By Tim Binnall
This coming Sunday, thousands of revelers will descend upon Detroit for an annual parade aimed at casting out a folkloric demon said to reside in the city, but among the partiers will be a handful of protestors who say that they've got it all wrong. Although some believe the entity can be traced back to Native American lore, the Nain Rouge, or 'red dwarf,' first appeared in an 1883 book entitled Legends of Le Detroit, where the creature was portrayed as a somewhat temperamental supernatural being that served as a harbinger of impending troubles.
In the century or so to follow, it seems that the Nain Rouge was largely relegated to local folklore and merchandising opportunities by savvy businesses until it found new life in the form of a parade which began in 2009. Created to be Detroit's answer to Mardi Gras, the annual festival portrays the entity not as a benevolent guardian of the city, but as the source for all manner of misfortune that had befallen the community in the past with urban legend now attributing various disasters to the demon's sinister hand. In the years since the gathering first began, the event has grown immensely and has even been embraced by some local politicians.
However, one area resident has made it his mission to fight what he sees as a gross misrepresentation of the Nain Rouge. Over the last few years, prolific paranormal researcher John Tenney has been speaking out against the depiction of the entity and launched a fun and informative website that attempts to set the record straight. "Nain is NOT the cause of unhappiness," it declares, "but the ancient warning sign that distress may be ahead of us." As such, Tenney argues that attempting to drive the demon from the city is antithetical to its very purpose.
On a larger level, he also laments that the modern-day version of the Nain Rouge is an example of how classic folklore can become mutated in our modern era as stories get broken down into bite-sized forms by the Internet. And so, in an effort to educate parade-goers this coming weekend, Tenney and a team of like-minded individuals will be on hand at the festivities armed with signs and flyers which tell the true story of Detroit's resident demon. Although they know that they are swimming against the proverbial tide of public opinion, the group hopes that someday the annual parade will be a celebration of the Nain Rouge rather than a repudiation of one of the city's oldest inhabitants.