Mole people

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  (Redirected from Mole People)
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the urban legend. For other uses, see Mole (disambiguation).
 This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2008)

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

Contents

[edit] Mole people and 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, [1] 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 none of the subway-specific facts described in Toth's book could be independently confirmed.[2]

A widely-read reference to urban legends, Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope, devoted two columns to the dispute. The first,[3] 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,[4] published on March 9, 2004 after contact with Brennan, showed more skepticism to the basic facts about the existence of 'mole people' as a unique entity, based on the total unreliability of the subway data (unlike that of the tunnel dwellers, this did not necessarily need to be fictionalized or obscured for privacy reasons)

[edit] In Other Cities

Media accounts have described "mole people" living underneath other cities as well. In Las Vegas, some homeless people find shelter in the storm drains underneath the city. While more than 200 miles of such drains are said to exist, most inhabit the sections near the Las Vegas Strip. A September 24, 2009 article in the London newspaper The Sun interviewed some of the inhabitants and included photographs[5].

[edit] Media portrayals

The 2009 film Stag Night - Four guys on a bachelor party get off the subway at a station that shut down in the 70's and, after watching a transit cop get brutally murdered, find themselves running for their lives beneath the streets of NY.

The Marvel Comics 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.

Mole people also appear in the 1999 video game Deus Ex.

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.

The Nickelodeon cartoon Invader Zim featured an appearance of rat people, an obvious play on mole people, when Dib was trapped in a mall parking structure.

INKlings - sewer-dwelling people described as "Kappa" who have developed their own culture in the 1985 Haruki Murakami novel Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

A community of people living underground in New York City is featured in an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

In the "Out of The Ashes" Series by William W. Johnstone the "Night People" are subterranean cannibals living in the ruins of post-nuclear war cities.

The Nickelodeon cartoon Hey Arnold titled "Sewer King" involved Arnold venturing underground to recover his grandfather's pocket watch after it fell down the drain. Arnold must beat the Sewer King, presumably a mole person, in a game of chess in order to get the watch back. [6]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Toth, Jennifer (1993). The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, Incorporated. ISBN 1-55652-241-X. 
  2. ^ Brennan, Joseph (1996). "Fantasy in The Mole People". http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/abandoned/mole-people.html. 
  3. ^ Adams, Cecil (2004-01-09). "Are there really "Mole People" living under the streets of New York City?". The Straight Dope (Chicago Reader, Inc.). http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040109.html. 
  4. ^ Adams, Cecil (2004-03-05). "The Mole People revisited". The Straight Dope (Chicago Reader, Inc.). http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040305.html. 
  5. ^ Samson, Pete (2009-09-24). "Lost Vegas: The People Living in the Drains Below Las Vegas". The Sun. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/2651937/The-people-living-in-drains-below-Las-Vegas.html. 
  6. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hey_Arnold!_episodes

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_people"
Languages