With St. Patrick’s Day approaching, longtime Mobile residents are once again recalling one of the city’s strangest moments of internet fame: the Crichton leprechaun sighting of 2006, a local phenomenon that briefly captured national attention.
Nearly nine years ago, crowds began gathering along Le Cren Street near UMS-Wright in Mobile after word spread that residents could see the image of a leprechaun peering out from the branches of a tree. A local television reporter visited the scene after fielding a flood of calls about the sightings, and the resulting news segment quickly went viral, eventually landing references on national late-night television.
An amateur sketch of the supposed leprechaun was later put up for auction online, fetching a winning bid of $1,100 from a bidder in New York City. Proceeds from the sale went to the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life fundraiser, tying the quirky local legend to a charitable cause.
Shun Thomas, a Crichton neighborhood resident, has long said he was the first to spot the now-famous image. Sitting in the same spot nearly a decade later, Thomas described the strange moment he first noticed a face-like shape emerging from the tree’s branches, first the outline of a mouth or nose, then gradually the rest of a face beneath what looked like a small hat.
Thomas said he called over family and friends who were with him that evening, and one by one, they reported seeing the same image. The sighting reportedly recurred each evening for about a week before news crews descended on the quiet residential street, transforming a neighborhood curiosity into a media spectacle.
Looking back, Thomas said the attention that followed was often frustrating, turning what felt like a genuine shared experience among neighbors into an easy punchline. He said the sketch that circulated widely online was actually drawn by his sister, and he has since painted his own rendering of what he saw in the tree that year.
Thomas told a visiting reporter that he glimpsed the image again only once more, in 2010, an experience he shared online at the time. He said the broader lesson from the whole ordeal is a simple one: people should look closely and draw their own conclusions rather than relying entirely on secondhand accounts.
The Crichton leprechaun remains one of Mobile’s most talked-about local legends, still surfacing in conversation whenever St. Patrick’s Day rolls around. For longtime residents of the neighborhood, the tale is less about the supernatural and more a reminder of the unpredictable ways a small Mobile street once found itself in the national spotlight.