Sewers and drains are more vital to civilization than many people in the modern world imagine. Before the widespread introduction of sanitation systems, human waste and other filth was often just tossed out of windows and onto the street—or the heads of passersby—below.

Now we simply press a button or pull a lever and we need never think of where our unwanted leavings go. However useful they are at collecting waste, sewers often pick up other unexpected items, too. Here are 10 of the weirdest things discovered in sewers.

10 A Rave

What could be more fun than meeting up for a late-night dance in a secret location and going wild?

Doing it in a sewer!

In 2017, over 200 people in Newcastle, England, clambered through filthy water to reach a dry spot in the drains that emptied into the river Ouseburn. The event had been organized on Facebook with revelers meeting up in a pub before rushing into the storm drains.

Once inside, the ravers found a light-and-sound system all set up and the partying began. Around 4:00 AM, however, one of the ravers began to find the dank setting a little too cramped. Worried for the participants’ safety, the person phoned the police.

Officers arrived and broke up the party, letting those in the tunnels out with just a stern warning about the dangers of mixing alcohol with confined and easily flooded underground tunnels.^[1]

9 Fatberg

Once we flush away nasty things, we hope they will never come back and haunt us. For sewer workers who have to deal with such things, however, our actions can create monsters.

The London fatberg of 2017 was a congealed and rotting mass over 250 meters (820 ft) long. In the sewers under the city, hard-to-flush items like diapers, wet wipes, and condoms had all become enmeshed in solidifying fats that threatened to block the sewer and send sewage spilling into the streets above.

Weighing as much as 19 African elephants, the fatberg was broken up by sewer workers with spades and jets of water. But for some, the fatberg was more than just an artifact of human wastefulness—it was a valuable historical relic.

The Museum of London managed to obtain a chunk of the fatberg for future generations. To preserve the greasy mess, curators were forced to X-ray it for used hypodermic needles and to wear biohazard gear. Eventually, a piece was stabilized (to stop it from rotting or hatching flies) and became a star of the museum’s fatberg display.^[2]

8 An Alligator

One of the great urban legends of New York is that their sewer system is riddled with alligators. According to legend, people would buy baby alligators before realizing that hissing reptiles with mouths full of sharp teeth make for poor pets. So these people would flush the gators down the toilet.

In the sewers, the alligators now prowl and thrive. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of a colony of alligators in the city’s drains, and most experts agree that it is far too cold down there for the animals to survive long term. Intriguingly, in 1935 in East Harlem, a 2.4-meter-long (8 ft) alligator was found down a manhole, but how it got there is unexplained.^[3]

In places that are more natural habitats for gators, it is not so unusual for them to turn up in sewers and drains. If you look into a drain and see a shining pair of pitiless eyes peering back, it might not be Pennywise looking to eat you.

In Florida, alligators end up having to be hooked out of sewers after either getting washed in with rains or chasing prey into them. In Louisiana, a 3-meter (10 ft) alligator was seen waddling out of a storm drain before taking a nap on a suburban porch.

7 A Cow

Not all creatures that are found in drains are quite as threatening. When a cow was found in a sewer in Britain, it was pretty docile—being already dead—but there have been cases of live cows found underground.

In Fujian Province in China, one farmer spent four days searching for a missing cow. Unable to find it, the farmer was ready to give up the hunt when a strange mooing noise was heard from beneath the village.^[4]

A manhole cover was lifted off, and the missing cow poked its head up. A makeshift winch was used to haul the cow back up into the open air where it seemed no worse for wear for its subterranean adventure. But just how it ended up in the sewer remained a mystery.

In India, where cows are held in reverence by Hindus, a calf was seen to slip into an open sewer and was carried underground by the flow. Witnessing this, one man clambered into the sewage and dived in to save the animal. Both cow and man survived whole and healthy, if not particularly sweet smelling.

6 A Sewer Monster

In 2009, a video of an unexplained and supposedly alien monster in a North Carolina sewer went viral. In the footage, a pulsating and squirming pink mass can be seen clinging to the wall of the sewer. Were the aliens done with probing human orifices and now coming for our drainage systems?

Not quite.

Experts soon identified the creature as a colony of Tubifex worms. These perfectly common segmented worms are often found living in wet soils.

The apparent pulsing behavior of the “monster” is likely to be due to the camera’s light, which may have been hot. While the worms themselves are not rare, it is unusual for them to stray into a sewer. This is why even those used to working down there were unable to identify this mesmerizing, if disgusting, meet-up of worms.^[5]

5 A Baby

When a woman in China heard the cries of a baby coming from a drain underneath a toilet, she raised the alarm and rescue services soon turned up. After a two-hour rescue, the baby was extracted—still alive—from the pipe in which it had become stuck.

The police searched for the baby’s mother. Soon, they realized that the woman who first called for help was the person for whom they were looking. Overcome with labor in the toilet, the woman had delivered her baby herself and watched it slip down the drain.^[6]

Her story was a sad one. The father of the child had refused to support the baby, and she had no idea how to raise a child on her own. This led her to panic when the baby started to arrive.

In a case from South Africa, a baby between one and three days old was discovered in a storm drain when passersby heard her screaming. Over four hours, drills and chisels were used to break into the drain to pull the child out. The baby was in relatively good health and was named Sibanisethu (“Our Ray of Light”) by locals.

4 A Community

Las Vegas is a place given to extremes and not just of gambling. When it is dry and hot, it is really dry and hot, and when it rains, torrents can fall. To battle the city’s tendency to flood, 1,600 kilometers (1,000 mi) of storm drains were constructed to channel rainwater away from the streets.

Soon, other things flowed into the tunnels. Homeless people, with no place in the glitz and glamour of the strip above, moved into the drains, and the tunnel people of Las Vegas were born.

The cramped tunnels of Las Vegas are filled with scorpions, graffiti, and people down on their luck. When it rains, the tunnel people risk losing everything they possess, including their lives, to the floodwaters. No one knows for sure how many people live underneath Las Vegas, though they are thought to number in the hundreds.

Some tunnel people manage to hold down low-paying jobs and only return to the tunnels to sleep. But others spend most of their time in the gloomy passages beneath the neon city.^[7]

3 Gold

Aside from the odd accident where something valuable gets flushed away, there is probably nothing in a sewer that you might want to recover. However, there may be millions of dollars of precious metals just being washed away each year.

Scientists have calculated that nearly $2 million dollars of gold, and the same amount of silver, pass through Switzerland’s sewers each year. Much of this may be in the form of flakes of metal lost in the jewelry and watchmaking businesses. In places with many goldworkers, it may be worth sorting through a lot of poop to find something that glistens.

In the appropriately named Suwa, Japan, gold has already been extracted from sewers. By burning the waste sludge left after treating sewage, they found that they were left with an ash that contained 2 kilograms (4.4 lb) of gold in every ton—a richer source than found in many gold mines.^[8]

2 Drugs

Anything that passes through the human body is likely to end up in the sewer system, and drugs are no exception. In fact, they may cause major problems. Contraceptive pills use hormones to control women’s reproductive cycles. But once they pass into rivers and waterways, the hormones may cause unpleasant changes in freshwater fish. As the fish undergo changes in their reproductive ability, populations may plummet.

One way of tracking the use of recreational drugs is by studying the contents of sewers. By looking at the waste collected at sewage treatment plants, researchers have suggested that drug use is far more pervasive than is often thought. One team was able to tell that the use of marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine all went up markedly during times of celebration.^[9]

Sometimes, it is not just drug waste that turns up in the sewers, though. In Palermo, police found 77 marijuana plants growing in the sewers underneath the city.

1 Snakes

Humans are at our most vulnerable when we are on the toilet. No sooner do you sit down than the telephone rings, the door buzzer goes off, or a snake bites you on the bottom.

Yes, there are places where it is common to find a snake in your toilet. In Australia, one woman spooked a carpet python in her toilet and got several puncture marks on her buttocks.^[10]

That snake may have slithered into the toilet to avoid a heat wave, but there are many cases of snakes emerging from sewers via people’s toilets. Often, they are following rats that have also used the loo as an escape route into people’s homes. When the snake gets into the toilet, it may find it a congenial place to rest—until someone takes a seat.

Don’t think it is just the dangerous proverbial Land Down Under where you might get bitten on your down-under. Reports of snakes in toilets have been made everywhere from Texas to Seattle and South Africa to Southend in the UK. Maybe check under the seat the next time you feel the call of nature.

If you had to make a list of places you never want to go, a sewer has to rank on there somewhere. You don’t need to experience one to know you won’t enjoy it. Depending on the sewer and its location you can expect to find human waste, cockroaches, rats, trash and a whole host of other unpleasantries. And that’s just the usual contents of a sewer. Sometimes it gets even weirder. 

10. A Lion Once Got Loose in the Sewers of Birmingham, England

Nothing should live in a sewer but that doesn’t mean nothing does. As mentioned, rats and roaches can make a fine home in the damp, dark tunnels beneath our feet and there’s not a lot to be done about it. But in 1889 a much larger resident set up shop in the sewers beneath Birmingham, England.

A traveling menagerie, which was like a traveling zoo, was in town and they had their display of exotic animals in tow. This included a male lion that made its escape in town and flee to the local sewer. The lion had previously mauled a person and killed another, so this wasn’t exactly a cute case of circus animals gone wild. 

In order to quell the panic of the people, the menagerie owner pulled a fast one by sneaking a second lion out of the show and then pretending to capture it at a different sewer entrance. Since no one saw a second lion escape, the man was hailed as a hero for snagging the beast. 

In reality, he had to come clean about his ruse to the local police who then helped him capture the escaped lion for real, just a day late. 

9. A Nile Crocodile Was Discovered in Paris Sewers 

In 1984, workers in Paris discovered one of the least likely things to find in a Paris sewer – a Nile crocodile. Named Eleanor, the baby crocodile had been eating rats near an entrance to the Seine River.

As helpful as a rat-eating crocodile might be, the city still captured the animal and placed it temporarily in the zoo. From there it was moved and most people forgot about it, but she ended up in an aquarium in Vannes where she spent most of the rest of her life.

The Vanne aquarium closed in 2020 when Eleanor was 38. She was transferred to a sanctuary called La Ferme aux Crocodiles but didn’t survive the re-homing and died soon after. 

It’s believed Eleanor had probably been illegally imported and then abandoned when she started growing too large and dangerous.

8. British Sewer Workers Had to Deal With a 130 Ton Sewer Fatberg

Misplaced animals in a sewer are one thing but a fatberg is quite another. That’s the name we’ve given to masses of goop that clog modern sewers thanks to people flushing too much junk into a sewer that it can’t handle. 

In particular, things like baby wipes which don’t break apart like toilet paper and aren’t meant to be flushed are the primary culprit. They form masses along with grease, human waste and more trash that can become so huge they can stop all flow in a sewer and need to be dislodged by entire teams of workers.

One of the biggest fatbergs on record was discovered in Whitechapel in London’s east end. This 130 ton monster had to be removed by trained professionals and the process was both disgusting and dangerous. 

On the surface it sounds just gross and maybe a little funny, but there is real danger. The amount of bacteria and potential disease present cannot be underestimated. As well, the bulky chunks of congealed fat and waste can hide things like needles or other hazards that put workers at risk. 

The local population became oddly fascinated with the blob of cooking oil, used condoms and old tampons. Pieces of the Whitechapel fatberg were preserved by the Museum of London and it took a lot of effort to do so as the salvaged chunks kept growing mold or hatching flies during the process.

7. Thousands of Bucharest Orphans Live Below the City

There’s another kind of nightmare you can find in sewers not related to something that makes you cringe in fear. In Bucharest there are thousands of orphans who live in the city’s sewers. The former regime had banned both abortion and contraception and the number of orphans was estimated to be north of 100,000. They’ve been living there since 1989 and many of them have grown up and started their own families beneath the streets.

The Communist regime in Romania ended in 1989 and that meant every orphanage was summarily closed. The children were literally thrown onto the streets to fend for themselves. The sewers of Bucharest are home to steam pipes which allowed many of them to keep warm and, having nowhere else to go, many of them stayed.

As you might imagine, life in a Romanian sewer is no picnic. Many of those in the tunnels dealt with addiction issues and illness including HIV and tuberculosis. 

6. Sydney Has Had Giant Snapping Turtles in the Sewer

We’ve seen how sewers across Europe are beset by unexpected visitors but it’s not restricted to the continent. Sydney, Australia has its own subterranean problems in the form of snapping turtles. 

An alligator snapping turtle named Leonardo is Australia’s most famous sewer resident. The turtle was rescued and sent to a zoo where it has grown to be over 100 lbs. Fans of the reptile rallied in 2016 to get him a larger enclosure as the zoo where he was sent had never upgraded his home despite him doubling in size. A petition to expand his digs garnered over 16,000 signatures. 

It’s believed the turtle was smuggled into Australia before being illegally dumped in a drain. When he was discovered in the sewer in the year 2000 he only weighed 55 lbs and was briefly named Cowabunga.

Alligator snapping turtles can grow to over 200 lbs and their jaws are strong enough to take a human finger clean off. Though they are native to North America, there was some speculation it may have also been stolen from a display at the zoo in 1979.

5. North Carolina Had a Viral Sewer Monster

When you want to see a true sewer monster, you need to head to the internet. That’s where most people first saw something no one could explain back in 2009. This sewer monster was discovered in Raleigh, North Carolina and for a while people thought it had to be a hoax or even a promo for some kind of found footage movie.

A viral video depicted a writhing, pulsating thing that would have looked at home in a Hellraiser film. It took a bit of time but people managed to sleuth out what it was. The thing was actually a colony of tubifex worms. The worms can be found in sewers where they attach to roots that have broken through bricks and cracks in walls. 

The lights from the camera disturbed the worms and caused them to pulse and retract while they were being filmed, creating the look of a single, mysterious and unsettling creature. 

There was also a competing theory that it wasn’t tubifex worms but a colony of bryozoans, which is just another small,creepy creature most of us on the surface have never seen in the light of day. 

4. An Ancient Roman Wrote About an Octopus Breaking in Through the Sewer

The ancient Romans learned the art of making sewers from the Etruscans and put them to good use throughout the empire. Just like in modern times, these ancient sewers were prone to attracting unwanted guests. Unlike in modern times, the simplistic way that some Romans made sewers, which included attaching them directly to the open sea, created an opportunity for some more diverse visitors.

There is a story which has lasted since Roman times, penned by the writer Aelian. He told of an Iberian merchant who had to deal with nightly visits from an octopus that would crawl from the sea, slink up the sewer and invade the man’s home. 

If you’ve studied much about octopus, you know they are extremely intelligent and also skilled at getting into and out of all kinds of tight spots. This octopus would raid the man’s pantry and steal his pickled fish. 

3. Snake Nests Are Not Uncommon in Sewers

The internet has more than its fair share of “snake in a toilet” videos for you to choose from. These can hail from Australia, South America, Africa, Asia and even North America. Arizona, for instance, is no stranger to toilet snakes. 

Many snakes find their way into a toilet from outside in, looking for a cool and damp place to hang out in high heat. But some take the long way around and work their way through sewers. For every snake that ends up in a toilet, it’s a safe bet a lot more are still down the drain somewhere.

In Thailand, a colony of over 100 snakes was found in a sewer in 2022. Flooding caused the sewer to back up which disturbed a snake nest and the hundred babies that were calling it home. 

Despite what you may think or feel about snakes, locals took the time to go out of their way and help the little guys who were trapped in the water by fishing them out and putting them safely on dry land again. 

A similar incident in Washington occurred back in 2014 when a contractor inspected a clogged line and found a half dozen snakes trapped inside. Because of the way lines had been constructed, there was unfortunately no way for those ones to be rescued and it was assumed they had been pets someone tried to flush.

2. Piranha Fish Have Made Their Way to UK Sewers

Just because something fits in a toilet doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to flush it. In the town of Chichester in the UK, a piranha was found in the local sewers in 2018 prompting the local water company to remind people only to flush their waste down the loo.

The freshwater fish are mostly known for their remarkably sharp teeth and bad reputation as carnivores, though in real life they rarely cause harm to humans. That said, they are an invasive species since they are not even indigenous to the continent and if a population of them were established it would be incredibly dangerous for the ecosystem, not to mention sewer workers.

1. Dozens of Corpses From a Cemetery Were Found During a New Sewer Excavation

Short of evil clowns there are few things any of us would want to find in a sewer less than an actual dead body. Workers in Indiana in 2023 found almost 70 of them when working on a new sewer system that was being run under what had once been a church.

No one knew that there had been a cemetery on site over a hundred years past, so their efforts to run the sewer through unintentionally disinterred the residents. The crew didn’t find them all at once so plans were made to move the deceased for proper burial as they came upon them. 

The cemetery itself was over 200 years old, older than the town that was built over it. The city was surprised that so many graves had remained hidden for so long with no other construction project disturbing them. Officials knew a cemetery was in the area but since it had never been officially marked, no one knew where to look.