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Garden gnomes keep mysteriously vanishing from a B.C. neighbourhood:
TORONTO -- Neighbours in Victoria are keeping a closer eye on their gardens following a string of garden gnome thefts in the quiet neighbourhood.
Heather Boggs said she realized several of her gnomes had been stolen last Friday when she went to tend to her garden in the West Shore community and saw empty spaces where she would normally find her gnomes.
[...] Luckily the gnome-snatcher was caught in the act as Boggs' doorbell camera filmed the kidnapping as it happened.
[...] Boggs shared the footage on Facebook to warn others and found that her neighbour who lives on the same street had also been targeted.
Sher Gosling told CTV News she believes the same man stole her gnome that would usually welcome guests in front of her home.
[...] While these mythical figures might not seem valuable, for Boggs, one gnome in particular meant a great deal. Boggs is a breast cancer survivor and, as a gift to celebrate her final chemo treatment, her mother gave her a little statue for her garden.
This is, of course, not the first time a gnome has been stolen. Here's one escapade from May 11, 1989.
Stolen Lawn Dwarf Returned with Pictures from His Travels:
Grumpy the traveling lawn dwarf is back where he belongs, concrete feet planted firmly on the porch, following his whirlwind tour of Washington, New York City, Florida and elsewhere.
He even has pictures from his vacation.
The 20-inch, 80-pound concrete statue of the character in the Walt Disney movie classic ″Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,″ disappeared March 16 from Carol and Gene Horne's front porch.
″I couldn't set my finger on it, but I felt something was missing,″ Mrs. Horne said. ″The next morning my daughter said, 'Mom, there's somebody missing.‴
Bashful, Doc, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, Dopey and the 400-pound Snow White were safe and sound but Grumpy was gone.
On April 26, a freshly scrubbed Grumpy returned, with a sign dangling from his shoulders that said ″I'm home.″ Along with the sign was an envelope with 35 photographs from his journey, many of them with captions on the back.
Among the photos were snapshots of Grumpy ogling bikini-clad women from a Florida sand dune, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and dining at McDonald's.
″My husband and I, we were laughing so hard at these pictures. My husband was late for work,″ Mrs. Horne said.
[...] She said neither she nor the police had any idea who took Grumpy. She theorizes that ″it's someone with an engineering background. The printing on the back of the pictures is very similar to the type you see on blueprints.″
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2020, @08:06PM (2 children)
This side of the pond, way back in the 1970s, a neighbour at the top of the hill had quite a number of gnomes in his garden, it was not that uncommon for the first bus driver in the morning to find them lined up waiting for him at the bus stop nearest to their garden home, of course, depending on the driver, sometimes they went on a little journey...and they'd be found by another driver, on another route, lined up at one of his stops, and so on, and so on.
They always (eventually) made their way back 'home', all 30 of them...
Happier, simpler fucking times. Now, the shitheads that we have living locally would smash the things...and that's just the alleged adults..
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday July 26 2020, @08:41PM (1 child)
A bloke I used to drink with would bring his neighbour's gnome to the pub every now and again.
Huge laughs all round, then he'd put it back on his way home. Pre-camera phone days unfortunately.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2020, @12:14AM
The 'gnomes on the bus' made it into the local paper, there was a picture of them at the stop, all lined up.
Unfortunately their archives aren't online, the publisher of the paper has been bought out by one of these global publishers, who didn't care much for things like the heritage aspect, so there's a question as to whether the old archives survived the offshoring of the operations.
But yes, it's a pity camera phones didn't exist back then..there were so many characters around whose antics were the stuff of local legend back in the day, but are now only remembered by the older generations (e.g. I can now count on two hands the number of people alive who remember that the site of a local school was, back in the 50's, the location of the once locally infamous 'cigarette mines') . This town used to have a reputation for being quite 'mad', this seemed to have peaked with the generations who fought in WW2, and those born during & just after it, nowadays? it's known as a shithole.
It would have been nice to have photos/videos of these characters of yore in action.