This was, obviously, false - bonsai kittens were clever photoshop combined with pictures of cats just being cats. But to young me, someone new to internet, with no idea of how powerful photoshop and suggestion could be, and a rampant case of preteen hyperempathy, those images were unsettling.

I lost sleep for weeks - first concerned that the images were real; and then concerned that some unsavory character would decide the photoshop wasn't enough and it was time to try it for real. The poor imaginary kittens in my anxiety-riddled mind...

I forgot about it until years later, when someone mentioned bonsai kittens as an internet mystery they never quite got the full story about. Thing is, there are countless things floating around on the internet that people just ... aren't sure about. Are they real? Hoaxes? Viral marketing? Something totally innocent but set to creepy music?

One Reddit user asked:

What mysteries from the early days of the internet are still unsolved to this day?

So here we go, once more down the rabbit hole ...

Chiclet Teeth

There was that guy in the middle 90's who designed his girlfriend using software. He ended up with something like a mug shot, then posted it, hoping to find her in real life.

He swore he was in love with her, this image he had created. He became an immediate laughingstock.

I can't locate any links, but I remember one person referring to the girl as "Chiclet teeth."

Anyway, I wonder if the guy ever found her.

- woofoo2

Clean The Skulls Before Sale

I remember that extremely creepy video of a young guy with longish hair and a very odd 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.

- MikeJudeDredd

A Guessing Game

Wouldn't say early internet but interesting nonetheless. 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 it 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.

- xImNotTheBestx

Yeah, the coordinates one was originally posted as a thread with a pic of the missing girl and the message "if this thread gets trips, I'll tell you where to find her" with 'trips' meaning a triplicate number in the post number (eg 222, or 777, etc) which was not something you could see ahead of time

Someone made a reply in the thread with trips, and the OP replied with gps coordinates. 2 days later someone posted a news article from the nearby city with an update about the girls body being found.

- FartKilometer

I was on there when it happened. We all thought the guy was full of sh*t until the news broke.

- thatvillainjay

Heaven's Gate

The Heavens Gate website is still up and running, but the real question is who is paying for it to stay up?

- FitzGamer999

I'm pretty sure it's just one guy running it. He left the cult before they did the suicides and then rejoined it I guess. I'm pretty sure he's the only person alive who still believes it. Sad, sad stuff

- grimoireofstrangers

Can someone explain what heaven's gate is and what does it do ?

- rushabh2005

A UFO cult that eventually became a suicide cult. Members were obsessed with Star Trek and general sci-fi/fantasy weirdness, and made frequent use of the Internet to make money and spread their theology. They believed, among other things, that malevolent aliens called "Luciferians" had infiltrated all major religions to keep humans from developing as a species, that God is actually a very advanced alien, and that their leaders' bodies were regularly taken over by alien "walk-ins." They wound up killing themselves when Comet Halle-Bopp came around, believing that their consciousnesses would be transported to an invisible starship in the comet's tail after their bodies' physical deaths (and, unlike the Jonestown massacre, the deaths seemed to be voluntary—as voluntary as they could be in a cult, anyway.)

They relied on the Internet a lot when they were around, and made most of their money by offering website design and cybersecurity services. Their original website is still up today, in all of its '90s HTML glory, and if you email the person running it, he'll probably respond to you. It's incredibly unnerving to read.

- arcadiaplanitia

Ted's Excellent Adventure

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!

- DenverTigerCO

That was the first and literally last thing I ever read from that website years ago and I still think about it sometimes at night and it scares me lol

- ahr3

It was solved it was confirmed fake. It started out real but eventually the guy decided to write a fiction thingymajig.

- Havoq12

For those interested in learning more about the story behind the story: https://grahamjw.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/ted-the-caver-mystery/

Even as fiction, it's still a masterful work of suspense! Major kudos to the author for crafting a story that's held up this well for so long.

- BradsBuns

How To? How 'Bout No. 

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, for instance; using a heavy duty zip tie to suffocate them so your hands would be free to hold them down; or rolling dice to decide what kind of person to kill next so there wouldn't be an obvious pattern.

I tried to show a friend what I had found a couple 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.

- TotallyNattyAF

Amazon Submarine

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 form 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 drugs 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 envelope 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 any more, 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....

- ibisum

Amputation 

One I remember is something along the lines of cutoffmyfeet.com. I don't think its still up, but the gist of it was that a dudes 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.

- dirtyumpire69

Here's a snippet from the old website:

Since Paul is on Medicare/Medicaid, his insurance will not cover the amputation and new prosthetics because it is not deemed a necessary procedure. Paul also receives medical disability and his Medicare plan does not even cover the cost of his catheter bag. Paul doesn't want to fight a no-win battle with the insurance and medical communities in the United States.

Paul is using this event as a chance to speak out against the lack of care in the medical field and the insurance industry. He strongly believes that this could make great strides in the much needed insurance and medical reform in the United States. This amputation is simply Paul's way of saying that even though corporate america has refused him, he will get his new prosthetics and improve his quality of life.

That's actually pretty sad :(

- Sipredion

Frozen

There used to be a huge conspiracy theory that Walt Disney's head was frozen in ice. Whenever you searched the key words "Disney" "Frozen", theories would show up.

By "coincidence" Disney makes the movie Frozen and you cannot search up those key words anymore without being blocked by the movie.

- sluttyjubilee

Big Ghost

Who Big Ghost is? He was a hip hop blogger who gave hilarious commentary on hip hop in the voice of Ghostface Killah from wutang. He became a music producer but I never found info on him or his real identity

- shriekingmenace

The Red Spiral

Around early 2000's, my cousin and I were using a very recent beta copy of Google earth (wasn't available to public yet, but people in the computer industry could access it). We found a random location in the middle east, miles from anything.

We found an enormous spiral made of those red markers and zoomed in. We clicked on the red dots and they gave the GPS coordinates and #of people killed there.

In all total it was several hundred killed, but it was strange that information was on Google maps and the it was in the shape of a spiral.

There was some obscure forum on it, but it is all long gone

- dontcareitsonlyreddit

Beebiss

There is a video game that seemingly never existed called Yeah Yeah Beebiss I, which has a ton of evidence on the internet for it's existence nonetheless. For all practical purposes, no physical evidence of it has ever been found or seen...and yet, actual documentation that it exists or existed at one point remains. Specifically, two actual, well-known businesses which sold and resold video games had it listed in their documents as one of the games they sold and listed for some time. And again these companies RESOLD video games, and they weren't just little out of the way joints either, so logic dictates that someone had to have gone, seen or found Yeah Yeah Beebiss I and estimated a price since, if memory serves, VARIED between the two establishments. So yeah, SOMEONE had to have seen it, but no physical copies have ever been found so far despite legions of people (myself included) searching.

More over, I actually did some research myself, and to be frank there are a ton of OTHER games on the lists that were used to document Yeah Yeah Beebiss I which either were not released in America or released under a different title--this combined with the...to say the very least, somewhat bizarre title Yeah Yeah Beebiss I means that it may in fact have been released either in America or only in Japan but under a wildly different title. Which in turn raises the question of what the everliving fck YEAH YEAH BEEBISS I was supposed to originally mean when it was first announced?!

I'm not the only one searching for this, a ton of other people have been looking for it in the Lost Media niche of the interwebs.

- ThatGamingAhole