'Harry Potter' Fans Force $580 Million Underwater Power Cable To Be Rerouted Due To Fictional 'Grave' Site

Uh, Harry Potter fans, are you okay?

The series has always had a deeply devoted fanbase, but the recent manifestation of that fervor is, uh, a bit over the top.

Fans in the United Kingdom forced the country's National Grid power company to relocate an undersea power cable in order to avoid the supposed grave of fictional character Dobby the House Elf.

Now, the $580 million cable will pass closer to actual human remains instead.

The Greenlink power cable was set to span 125 miles between County Wexford in Ireland and Freshwater West, a beach in Wales where Dobby's death was filmed.

The Welsh beach is the site of a makeshift memorial to Dobby where fans leave him handwritten messages on rocks, and the Greenlink route was set to pass right through it.

The power cable is part of an effort to double the electrical capacity between the two countries by sharing the excess renewable energy produced by both.

But after a report about the project on the BBC, Simon Ludlam, the CEO of Etchea Energy, which is managing the project, said his company was inundated with messages from upset Harry Potter fans.

He said:

“We got hundreds of calls; I mean, hundreds of calls."

Ludlam also said he wasn't even sure who or what Dobby was at the time, and even after it was explained to him he was left in disbelief.

“I said, ‘He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’”

So he and his team set about rerouting the cable. And now, it will go right through an area with actual human remains from the Bronze Age. Yes, you read that right: The area contains Bronze Age urns associated with human burial.

This is, of course absurd and historically disruptive. Depending on your view, it's also something like sacrilege. But that doesn't seem to have deterred the Harry Potter fandom.

As you might guess, people online had a lot to say about this bizarre story.

While this may be the most absurd chapter in the saga of Dobby's grave, it's not the first time Harry Potter fans have caused a bit of a ruckus on the site, which appeared in the 2010 installment Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

In 2022, UK conservation society The National Trust issued a statement letting fans know they can continue to visit the site, but urging them not to leave rocks and other items like socks as they disturb the beach's delicate ecosystem.