- The sewer people are unnerving but at least the cops don’t think they’re up to anything dangerous.
In the dead of night, they rise from the dank sewers underneath the city. Nobody knows who they are, what they want, or where they go after emerging from the underground.
That’s what’s going on in New York City, anyway.
Passersby and security cameras have recently caught strange groups of men climbing out from the city’s sewers at night. After crawling out of manholes, they’ve disappeared into the darkness without a trace.
Understandably, the nighttime sewer men have caused no small deal of concern and confusion in the city. Nobody knows what they’re after, if anything, and what they’re doing in the stinking tunnels.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has launched an investigation into the sewer dwellers. According to the cops, they’ve found nothing unusual under the streets and don’t believe the public has any reason to be concerned.
Yet, you can’t help but wonder who these nocturnal sewer guys are. Do they have a connection to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, another famous group of NYC sewer residents?
Probably not.
They Came from Below
Both sewer people incidents happened in Brooklyn on May 29. They took place within a couple of hours of each other, only a few miles apart.
The first emergence happened at the intersection of McDonald Avenue and Colin Place. Surveillance video, shot at around 2 a.m., shows a man in a white shirt and shorts nonchalantly approaching a manhole.
He lifts the cover and places it on the street between parked cars. Then things take a decidedly clown car-like turn as seven other men climb out of the sewer.
The video shows all of them wearing overalls or waders, presumably to protect themselves from sewer sludge. They’re seen throwing their gear into two of the parked cars, climbing in, and driving off.
Then, at 3:40 a.m., a similar incident happened at the intersection of Hayward Street and Bedford Avenue. This time, however, the manhole was opened from beneath the street.
Video footage shot at the scene shows a red-shirted man lifting the manhole cover and climbing out onto the road – dangerously close to passing traffic. After he’s out, six more people crawl out from the sewer, all wearing headlamps.
This group, too, quickly disappears from view.
No Immediate Connection
Considering that these two incidents happened close to each other both in time and place, there has to be a connection between them, right? The first group must’ve descended back into the sewers and then popped out at another spot.
That may not be the case. You see, the camera that recorded the later 3:40 a.m. incident also witnessed that the men went down the same manhole at around 1 a.m.
Why would they have gone down, come up somewhere else, driven off, returned to the sewer, and then come back to the first manhole?
I’m seriously asking.
The police don’t believe the two groups of sewer dudes necessarily have anything to do with each other, either.
“Right now, we can’t say that they’re the same,” a police spokesperson told the New York Post.
“It’s very peculiar that there’s similar incidents within miles of one another,” they added, however.
‘Not a Threat to the Public’
As to what the guys wanted to achieve by creeping in the sewers is anyone’s guess. The bizarre nature of the incidents has, understandably, caused quite a bit of concern for the locals.
After all, the men could’ve been planting explosives in preparation for some kind of attack, as far as anyone’s concerned.
The police don’t currently have any conclusive answers. However, the NYPD performed a security sweep of the area’s sewers.
“The NYPD, to make sure there was not a threat to the public, sent their highly trained Emergency Services Unit officers into the sewer system to make sure nothing nefarious had been left behind by the individuals,” the police told NBC News.
As such, the NYPD has declared that, at the moment, there is no cause for concern.
In the past, when the cops have caught sewer-prowling groups, they have typically been looking for valuables among the waste. As such, the cops believe that these two groups, too, may be urban scavengers scouring the filth for anything worth salvaging.
The only certain conclusion we can make is that this is not proof of a race of nefarious mole men living under NYC.
The sewer dwellers certainly aren’t afraid of the mythical giant alligators supposedly living in the NYC sewage system. Did you know that the legendary ‘gator got a commemorative statue in 2023?