A Louisiana public official is amazed people still talk about a viral St. Patrick’s Day sensation that catapulted him to YouTube fame in 2006.

A news station in Mobile, attracted millions of views in 2006 after filming the devoted search for a neighborhood leprechaun. The video shows an array of emotions — excitement, happiness, worry — with residents holding up their flip phones and pulling out their binoculars to capture a seemingly non-existent sight.

One resident even did an amateur sketch of the ‘Crichton Leprechaun’, displaying its oval head, round eyes and button nose on a piece of lined paper. The creature has not been proven to be real.

Scott Walker, a Jefferson Parish councilman and former TV news anchor, introduced the story to viewers then as a news anchor for a Mobile television station.

Walker told the Times-Picayune that the camera crews and reporters were originally sent out to the neighborhood to cover other issues residents were facing, which he thought could have been “questionable news decision” at the time.

Once Walker and other journalists arrived, however, residents opened up about their worry about the alleged leprechaun lurking in their neighborhood.

The television station’s staff posted the story to YouTube the night before it was actually aired. As Walker made his way to the studio the next day, he had no idea what he was about to report until he was on live television reading the script.

“I was like, ‘What am I reading?’” the councilman said.

Walker never expected the video to go viral.

“You never know what could stick,” Walker said. “If you’d have told me in 2006 we’d still be talking about this in 2024, I would have said you were crazy.”

To this day, Walker continues to embrace the viral story like many others, as seen by the subtle reference he made to it in an Instagram post Friday.

He included a tiny version of the amateur sketch at the bottom of the post, celebrating the St. Patrick’s Day weekend ahead and the video that remains remembered nearly two decades later.

“I could be immortalized on YouTube for something far worse,” Walker said.

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