Search for the Somerset villages of Claverham, Yatton, Cleeve and Bleadon on the local police website and one topic dominates. Not appeals relating to burglaries, car crime or missing people – but sightings of a figure who slips out from the shadows at night, dressed top to toe in black bondage-like gear.
Since the so-called Somerset gimp first emerged five years ago, he has caused a mishmash of distress, fear and concern in this picturesque, usually peaceful, rural area 10 miles south of Bristol, set just back from the coast.
Chris Jackson, the chair of Yatton parish council, said: “There’s a mix of feelings. There is some disquiet among people who worry they may come across him late at night. But there is also sympathy that this individual may have problems.”
Kelly, who works in a shop close to one of the gimp’s haunts, said: “He does frighten some people. Especially on dark winter nights. There’s a lot of families with children in these villages. It’s a worry for them. Is it a fetish?”
Her colleague, Natalie, said: “It’s creepy.” One of her friends has seen the gimp, she said: “She was pretty freaked out. I’d run a mile if I saw him.” But another local woman, Rebecca, insisted he was harmless and needed help rather than punishment. “I feel sorry for him.”
The first reports of the gimp reached the police in November 2018, but he became headline news the following summer when a woman snapped an image of a striking figure walking down Chapel Lane in Claverham. According to the woman, he was wearing a “rubbery suit” and ran off when she screamed.
It was the sort of offbeat English West Country tale that can fly, in the same curious ballpark as the Beast of Bodmin, the mythical – perhaps – big cat said to roam the Cornish moor. The Somerset gimp attracted national, then worldwide, attention. The New York Post reported the story with the headline: “Freak dressed in black gimp suit terrorizes UK village”.
An entrepreneur produced T-shirts, hoodies and mugs printed with an image of the gimp. Another fan of black body suits, the so-called Gimp Man of Essex, complained that the Somerset version was giving the “whole gimp community a bad reputation”.
There were more sightings of Somerset’s gimp in the summer of 2022, including one in Yatton High Street. And then, in October that year, the gimp was spotted in Cleeve by a teenager who described his outfit as “shiny” and claimed he “flopped” to the ground and spoke in a “demon language”.
Such a claim has resonance in this area. In the 18th century, a man called George Lukins was dubbed the “Yatton daemoniac” for supposedly being possessed. An exorcism took place in 1788.
No exorcist was called for here. Instead, the police scrambled a dog unit and helicopter and a man was arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance. He was released on bail with conditions to remain home between 9pm and 6am.
In May this year, there were two sightings of a man answering the gimp’s description. On the second occasion, on 9 May, a masked man dressed in a dark outfit leapt out in front of a vehicle driven by a woman on Accommodation Road in Bleadon. Officers were on the scene within three minutes.
Joshua Hunt, a man from a Claverham farming family, was arrested. His court appearance attracted many headlines, some gleefully claiming the gimp had finally been “unmasked”.
While he awaited trial for public order offences, Hunt appeared in court in Bristol in July, where he was given a detailed interim sexual harm prevention order restricting his behaviour.
District Judge Joanna Dickens told him she could understand why villagers, particularly women, would be frightened.
She ordered Hunt not to wear any sort of mask or face covering unless required for medical reasons, and not to wear or be in possession of black all-in-one garments or tight-fitting black clothing while in a public place between 9pm and 6am.
Extraordinarily – in what must have been a first for her and possibly for any judge – she ordered him not to “crawl, wriggle or writhe on the ground wearing a full-body covering or mask”.
Hunt has accepted he was the masked man dressed in black in Bleadon in May – but not that he is the Somerset gimp. The person in black has not been seen since May, but time will tell whether he – or she – has gone for good.