Hello! My name is Bennett, and for the last 12 years, I have worked as an MTA employee for the New York City subway system.
During that time, I’ve had a fairly substantial number of odd occurrences, reports, and stories happen on the job. The things I’ve seen and heard about down in the tunnels have always made for pretty good workplace banter, but I figured it’d also be worth a shot to share some of the more unusual tales here on Reddit. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them down in the comments.
Pretty much anyone who has ever rode the NYC subway knows that there are some interesting characters down there. From doomsday prophets to men claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, these guys can make for some of the most entertaining and/or obnoxious parts of your day. Still, they’re harmless enough. As long as you follow the general rule of thumb (which is to stare off into the distance and ignore them until they go away or you reach your stop), you should be fine.
With that said, I always have to warn tourists about some of the more malicious people you might run into in the tunnels. One of the more chilling stories I have is of the tall man in the bowler hat and overcoat. I’ll never forget it. I had only been working for the MTA for a year or so when he first appeared.
I never got a good look at the guy. No matter what way you angled yourself to him, he always seemed to turn the other way, almost like he was on some kind of invisible pivot. Even more frustrating, the people that he did face were simply never able to recall any of his features. Whenever you asked them, they’d just say that they hadn’t noticed the guy until the commotion began, and once that happened, it was too late to find him in the crowd. What you always did see, however, was the stubby bowler hat that rested on his head and the big, brown overcoat that extended from the nape of his neck all the way down to just above the heels of his shoes.
What made the guy even more conspicuous was that he was always wearing the overcoat, no matter the time of day or weather. I mean, the first time I ever spotted him was in the middle of July. Not exactly the time of year for that line of clothing, if you ask me.
The guy was also pretty damn tall. Nothing insane, but he was definitely over six feet tall, probably a little under six and a half.
Anyway, the first time I saw the guy, I didn’t make much note of him. I have to reemphasize, you see a lot of strange people in the NYC subway on a good day, and even more so if you have to work there. I made a small mental note about how unusual his clothing was and how hot the guy must have felt, but not much else.
Then, a minute or so later, he pushed a lady onto the tracks.
The poor woman didn’t even really have a moment to process what was happening. The guy spent a minute just leaning a little over the yellow line, listening for the oncoming subway. Then, once the rattle of the approaching train had gotten significantly louder, he just reached out one of his long, sleeved arms and swatted the lady next to him on the back. Hard. She yelled out as she hit the track, and then just a second or two later, the train hit.
I didn’t see anything after she fell in, but a few of the other passerby did. I was later told she landed on her back and that her arm flopped onto the live rail next to her. It’s likely that she had already been electrocuted by the time she was ran over, but we’ll never really know. A metro takes a while to stop once the brake’s been applied, so by the time it had come to a stop, there was next to nothing left to examine.
When it happened, the whole platform erupted into pandemonium. You’d think they would have caught the guy right there, but he was just gone. Vanished. And, like I said, no one remembered getting a good look at the guy. It was probably one of the worst days of my life.
Even worse, that wasn’t the last time it happened. Not even six months later, I spotted the back of the guy in the brown coat walking through a turnstile. I ran up to catch him, but once I got over the turnstile, he had already melted away into the crowd. I didn’t even see it happen. I just heard the yell and then watched the crowd devolve into chaos. That time, it had been an elderly man. The guy was pushed into the side of a passing train. It broke his spine on impact, and he later died in the hospital. Again, the guy was not caught.
That was the last time I ever saw him, but he did appear a few more times off my shift. He showed up three more times in the next four years, during which he killed two women and one little boy and seriously injured a middle-aged man. He appeared again around three years later, but the woman who was pushed that time acted quickly enough to scramble back up to the platform before the train had reached the station. Finally, he was last spotted about three years ago, when he pushed a young man directly into the front of an oncoming train. The man was dead almost instantly.
He hasn’t been seen since, and I really hope that, whoever he was, he’s gone for good.
On a lighter note, there have also been some amusing stories about weird people on the NYC subway. One that’s always tickled my funny bone are stories about the infamous “Little Caesar.”
A few years ago, for the period of a few months, there were frequent reports coming in from passengers about a short man dressed entirely in the garbs of a Roman emperor (we’re talking a toga, a laurel and sash) walking into the train, pacing up and down the entire length of the car, and reciting something in complete, fluent Latin for hours at a time. Most passengers would get off before him whenever he rode the train, but a few claimed he would always get off on one of the first stops in upper Brooklyn.
Honestly, we were pretty sad when we stopped hearing stories about Little Caesar. Those tales always lightened up the mood with us MTA workers. Most likely, he was just some prankster who really went the extra mile.
One of the weirder phenomena actually has to do with MTA rules and regulations themselves. When I was first hired, I was told that it was imperative to count the number of subway cars on trains that stopped at our assigned stations and to report that number to the workers at the next station.
On my very first day, I asked an older worker why we did this. She then told me that it was fairly common for trains to leave one station with one or two more cars than they would have when they arrived at the next one. I thought she was bullshitting me, but throughout that whole first day, trains would pass through with fewer cars than the reports coming in from the previous station. Same for the trains we would send to the next station; I’d later find out that the numbers they counted didn’t match up with ours.
This has been happening pretty much the entire time I’ve worked for the MTA. Most of the time, a few cars have gone missing, though it’s not uncommon for there to actually be more cars than were counted by the last station. The most bizarre part is that the varying number of cars never seems to get noticed by anyone else. As far as I know, there have never been any missing persons cases to come out of this phenomenon, and everyone who goes into the train eventually comes out.
Even weirder, the numbers on the cars themselves are never missing. The sequence of cars according to the numbers on their side are always, without fail, completely uninterrupted. I assume that’s why we employees are told to count them. Otherwise, no one would really notice.
The only time a subway car has ever gone legitimately missing was about five years ago. This one still perplexes me. A group of passengers reported that they had been shuttling along one of the tunnels when, somehow, the car behind them–the last car on the train–became detached from their own car. Naturally, the passengers reported how stressed and afraid the people in that car had looked.
We immediately radioed in what had happened and had the next train stop before reaching the tunnel. Luckily, the car was never hit. Unfortunately, it was also never found.
We scoured that tunnel for the better part of four hours, but there’s really only so much to do or say when an entire subway car has gone missing. I’m still not sure what could possibly have happened to it. To this day, that entire car and all of the passengers on it are unaccounted for.
One time, I caught a guy trying to smuggle live rabbits onto the train. I noticed a scrawny, shady-looking guy hop one of the turnstiles and walked over to talk to him. It’s not at all uncommon to see people hop the turnstiles. Probably happens a few hundred times a day. This guy, however, looked really pale, gray, and nervous. He was also visibly sweating; I would’ve assumed he was on drugs if it wasn’t for his bulging shirt and the little squeaks coming from all over his body. When I asked the guy what was going on, he just clammed up and stood there. Didn’t move an inch.
After a full minute of questioning him, I called over some other workers. At that point, the guy tried to bolt back to the entrance, but he got grabbed by another MTA employee who had been heading over to the ruckus. We restrained him until the police arrived, and when they had him strip out of his shirt, he just had living rabbits strapped all over his torso.
Seriously. The guy was absolutely covered in rabbits. You couldn’t even see his bare skin underneath the squirming, squeaking mass of fur and flesh he had taped to his body. All of their mouths were bound shut with tiny bundles of rope that looped over their noses, and they had just been sort of taped to his skin. Once all of the rabbits had been removed, the police found his entire torso had been scratched up something fierce by the poor critters. To this day, I have no idea what the guy was doing with the rabbits or why he had ever thought this was a good way to transport them. Honestly, I’m not sure I want to know.
One more story for now. Not too long after I had been hired, a man was accidentally separated from his daughter at my station. He had been holding her hand one moment, let go for so he could tie his shoe, and then stepped onto the train as it pulled up. It was only when the doors were closing that he realized she hadn’t actually followed him on board. You could see the panic on his face right as the car’s doors slid shut.
Luckily, one of my pals noticed what had happened and notified the subway operator. Of course, the train was on its way to the next station already, so there wasn’t much more that we could do other than plan on transporting the kid to her father or vice versa. But then, the kid let loose something astounding. Apparently, she wasn’t even supposed to be with her father.
The girl then told us that her parents had split up the previous year, and the court had denied her father custody and given him practically no visitation rights on the basis of his abusive tendencies. Her father had picked her up from her kindergarten class early that day and had been saying that he was going to bring her to the JFK airport so that they could live far, far away from her mother.
The real reason the guy had looked so panicked in that moment, I suspect, was because he realized that he was about to be found out. We relayed what the girl had told us as quickly as we could, and he was arrested at the next stop. That day was a good day.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. I have a whole lot more stories about the subway to tell, so if you all enjoy this, I’ll probably be back with more.
Additionally, if you have any questions (or anything at all, really), I’m happy to respond below. Have a good day or night.