Top 20 Unsolved Internet Mysteries

In 2013, a bizarre game called “Kanye Quest 3030” was released for PC. Players controlled Kanye West and fought other rappers like Eminem and LL Cool J in “Pokémon”-style battles. However, this was merely a front for the so-called “real game.” If the player typed the word “ascend” into a dialogue box, they were taken to a freaky secret area. This segment of the game asked players for their personal information and contained a QR code that, if activated, would supposedly pull the user’s IP. Some people believe that this game was created by a cult known as Ascensionism and that it served as a recruitment tool. Others think it’s a weird alternate reality game. Either way, it’s super creepy.

There’s a reason this thing is called GhostNet. Uncovered in 2009, GhostNet refers to a massive cyber spying operation that targeted over a thousand computers in over a hundred countries. Emails bearing sketchy attachments were sent to high-profile targets like foreign embassies and government offices. When opened, it would give the spies control over the computers. The command infrastructure was based in China, but no conclusive link to the Chinese government was made and the country denied any and all involvement in the attacks. To this day, no one knows who, exactly, was responsible. They’re as invisible and intangible as a ghost.

This sounds like a killer title for a crime novel, but it’s a very real thing that was found on Reddit. The story involves users named ReligionOfPeace and 2-6. The former posted something in relation to “Lake City Quiet Pills,” only for the latter to announce the other user’s death not a day later. Turns out, they both may have been involved with a shady website called lakecityquietpills.com. Redditors started to believe that “quiet pills” was a euphemism for bullets, and that the website was part of an international assassination ring. There was mention of an upcoming event at a hotel, and the specified date coincided with the assassination of the 2010 Mahmoud al-Mabhouh (muchh-MOOD el-mub-HHHHoohh) who was killed inside a Dubai hotel. Did Reddit users stumble upon a secret cabal of hitmen?

YouTube can be a weird place, and it’s filled with some puzzling videos. Beginning in April of 2015, a user called Unfavorable Semicircle began uploading some very strange videos. These didn’t have proper titles or descriptions, and they were very abstract in content. Nothing about them really made sense, and the videos ranged from just a few seconds to eleven hours in length. The channel quickly caught the attention of internet sleuths and even the BBC, who reported on it in 2016. In a shocking turn of events, Unfavorable Semicircle was suspended by YouTube shortly after the BBC piece had been published and has never been heard from again.

There are millions of songs out there. Some are bound to get lost. “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet” refers to a tune that once aired on the German radio station NDR. Some time in the early 80s, a man known only as Darius S. (dawrry-ooce) recorded the song off the radio alongside other popular singles of the time. Darius digitized his cassette playlist in 2004, but that song from the ‘80s was long forgotten. It was Darius’s sister, Lydia, who began using the internet to search for the mysterious ditty, but to no avail. The search has continued since 2007 and is now a bonafide web phenomenon. Unfortunately, no one has been able to crack the case of the mystery track.

Could we have a genuine body snatcher on our hands? Some people certainly think so. “Grave Robbing for Morons” is a famous VHS tape of unknown origin. It depicts a young man holding a human skull and giving detailed instructions for robbing graves. No one knows where the tape came from, who is in it, or even if it’s genuine. The man in the video calls himself Anthony, and some people believe it could be Anthony Casamassima (cassa-muh-SEE-muh), who was arrested for pillaging graves in the late ‘90s. Others believe it’s a hoax made by a bootlegger known as Screws. Real or not, the video is supremely creepy.

Heaven’s Gate was a small American cult that was made famous in March of 1997 after 39 members of the cult took their own lives in order to “ascend” to a new plane of existence. A few of the members who survived have since been given the task to preserve their group’s legacy digitally. Heaven’s Gate’s website remains in operation and, as much as it is a glorious time capsule back to ‘90s web design, it also proclaims messages about leaving “this world.” No one really knows who runs the website, but all signs point to a couple named Mark and Sarah King.

Spend about two minutes on 4chan and you’re bound to come across something disturbing. But, this probably takes the cake. In April of 2013, a post was made providing coordinates to an industrial area of Tennessee. Accompanying the coordinates was a piece of text claiming that a “prize” was awaiting those who visited. After users joked about going, the OP provided unsettling pictures of what looked like human remains and a body bag. A user calling himself Alex then visited the location and documented his frightening progress, but he abruptly stopped posting after hearing someone approaching. Maybe Alex was real and met a tragic fate, or maybe it was all just an elaborate hoax concocted by the original poster. Who knows?

We all want to believe in time travel, and John Titor may be proof of its existence. A user named TimeTravel_0 posted on the Time Travel Institute and Art Bell BBS forums in the early 2000s. They claimed to be a time traveler from the year 2036, describing the workings of a time machine in detail and even making various predictions about the future. The most elaborate was an American civil war that would break out in 2005 and lead to World War III. The posts were eventually traced to a Florida lawyer named Larry Haber, and it’s now believed that both Larry and his brother Richard were the men behind John Titor. Still, even a likely conclusion is not certifiable proof, and the enticing posts remain a mystery.

It seems like every other month the kids are participating in a new trend. One dating a while back was called The Elevator Game. This trend originated in Korea and was said to bring its players into another dimension. The ritual game comes with a specific set of rules and instructions, like going to specific floors in a building and refusing to speak to the mysterious woman who supposedly eventually enters the elevator. The game gained popularity after the death of Elisa Lam, as some people theorized that she was participating in the game. Though this might just be some glorified creepypasta, one thing is for sure: it was popular enough to get a movie adaptation!

It’s one of the greatest and most popular ghost stories of the 2010s. Jack Froese contacts his friends and family from beyond the grave through the modern miracle of smartphones. Froese passed away in 2011, and people started getting strange emails shortly after. These emails were of a very personal nature with inside jokes and things that only Froese would have known about, including a dream his cousin had about him. Numerous theories have been put forth regarding the source of the emails, like scheduled sending and even Froese’s mother posing as her deceased son. Either way, his friends and family were happy to hear from him, and that’s good enough for us.

For this internet puzzle, we’re going back to 1994, which makes this one of the earliest viral internet mysteries. At the time, Pink Floyd was on their Division Bell World Tour, and a user by the name of Publius posted a cryptic riddle relating to the band’s album on a fan forum. On July 16, Publius wrote on the forum that he would prove his authenticity in person, and two nights later, the words “Enigma Publius” were briefly spelled out in the stage lights at a Pink Floyd concert. Band members David Gilmour and Nick Mason claim that it was all a marketing stunt by the record company. Regardless, the riddle itself has never been solved. Then again, maybe it was never intended to be.

Given its high level of journalist assassinations, the country is among one of the most dangerous for those in the press. This makes the work of Valor por Tamaulipas so much more honorable. This was a Facebook page run by… Well, no one knows. They would report on violence in the state of Tamaulipas, with most instances linking back to organized crime. By exposing such people, the administrator (or administrators) were putting themselves at great personal risk. Indeed, one criminal organization offered around $50,000 for information about them and their family. Thankfully, none of their identities were ever revealed.

The internet is filled with many haunting and enigmatic websites, and oct282011.com was one of them. The page consisted of little more than a dark screen, some cryptic text that no one understood, plus a phone number. This is where things get really creepy. Those who actually called the number reported a series of unsettling noises, such as strange voices, heavy breathing, loud beeps, and one person even claimed to hear something being dragged across a floor. No one knew what the heck was going on, and October 28, 2011 didn’t amount to much either. That is, unless you count the release of Dreamworks’ “Puss in Boots.” The site was taken down in 2015, leaving behind a ton of questions that are still unanswered.

Unlike Oct282011.com, this website is still up and running, so you can explore it to your heart’s content. Fair warning - you might be there a while trying to figure it all out. It’s more like a Russian Doll than a website, with links opening more links that open other links that open…well, you get the idea. The whole thing is super weird, with pages featuring distressing pictures, numerology, and Bible passages. Someone get Robert Langdon on the phone, stat! To this day, both the administrator and the nature of their website are unknown. It’s one of the internet’s finest, and more tantalizing mysteries.

This is an all-time classic internet puzzle - and also one of the first. It dates back to 1996, when nonsensical texts were posted to the discussion system Usenet. Every single post had the subject line “Markovian parallax denigrate,” and the messages themselves were filled with even more unintelligible nonsense. It’s not necessarily creepy or troublesome. Just…weird. Many people believe that the messages are spam or some kind of primitive text generator, while others think it was the ramblings of a single troll. Whatever they are, the posts are no clearer today than they were in the ‘90s, and no one has any idea what they are supposed to mean.

Inspiring many epic works of science fiction, black holes, as defined by NASA, are “region[s] in space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not able to escape.” The name was lent to this strange phenomenon in which web traffic simply disappears. Working much like a black hole in space, an internet black hole sucks in discarded data packets when they can’t reach a router that’s either offline or disconnected. Neither the sender nor the recipient are informed of the delivery’s failure, and the packet of info just up and vanishes from the digital sphere.

Bitcoin - many have heard of it, few understand it. But that’s not the mystery. The mystery lies in the currency’s founder. Or, maybe, founders. Absolutely nothing is known about the person or people responsible for Bitcoin. All we have is the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and a few alleged bits of personal information, like a Japanese heritage and the alma mater California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. A few people have been put forth as potential suspects, and an Australian computer scientist named Craig Steven Wright has claimed to be Nakamoto. However, many experts doubt his claim. Unfortunately, it’s the best we have at the moment in deducing Nakamoto’s identity.

No other mystery has captivated Reddit quite like A858. In the early 2010s, a mystifying subreddit was created that contained nothing but strings of letters and numbers. It soon gained popularity, and many Redditors devoted many hours to cracking the code. Some messages were successfully decoded, but not many. And, unfortunately for the internet sleuths who dedicated countless hours to solving the case, it led nowhere. The subreddit went private in 2016, leaving Redditors stumbling in the dark without answers. No one even knows why A858 was created in the first place but, hey, at least a valiant effort was made.

Perhaps the greatest internet mystery of all was derived from where else but 4chan, on January 4, 2012. The post consisted of an elaborate puzzle centered around data security and cryptography. Two more puzzles followed in 2013 and 2014 - both of which were again posted on January 4. While the first two were eventually cracked, the third remains frustratingly unsolved. The puzzles were apparently made to recruit “highly intelligent individuals” for some cryptography-based mission or job. Many people believe it has something to do with government agencies like the NSA or CIA. Others believe that the challenges have a darker source and could be linked to cults or conspiracies. For now, though, it’s all up to individual discretion!