Strange sightings....the Somerset Gimp

For Halloween, I bring you the story of a some disturbing sightings. Recently a man was convicted of being the “Somerset gimp”.

This bizarre headline marks the end (perhaps) of a rather strange case occurring in the English county of Somerset. The reports of someone in a latex suit wandering round villages in Somerset started in 2018. They were mostly regarded with bemusement, or amusement. English eccentrics are nothing new.

There are differing reports of his practices: jumping out and scaring people, or just walking around, or peeping in windows, or thrashing around on the ground. Reddit is a useful archive of some of these type of phenomena (and all things urban legend), and there is a discussion of the gimp from 2019 here. News reported another sighting in 2021.

There were some gimp sightings in different parts of the country too, and another (apparently professional?) gimp declared that the Somerset man was giving gimps a bad reputation. (As opposed to the positive, friendly opinion people previously had of men in head-to-toe latex wandering around). Fetish weirdo annoyed by other fetish weirdos bringing down the vibe? The whole tabloid nature of the story seemed like the bizarro world version of a children’s party clown being annoyed by creepy clown horror movies damaging his image.

Creepy clowns though are something of a forerunner of the gimp case. Some of you may recall that in 2016 there was a wave of clown sightings, which seems to have been a mix of things. There was a stunt marketing campaign for a horror movie, there were unrelated costumed pranksters and a kind of mass hysteria about clowns. The story spread via social media, and sightings were reported in different countries, encouraging more sightings (real and probably imagined) and more clown copycats. It was taken seriously enough that Halloween stores in some places stopped selling clown outfits.

The difference between today’s weird sightings and those of decades ago is that most of us have a camera in our pocket. So there were quite a few photos of the gimp/s.

There was even footage of one odd encounter, where the man appears not to be wearing a latex suit but to be covered in mud or paint: and where it has come off his fingers it looks like he has blue surgical gloves underneath. He refuses to respond verbally to the men addressing him, at least not until near the end, when he is out of sight and appears to shout “I’ll try”.

So far, so strange. There are oddballs in the world, if he was some kind of fetishist, or acting on a bet, who knows.

The man convicted seems to have been mentally ill, and his motives are unclear. Whether this actually marks the end of the Somerset Gimp remains to be seen. Reddit sleuths guess there is more than one gimp, given differences in their costumes, based on witness photographs and descriptions. (The idea that the gimps were some kind of collective effort makes the story even weirder). But, like the clowns, this could also have been a copycat. We may yet learn that there are others still out there. That the real gimp remains at large.

The gimp sightings went on over enough years for it to start sounding like the origins of an urban (or rather in this case, rural) myth, the “Somerset gimp” entering parlance as something you might encounter on the road at night, somewhere in credibility between the Beast of Bodmin and Slenderman. A twenty-first century Mothman.

Fans of the work of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand will know his tracing of folklore (he most famously wrote about how the Vanishing Hitchhiker story came to be popularised in different parts of the world). Urban legends persist because of the thrill (horror-type stories) and also as cautionary tales - like all the fwd:fwd:fwd: emails you used to get from your aunt with stories of women getting abducted from the mall, based on supposedly true events (“This really happened to a woman in Minnesota!!!!!” no, it did not). Every urban legend you hear comes from a friend of a friend’s roommate’s cousin, but historically it was never possible to actually trace it back.

That is changing with digital folklore, as Slenderman demonstrates. He was created in an online forum, we know when and by whom. The Somerset gimp is an analogue rather than digital creation, but his adoption into memeable form and online discussion means he could also transition into urban legend status. Yes there are photos of him/them, but the malleability of photos (and AI) mean anyone could create a “gimp sighting”. I just made one here. I didn’t ask for him to be armed. But perhaps in the next iteration of the legend he will be. Machines creating our narrative for us.

The AI image I got from the prompt: “man in gimp suit in the woods”

So we may not have seen the last of the Somerset Gimp. Stay safe out there.

Happy Halloween!