The Sewer Alligators Of New York City And The 7 Other Craziest Urban Legends That Turned Out To Be TRUE
It always starts somewhere in the woods.
It always starts with a group of teenagers armed with flashlights and the age old dream to just get out of this piece-a-shit town, man.
But most importantly, it always starts with a rumour. And you only have to go a ‘couple sentences deep to discover that the story doesn’t quite add up - there was no abandoned hospital at the end of that street and there was no nuclear accident here in 1957.
You see, urban legends have this terrible habit: they’re legends.
They’re rubbish. They’re BS. And yet somehow America’s most famous urban legend still manages to conform to this undying principle: it is full of shit. But at the same time, the Sewer Gators of NYC are also swimming in truth.
Government reports, newspaper clippings, and photographs dating back to the 1930s all document evidence that fits the legend first mentioned on the streets above. Even as recently as 2010 a 2 foot gator was found thrashing about in icy, slushy water by a sewer grate, cowering from the cars roaring past on the highway.
As terrifying (or as tragic) as that may sound, the Sewer Gators isn’t the only urban legend that turned out to be true. Grab your head torches, kids, and let’s discover the reality that inspired our favourite scary stories.
The Sewer Alligators of NYC (New York)
The urban legend: there is a vast population of monstrous, mutant alligators living and breeding in the sewer system beneath the city that never sleeps.
Our story starts 100 years ago in the roaring 1920s and the poverty-stricken 1930s. It was during these years of bust and boom that sewer workers began to report seeing strange things down in the depths below. They were used to the rats and they were desensitised to the stench - but it's when they started seeing 8 foot long alligators swimming towards them that they kinnnnda started getting concerned.
(Understandable.)
The alligators rumoured to exist in the sewers allegedly mutated overtime, becoming hulking albino beasts. This legend was recorded in The World Beneath The City (1959), from which Robert Daley explored the many problems of the utilities network beneath Manhattan and recorded the original sightings of large gators terrifying sewer workers.
But the backstory of these legendary monsters isn’t quite as terrifying as one would expect.
As late as the 1950s souvenir shops in Florida sold baby alligators to tourists. Not realising their potential size and threat, New Yorkers would buy these novelty souvenirs as a reminder of their stay in The Sunshine State. What was once memorabilia would soon become a monster, however, when the alligators began to grow. When their new pets became too much of a burden, they would flush it down the toilet just like that dead goldfish you overfed when you were 8.
The rumours festered far more on the creation of a mutant alligator population rather than just the existence of gators: with a diet of rats and trash - and then a cocktail of chemicals to wash it down - the gators were becoming terrifying beasts flushed with strange colourings. The albino trait was pinned on the alligators’ lack of sunlight.
It's almost like they were becoming a different, dangerous species, like a product of an experiment gone wrong. And it all started with a flush of the loo. What was happening beneath the glittering lights of Manhattan would only become a greater mystery as time went on. Books, films, and even a cameo on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles put the legend on the map.
What’s really peculiar, however, is that some believe this urban legend was created by Teddy May, the Commissioner of Sewers at the time. Surely this would prove the sewer system was poorly managed, you know, it being crawling with mutant creatures that just appeared from nowhere?
May was even interviewed for Robert Daley’s book, claiming the first reported sightings in 1935 prompted him to explore the sewers himself. When he cast the beam from his flashlight on a two foot long gator, he realised the rumours were in fact true.
And yet despite the strange claims, sightings, and circumstances, May’s campaign to exterminate the alligators is somehow the weirdest part of this urban legend: May would used poisoned bait, flood the side tunnels, flush the alligators out of the major arteries of the system, and they would wash up in front of sewer workers armed with rifles.
By 1937, Teddy May reported that the alligators were gone.
May might have exterminated the original population, but according to numerous sightings since then the gators shortly returned to their dark, disgusting home.
What’s really worrying, however, is that New York isn’t the only place is the US that has alligators lurking in its sewers. It’s not even the only place in the world that has these reptiles roaming underground:
Alligators are often sighted in their native state of Florida and are reported to shelter there during storm surges and the colder winter months. And in Paris a Nile crocodile was captured in 1984 just below the Point Neuf bridge.
(Elenore currently resides at the aquarium in Vannes, France.)
Charlie No-face (Pennsylvania)
The urban legend: a mysterious man with no face who glows with a radiation green aura walks about an abandoned train tunnel in western Pennsylvania.
This legend has all the traits of an All-American scary story. There’s a strange recluse who wanders around in the dead of the night and, just like the Sewer Gators, they are the result of some twisted experiment.
There was no twisted experiment, however. There was only tragedy.
In 1919, an 8 year old boy - Ray Robinson - was electrocuted by a trolley wire whilst climbing a pole to reach for a bird’s nest. He fell headfirst. He lost his nose, his mouth, and an eye. The injury was so severe he was unable to go out in public for fear of being ostracised by the community or creating a panic.
He would instead go for walks along a quiet stretch of State Route 351 in the middle of the night, meeting the strict cultural standards of Victorian ostracism of the visually disabled or disfigured. It was alongside this road that he was frequently seen and the legend first began. Locals would even venture out into the night in an attempt to find him when he was walking.
Also known as the Green Man, the colour often associated with Robinson is attributed to the electric shock locals claimed gave his entire body a greenish tinge. As far as we know, he did not glow with a ghoulish green aura.
Corpse Found In A Hotel Room (Nevada)
The urban legend: a couple turn up at their hotel room to discover a strange smell - they then discover a corpse rotting beneath their bed.
This legend dates back to 1991 according to folklore expert Jan Harold Brunvard. Every version he heard traced the original story back to Las Vegas, but the vague details also told him this was merely an urban legend.
Only it wasn’t.
If you type ‘corpse found in hotel room’ into a search engine of your choice, you’ll discover that this has actually happened in real life. And it happens a lot.
Actually it happens all the time, this is genuinely concerning.
Whether a dead body has been tucked away in a mysteriously stained mattress, or one’s stashed in the broken wardrobe with a miniature kettle, this is happening far too much.
The most concerning case, however, has to be that of the death of Elisa Lam:
In 2013, guests at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles began to report that they were having water problems in their room. The water pressure in the shower was temperamental and the taste of their morning coffee was odd.
5 days prior to this flurry of complaints, a young woman was caught on CCTV acting strange in an elevator. The footage would later go viral, with many claiming her strange behaviour - which included hiding in an elevator and gesturing to what appears to be an invisible figure - was a sign of either deep mental distress or paranormal activity.
Her roommates in the hotel also reported her strange behaviour, and she was moved to a different room. Her body was later found in the water tank of the hotel.
Cropsey (New York)
The urban legend: an escaped asylum patient who lives in the woods of Staten Island kidnaps and murders children, and takes them back to the abandoned TB sanatorium nearby for unknown reasons.
Some say he had a hook for a hand, others claim he would drag the children through a forgotten underground tunnel system to their fated death. What we do know for certain, however, is that Cropsey is real. And that Cropsey is still very much alive.
Andre Rand was a janitor that worked at Willowbrook School (which closed in 1987) and was associated with the disappearances and murders of 5 children and young adults in the 1970s and 80s. According to a documentary on the urban legend, he might have been involved with Satanism and provided these children for sacrifices or trafficked them to the homeless people that lived in the nearby underground tunnel system.
One of his victims was even found in a shallow grave on the grounds of the school he once worked at.
Regardless of the urban legend, this is still a terrifying - and a tragic - tale.
The Maine Hermit (Maine) (Obviously)
The urban legend: a mysterious recluse living in the woods of central Maine would break into the houses of locals and steal food and possessions before returning to his hidden camp.
Most urban legends are embellished to say the least. A flying saucer here, a missing person there… This one isn’t much of a mystery, however.
On April 4th 2013 at 1.30am, Christopher Knight was arrested with his pockets full of stolen foods and candies in a local cabin’s dining room. He complied with the police, eventually giving them information as to who he was and what he had been doing - that is, committing approximately 40 burglaries on local houses a year.
When asked for how long he had been living in the woods and stealing from the locals he failed to provide a date. He had lost track of the days, of the months, and of the years that had passed. Instead, he asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster took place.
For the last 27 years he had been living alone in the woods, moving this camp under the cover of darkness to avoid detection. He had only uttered one other word to another human being in nearly 3 decades: he said ‘hi’ to a hiker walking past an unknown number of years ago.
The Bunny Man (West Virginia)
The urban legend: in the early 20th century, there was an asylum in a town called Fairfax. The asylum closed and the patients were transported to the local prison by bus - but it crashed. Only one patient was not caught. Gutted rabbits were found hanging from the Fairfax Station Bridge the next day, however. The morning after Halloween night a group of teenagers were found hanging from the same bridge. If you go to the bridge at midnight on Halloween, you will meet the same fate.
Most of the time the stories that inspired urban legends turn out to be worse than the story. Thankfully, no furry creatures were harmed in the making of this legend.
In October 1970, an Air Force Army cadet and his fiancee were sitting in their car near a friend’s house when they saw something rather odd: a man in a white suit with bunny ears was walking towards them.
He yelled at them, claimed they were on private property, and proceeded to throw a hatchet through the window of the car.
Two weeks later, on Halloween night, the Bunny Man was spotted once again. An off-duty security guard saw the strange man in rabbit-mode sitting on the porch of a house. He was holding an axe.
The security guard started talking to him but it wasn’t long before Bunny Man lived up to this name and began to swing his axe at a pole on the porch, threatening to kill him if he didn’t get off his property.
The Fairfax County police soon began an investigation into this armed and dangerous man, and later confirmed they were looking for a male in his late teens or early 20s that was dressed as a rabbit. They never found out who the Bunny Man was.
The Mole People (Nevada)
The urban legend: there is an underground society of homeless people living under large cities in abandoned underground structures. They have formed vast communities including tribes and an entirely separate culture hidden from those living on the streets above.
Just like the Sewer Gators of NYC, this urban legend is technically true: it is common knowledge that homeless people in large cities use abandoned underground structures for shelter. For example, in the Las Vegas Valley, roughly 1,000 homeless people find shelter in the storm drains below the city for protection against the fiercely hot summers and icy cold winters.
It is also typical for parts of the shelter to be furnished, for example a 2009 ABC news report documented a couple who had lived in the tunnels for five years had managed to accumulate and craft a bed, bookshelf, and a shower.
The existence of tunnel people, as they are also known, is not necessarily a surprise. The existence of an underground city as suggested by the numerous books and documentaries that have sought to showcase life under the city is less likely.
One controversial book - The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City (1993) - attempted to paint an image of an underground society but few claims made by the author, Jennifer Toth, have been verified.
"Every fact in this book that I can verify independently is wrong." - Joseph Brennan
The Alice Killings (Japan)
The urban legend: an unknown serial killer was slaughtering people across Japan from 1999 to 2005, leaving only a playing card with the name ‘Alice’ written on it. It was written in the victim’s blood.
Not many creepypastas can champion the fact that they were based on a true story. In fact, internet culture claims one must take the story as fact for the ultimate horror experience. However, one of the most infamous of these stories left to fester on the web was caught up in a horrific set of murders that took place on the other side of the planet.
Even though no brutal murders described with such details took place in Japan, an eerily similar series of events did take place in Spain in the first few months of 2003.
Alfredo Galán Sotillo, The Playing Card Killer, killed 6 and wounded 3, leaving only playing cards on the bodies of his victims. He is currently serving 142 years behind bars for his crimes.
Do you know an urban legend that turned out to be true?
Type that shizz in a comment, and don’t forget to like and reblog if you’re #livinnnnnngggg for this post.
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Spook Of The Day #247 • The Sewer Alligators of NYC
In the 1950s, those visiting Florida could purchase among trinkets and knick-knacks baby alligators. Yes, small reptiles in inhumane fish tanks could be taken back with tourists to their home towns and kept as a pet. But alligators have this problem - they grow. When they did and became too unruly to have around the house, they’d be flushed down the loo and sent off into the sewer system.
But the first tales of alligators in the sewers actually began in the 1930s in NYC. Although refuted by experts claiming nothing could survive for long down there due to bacteria levels and the low temperatures, reports of huge alligators swimming towards workers had grown increasingly popular in the early 20th century.
The urban legend is still whispered today...
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Alligators in the Sewers: The Shocking Truth You Won't Believe
Introduction to the UnbelievableDiscover what's happening now with Alligators Found in Sewers: You Won't Believe! It's a story that sounds like the plot of a horror movie, but it's based on real events. Did you know that alligators have been found in sewers? It's a phenomenon that has puzzled and frightened people for years. Here's the crazy thing: it's not just an urban legend. There have been real instances of alligators being discovered in sewer systems, and the reasons behind it are both fascinating and terrifying.A Look into the PastAbout twelve years ago, two incidents occurred that bore no relation to each other but shared a common thread - alligators in unexpected places. One such incident involved the Kendal family, who, after returning from their Florida vacation, decided their pet baby alligator was too much of a nuisance and flushed him down the toilet. At first, it might seem like a joke, but this act had serious consequences. The alligator, designed by nature to thrive in...
