The famed Twitter account for San Francisco's famed fog, Karl the Fog, dormant lo these several years, came back to life Thursday morning just as some seriously dense fog came to envelop the city and wreak havoc.

"Oh, hey down there. I know it's been awhile, so hope you still recognize me. (I put on a few metric tons over the last two years)," Karl says.

"Moved in with my parents in Point Reyes at the start of the pandemic. The free rent was great, but nothing beats hanging 6ft away from you."

For those new to the city, you may have heard that the fog is "named Karl," but you may not have known that there was this Twitter account that launched in 2010 which actually gave the city's notorious fog a name and a persona. That account's holder has remained anonymous over the last decade, even after becoming a corporate "weather advisor" for a former airline, putting out a novelty book in 2019, and expanding to Instagram.

And no, the fog has not always had a name — it was literally all because of this Twitter account.

The Karl the Fog Twitter account went silent after tweeting about the 49ers being in the Super Bowl in Jan. 2020 — after a couple of years of less-than-regular tweets — and filling the void starting in the mid-pandemic fall of 2020 was a new account, Karla the Fog. That account only attracted around 9,000 followers, despite remaining pretty active the past year and a half.

We'll see if the return of Karl on Twitter is for keeps — the male persona, wouldn't you know, has over 340,000 followers and counting, and the return tweet is racking up the like and retweets as we speak.

And we still don't know who's behind it! We just know that SF Weekly interviewed them in 2013, and they said they were inspired by a fake BP public relations account that appeared on Twitter after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — an earlier pioneer in parody accounts.

"I love the idea of blending fact and fiction and not knowing where one stops and the other begins," Karl's human creator said. And then during some foggy SF weather, they said, "Friends were whining about the most recent fogpocalypse and I was loving it. ... I've always thought of the fog as mysterious and romantic and looked forward to its arrival. Since everyone was complaining, I started thinking, 'I wish the fog had a chance to defend itself,' and that's when I created the Twitter account."

Are you back for good, dear Karl? Or is this just a tease.

Photo: Denys Novozhai