The thing about Jimothy is that when you see Jimothy, you immediately understand that the bizarre creature, both cute and just a little bit freaky looking, could not be called anything else.
“Ah, yes,” you say to yourself, nodding. “That is a Jimothy.”
Jimothy, a raccoon with a spinal condition in Seattle, has gone from being a local legend to a national celebrity after several videos of the critter circulated on social media this month and made the animal an internet celebrity.
In the most popular of the videos, Kiana Hall, a 33-year-old marketing specialist, spots the raccoon while walking through her neighborhood of Ballard, in northwestern Seattle, in July.
“He was under a car, and I thought he was a cat,” she said. “I just love cats and wanted to take a closer look.”
When she pointed her phone at the animal, it was something else. “What am I looking at?” Hall exclaims in the widely shared video, as Jimothy scampers across a sidewalk looking like a 5-year-old’s crayon rendering of a raccoon, or a lesser character from a horror film.
In her Instagram caption, Hall dubbed the creature Jimothy. “He just looked like a Jimothy to me,” she explained, describing him as “just a silly and round little guy.”
The animal is likely to have short spine syndrome, an extremely rare congenital deformity that results in a significantly shortened spinal column and a rounder appearance, said Dr. Marcie Logsdon, a veterinarian who teaches at Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine.
“Everything is kind of cramped up next to itself instead of being long and spread out like it should be,” Dr. Logsdon said, adding that the condition can affect how other body parts develop, too. “One of the things that you might notice first on Jimothy is how his legs are all a little bit disproportionate to the rest of his body, probably because as he was growing and those legs were developing, his spine wasn’t normal,” she added. (Short of performing a physical exam, Dr. Logsdon said it was not possible to discern Jimothy’s sex.)
Dr. Logsdon said it was “surprising” to see an animal with this condition appearing to thrive in the wild. It “seems to be in reasonable body condition and he seems be moving very well and seems to have adapted quite well to what’s going on,” she said.
Jimothy has captured quite a few hearts around Seattle. Rebecca Sorensen, the owner of Ballard Clay, a pottery studio, commissioned a local artist to paint a mural of the raccoon outside her business.
“We thought behind the garbage can would be most appropriate,” Andrew Miller, the artist, said.
Sorensen, 45, said she first spotted Jimothy about six months ago. “We live at the dead end of an alley, and something caught in my headlights as I turned in and scurried away,” she said. The creature startled her so much that she asked her neighbors to check their home security camera footage. She told her neighbors, half-jokingly, that she had seen a chupacabra, a creature from folklore known for sucking the blood of livestock.
The small mural outside her studio has already begun drawing fans, Sorensen said.
Jessica Hinnenkamp, 38, stopped by Sorensen’s studio on Monday for a quick visit while in town from Virginia for work. “My husband and I are, like, the world’s biggest raccoon fans,” said Hinnenkamp, who is in the Navy. “We call each other our trash pandas. We have matching raccoon tattoos.”
Laura Exley, a Seattle-based tattoo artist, recently began offering a few Jimothy tattoo designs on her Instagram page. One customer had already taken her up on it, she said. “Every time that there’s a little internet thing that captures people’s hearts, there is an influx of tattoos of that thing,” Exley, 47, explained. She has over a dozen more appointments booked with people looking for raccoon ink.
In recent days, Dmitriy Ishimskiy, 36, posted videos he had filmed over a year ago of what appeared to be Jimothy as a baby, climbing on a fence in Ishimskiy’s backyard.
“They were the cutest little raccoon family, wandering around our neighborhood and visiting everyone’s backyards,” Ishimskiy wrote, adding that he had not seen the round-backed raccoon in many months and was happy to see Jimothy was doing well.
Jimothy’s fame has begun to spread beyond his small neighborhood in Seattle, too.
The city’s baseball team briefly changed its social media profile picture to one of the raccoon wearing a Mariners hat, and a person dressed as a raccoon participated in a mascot race during a recent game. (Jimothy took home the “win-othy,” a spectator reported on X.) During the World Cup final, the official Budweiser Instagram account posted a picture of Jimothy, and an official NASA account on X posted a photo of Seattle taken from the International Space Station, stating, “Jimothy runs this city.”
Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a member of the Seattle City Council, announced that she would soon present a proclamation to “celebrate the majestic Jimothy” and “commemorate Jimothy Summer.”
“I think he’s an example to all of us that you don’t have to be perfect to be loved, and it’s what makes us different that makes us sensational,” she said. Jimothy’s viral moment felt like the Seattle equivalent of New York City’s “Pizza Rat” episode, she added, when a persistent rodent was captured dragging a slice of pizza down some Subway stairs.
“It is a dream of mine to encounter Jimothy in real life and then keep my measured distance from him so he can live his good little life,” Rinck added.
Dr. Logsdon echoed the need to keep a safe distance from Jimothy — and all raccoons — and advised any fans against feeding the animal, adding that attempts to “help” it were likely to do more harm than good.
“His best life is going to be just out in the wild, essentially being left alone,” she said.
Still, even from a distance, Jimothy’s tale has become somewhat allegorical. For Sorensen, the clay studio owner, the raccoon is a symbol of resilience.
“I think worldwide right now, in a lot of ways, with everything that we’re experiencing and seeing,” she said, “he’s a story of surviving when things maybe aren’t quite right.”
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