The Nain Rouge of Detroit

Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded the French outpost of Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit on the river in 1701, a real event, and he was later removed from his post and sent as governor to Louisiana. Around that history Detroit has wound its oldest legend. In the story, a fortune-teller in Quebec tells Cadillac before he leaves that he will found a great city but must “appease the Nain Rouge”, the Red Dwarf, a malignant imp of the strait. He ignores her, and when a red-faced dwarf with a cold, glistening eye and pointed teeth later crosses his path on the beach, he strikes it with his cane. From then on, the legend says, the dwarf marks the city’s misfortunes.

The tale is far younger than the founding. The earliest known printed account is in Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin’s book Legends of Le Détroit, published in 1883, about 180 years after the supposed encounter. Hamlin wrote that the dwarf was long regarded as the “banshee” or demon of the strait, and that whenever he appeared it was a sure sign of impending evil. He was seen running along the shore the night before the British disaster at Bloody Run in 1763, in the burning streets when Detroit was destroyed by fire in 1805, and on a foggy morning before Hull’s surrender of the city in 1812. Hamlin says that since then he had never reappeared, though the old French families held that he would return should misfortune threaten the city again.

Later tellers took up the thread. Retellings added a sighting before the July 1967 uprising, when two utility workers are said to have seen the creature, and another before an ice storm in 1976. None of these has contemporary documentation, and later accounts largely repeat one another. Historians such as Kate Grandjean have suggested that the figure blends French lutin folklore with older Native American traditions, a creature that, in her words, mostly menaced those in power rather than ordinary people.

Since 2010 the legend has had a modern festival. Each spring, on the first Sunday after the equinox, the Marche du Nain Rouge sets out from Detroit’s Cass Corridor and ends at the Masonic Temple, with costumed marchers chasing out a figure of the dwarf, and, organisers say, an effigy burned at the finish to banish him for another year. The parade began as a few hundred people and has grown to thousands. It has also drawn criticism from some residents who object to the idea of banishing a scapegoat, particularly one that has been identified with long-time residents, and from others who say the creature was originally a protector or earth spirit and that a Native tradition has been turned into a devil.

A dwarf or imp, very red in the face, with a bright, cold eye and a grinning mouth of sharp teeth in Hamlin’s telling, reported on riverbanks and in streets before fires, battles and civic upheavals. There are no accounts of contemporary sightings from the colonial period, and he is treated as a harbinger rather than a haunter.

The Detroit River shore and the old fort of Détroit in the legend; today the story is anchored in Detroit’s Cass Corridor and the Masonic Temple, where the annual parade is held.

The Marche du Nain Rouge draws thousands each March. The creature has given its name to a lager, an absinthe and a wine, and inspired the 2019 horror film Devil’s Night: Dawn of the Nain Rouge. Hamlin’s book remains the standard source for the Detroit folklore of the old French habitants.