The late gonzo journalist ‘got caught up in the moment’ on a visit to his idol’s home, his widow explained, and had long planned to return them

A set of antlers stolen by the late Hunter S Thompson from the home of Ernest Hemingway has been returned to the Nobel laureate’s family by the gonzo journalist’s widow.

Anita Thompson told the website BroBible that Thompson took the elk antlers from Hemingway’s home in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1964. Hemingway shot himself in the home in 1961. Thompson visited three years later, to write an essay about his visit, What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?, exploring “just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America’s most famous writer”.

The young man who would go on to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and to invent gonzo journalism also, according to his widow Anita Thompson, “got caught up in the moment” and stole the antlers, going on to hang them in his own garage. In his essay, Thompson refers to “a big pair of elk horns over the front door” in Hemingway’s “comfortable-looking chalet”.

Anita Thompson told Brandon Wenerd at BroBible that her late husband, who killed himself in 2005, “had so much respect for Hemingway” and “was actually very embarrassed” by his actions.

The couple had “planned to take a road trip and quietly return them, and not make a thing of it”, she said, but never did. This year, she got in touch with the Hemingway family, and earlier this month drove the antlers back to Ketchum – now owned by charity the Nature Conservancy – herself.

“They were warm and kind of tickled … they were so open and grateful, there was no weirdness,” she told Wenerd, a long-time friend, of the Hemingway family’s reaction. “Still, it’s something that was stolen from the home. They were grateful to have them back. They had heard rumours. Sean Hemingway, the grandson, was the first family member that I’d heard from. He spoke with other Hemingway family members and he said that everyone agreed that he should have them. He lives in New York, where he curates a museum. So now that I’m back from Ketchum we’re actually shipping them to Sean.”

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