a pair of little feet shuffling through their garden out front, right under the living room window—and then the pointy red top of the creature’s hat appeared in the window…

“I closed the blinds and moved away from the window,” Tammy told Offutt. “The weird thing about seeing that hat under the window is that the window was about eight to ten feet off the ground—and that little creepy thing was only about two or three feet—so how was it able to be so close up to the window?”

Eventually the terrified woman went out and retrieved her groceries, and thankfully, the gnome was gone by then. She and her kids would never see it again, but sometimes, they’d catch that nasty little chuckle coming from the direction of the old barn.

It wasn’t long before Tammy and her brood relocated.

Summer 2011, Maryville, Missouri

In 2009, about two years after he’d interviewed Tammy about her family’s encounters with that whatever-it-was in Porterville, Jason Offutt heard from another spooked woman with a very similar tale—in the very same Central California town of Porterville.

As a well-known chronicler of unexplained and paranormal phenomena, Offutt heard from strangers from all over the country, as they shared their supernatural experiences with him—which he regularly posted about on his blog, From the Shadows. But what were the odds of two families encountering nearly identical phenomena, in virtually the same geographical location?

Spring 2010, Porterville, California

The property seemed perfect at first. A large country spread outside Porterville, it boasted extensive rural acreage and a spacious two-story house, complete with a backyard deck opening on to the nearby Tule River. Not to mention the scenery and local wildlife…

For Charlie Thomas and her husband—veterans of the Army and the Marines, respectively—this was a place to put down roots. A fresh start for a couple who had already witnessed the worst of wartime carnage after tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan—a home to bring up their two-year-old twin daughters; room enough for their two golden labs to roam and explore; and a tranquil country existence in which to grow old together.

Perhaps most enchanting of all, however, was the koi pond out front. And in no time at all, Thomas transformed the front yard into a fairy tale oasis of garden gnomes, fairy statues, and colorful toadstools surrounding a pond well-stocked with Japanese koi fish.

There was one place on the property, though, that none would set foot near: a dilapidated old structure that the Thomases called “the shack.” And unfortunately, it was an eyesore that Charlie, her girls, and the dogs all had to pass on their way to the Tule riverbank. The two labs, in particular, always bristled and barked at the rickety outbuilding.

What happened on one early spring day, about a week after her family had moved in, shattered the Army vet mom’s sense of security. She had been meandering alongside the river with her daughters and dogs that early afternoon.

“I heard my husband calling my name from the house,” Thomas told Jason Offutt well over a year later. “He sounded kind of frantic … so I hurried the girls … and started for the house…

“As we got even with that shack, the dogs went crazy. They were barking and snarling … and something told me to run, so I grabbed a twin under each arm and ran for home.”

But Charlie’s husband was not at home; in fact, a call to his cell phone confirmed that he’d been gone all day. But later, after he’d returned—and as the couple got some yardwork done before the sun set—they heard what sounded to Charlie like a catfight coming from the shack. So he grabbed a flashlight from the house and went to check it out.

“Just as he got to the door [of the shed] the noise stopped,” she related to Offutt. “He went in and looked around … something in a corner caught his eye … There was a cat, and it looked like it had been in a fight with a meat grinder. It was totally skinned on one side—and its neck looked as though something had taken a huge chunk out of it.”

Several days passed without incident, but the Thomases remained wary. Chalking up the cat situation to a coyote or other such predator, they kept vigilant watch over their children and pets, especially after dark. They brought the dogs inside at night.

And then one night, around three in the morning, the couple was awakened by what Charlie described as “a raspy, gurgling sound.” Dreading what they would lay their eyes upon, the pair peered out of their first-floor bedroom window.

“Standing by my pond, holding one of my garden gnomes,” Charlie told Offutt, “was what I can only describe as something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.”

“The ‘thing’ stood illumined under the motion detector light,” Offutt wrote. “It was less than three feet tall; had a long gray beard; [and] wore maroon pants, a baggy yellow shirt, brown vest, and a dark waistcoat.” A pointy reddish-brown hat perched atop its head. It could only be called … a gnome.

“The thing that made this creature really hideous was its eyes and teeth,” recalled Thomas. “It looked like it was grinning, and its teeth were jagged and pointed. The eyes were little, beady and dark and mean…

“That thing—gnome, troll, whatever it was—knew we were looking at it, and it reached into the pond and grabbed a koi [fish]. Right there in front of us, it dropped it in its mouth and swallowed it. We had noticed that every time we put fish in the pond, they disappeared—and we thought it was cats or raccoons eating them … [but] that creepy little creature was the guilty party.”

Pushing open their bedroom window a few inches, Charlie’s husband yelled at the goblin to get lost, or they’d call the cops. It simply smirked and flipped them off. So the Thomases dialed 911.

“We just said that we had an intruder in our yard,” Charlie remembered, “but we honestly didn’t think he was going to be there when they arrived.” And sure enough, the gnome disappeared as soon as a police car pulled up, lights flashing.

“We told the officers that the person ran off when it saw the lights coming up the drive, but they looked around anyway. When they were satisfied that it was gone, they came to tell us they had only found some small shoeprints like a kid’s. We knew it was no kid.”

Unfortunately for the Thomases, that was only just the beginning. The gnome showed up like clockwork, always around 3 a.m., to cradle one of Charlie’s garden gnomes while noshing on Japanese koi. And finally—fed up with the creature’s nightly antics—the couple removed all the lawn ornaments, and brought the dwindling number of fish inside to an aquarium. Then they waited.

“One night after we had removed the fairies and gnomes and fish from the yard,” Thomas told Offutt, “the creature showed up at the usual time, 3 a.m. …[and] it went crazy. It was yelling and screaming something we couldn’t understand.”

The goblin flew into a veritable rage like Rumpelstiltskin, snarling its curses, circling the Thomases’s house in such a rabid frenzy, its feet hardly touched the ground. But it wasn’t until the dogs began barking at their doggy door that terror truly gripped Charlie Thomas. She practically flew to the kitchen to secure the doggy door, then ran upstairs to check on the girls. Both slept soundly in their cribs, but their mother latched and locked all the upstairs windows, just in case the gnome really could fly.

“Neither parent slept that night,” Jason Offutt wrote. “They realized their days in Porterville were short … They soon moved.”

Summer 2011, Maryville, Missouri

After interviewing Charlie Thomas about her family’s chilling encounters with the evil gnome, Jason Offutt felt fairly certain the two bizarre cases had to be related. What were the odds?

“I asked both women if they had lived in the same house,” the blogger wrote. “Thomas wasn’t sure … But she wanted to know. Her experience was too terrifying for her to be at peace … [so] I put Thomas in contact with Tammy, [who] didn’t think it was the same house, either.

“Overwhelmed with curiosity, the women met and drove to the property … [But] something seemed wrong—the barn was gone … Someone had torn down the shed—a place of refuge for the gnome-like creature. Thomas was happy of that.”

Before they left the rural property, the two women cautiously approached their former home and knocked on the door. But the elderly woman who answered told them to get lost; she refused to answer any of their questions pertaining to the old barn—then promptly slammed the door in their faces.

Thoroughly shaken, Charlie and Tammy did some more investigative digging that afternoon: a family that had lived on the property previously told of hearing their names called when no one was home (echoing Thomas’ eerie experience); TVs and radios turning on by themselves; piles of feces on the floor every morning, even though the residents had no dogs; and a nasty little voice cursing them out.

“Hopefully that creepy little creature didn’t move to another barn or shed or shack,” Thomas told Offutt, “and is not terrorizing someone else. One thing I would like to know is—where did it come from, and why was it there … other than to terrorize everyone who lived near that old shack?”

The story of Porterville’s evil gnome spread like an online virus along the digital byways of the internet, popping up on paranormal websites like Mysterious Universe, and on blogs like Michael Banti’s Weird Fresno. Television was not far behind: supernatural reality shows Paranormal Witness and Monsters & Mysteries in America both covered the murderous little entity—the latter show even featured Tammy herself.

Online speculation was rich in theories. “…how in the hell did a mean little creature straight out of English folklore get all the way to Central California” wondered blogger Michael Banti of Weird Fresno. He posited the possibility that the gnome was actually a thought form—the manifestation of a belief that takes on a life of its own.

Others had very different ideas. “I think that this is a small person trying to live for free in everyone’s backyard,” commented a poster named Lexi in response to Banti’s post about the Porterville gnome. “Most of all, he seems to be mentally ill … I believe in my heart that this [could] be a crazy man who needs to be brought to jail—and needs medication.”

But if we’re looking at this entity through the historical lens of folklore, then the term “gnome” is something of a misnomer. Given the description of the creature by two eyewitnesses—a two-to-three-foot-tall male humanoid with a long gray beard, jagged incisors, and that telltale pointed, blood-red hat—it would seem this entity matches the vicious “redcap” goblin of British and Scottish folklore, rather than the benevolent German earth-dweller known as the “gnome.”

Hailing from the Anglo-Scottish border region in the United Kingdom—and also known as a “Redcomb” or “Bloody Cap”—the redcap was said to inhabit the medieval castle and fortress ruins in the liminal space of the warfare-haunted border between England and Scotland. Borne of the blood that soaked this battle-scarred land, the territorial redcaps guarded these ruins to the death of any unfortunate traveler passing within the ruins’ vicinity.

“These creatures looked—in many respects—like the garden gnomes,” paranormal podcaster and folklorist Mattew Armstrong told listeners in a 2023 episode of his podcast Ghosthropology, “but were vicious murderers whose hats were red with the blood of their victims. Should their hats dry out, the redcaps would die (or be sent back to Hell). [They] wore iron boots … but nonetheless ran faster than any human could. They were vile, often dirty, and enjoyed the pain and suffering of others.”

Armstrong wondered how a creature out of northwestern European mythology could have surfaced in the folklore-rich Latin-American culture of California’s Central Valley. Noting Porterville’s large Spanish-speaking population, he opined that in a cultural tradition populated by the likes of La Llorona, the chupacabra, and a chicken-footed Devil, the European-derived redcap would definitely be the odd man out.

Elements of the Porterville-specific story—a bloodthirsty little person, the witching hour of 3 a.m.—smack of pop culture references, from The Amityville Horror to The X-Files, he noted. (Not to mention popular horror film franchises like Child’s Play and Leprechaun—or even R.L. Stine’s middle-grade horror series, Goosebumps.)

“And the activities of a gnome or redcap,” Armstrong pointed out, “—running around the house making noise, eating a whole fish while grinning at the homeowners, skinning and eating a cat—it all seems more like the elements of a slasher movie than anything out of redcap lore.

“Can I say that Tammy and Charlie didn’t have these experiences? No, of course I can’t. I honestly don’t know. But I can say that the story available reads like it was put together from elements of various horror genres, rather than a cohesive narrative of actual events. That doesn’t make it false, but it does make me suspect that … someone may have told an exaggeration … for the sake of entertaining others; the story was picked up by a relatively influential paranormal website … and then took on a life of its own.

“I may be wrong,” concluded Armstrong, “but that’s what I suspect is occurring here. And if I am right, that is itself fascinating … [how] even a single post on a website can be picked up by those with an interest [in the story], and [how it can] become a fixture in folklore.”

So did an evil gnome really terrorize two different families—six years apart—on the same rural property outside Porterville, California? Or was it a thought form; a diminutive, mentally ill, unhoused individual with a preference for raw meat; or simply a tall tale that spread online like a California wildfire?

The jury is still out on this one. Perhaps it is one, any, all, or none of these. Regardless, it sure makes for one spine-tingler of a summer campfire story, doesn’t it?

Works Cited
Briggs, Katharine. An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York, New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.
Way, Twigs. Garden Gnomes: A History. Oxford, UK: Shire Publications Ltd., 2009.
Offutt, Jason (2009, June 7). “The Evil Little Man.” From the Shadows. https://from-the-shadows.blogspot.com/2009/06/evil-little-man.html
Offutt, Jason (2011, August 6). “Terror of the Evil Little Man—Part One.” From the Shadows. https://from-the-shadows.blogspot.com/2011/08/terror-of-the-evil-little-man-part-one.html
Offutt, Jason (2011, August 12). “Terror of the Evil Little Man—Part Two.” From the Shadows. https://from-the-shadows.blogspot.com/2011/08/terror-of-the-evil-little-man-part-two.html
Offutt, Jason (2011, August 20). “Terror of the Evil Little Man—Part Three.” From the Shadows. https://from-the-shadows.blogspot.com/2011/08/terror-of-the-evil-little-man-part-three.html
Banti, Michael (2014, May 26). “An Evil Gnome-Like Creature Terrorizes a Farmhouse in Porterville.” Weird Fresno. https://www.weirdfresno.com/2014/05/an-evil-gnome-like-creature-terrorizes.html
Banti, Michael (2018, October 22). “Have You Seen These Supernatural Creatures That Haunt the Fresno Area?” FresYes! https://fresyes.com/fresno/strange-creatures
Offutt, Jason. Chasing American Monsters: 251 Creatures, Cryptids, and Hairy Beasts. Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2019.
Van Vuren, Ronel Janse (2020, April 21). “Repugnant Redcaps: An A to Z of Faerie.” Ronel the Mythmaker. https://www.ronelthemythmaker.com/repugnant-redcaps-atozchallenge-folklore/#
Gomez, Manny (2022, October 17). “Does Porterville Have Malicious Gnomes?” Your Central Valley. https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/digital-enterprise/malicious-gnomes-in-porterville
Armstrong, Matthew (Host) (2023, May 8). “Gnomes and Ghosts (Episode #58) [Audio Podcast Episode]”. Ghosthropology. https://kmmamedia.com/2023/05/08/58-gnomes-and-ghosts

Sarah A. Peterson-Camachois a library assistant with Fresno County Library, with a Bachelor’s in English and a Bachelor’s in Journalism from California State University, Fresno. In her free time, she makes soap and jewelry that she sells at Fresno-area craft fairs. She has written for The Clovis Roundup and the Central California Paranormal Investigators (CCPI) Newsletter.