Grimothy the Jim Reaper: A Giant Evil Raccoon Towers Over Bainbridge Island in Honor of Seattle's Jimothy

Seattle’s most beloved raccoon now has a dark lord for a father. A massive Halloween display dubbed “Grimothy” has been erected on Bainbridge Island, Washington, in honor of “Jimothy,” the stubby, deformed raccoon who became a viral sensation in Seattle, the New York Post reported on Tuesday, October 20, 2026. Where Jimothy is cute, round and unbothered, Grimothy is built to menace: the installation stares out at the street with bright-red eyes and a bloody-red tongue, a Halloween-season evil twin for the most famous raccoon in the Pacific Northwest.

The display is the work of two brothers who know a thing or two about internet fame. Cartoonist and New York Times bestselling author Matthew Inman — the creator of the webcomic The Oatmeal — and his brother Bryce welded and wired the massive installation themselves, according to the Post. Matthew announced the finished piece to his followers on Instagram, where he posts as @theoatmeal, with the kind of proclamation a dark lord deserves: “Behold: Grimothy is here, the Jim Reaper, Dark Lord and Father of Jimothy.”

That lineage is the joke and the tribute at once. Grimothy is not a generic Halloween monster; he is Jimothy scaled up, darkened and given a mythology — the father of the little raccoon Seattle adopted this year, reimagined as a reaper. To make the contrast land, the brothers fitted Grimothy with menacing bright-red eyes and made his tongue bloody red, the Post reported, deliberately setting the display’s look against the cute Jimothy who won the city over.

Who is Jimothy?

For readers outside Seattle, the backstory starts with a very unusual raccoon. Jimothy is a stubby critter whose short, compact build sets him apart from other raccoons, and locals dubbed him “Jimothy” as his appearances piled up. He became an internet sensation after Seattle residents shared videos of him traversing backyards and balconies in the Emerald City, the Post reported — the kind of unscripted, repeatable sighting that turns a neighborhood animal into a folk hero. His hometown, per the trading-card stats the Seattle Mariners later printed for him, is Ballard, the northwest Seattle neighborhood where he was most often spotted.

What makes Jimothy’s rise remarkable is how completely Seattle claimed him. This was not a zoo animal or a mascot costume; he was a wild raccoon going about his business while an entire city watched, filmed and rooted for him. Every new video of the little raccoon crossing a balcony or waddling through a backyard extended the story, and the name — Jimothy, formal and faintly absurd for an animal who raids trash cans — did the rest. By the time the Inman brothers started welding, Jimothy was less a raccoon than a shared character in Seattle’s year.

The night Jimothy got a trading card

The surest sign of how far the phenomenon traveled came in August, at a ballpark. Baseball fans at T-Mobile Park celebrated Jimothy at the Seattle Mariners’ game against the Tigers, the Post reported, and fans who purchased tickets through a special promotional offer were given Jimothy shirts. The first 20,000 fans at the game received Jimothy trading cards printed with his stats — including his hometown of Ballard and his throwing hand, listed, accurately, as “all fours.”

One card from that night became a story of its own. A 13-year-old girl, Abby, received the one-of-a-kind Seattle Mariners “Jimothy” raccoon card, according to the Post, and Oliver Moy — the Florida-born social media influencer and founder of the Asian American boy band North Star Boys — paid $20,100 for the rare card at an online auction. A raccoon who started as phone footage over a backyard fence had, by late summer, a five-figure collectible market. Grimothy arrives at the far end of that arc: the moment a viral animal gets a Halloween monument, his legend is secure.

Built by hand, one tiny weld at a time

Grimothy looks effortless in the finished photos, but the build was anything but. Getting the main ring structure welded together was the hardest part, Bryce Inman told The Stranger, in comments quoted by the Post. The problem was the material itself: some of the steel rods are small, and anything more than a tiny spot weld burns through and cuts the piece in half. “So, if I made one small mistake, Jimothy would implode on top of me,” Bryce told The Stranger. The brothers welded and wired the whole installation themselves, which means the display’s scale — big enough to stop traffic, as it turned out — was achieved with the most delicate possible touch, rod by rod.

There is a fitting symmetry in that. Jimothy’s fame was built from small moments — a short clip here, a balcony sighting there — and his monument was assembled the same way, in small welds that each had to be exactly right. A heavier hand at any joint, and the ring that holds Grimothy together would have been cut in two by its own construction.

The front yard that became a tourist attraction

The brothers may have underestimated what they were unleashing. Matthew told The Stranger that the installation has become a local attraction, with people lining up to get a look at Grimothy — not just at trick-or-treat hour, but deep into the night. “Last night (Saturday) 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.”

Bainbridge Island sits across Puget Sound from Seattle, close enough that a determined Jimothy fan can make the trip, and the display gives the island a Halloween destination with a genuinely local story behind it. This is not an imported franchise decoration; it is a tribute to a specific raccoon, from a specific neighborhood, built by a cartoonist whose own career was made by exactly this kind of internet moment. For more of the season’s larger-than-life Halloween celebrations, see our coverage of Pittsburgh’s monster pumpkins festival, and for the rest of today’s culture news, browse Previously’s News front.

Halloween displays live or die on whether strangers slow down. By that measure, Grimothy has already won his season: a front yard on Bainbridge Island, a line of cars at 9:30 on a Saturday night, and a little raccoon named Jimothy — still out there somewhere in Ballard, presumably unaware that his father, the Jim Reaper, is watching over Puget Sound with bright-red eyes.