Mole people

This article is about the urban legend. For the film, see The Mole People (film). For other uses, see Mole (disambiguation).

Mole people is a term used to refer to the homeless people living under large cities in abandoned subway tunnels and shafts.

Urban folklore

While it is generally accepted that some homeless people in large cities do indeed make use of accessible, abandoned underground structures for shelter, urban legends persist that make stronger assertions. These include claims that 'mole people' have formed small, ordered societies similar to tribes, numbering up to hundreds living underground year-round. It has also been suggested that they have developed their own cultural traits and even have electricity by illegal hook-up. The subject has attracted some attention from sociologists but is a highly controversial subject due to a lack of evidence.

Jennifer Toth's 1993 book The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City, written while she was an intern at the Los Angeles Times, is allegedly a true account of travels in the tunnels and interviews with tunnel dwellers. The book helped canonize the image of the mole people as an ordered society living literally under people's feet, reminiscent of the Morlocks of science fiction writer H.G. Wells.

The book has met with criticism, primarily for the inaccuracy of geographical information, compounded by numerous factual errors and an apparent reliance on largely unverifiable claims. The strongest criticism came from Joseph Brennan, a New York subway enthusiast who declared that "Every fact in this book that I can verify independently is wrong."

A widely-read reference to urban legends, Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope, devoted two columns to the dispute. The first, published on January 9, 2004 after contact with Toth, noted the large amount of unverifiability in Toth's stories while declaring that the book's accounts seemed to be truthful. The second, published on March 9, 2004 after contact with Brennan, was more skeptical of Toth's truthfulness.

Cities

See also: Storm drain#Residence

Media accounts have reported "mole people" living underneath other cities as well. In Las Vegas, numerous homeless people find shelter in the storm drains underneath the city, for protection from extreme temperatures that exceed 115 degrees Fahrenheit while dropping below 30 degrees Fahrenheit in winter. Most of the inhabitants are turned away from the limited charities in Las Vegas and find shelter in the industrial infrastructure of the Las Vegas Strip, similar to most cities. The Las Vegas Channel 8 News sent their Eyewitness News I-Team with Matt O'Brien, the local author who spent nearly five years exploring beneath the city to write the book, "Beneath the Neon". Mark Sayre, Investigative Reporter, I-Team: 'Beneath the Neon' -- Underground Las Vegas. Las Vegas resides in Clark County and the Clark County Regional Flood Control District stated the valley has about 450 miles of flood control channels and tunnels, and about 300 miles of those are underground. A September 24, 2009 article in the British paper The Sun interviewed some of the inhabitants and included photographs.

Media portrayals

• The 1962 French science fiction film La jetée is set in a post apocalyptic world where survivors live underground Paris in the galleries of the Palais de Chaillot. An underground community of survivors is also seen in Terry Gilliam's adaptation of the film, Twelve Monkeys.
• In the 1996 film Extreme Measures a community of mole people is preyed upon for use in medical experiments.
• The 1999 novel Downsiders features an entire city of people below New York
• In the TV Show Bones: Season 1, Ep. 16 - The Woman in the Tunnel , a dead body of a woman doing a documentary on mole people was found in the tunnel.
• The Marvel Comics character Mole Man is the ruler of a race of mole men called the Moloids and the comic book series X-Men has featured a society of superhuman mutants, known as Morlocks after the H. G. Wells characters, who live in the tunnels below New York City.
• The 1994 short documentary film by Steven Dupler, Outside Society, went underground in New York to cover the homeless community living in the Amtrak tunnel, as well as the NYC subway system. It was awarded the Nombre D'Or Prize for Best Documentary in 1995 by the International Broadcasting Conference's Widescreen Film Festival in Montreux, and also received the United Nations' UNESCO Prize for Best Direction, Human Rights Programming, at the 1995 International Electronic Cinema Festival in Amsterdam.
• The 1987-1989 television series Beauty and the Beast featured Vincent, a lion-like man who lived among a group of the homeless in the tunnels of New York Below.
• The film Subway (1985) featured mole people.
• The 2006 film Urchin features a society of mole people who call their home "Scum City".
• Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere depicts highly fictionalized dwellers in their world of London Below, who are literally invisible to those who dwell aboveground.
• Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's sci-fi/horror novel Reliquary deals with mole people living in numerous communities in the subway tunnels, sewers and service tunnels beneath Manhattan.
• The 1984 horror film C.H.U.D. portrays mole people as mutated cannibalistic humanoids that come up from the sewers and prey upon the citizens of New York.
• The 1981 John Carpenter classic Escape From New York features "Crazies" - underground dwelling cannibals.
• Mervyn Peake's 1959 novel Titus Alone of the Gormenghast series features a poor, displaced, underground society who live in an area known as the "Under River".
• The animated television series Futurama has a race of mutants living in the sewers of New New York.
• The Troglodytes in the French black comedy Delicatessen are a group of vegetarian rebels who live in the sewers.
• A community of people living underground in New York City is featured in an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
• In the James Patterson novel Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, the Flock (a group of genetically altered children) take refuge in an abandoned subway tunnel in New York City, meeting up with a young mole person and observing other mole people living there as well.
• In the 1993 film Demolition Man Denis Leary's character, Edgar Friendly, is the leader of the homeless “Scrap” people who live in the underground “Wasteland,” or the ruins of old Los Angeles.
• The show Upright Citizens Brigade features a Moleman character in one episode, who leaves his girlfriend with only his clothes to remember him by. This causes a stranger to ask the woman if she is wearing "Moleman perfume."
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as their sensei Splinter and one of their primary villains, The Rat King, live permanently in the New York sewer system.
• The 2001 novel The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul is about a secretive gentlemen's club in New York that turns hunting of humans into a sport in the tunnels under New York City.

See also

• Voices in the Tunnels (documentary)
• Dark Days (documentary)
• Underground living
• New York City Subway
• Freedom Tunnel
• Avinguda de la Llum
• Sewer alligator
• C.H.U.D.

Further reading

• Haughney, Christine, "The Fiery End of a Life Lived Beneath the City", The New York Times, February 6, 2012
• Landowne, Youme; Horton, Anthony, Pitch Black, El Paso, TX : Cinco Puntos Press, Oct 1, 2008. ISBN 9781933693064
• Morton, Margaret, The tunnel: the underground homeless of New York City, Yale University Press, 1995

External links

• NYU Portfolio Review: The Mole People - Jennifer Toth, The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City - Chicago Review Press, 1993.
• Straight Dope article: Are there really "Mole People" living under the streets of New York City?
• Straight Dope article: The Mole People revisited
• Joseph Brennan - Fantasy in The Mole People
• Teun Voeten - Tunnel People