Le Nain Rouge has cursed Detroit for three hundred years. Antoine Laumet made up the name "Cadillac, " stole a coat of arms off a gate in France, and founded the city under a lie. Three weeks after he arrived, something small and red stepped out of the riverbank fog, and he swung his cane at it.

The fortune teller in Quebec had warned him. His wife recognized it. He hit it anyway.

Tonight is a special. Our friend Jennifer brought this one from Detroit. She's sharing the mystery of Le Nain Rouge — the Red Dwarf — while Shane and Kim get to listen.

The gang investigates a creature reported in Detroit for over three hundred years. Every time the city has fallen, somebody reported seeing the little red man again. The 1763 Battle of Bloody Run. The Great Fire of June 11, 1805, the one that gave Detroit its motto, Speramus Meliora — we hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes. The 1812 surrender, when General Hull gave up the city without firing a shot. The 1872 sighting by Jane Dacy in the Detroit Free Press. The 1884 newspaper account of a woman attacked by something she called "a baboon with a horned head, brilliant restless eyes, and a devilish leer. " The 1967 Riots. The 1976 ice storm.

Like, what if Detroit's whole identity, from its founding to its bankruptcy to its rebirth, is wrapped around a creature it can't actually find?

Jinkies! Here's where it gets stranger. The first written record of the Nain Rouge doesn't appear until 1884, one hundred and eighty-three years after Cadillac's encounter. Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin, a descendant of Detroit's earliest French families, gathered the oral tradition into Legends of le Détroit that same year. Either Hamlin influenced the sightings, or the sightings influenced Hamlin, or both responded to the same Detroit anxiety.

Plus: the Marche du Nain Rouge, founded 2010 by Wayne State law students Francis Grunow and Joe Uhl, modeled after New Orleans' post-Katrina Mardi Gras revival. The annual parade banishes Le Nain Rouge in effigy on the steps of the Masonic Temple at 500 Temple Street. Indigenous scholars have argued since the parade began that the Nain Rouge has roots in Anishinaabe protector-spirit traditions, and a mostly-non-Indigenous parade banishing it enacts colonial logic. That debate hasn't gone away. Neither has the curse.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The con man who founded Detroit — Antoine Laumet and the noble identity he invented

Marie-Thérèse Guyon, Cadillac's wife, called the "First Lady of Detroit" by the Detroit Historical Society

The fortune teller's warning Cadillac ignored

Every documented sighting from 1701 to 1976, including the 1872 and 1884 Detroit Free Press accounts

Father Gabriel Richard — the priest who gave Detroit its motto, then died September 13, 1832, treating cholera patients

Three competing theories: French lutin vs. Anishinaabe spirit vs. literary creation

The Marche du Nain Rouge, the Masonic Temple, and the Indigenous protest

Two Shit Fire stories: Officer Matthew Jackson at Zoom court without pants, and a Michigan bear who wore a plastic drum lid for two years

Join the gang. The cane stays raised.

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