Who is Jimothy?

A real raccoon, in a real neighbourhood, with a real (and really rare) condition. Here’s how a Ballard local called Nubby became the internet’s favourite round raccoon.

A Ballard local

Jimothy lives around Ballard, the old maritime neighbourhood on Seattle’s northwest side: a place of shipwrights, breweries, backyard fruit trees, and, apparently, one extremely round raccoon. Neighbours first started noticing him around 2023: a raccoon shaped like no raccoon they’d seen, low to the ground, no visible neck, tail almost dragging. They called him Nubby, and for a few years he was purely a local phenomenon, a porch-camera regular working the same few blocks.

Then the internet found him

In the summer of 2026, clips of the little round silhouette trundling across a Seattle street started circulating, and they did what clips of improbable animals do. Within weeks he had a new name, Jimothy (nobody can fully explain it; the internet simply decided), and national outlets from Popular Science to The Washington Post were asking experts the question everyone had: what is that?

So… is he real?

Yes. Jimothy is a real wild raccoon, and the footage is real. Not a costume, not a filter, not AI. His shape comes from short spine syndrome, a rare congenital condition in which the vertebrae form compressed or fused, shortening the back while the legs grow to normal length. It’s the same condition documented in a handful of dogs worldwide. Experts who reviewed the footage say animals with the condition are generally healthy underneath. The back is different; the raccoon is fine. We wrote a plain-language explainer with sources: what short spine syndrome actually is ›

About the coin thing

When anything goes viral, someone mints a token about it. To be plain: Jimothy has no official anything. He is a wild animal, and this site is an unofficial fan project with no affiliation to any token or cryptocurrency. If you’d like to put money somewhere Jimothy-adjacent, the only ask we make is on behalf of PAWS Wildlife Center in Lynnwood, which actually rehabilitates raccoons. Nothing passes through us.

Seeing him for yourself

Seattleites still spot him: porch cams, alleys, the occasional confident street crossing. We keep a community sightings register, logged at neighbourhood level only (never exact locations), with every entry reviewed before it appears. If you see him: enjoy it from a distance. Don’t feed him, don’t follow him, don’t crowd him. He’s been doing fine without us since 2023.

And if you can’t make it to Ballard, we made a small browser game about his adventures ›