A Shropshire woman filed the correct form. The council received it. The system has no field for this.

Form PD-7, titled ‘Persistent Uninvited Species (Residential/Agricultural),’ was submitted to Shropshire Council on the fourteenth of this month by a Ludlow-area allotment holder named Patricia Elm, who described in the form’s ‘Species Description’ field a creature approximately three feet tall, pale green-grey, with fingers she characterized as ‘too long for what it was doing with them,’ which was pulling up her parsnips row by row in what she considered a targeted and non-random order. The council has confirmed the form is in the system. The system, a spokesperson told me by email, ‘does not currently include a classification field that would accommodate this submission, and the relevant department is seeking internal guidance on how to proceed.’

Elm is not the only witness. Twenty-three individuals have now reported contact with or observation of the creature across a stretch of allotment plots running roughly four hundred meters along the Corve valley. Their accounts are consistent on the key details: the height, the coloring, the hands, and the parsnips. Several note that other root vegetables — beetroot, carrots — were left entirely alone. One witness, a retired schoolteacher named Colin Marsh, submitted his own PD-7 independently and received an automated acknowledgment with a case reference number. He told me he found this ‘reassuring, in theory.’ I did not push him on what he meant by that.

Community Notice

I filled out the form correctly. I ticked every box that applied. There simply wasn’t a box for what I saw.

— Patricia Elm, Allotment Holder, Ludlow

What Elm saw, based on every physical description in my possession, is consistent with what this network catalogs as the Common Goblin — though there is nothing especially common about finding one systematically harvesting a specific root crop with apparent intentionality. The Common Goblin’s documented behavior runs toward opportunistic scavenging and general disruption. Selective agricultural focus is not a behavior I have a prior file on. I’ve flagged it to the second notebook. The parsnip specificity is the detail I keep returning to.

As of this writing, the council has not indicated when clarification will be issued, which department will issue it, or whether Form PD-7 will be amended to include a new classification field. Elm’s allotment has been visited on four consecutive nights. The parsnip beds are described as ‘essentially gone.’ She has begun covering the remaining plot with chicken wire, which she acknowledges is, in her words, ‘probably not the right solution, but it’s the only one available to her while the council thinks about it.’ I am driving to Ludlow tomorrow. I have the county atlas. I want to see the row spacing.