Haunted People Reveal The Weirdest Internet Rabbit Holes They've Ever Found
It's easy to get caught up while surfing online or exploring the interconnected nature of modern technology. You sit down for a few minutes to check something out only to emerge hours later. Sometimes the stories you find are simply too compelling or the the single thread you pull ends up unraveling a massive web.
So Reddit user Budfraiz asked people to share "What's the best/scariest/most interesting 'internet rabbithole' you have found?"
Here are the answers with links, denoted with bold _italicized _font, where available so you too can tumble down into the online abyss.
Number Stations
Oh man, Number Stations are incredibly creepy to me. Fascinating but creepy as hell.
'A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries' - Source
Check out The Conet Project if you're not already familiar with it. It's a series of numbers station recording first released on CD back in the 90s, but now available for free online. The link is to a YouTube playlist of the recordings.
#ElsaGate
ElsaGate is a Phenomenon on Youtube of reoccuring Themes, Animations in Context of inappropriate Topics in Videos on several Channels available and targeted at Kids. Those videos often feature Spiderman, Frozen Elsa, Joker, Mickey Mouse and other Characters popular with Kids.
History of AskReddit
Some more : ( don't worry these are lighthearted, funny threads)
The Rock-afire Explosion
For those of you old enough to remember this, before there was Chuck. E. Cheese... There was Showbiz Pizza.
Some mad "genius" in Tampa started "perfecting" animatronics and creating characters for the birthday party celebrations... Only to see his precious creations get bought out, stripped down and repurposed.
There are some people out there who spend everything they make acquiring and maintaining these ancient monstrosities... Going to far as to program them to play their favorite songs by hand. Here they are doing Nine Inch Nails.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Serial Killers
Serial killers on Wikipedia.
Myriad options to peruse:
List of serial killers by number of victims
List of serial killers by country
List of serial killers before 1900
List of Unusual Deaths
I've read the list of unusual deaths (on Wikipedia) an embarrassing number of times. My favorite one is the guy that died laughing watching a donkey eat figs.
Poles of Inaccessibility
For some reason, I find the Poles of Inaccessibility super fascinating.
"A pole of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide access."
For example, Point Nemo (the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility) is so remote that if you were there and the International Space Station flew over you in orbit, you would be closer to it than to any land on Earth.
I realize that the ISS's orbit is only ~205-270 miles above Earth. It's still pretty crazy to me that if you were here, you'd potentially be closer to an astronaut than to anyone on land. To put it in another perspective, you'd be a little more than 1 Pluto away from the nearest land. (Pluto's diameter is 1,475 miles, the nearest land from Point Nemo is 1,670 miles).
Kerguelen Islands
I find the Kerguelen Islands fascinating. The few available pictures are hauntingly beautiful, and it is one of the most remote places on Earth.
Bouvet Island
I was just reading a few weeks ago about another island called Bouvet Island. The first explorers believed to have ever explored the island on foot found a frozen lake in the middle of the island, and in this lake they found a lifeboat stuck in the ice. To this day no one knows how it got there.
Tangled (worldwide) Web
I once had my home Linux server hacked while I was away on winter holiday. Logging in remotely from my grandparents house I noticed that the server was behaving oddly, took a look at the log files and found them truncated, so sent a shutdown command so I could do forensics when I got home.
What I ended up finding really did feel like swallowing the red pill. Someone had hacked the server using a recent sendmail exploit and resold it to someone who was using it to host an 'eggdrop' IRC bot. I logged into the IRC channel that it had been holding open and found a bunch of people sending short messages like 'CCs', or 'Root'.
About five minutes in a longer message comes along. Some guy is annoyed with a trade he has made, someone gave him a bad set of data and he wants to make his own data worthless in return before the buyer can get full use of it.
So on my screen there is suddenly a splat of information about some guy who lives in Texas, credit card, phone number, street address, and the first guy is urging everyone to buy stuff as quickly as possible before the credit limit is hit.
Feeling I was f'ed, I disconnected ASAP, left an anonymous phone message on said Texas individual's answering machine advising them to check their Visa charges, and hoped that my lack of foresight in not setting up an IP proxy or anything to hide my own identity wouldn't have either the FBI or organized crime breathing down my neck in a few days.
Stalker
I found out I had a stalker from high school when I was in community college and decided to Google my name for some dumb reason. I don't have a very common last name but there are still a few other people out there with my first and last name.
I was like 10 pages deep in Google, place many do not ever go to and I found an old Tripod site that had my name in the url followed by one of my old AIM screen names. So I clicked it and was taken to a very basic page that had a ton of pictures stolen from my Myspace and others that had to have been taken without me knowing, things like me out working on my car or on the trampoline with my siblings in our yard...
It was really weird and I had no clue who it was until I scrolled all the way down and realized it was the girl I dated for a few months in Spring of our sophomore year...she had a screen shot of a AIM conversation where I said I liked you way more than others or something on it and she took that and ran with it...
Reddit Leads to Inspiration
I was on the Reddit subthread about tinder looking at some hilarious comebacks and putdowns. One of the top posts was a profile someone had posted of a young lady in a wheelchair, that had a wicked sense of humor around her situation.
Well, turns out she was a redditor, and appeared in the comments section, chatting and joking away with other redditors about her profile.
I went deeper and came across her story, which she'd posted to Imgur (possibly NSFW hospital images).
So from having a light-hearted chuckle at some funny Tinder chat, to going to bed deeply affected by one of the most, tragic, creepy/strange and yet uplifting human stories I've ever read was a pretty strange left turn.
If you're still on Reddit lifeproofbionicwoman - you rock!
Before First Contact
Wikipedia's page on uncontacted tribes. It's fascinating to read about first encounters, how everyone reacts, the ultimate outcome. Every linked page about specific tribes is like it's own mini-drama.
The MarbleLympics
There's this series on YouTube called the "MarbleLympics." This guy basically made different "events" and puts teams of marbles through them and color commentates. The production value isn't bad considering what it is, and you WILL start rooting for a team.
The Editing Room
The Editing Room. They adjust movies' scripts highlighting plotholes and bad acting. How they break down and mock the stories is especially interesting if you have already seen the movie, they usually notice much more than a casual moviegoers sees.
Missing Germans
The Missing Germans. I read this all in one marathon session well into the wee hours. Essentially it's about a German family of four that were vacationing in the US and disappeared in Death Valley in 1996. A search-and-rescue guy hears about it and decides to try to solve the mystery.
important videos
There's this well known playlist on YouTube called "important videos", it has about 300 videos that are mostly short and stupidly funny.
Truth Shall Set You Free?
I was an active Mormon and researching something for a meeting. I came across a website that had great historical information and didn't at first appear to be an "anti-Mormon" site. I read that the Restoration of the Priesthood doesn't have an actual date and immediately I thought that was BS because since I was a child I had read in Church publications all about the Restoration. I could recite dates, names, places and what these great religious leaders were thinking at the time. Yeah, about that...
This website showed strong evidence that it was all a lie, but I was sure they were wrong so I set out to prove they had the wrong facts. I stared with the Church's publications, but dug deeper. I searched for source material on college websites. I found journals and other writings on archive.org. I found websites that pulled together information from a dozen sources and assembled it in a way that was terrifying to read.
In 2-weeks of near constant searching I went from a faithful member to feeling sick, crying and wanting to tear my own eyes out. Then came anger and that feeling of betrayal. I spent a couple hours nearly every day for the next year doing my best to prove everything wrong. I prayed, studied, fasted and in the end I had to be spiritually honest -- I had been lied to.
