Michelle Rojas Blackett was on her way home from work when she noticed a man standing on the platform at Spring Street in Soho wearing an unusual jacket.
Then she looked closer. The jacket was transparent. It was full of cockroaches. Live ones.
“I saw a man standing there with an odd looking jacket only to realise that it had bugs in it and that they were cockroaches,” the 31-year-old human resources worker from Manhattan told Creatorzine.
The man appeared entirely unbothered. Everyone around him was not.
Nobody knew what to do
A video of the scene, filmed on the New York City subway platform, has been viewed 2.6 million times and liked more than 28,000 times.
The footage shows the man standing in the clear plastic garment while cockroaches crawl across the interior.
“Other people were staring and making faces or laughing or just in pure shock,” Blackett said.
“He seemed completely unfazed by it all.”
New York subway commuters have a high tolerance for the unexpected. This apparently tested it.
The internet was torn between horror and respect
The comments split roughly into three camps: people who were disgusted, people who were impressed, and people who wanted to call pest control on a human being.
“I don’t like roaches but keeping living things in sealed plastic just doesn’t feel humane,” one viewer wrote, raising the animal welfare question that the spectacle probably wasn’t designed to provoke.
“This stopped me in my tracks,” said a third.
“Is it illegal if I spray him with Raid?” asked another, only half joking.
Perhaps the most accurate assessment came from one commenter who simply called him “the most untouchable man in NYC.”
Hard to argue. Nobody is pickpocketing someone wearing live insects.
Why it matters
New York subway content is its own genre at this point, and the formula is well established: film something unhinged, post it, watch the numbers climb.
But the cockroach jacket stands out because it provoked a reaction that most subway stunts don’t.
People weren’t just amused. They were genuinely uncomfortable, and the comments reflect a real split between treating it as performance art and calling it cruelty.
For creators, the 2.6 million views came from a bystander who happened to be on the right platform at the right time.
Blackett wasn’t chasing content. She was commuting.
The man in the jacket, intentionally or not, turned himself into the kind of spectacle that the algorithm rewards instantly.
Whether the jacket was a statement, a stunt or just a Tuesday in Manhattan remains unclear.
The man hasn’t been identified. The cockroaches haven’t commented.
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