Sewer alligator

The urban myth has permeated popular culture, featuring in various forms of media including books, television shows, and movies.

It has also inspired hoaxes and artistic projects, and is commemorated in the city with a quasi-holiday known as Alligator in the Sewer Day,[3] celebrated on February 9.

May started an extermination campaign, using poisoned bait followed by flooding of the side tunnels to flush the beasts out into the major arteries where hunters with .22 rifles were waiting.

[7]An additional reference to the sewer alligator exists in Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V.[8] It fictionalizes the account, stating Macy's was selling them for a time for 50 cents.

A 1973 children's book, The Great Escape: Or, The Sewer Story by Peter Lippman anthropomorphizes these alligators and has them dress up in disguise as humans and charter an airplane to fly them home to the Florida swamps.

Some versions go further to suggest that, after the alligator was disposed of at such a young age, it would live the majority of its life in an environment not exposed to sunlight, and thus it would apparently in time lose its eyesight and the pigment in its hide and that the reptile would grow to be blind and completely albino (pure white in color with red or pink eyes).

[9] Some people even spoke of mutant alligators living in the sewers which have been exposed to many different types of toxic chemical waste which altered them, making them deformed and sometimes even larger and with strange colouring.

The account reads, "[He] removed the manhole cover and began to clear an obstruction when he realized that a set of 'evil looking eyes' was staring at him."

[11] There are other numerous recent media accounts of alligators occupying storm drains and sewer pipes, all from states in the southern US.

[22] Alligators are occasionally sighted in the drains and sewers of Florida, due to many of these waste outlets' backing out onto the swamps.