A video posted on TikTok on Friday showed three people in overall, wearing what appeared to be headlamps, emerging from a manhole at 32nd St and 7th Avenue, near Penn Station and Madison square. The incident happened after 4 a.m. on Aug 18th.
New York police are investigating the men in the video, months after similar incidents were deemed to post no threat to the public. “There are no arrests and the investigation is ongoing,” police said.
Videos of men emerging from manholes in various parts of the city circulated online in May. It is unclear if what happened on Aug 18th is connected to those from May, but they were both dressed in similar clothing and with headlamps.
In one May incident, a man in a white shirt and shorts was seen lifting a manhole cover at 2 a.m. in Brooklyn, allowing seven men to climb out of the sewers and change into different clothes near McDonald and Bedford avenues.
Hours later, another video shows seven men emerging from a manhole into a street with active traffic, near Heyward Streets and Bedford Avenue, at least three were carrying shovels.
A senior law enforcement official told the news at the time they had a theory that the individuals were scavenging for valuables rather than engaged in anything more sinister, though that theory was never confirmed as a fact. It remains, for now, the closest thing to an official explanation.
“The NYPD, sent their highly trained Emergency Services Unit officers into the sewer system to make sure nothing nefarious had been left behind by the individuals – nothing was found” police said in June.
Whether the August sighing connects to those earlier incidents is unclear, and the NYPD has stopped short of drawing that line itself. The overlap is circumstantial: similar clothing, similar hour, similar disappearing act once the manhole cover goes back on.
The only thing that has changed is where it happened. Residential blocks are one thing, but two minutes from Penn Station, the busiest corners of the city, is another.
