30 Unsolved Mysteries From The Early Days Of The Internet

"Webcams were installed and you could watch her sleeping or on her computer. And her door would be barricaded most of the time and there were handwritten signs all over the place."

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A few people from Ask Reddit are still wondering about unsolved mysteries from the early days of the internet.

1. I remember that extremely creepy video of a young guy with longish hair and a very unique way of speaking (I think it was a combination of accent and speech impediment) talking about grave robbing and how to prep the remains for sale. I remember specifically him going into great detail into how to properly clean out the skulls so they wouldn’t rattle when you shook them. Nobody ever came up with an identity, location, or even a solid answer for who was buying the human remains or why.

Anyway, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for a long time, because last year a man where I live was arrested for doing the exact same thing. He was digging up graves, taking the remains, and methodically cleaning them for sale. Sale to who?? For what reason?? It literally drives me insane.

2. A young girl went missing or was killed in a certain area and as time passes, on Youtube an old white guy titled the anniversary of that girl’s disappearance/death with the location stares into the camera and is just laughing menacing for quite a while before the video ends with him smiling.

3. There was a multitude of killers who have posted on 4Chan one who asked the question “What does /b/ keep in the freezer?” they then proceeded to post pictures of body parts with timestamps to prove its authentication. Another one was (again 4Chan) a guessing name of a missing person and provided a freebie which when guessed correctly lead to the co-ordinates of where the body was buried.

4. Death of Philip Taylor Kramer, the bass guitarist for Iron Butterfly who became a computer engineer. He was said to have been working on data compression techniques and may have been assassinated, but his death was ruled a suicide.

The whole story (and family) are weird. It made the rounds as a favorite early internet conspiracy and then… just disappeared.

5. What about the guy that tried to test his new gas mask and made chlorine gas, and it was absorbed into his skin, and he stopped posting updates.

6. I somehow stumbled onto a very disturbing website called something like howtobeaserialkiller.com. That’s not exactly the right URL, but it’s close. I probably found it through Stileproject.com. It was full of information that seemed like it might actually really help someone to get away with killing strangers. I tried to show a friend what I had found a couple of weeks later and the site had been removed with a simple message remaining, “How to be a serial killer has been removed. If you’re really interested in killing someone why don’t you start with yourself.” I’d like to know what the hell inspired someone to create such a site and why did they decide to remove it.

7. There was a really old youtube video tutorial of this American hiker explaining how to use a compass while on top of some mountain. At the end of the video, he’s like okay time to hike back down and he says, “Now that you guys know how to use one, don’t get lost out there,” and you see him walk downhill and the video cuts. Someone commented (probably jokingly) that after that video: “He was never seen again.”

Well, it turns out that was the last video he made and he actually was never seen again. I have no idea whether he uploaded it live or went back home, uploaded it, and then went missing.

But the irony is that he went missing after giving a tutorial on how to use a compass and not get lost.

8. The identity of Shiloh Dynasty and whether they’re still alive. They just randomly popped up on the internet with a few clips of them singing uploaded to their vine and their Ig. And these clips have been sampled multiple times to make hit songs by different producers and most notably from XXXtentacions album. Yet it is unknown who Shiloh is, whether male or female, alive or dead.

9. There was this one billboard advertising this number and when you called, it was a voice that said weird things in a pattern. People went over the words again and again, he always took a pause and took a breath and the same words every time. If you look you could probably find a website, even a subreddit. It was a weird story.

10. There used to be a huge conspiracy theory that Walt Disney’s head was frozen in ice. Whenever you searched the keywords “Disney” “Frozen”, theories would show up. By “coincidence” Disney makes the movie Frozen and you cannot search up those keywords anymore without being blocked by the movie.

11. The dude who found a nazi underground bunker in his garden. Kept posting updates on how he was digging towards it and finding odd stuff, until the day before he was due to enter it. Nothing after that if I remember correctly…

12. I remember watching a video of a man exploring the catacombs and out of nowhere he just drops the camera and begins to run.

13. Cicada 3301 a series of puzzles put out by an anonymous source that has been stuck at a roadblock for a couple of years now. The current puzzle is called the Liber Primus and is 58 pages of Nordic runes, only 2 have been decoded in the past 6 years or so.

14. Smurf in Hand. This guy was a Smurfs fan with sadistic and pedophiliac inclinations. He went to a forum for the fans of the cartoon and made a long story that was pretty much just graphic torture porn featuring Smurf babies. The pictures he drew had his own hands poorly Photoshopped in, often scaring or harming the Smurfs. It’s so horrific (and still up on the forum) that most people reading it wonder just what the hell this guy has done since.

Smurf In Hand has never been found. No one knows where he is or what he now does for a living. Given that he clearly wants to hurt babies, it’s quite possible he got a job caring for them…

15. The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet, I only know about this mystery because of a series of videos made by Whang! If you don’t know what the mystery is about, it’s about a song that is visible to the public, but no one knows who made the song, no one even knows the title of the song, this search started in 2007, but wasn’t big until 2019 I think.

16. Back in 1993, there was a page that had the full process of creating ecstasy. Must have been written by a scientist, because it was highly detailed.

17. In the early days of the internet, there was a site which purported to show a massive submarine base being built in the middle of the Amazon – it was documented through a series of photos developed from a camera that had been found in the jungle. The theory was that the camera had been thrown from an airplane that had flown over the base just prior to being shot down.

This is NOT a drug submarine base, but rather something else entirely – it was in the MIDDLE of the Brazilian Amazon, far from any body of water, and the submarine itself was GIANT.

The conjecture was that the elite of the world knew something about coming cataclysmic floods that would envelop the planet and so had built themselves an escape submarine – an Ark – out there in the sticks.

I saw this site in the very, very early days of the web… it was one of the few sites to visit with the new web browsers of the time.

But try as I might I simply cannot find any trace of this site anymore, it has vanished and even the Internet Archive has no reference to it.

Was pretty interesting that’s for sure. The sub looked huge and the pictures of it quite legitimate…

18. The woman who thought the government or someone was listening to her and spying on her in South Korea I think, that they were trying to control her I think too, and webcams were installed and you could watch her sleeping or on her computer. And her door would be barricaded most of the time and there were handwritten signs all over the place.

I lost the bookmark to the link for the webcams years ago. But I still think and wonder if she is ok and if the cams are still running.

19. There was this story of someone on Reddit who accidentally killed this special needs kid when he/she was a child. They were with some friends bike riding I think and they accidentally watched as this kid fell off the mountain and died. They told nobody but the posted about it on Reddit somewhere. Then someone replied with a question asking about the name of the kid who died as it seemed really similar to another story. Then out of nowhere op deletes his whole ass account and everything with it after the reply.

20. Did Hugh Hefner really have a secret collection of sex videos of celebrities from his parties which his sons and lawyers gave back to them after Hugh died? And did they really find blueprints for tunnels to be built to James Caan’s, Beatty’s, and Nicholson’s house… because that is some crazy sex addiction stuff when your thinking of building tunnels.

21. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto; inventor of Bitcoin? He disappeared shortly after its release and has never been heard of again. He still has a $10 billion worth that is just sitting there untouched.

22. What about that guy that’s seen sprinting out of an airport with none of his luggage then is never seen again?

23. During the golden age of the internet, I was in my early teens, I would type random URL addresses to see where it took me. One time I typed WWW.Hell.com

It was an extremely weird web site that eventually fucked up my shitty Packard Bell computer so badly that it was useless. I wonder who made that web site. I miss the old school internet. It was very much like the dark web, but not as difficult to explore back then.

24. There was a simple Geocities type page with a blog about a guy who’d found a cave beneath his house and was exploring it. It was the earliest type of creepypasta I’d encountered—probably 2002-3. Remember really fascinated by it and wondered if it was real.

25. There was a blogger named Rance in the early 2000s who was rumored to be a celebrity since his posts contained a lot of detail about other celebs. At the time I think some people thought it was George Clooney, but whoever it was abruptly stopped posting.

26. One I remember is something along the lines of cutoffmyfeet.com. I don’t think it’s still up, but the gist of it was that a dude’s feet were paralyzed and he wanted to cut them off so he could get prosthetics. I don’t remember much, there are probably better explanations out there.

27. R/thatevilfarminggame. Essentially, a user on Reddit posted about a farming simulation game, however, there’s a twist where you kill your wife and have to cover it up. No one is able to find it and some say the OP is misremembering details of the game.

28. Lake City Quite Pills.

Old Reddit user who used to post here in the really old days (before subreddits even I think?) died. Their friend took over their Reddit account for a bit and let Reddit know. Eventually, people noticed the user was linked to some site (I think it was porn or something) which in turn contained message logs. These message logs were all pretty cryptic.

The logs eventually mentioned holding a service for the dude who died but gave weird requirements like not giving your real name to hotel staff, not being tailed, only American currency, and to remain low profile. Stuff like that. People are a bit suspect of this and during the same night this “party” is meant to be happening some mobster is killed close to the venue of it by hitmen.

Website after a while was taken down and all that remains are screenshots of the original logs. Barely Sociable has a vid about the topic on YouTube which will do it far more justice than I have here but it is certainly the oldest thing I know of.

29. The mystery of Bruno Powroznik. this guy was really weird and he had a youtube channel, he made videos like objects that I’ve shoved up my ass, and Margret Thatcher is dead. One day all of a sudden his channel and all its content disappeared and no one knows what really happened to this day.

30. The guy who went caving. He ends his blog with ‘I’ll let you know what I find.’ And then it just ends. Google Ted’s caving and it’s the first result! Thought Catalog Logo Mark


About the author

January Nelson

January Nelson

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.