‘Everybody loves a hippo.’ This one sent Chapel Hill on the Great Hippo Hunt of ’95.

It’s been an exciting life for Ursula Pickle, traveling coast to coast by flatbed trailer, but now the hippo just wants to relax where the waves caress North Carolina sand, her owner says.

The move is already attracting ripples of neighbors and visitors, who slow down as they cruise past the bright yellow house and half-ton hippo overlooking the Core Sound near the Outer Banks.

Born out of owner Gerry Barrett’s desire to honor his father and the stories he heard as a boy, Ursula represents the magical hippo that lived in the trunk of the family’s car until it wandered down to Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill.

In 1981, Barrett commissioned the 1,000-pound, concrete and rebar statue from sculptor Robert Gaston and hired a crane to set the hippo in Mill Race Branch near Bolin Creek, not far from the Chapel Hill Police Department.

Parents and children traveled the many walking paths to hang out with Ursula and play on her mighty shoulders, Barrett said. Others said they remember youthful LSD episodes spent mesmerized by the “trippopotamus.”

The mysterious origin of the hippo by the creek filled newspapers that Chapel Hill summer.

But in June 1995, the tide of development nearly swept Ursula away when Wilmington developer Rolf Sass bought the land to build homes. Thinking the hippo too gauche for the new neighborhood, Sass and the town talked about moving her to Umstead Park.

Then overnight, Ursula disappeared.

Search for the missing Chapel Hill hippo

The Great Hippo Hunt of ‘95 ensued, and local Realtor Eunice Brock offered a $200 reward for Ursula’s return. Rumors had it the hippo was seen on a truck, heading south to Chatham County or west to Alamance. Some accused Sass of doing her in.

Two weeks later, photos were anonymously dropped onto local newspaper desks. A man wearing a hood and a hard hat was pictured holding a jackhammer to the hippo’s head.

“Back off or the hippo buys it,” the caption read.

“The next day, both papers ran front-page stories with the hippo with a jackhammer,” Barrett recently told The News & Observer. “So they knew the hippo had not been destroyed and somebody was fooling with them.”

Ursula was safely tucked away at Barrett’s Chatham County home near the Haw River, he said. The hippo had called with “concerns,” saying it was time for more tranquil waters, so he covered her tracks as best he could, swearing a nearby store owner to secrecy, he said.

A dogged Chapel Hill News reporter showed up a few days later to find the hippo hanging out with a gorilla in a grassy field. Barrett held a press conference for the newspapers, WCHL radio station and even a few TV stations, he said.

“It was wild. The real estate agent came out, and I just had a blast telling them the story and tweaking it every little bit,” he said.

Controversy fades as hippo heads west

Brock urged Barrett to donate the hippo to the town. Sass, who considered the hippo his after buying the property, offered to add a bronze plaque telling Ursula’s story if the hippo moved to the Bolin Creek Greenway.

Barrett turned both offers down, instead pledging $100 toward the $5,000 cost of having Gaston produce a new hippo. Brock offered another $500 and local mural artist Michael Brown tried to negotiate the deal, but a year later, the money was not there.

“It’s a Who’s-on-First kind of comedy of people who all seem to be pretty civic-minded individuals,” Brown said about the interested parties at the time. “In their own very different ways, they were all doing the most civic-minded thing they could think to do.”

Roger Waldon, then the town’s planning director, suggested a private fundraiser to add a hippo as “playground equipment” in town, rather than art, to avoid the hurdle of local rules. The town was focused at the time on funding its “peace sculpture,” also known as a “gun sculpture” because it was supposed to be made from disassembled gun parts.

But the peace sculpture never materialized, and Ursula never moved back to town.

Barrett soon packed up and, taking Ursula with him, moved to the West Coast. There, the hippo lived in Oregon until early July, when Barrett again loaded her onto a flatbed trailer with her gaping mouth facing the traffic behind him and returned to North Carolina.

People waved, honking and taking photos as they passed the hippo, a third as large as an adult female hippo and about 10 feet long, Barrett said.

“The most fun was when you stop at a gas station, and everything comes to a screeching halt,” he said. “Everybody wanders over and goes, ‘What in the world? Tell me more.’ Everybody loves a hippo.”

‘The end of the road’ for the hippo

Barrett and Ursula are spending more time at the beach these days, where he’s been fixing up a house in Carteret County just past the sign marking “the end of road” on U.S. 70.

The plan is to assemble a menagerie: a penguin, a large rhino and a pig just like the one at Crook’s Corner restaurant on Franklin Street. Gaston also might make a gorilla to hang from a tree, Barrett said, with live peacocks rounding out the group.

Ursula, he said, “loves the salt water” and has no plans to move. Visitors are always welcome, Barrett said.

“Probably this is as good as it can get for her,” he said.

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