THE DEVIL WITHINThe New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Two: The Man Who Saw ThemThey 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.LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOWListen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts.Rate & Review: Leave a five-star rating and review to help new listeners discover the show.Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for full episodes and exclusive video content.Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us what you think Teddy May really saw beneath Manhattan.Stories, tips and strange encounters: [email protected]Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices