Viral raccoon “Jimothy” has gotten his own spooky Halloween tribute in Washington as The Oatmeal creator built a massive, terrifying display featuring his “evil father” named “Grimothy.”
“Behold: Grimothy is here, the Jim Reaper, Dark Lord and Father of Jimothy,” Matt Inman, the artist behind the card game Exploding Kittens and the webcomic The Oatmeal, wrote on Instagram.” Located on Bainbridge Island at my brother’s house, across from the Wing Point Golf Course. I’m giving out free pins.”
According to The Stranger, “Grimothy, the broader-than-human-sized raccoon, is an animatronic Halloween installation. He is ghastly, but also beautiful. His red eyes glow, his bony arms flail—as if grasping toward Ballard, the hellscape his son has run off to—and his mouth of spiky teeth chomp towards cars and pedestrians in a quiet corner of Bainbridge Island.”
Grimothy was created by Matt and his brother Bryce Inman, and according to Matt, he has been a big hit.
“Last night at around 9:30 p.m., there was still a line of cars outside the house,” he told The Stranger. “We realized we’d turned the front yard into an all-hours tourist attraction.”
Bryce said “getting the main ring structure welded together” was the hardest part of building Grimothy.
“If I made one small mistake, Jimothy would implode on top of me,” he said, because the rag he used to clean the welder kept catching fire, and Grimothy’s fur is super flammable.
Matt added that learning to work with servos – the “little motors that make things move” – ended up being “a total hack job of bad wiring and electrical tape.”
What exactly is Jimothy and why has he gone viral?
For those unfamiliar, Jimothy is a raccoon in Seattle which people have compared to cryptids like the chupacabra. Jimothy has gained significant notoriety, especially on Seattle’s Reddit pages.
He appears to be a raccoon with a deformed spine currently living in the Seattle suburb of Ballard. Marcie Logsdon, an associate professor at Washington State University’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital, told the Seattle Times that a congenital deformity in its spine likely causes its unique appearance.
Kiana Hall, the Instagram user whose video has received over six million views, told the Seattle Times that she called the raccoon Jimothy “because he looked like a Jimothy.”
Since then, a dog with a similar spinal disorder has gone viral, Seattle Mariners players have worn shirts honoring the raccoon, and the team even gave out Jimothy trading cards, one of which ended up being sold by a 13-year-old Mariners fan Abby for a crazy amount of money.