The Devil Within

THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Two: The Man Who Saw Them

They kept seeing alligators.

Sometime in the 1930s, New York sewer inspectors began returning from beneath the city with an increasingly ridiculous claim: there were alligators living beneath Manhattan. Their boss, Theodore “Teddy” May, had a more reasonable explanation.

Whiskey.

According to Robert Daley's 1959 book The World Beneath the City, May became convinced his workers had discovered somewhere underground to hide booze. He sent men to investigate. Nobody found the whiskey.

But the alligator sightings continued.

Eventually, Teddy May decided to descend into the sewers himself—and according to the story he later told, his flashlight swept across the water and revealed something he hadn't expected to see.

Several alligators.

In Episode Two of Alligators in the Sewers, The Devil Within heads back beneath 1930s New York to meet the men whose jobs took them into a hidden world most New Yorkers would never see.

We explore what it was actually like to work inside Manhattan's enormous underground infrastructure, where sewer inspectors navigated brick tunnels by flashlight during the lowest-flow hours of the night. The dangers were very real: rapidly rising wastewater, powerful currents, blockages and deadly gases. And the things moving through those tunnels could be bizarre—barrels, Christmas trees, jewelry, false teeth, weapons and practically anything else New York managed to lose down a drain.

Then we meet Teddy May.

Part sewer worker, part foreman and apparently one hell of a storyteller, May would become the central figure in the sewer-alligator legend. His claims transformed the documented discovery of a single reptile beneath East Harlem into something much larger: an entire population living beneath Manhattan.

And then, according to the legend, New York fought back.

Daley's account describes an extraordinary extermination campaign in which sewer crews supposedly used poisoned food, powerful trunk-sewer currents and, in some versions, .22-caliber rifles to eliminate the animals. It's an irresistible image: Depression-era municipal workers disappearing through Manhattan manholes carrying flashlights and guns to hunt alligators beneath New York City.

There's just one problem.

The evidence for a citywide infestation—and the war supposedly waged against it—is considerably thinner than the story. No substantial contemporary municipal paper trail has emerged documenting an organized extermination campaign. What survives largely depends upon testimony recorded more than twenty years later.

But folklore was already taking over.

The ordinary reptiles of the earliest stories became pale, blind subterranean monsters, supposedly transformed by generations without sunlight and sustained by Manhattan's endless supply of rats. The biology doesn't work, but the mythology is perfect. An ordinary alligator beneath New York could simply be lost. A pale, blind alligator belonged there.

This is the story of the men beneath the manholes, the raconteur who gave their stories life, and the moment an escaped exotic pet became something uniquely New York.

This is The Man Who Saw Them.

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THE DEVIL’S LEDGER

Week of September 8, 2026

MISTRIAL.

After seven weeks of testimony and roughly 36 hours of deliberations, the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has ended with a hung jury in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Eleven jurors reportedly favored finding Clancy not criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children. One juror disagreed, and Judge William Sullivan ultimately declared a mistrial.

So what happens now? Potentially, we do the whole thing again. A deadlocked jury generally does not trigger the double-jeopardy protection that would prevent prosecutors from retrying the case, leaving open the possibility of another trial, a negotiated resolution, or whatever comes next in a case that has already generated an extraordinary amount of public attention.

We'll keep following it. In the meantime, I suppose we'll have to wait for whichever juror signs the first book deal.

THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK

THE MASKED MENACE — CAUGHT

Remember our masked friend from Philadelphia?

A few weeks ago, we told you about a man roaming Center City Philadelphia in a disturbing white doll mask, approaching and chasing strangers and generally turning the morning commute into the opening ten minutes of a slasher movie.

Now we have an ending.

Authorities identified the suspect as 22-year-old Zymire Hughes, who police say harassed or terrorized more than fifteen people on August 12. In one particularly disturbing encounter, he allegedly approached a woman near JFK Boulevard and repeatedly asked her, “Are you ready to die?”

Hughes subsequently traveled from the Philadelphia area to Orlando and then Las Vegas. Newly released body-camera footage shows Las Vegas police and U.S. Marshals closing in on an apartment where authorities believed he was hiding. On August 25, the Nevada Violent Offender Task Force surrounded the complex.

Hughes came out.

The mask did not.

And perhaps the strangest detail of all is that investigators have suggested at least some of this behavior may have been intended for social-media content. Which raises the possibility that the mask wasn't worn because someone didn't want to be recognized.

Maybe it was worn because he wanted to be watched.

A generation ago, if somebody put on a horrifying mask and started chasing strangers through downtown Philadelphia, we'd ask: What the hell is wrong with this guy?

In 2026, apparently we have to ask another question:

Was he doing it for the algorithm?

That's the Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week.

THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN

THE NEW MONSTERS: ALLIGATORS IN THE SEWERS

This week's installment of The New Monsters deals with one of my favorite urban myths of all time.

Growing up in Northern New Jersey, Manhattan was right across the river, and for a kid in the 1980s it represented both sides of the cultural coin. It was the stuff of dreams—hip-hop, graffiti, Basquiat, clubs and the feeling that practically everything interesting in America was happening over there.

It was also the stuff of nightmares.

This was the New York of Son of Sam, abandoned buildings, graffiti-covered subway cars and an underground world that seemed to begin at the bottom of every subway staircase and continue forever beneath Manhattan.

And somewhere down there were the alligators.

At least where I grew up, nobody presented this as folklore. Somebody bought a baby alligator in Florida, brought it back to New York, discovered that baby alligators have the annoying habit of becoming adult alligators, and flushed it down the toilet.

Then it grew to twelve feet long beneath Manhattan and lived on rats.

Obviously.

The adults told us this stuff. We didn't invent it.

This week on The New Monsters, we're breaking down where the legend came from, the real alligators discovered in New York, the bizarre trade in baby alligators as Florida souvenirs and the stories of legendary sewer superintendent Teddy May that helped turn an isolated reptile into an entire subterranean population.

And here's the surprising part:

It's not as crazy as you might think.

The giant albino colonies are another matter.

THIS WEEK ON CRIMINAL MISCHIEF

BAD BLOOD: THE HATFIELDS AND THE McCOYS

Over on Criminal Mischief, Carolyn Ossorio rolls up her sleeves and heads into one of the most famous family feuds in American history: the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Long before reality television discovered that Americans would happily spend an hour watching two families scream at one another, the Hatfields and McCoys were doing it with considerably higher stakes.

The feud unfolded along the Kentucky–West Virginia border in the decades following the Civil War and became so deeply embedded in American folklore that the family names themselves became shorthand for any argument that has gone on so long nobody can quite remember why everyone is still angry.

But beneath the mythology were real people, real politics, property disputes, murder and revenge. Carolyn separates the history from the caricature this week in Bad Blood, on Criminal Mischief.

THIS WEEK ON THE SLIPPERY

Scott and Nancy are taking the Labor Day holiday off this week, no doubt researching another scammer, fraudster or human-shaped warning label whose story will eventually have you stopping halfway through the episode to Google:

“Wait... is this actually real?”

They'll be back next week.

Hang in there.

THIS WEEK IN HORROR

ONSLAUGHT

This week in horror, ONSLAUGHT, the new R-rated action-horror movie from director Adam Wingard, gives us an Army sniper veteran forced to unleash everything she knows when a rogue squad of genetically engineered super-soldiers threatens her young daughter.

And if that sounds gloriously like somebody discovered an unproduced screenplay behind a Blockbuster Video in 1989 and decided to spend actual money making it nearly four decades later, you understand why it made this week's Ledger.

Genetically engineered super-soldiers. Army sniper mom. Dan Stevens. Michael freaking Biehn.

I'm not sure what else you people want from me.

Onslaught is in theaters now.

ACROSS THE EVIO UNIVERSE

That's it for this week's Devil's Ledger.

Happy September, everybody. We survived August, Labor Day is behind us, football is back, playoff baseball is approaching, and somewhere out there somebody has already ordered a pumpkin-spice latte while it's still ninety-four degrees outside.

Hang in there. Fall is coming.

Follow your favorite Evio shows wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a 5-star rating and review, and subscribe to the Evio Creative YouTube channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss what's coming next.

We'll see you on The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief, The Slippery and everywhere else we're telling stories this week.

We'll see you across the Evio Universe.
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THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode One: Beneath the City

On February 9, 1935, three teenagers shoveling snow into an open manhole on East 123rd Street reportedly discovered something moving beneath the ice.

An alligator.

The following morning, The New York Times carried the headline “ALLIGATOR FOUND IN UPTOWN SEWER.” The animal was reportedly seven to eight feet long, weighed roughly 125 pounds and had been dragged from beneath East Harlem using a makeshift noose fashioned from clothesline. Whatever happened on that winter afternoon, the story gave one of America's greatest urban legends something most legends can only dream of: a date, an address and witnesses.

But before we can hunt alligators beneath Manhattan, we have to understand how an entire hidden world came to exist beneath New York in the first place.

In Episode One of our latest New Monsters investigation, we descend into the history of the city beneath the city—from Manhattan's vanished streams and polluted Collect Pond to overflowing cesspools, cholera epidemics and the massive nineteenth-century engineering projects that transformed New York. The arrival of Croton water in 1842 helped create a new problem on an enormous scale: all that water eventually had to go somewhere. The solution was a vast network of brick-lined sewers constructed beneath a rapidly expanding metropolis.

Then we head south to the Sunshine State, where Florida's booming tourist industry once offered visitors a souvenir that would be almost unimaginable today: living baby alligators. They were cute, exotic and small enough to bring home. Unfortunately, alligators possess the irritating habit of becoming considerably larger alligators.

And that's where the legend gives us the image that has survived for generations: the unwanted pet disappearing down the toilet and into the sewers below.

The plumbing makes that particular scenario considerably more complicated than folklore suggests. The biology is even less cooperative; New York's cold underground environment is a miserable place for an alligator to establish a permanent home. Yet the reptile reportedly discovered in 1935 was real enough to make headlines—and that was all the story needed.

Finally, we meet Teddy May, the New York sewer worker whose stories would transform one misplaced reptile into something much larger. More than twenty years later, writer Robert Daley recorded May's extraordinary claims in The World Beneath the City: according to May, there hadn't been just one alligator beneath Manhattan.

There were dozens.

Was there really a colony living beneath New York? Were unwanted Florida souvenirs somehow surviving underground? And how did ordinary reptiles eventually become the enormous, pale, blind sewer monsters generations of Americans grew up hearing about?

Welcome to Alligators in the Sewers.

Welcome back to The New Monsters.

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The Fresno Nightcrawler: Proof of Something

There was a brief period when we thought cameras were going to solve everything.

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The Fresno Nightcrawler: The Internet Gives It Legs

One unexplained video can be dismissed as an anomaly. A second changes the equation.

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