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.

Books

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth

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