Here's a nice bit of mystery wrapped around real-life monstrosity. Start with this video, which purports to be from a "sewer snakecam in North Carolina". The YouTube header dubs it "Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer!", while the info tab suggests "Believed to be of ET origin."
Creepy, yes? The clip became a massive YouTube success. Cryptids plus mystery plus ick apparently equals viral success, in this case.
The things turn out to be clusters of tubifex worms. Tubifex has other charming names, says Wikipedia: "sludge worm, sewage worm, or lime snake". A Charlotte outlet calls them "bryozoans".
One Gothic storytelling possibility: Wikipedia also claims tubifex (what's the plural, tubifexes? tubifexen?) are sold for critter food in pet stores. Now recall the old flushed alligator tales, and ponder what happens to sludge worms growing for a while - unnaturally - underground...
There's a kind of desperate poetry in the YouTube word cloud tags:
Comments