About 10,000 people showed up in Cass Corridor on Sunday, March 23, 2025, for the annual Marche du Nain Rouge CBS News, the costume parade that exists to chase a small red imp out of Detroit. The parade has been running since 2010. The format barely changes year to year, which is part of the point.
Music starts at 11:30 a.m. at the corner of Canfield and Second. marchedunainrouge A New Orleans-style brass band kicks the actual procession at 1 p.m. Costumes range from elaborate (full devil headdresses, krewes with custom human-powered floats) to thrown-together (a red bandana, a feather boa). The Nain Rouge appears at the end of the route. The Nain Rouge gets booed.
The Nain Rouge is run out of town. The afterparty, until about 5 p.m., happens in the Masonic Temple's Fountain Ballroom. Events in the D Free, with DJs, drinks, and vendor tables.
The legend the parade is built on is genuine pre-American Detroit folklore. The Nain Rouge supposedly appeared during the 1763 Battle of Bloody Run, before the 1805 fire that burned down most of Detroit, before the 1967 rebellion, and during a 1976 utility-worker sighting on a snowy Detroit pole. Whenever something terrible happens, somebody claims to have seen the imp.
The Marche has fashioned that into an annual exorcism. There are also, every year, protesters. The protesters argue that the Nain Rouge is misunderstood, a creature of European folklore who has been unfairly cast as Detroit's villain.
Whether the protest is sincere or part of the bit is, as the organizers themselves say, hard to tell. The signs are funny either way. The Marche has no admission fee, no major corporate sponsorship, and no real promotional infrastructure besides word of mouth.
People who go talk about it for weeks. People who don't go don't really hear about it. It is the closest thing Detroit has to a shared local holiday that hasn't been absorbed into anyone's brand strategy.
What it actually feels like on the day: a bunch of people in red walking down Second Avenue, wearing masks so the Nain can't recognize them, listening to a brass band, holding cans of beer that are technically not allowed but visibly tolerated. Costumes get more involved each year. The crowd is mostly twenty- and thirty-something Detroiters, with a strong contingent of suburbanites who treat it as their one Detroit weekend.
The 2026 Marche is already on the Events in the D calendar for next March.
Location: starts at Canfield and Second, ends at the Masonic Temple, Cass Corridor / Midtown
