Mole People Part 1

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, 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.

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, 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)

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.

Source : http://www.fazamania.com/the-mole-people/2006/02/23/