It was St. Patrick’s Day of 2015 when my friend and I started the evening at his place. We pregamed there for a bit before making our way to the bars. We took an Uber downtown where all the bar crawling was happening. We had several bars in mind that we wanted to hit up that night, but unfortunately, every bar on the strip seemed busy as hell, with huge lineups outside all of them.
We ended up lining up behind one of the bars and waited like everyone else. As annoyed as I was, there was a lot to see while waiting—thousands of people walking by wearing the same shade of green, and probably not a single one of them sober. People were chugging drinks outside the bars, blazing it up in public, puking in the gutters. It was quite the scene.
That night I remember noticing all kinds of different people too—from the typical half-naked women, drunk guys trying to get at them, belligerent people stumbling around—stuff like that. And then I saw this short homeless guy coming towards us from down the street. The guy looked malnourished and was one of the many short men dressed as a leprechaun that night. I could tell he was a hobo from the way his face and clothes looked.
I watched him come down the street, stopping every other person to panhandle or harass women. Typical crazy downtown hobo behavior. He eventually made it to the line we were waiting in and immediately started harassing people. Finally, he made it to me and my friend. He started asking us for money. In my drunken state, having watched him be a menace to everyone he saw, I thought I’d be a wise guy.
“Hey, can you spare a couple bucks?”
“No man, sorry. Don’t got any cash.”
“What about you then? Gonna help a guy out?”
“If you’re a leprechaun, why don’t you just make a pot of gold appear?”
“Burn in hell, you piece of s*!”
Suddenly, the guy charged straight at me. In just a few seconds, he took me to the ground with his hands around my neck and started strangling me. The whole time my friend was trying to help, the man was yelling, “Burn in hell! Burn in hell! BURN IN HELL!”
“St. Patrick’s Day is going to be marked as the day you die!”
It took the whole crowd of people in line to finally pull that freak off me and shove him back into the street. He walked off cursing me, saying he was going to come back and finish me off. But my friend told me to forget about it. Unfortunately, that guy completely killed my buzz, so I was pissed off.
About 45 minutes later, we finally got led into the bar. We stayed there until they closed, getting hammered and drinking so much that we got totally belligerent like the rest of the people there. But by the end of the night, I was antsy to leave. As they were ushering us out, I didn’t want to run into that psycho creepy homeless leprechaun again, so I did everything in my power to procrastinate.
My friend convinced me that there was no way that guy held such a grudge that he’d actually stick around and wait for us to leave. He probably just kept going around town freaking people out with his weird face and bumming whatever people were willing to give him so he’d go away.
We eventually left with a large crowd, all leaving at the same time. I remember looking around, keeping an eye out for the freak. There seemed to be no sign of danger. We were at the curb with a bunch of other people all waiting for our rides to show up.
But then just a few minutes later, something insane happened.
A man engulfed in flames came running around the corner. Everyone turned to look at him at the same time, frozen in shock. And he was coming straight toward us.
When I looked closer, I saw it was the same leprechaun that tried to kill me.
“Burn with me! BURN IN HELL WITH ME!”
I turned away and started running for my life. My friend followed me as the psycho chased after us. We ran through the street like wild animals, screaming for help.
Finally, we saw police officers and went straight for them. We ran past them before stopping and looking back. The flaming leprechaun was in a standoff with the cops who were now protecting us. He didn’t seem to care that he was on fire. He just kept screaming—but it wasn’t from pain. It was from rage.
They kept telling him to get down, but all he did was inch closer. For a second, I thought he was going to burst through them and set us all on fire. But then—they tased him to the ground. They rushed in, put out the fire, and restrained him. They apprehended him and put him in a cruiser, then asked us some questions—but I was pretty much in shock.
Who wouldn’t be? After a man set himself on fire and tried to take others down with him.
Till this day, I’ve never been able to think about St. Patrick’s Day without seeing a flaming leprechaun rushing at me, screaming at me to burn in hell with him.
Note: This story was inspired by a disturbing real-life incident on a St. Patrick’s Day regarding a homeless man who set himself on fire on a Hoboken street near where hundreds of revelers were hopping bar to bar for an annual pub crawl.
Police received a call at about 11:00 p.m. Saturday that a man was trying to set himself on fire. Responding officers found the man with his jacket on fire and shouted for him to get on the ground so they could extinguish it, but he refused. Once the fire spread, the man started screaming, and officers were able to push him to the ground to put out the blaze.
Thankfully, the man was not seriously injured and was transported to the hospital. The crawl continued as business as usual, with 11 people arrested for everything from assault to narcotics possession. There were also over 100 violations of city ordinances barring public drinking and urination.
RELATED POSTS
View all
