Transcripts:
Nothing grabs the internet's collective curiosity quite as much as discovering an unexplained sealed off space on one's property. Several of the top threads of all time in the Ask Reddit subreddit revolve around finding a secret room in your house.
And of course, there's the infamous safe saga from 2013 when a Reddit user discovered a lock safe in the basement of their new home. This situation will be all over the site for a whole 7 months. People will go nuts speculating just what could be inside this massive safe, but the saga ended when it was eventually cut open and nothing was actually inside it. That's how these stories tend to go.
People always assume they're going to find some secret murder room or hidden treasure, but it always ends up being some unused crawl space or something. Unfortunately, in 2012, however, there was a story just like this that flew under the radar. But the difference with this one was that it did indeed amount to something more.
On August 22nd of that year, a user would write a post on B, the random board, claiming to have a disturbing and true story to share. This is what they wrote. Have you ever stopped and consider just how much data you're unknowingly giving out to third parties when you sign up for different apps and services on the internet? Every time you input a personal piece of data on a form somewhere, you can't be totally sure where it's going to end up unless you write through the entire terms and conditions. And don't try to deny it. We both know you pressed agree without reading a single line. You know what
this is? This is an example of a report received from a data broker on a single person. It's surprisingly detailed and it almost reads like something you would get after hiring a private investigator to spy on someone. We've got address history, aliases, photos, and even possible relatives, neighbors, and associates.
The longer you use the internet, the more likely it is for a data broker to be capable of filling a report just like this with your private information. And not only are these shady companies making billions of dollars by doing this on mass, they also sell this info to whoever is willing to pay the right price for it. Whether that's a scammer, spammer, or even a stalker.
Luckily though, I don't have to worry about that because I've got Aura, the sponsor of today's video. Aura protects your privacy by identifying data brokers selling your info. They take care of the hard part, automatically removing your info from these sites and making sure it never resurfaces.
Aura certainly isn't the only service of its kind, but nobody offers quite as much for the price as Aura. You'll get alerts if your personal info is found on the dark web, a secure VPN, antivirus, and even a password manager. Aura even reaches outside the internet as well, providing real-time fraud alerts for credit and banking, and even $5 million in identity theft insurance protection. It's genuinely a great deal for what you're paying.
I'm not leaving myself vulnerable, and you shouldn't either. If you use my link or.com/ferrell, you'll get 14 days for free, which is enough time for Our to start scrubbing your personal info from data broker sites. Thanks to Aura for sponsoring this video.
3 days ago, my last living grandparent, my mother's father, passed away at the age of 89. He was a World War II vet, and my mom tells me that after returning home from the Navy, he was never quite the same. In fact, he was pretty paranoid about nearly everything. I was never really allowed to stay at his house. In 1965, his wife died suddenly with no real explanation. My mother tells me that my grandfather became extremely fearful of a nuclear war with the communists and that he started to dig a bomb shelter out of the rock and limestone on his land. I had never saw the shelter until today when my family
was going through my grandfather's belongings. This is the entrance. I had only ever asked my grandfather about his handd cave one time in my life, which was when I was about 16 or so when we got together for Christmas. He didn't really seem to want to talk about it. He just told me to not ever go there.
This picture is a view back towards the door after you go down some steps past the entrance. I hadn't thought about the shelter since then until today when my mother asked me to go and check it out to see if I could find anything worth putting into the estate sale. To be honest, I was pretty excited.
I thought maybe I'd find old gas masks, non-p perishable food items from the '60s, and maybe even some forms of entertainment that he had planned to use to keep the family busy in the event of an attack. This picture is the first hallway, which curves off to the right the end. The first thing I found was this rudimentary toilet. Of course, time wasn't kind to it, so there wasn't much left. I just snapped a picture of it and kept going.
Although, I did have to admire the work that had to have gone into chipping away at the rock one heave at a time. Further down the hallway, I came to nothing more than a bunch of old, rusted garbage on the floor. I instantly felt my heart sink because I had such high hopes for what this exploration might yield.
It was beginning to look like my grandfather had just given up at some point on his dream of crafting a shelter. But you'll notice that in the previous picture, the hallway curves off to the left. I was expecting to hit a flat wall of rock, but instead, I found a huge iron door that was padlocked shut. Fortunately for me, it had become rusted to all hell.
So, I was actually able to just pick up a decentsized rock off the floor and hit the padlock until it busted the entire loop that I went through. Opening the door was another story, though. It was extremely heavy and had become rusted shut over the years. I found a shovel back in the garbage heap, used all my strength, and was eventually able to force it open.
The only thing back here was a hallway that abruptly ended where he had stopped digging and a doorway off to the right. Going through it led to this room that looked more like a cavern than a bomb shelter. As I looked around, I noticed this carving of a cross in the stone. At first, I thought, "Oh, no big deal.
Maybe he just came back here to pray or something." But that's when I noticed there were more carvings. Suddenly, I see this face carved in the rock. There were faces everywhere. Seriously, it was as though there were a bunch of ghostly faces staring you down in that room. Here's another example. I noticed that while the previous one appeared to be a soft female face, this one was an angry male face.
There were really quite a few of them, probably six or seven. They were all carved into the walls as if they were facing that cross carving and worshiping it or something. And then I saw this one. Unlike every other carving in that room, which were all faces, this one was clearly meant to be a skull. It seemed so out of place.
I happened to look down at the ground below the skull carving and there sitting in a bunch of concrete rubble was a bone. Don't get me wrong, this was no deer bone. It clearly came from a human. My heart was pounding out in my chest. As I started to look more closely, I saw more bones coming out of the concrete as though human remains dumped in a batch of quick dry cement or something.
Then I could have sworn I heard a quiet laugh from the corner of that room. That's when I bolted. I ran out of that room like the devil was chasing me. I ran all the way out of the shelter, all the way back to the house. Anons in the thread would speculate just what the purpose of this real life dungeon may be. And one user came up with a pretty good theory.
You see, one thing I left out here was the word that Opie's grandfather used to refer to a shelter. OP couldn't make out exactly what it was. To him, it sounded like his grandpa was saying asuair. Anon's theory was that the word OP was likely looking for was oaryi, a site made to serve as a final resting place for skeletal remains. One famous example you've likely heard of would be the Paris catacombs.
By the way, before you ask, this is an actual sculpture that exists in the catacombs is called the passer through walls. If Opie's grandpa was mentally unwell, it's not terribly far-fetched to assume that this was intended to be some sort of tomb for his loved ones, just a very unusual one.
Shortly after posting it, the picture of the bone would be unexplainably removed from the thread. And before the OP could have returned to continue the story, the entire post would be mysteriously deleted. It would never get properly archived. The only proof that it even exists in the first place is this single screenshot, which would be passed around the following years on various platforms. This thread is not a unique case.
Over the years, one of the primary drivers of the more esoteric side of internet culture has been 4chan screenshots. I'm sure you're no doubt familiar with some of the more famous stories to come from these visual archives like Lavender Town Syndrome, Ben Drowned, or Herobrine. Even the SCP Foundation was a concept burnt on 4chan all the way back in 2007.
When the story presented in a thread resonates enough, screenshots of it will begin floating around other threads, eventually finding their way onto Reddit where a big YouTuber will find and make a video about it, at which point the story will be forever cemented as part of the general internet horror lore. But while his pipelines run its course many times throughout the years, not every 4chan screenshot makes it all the way.
More often than not, a lot of these stories never make it far outside the image board, only ever being passed around different creepy pasta or internet mystery threads throughout the years. A couple weeks ago, I spent a substantial amount of time reading through every archive creepy pasta thread I could find between the years of 2011 and 2015.
This era is what I would consider to be the golden age of internet horror. And it's when I used to personally browse 4chan's paranormal board, also known as X, late at night looking to scare myself before going to bed. In this time period, X was chalk full of internet mysteries, unexplained websites, disturbing YouTube videos, and creepy pastas.
Nowadays, the board is more focused on esoterica magic than anything else. So, I wanted to bring back a taste of what I remember from this bygone era of 4chan. I read through literally thousands of posts to make this video. And while I'm sure some of these topics were likely covered by other YouTubers before, I am certain that a good amount of the stuff we're going to go over today hasn't been talked about before on YouTube. So without any further ado, let's get back into it.
In 1998, British artist Tracy Emmen would unveil the piece that would go on to define her entire career. It was called My Bed and consists of a meticulous recreation of what a section of her bedroom had looked like when she was going through a particularly rough, depressive episode.
The piece is complete with empty alcohol bottles, used tissues, and other various pieces of trash, an overflowing ashtray, and bloody underwear. Even if you're not into modern art, you've got to admit that the piece is striking. It's not what you expect to see in a sparkling clean art gallery.
And even though it's just a few pieces of garbage around a bed, it's a little hard to look away from, almost like watching a car crash. This same morbid curiosity that fueled the eventual 2.5 million pound sale of my bed also fueled a trend that would occur about 10 years later on 4chan. Neckbeard nests originally starting on V the video game board. Users with particularly messy and disheveled bedrooms would post photos of their surroundings.
While Emy's depressive episode mostly amounted to a small amount of trash around her bed, these neck beer nests were on a totally different level. Tucked between mountains of trash, you'll find a CRT monitor perch on top of empty cans, dirty plates, and cigarette butts.
Not only is the room itself always a disaster zone, but sometimes these battle stations exist in what appears to be abandoned houses or subb. They really are some of the worst possible situations you can imagine somebody setting up a computer room in. Nowadays, the neck beer nest community still survives on Reddit, but it pales in comparison to the 4chan days of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
The modern Reddit community is mostly centered around motivating others to clean up their clutter, depression dense, which is undeniably a positive spin on this kind of trend. But 4chan wasn't so kind. These early days of this community were solely focused on the morbid curiosity of seeing just how badly another human being can live.
And in 2010, one anon would share with others just what sort of horrible ending this sort of situation can potentially result in. In March of that year, a 4chan user in Michigan had been daydrinking with a friend who was visiting out of town. The friend noticed that the house next door seemed to be abandoned and had a bright pink condemned sign on it.
OP notes that they had never seen anyone walk in or out of that house in the 2 years they had lived next door. With the two getting more drunk, they decided to see if they can get into the condemned house and explore it. The door of the garage was partially open, and inside there was a door that led into the house.
The place is incredibly cluttered and dilapitated. The two set about exploring the home room by room, noticing strange details like the extremely antiquated interior decoration and a full train set proudly displayed in the middle of the mess. They explore the basement, the kitchen, and then they get to the living room, which appears to be the messiest room in the whole house.
Here we can see an insane amount of empty bottles and cans. Some of them are water and soda, but the vast majority here are alcohol containers. As Opie is taking pictures, his friend suddenly freezes up and says, "That's a dead body." Opie turns to face where his friend is looking. And sure enough, an extremely decayed body of a man is sitting in an easy chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by garbage.
I obviously can't show you exactly what the deceased person looks like here, but it almost seems like he just dozed off and never woke up. The OP says that this is where their memory got a little foggy. But the one thing they can recall is the journal sitting next to the man.
It would seem this guy documented everything he ate or drank as well as the money he made by returning empty cans. In the final entries of this journal, the man writes that he's sick as heck and can't eat anything due to an intense flu, which he can assume is what led to his demise. This story would make it outside 4chan, gaining a decent amount of traction on Reddit a few years later.
In one of the threads, a commenter gives us a bit of insight into the situation. They say that this was more than likely a drinking journal, which is something that AA programs request participants to do to keep track of their alcohol intake. They go on to say in a different comment that the flu the man was suffering from was likely complicated by liver failure or chronic pancreatitis.
When this happens, the person suffering often can't keep food down due to the pancreas contracting. Alcoholics tend to have very weak immune systems, so this combined with the flu is what likely led to this man's lonely death. I tried to find some news story or something that could corroborate this story, but I couldn't find anything.
That's not terribly surprising since there likely wasn't any sort of investigation here and no reason for the media to get involved. On top of this, the original thread where this was posted has been completely lost of time. 4chan archiving wasn't all that common back in 2010 and as such this story only lives in the form of various screenshots which have been passed around different 4chan threads over the years.
Our next topic survived the test of time in the exact same manner. ID Software's Quake 3 was a pivotal game indicative of an era of major transition for the FPS genre. Just like what Epic Games had done with the sequel to Unreal Unreal Tournament, ID 2 had dropped the campaign element present in the first two Quake games in favor of a multiplayer focused experience for the third entry.
Instead of playing through a story, the single player component of the game essentially replicated the multiplayer mode with players having to fight a series of death matches against bots that would play just like human players. Nowadays, this would seem like a major downgrade considering just how good it Software's legendary team were at crafting FPS campaigns.
But you have to remember the context of this time period. Internet was becoming much more commonplace and the idea of playing against other humans from the comfort of your own home was an incredibly tantalizing novelty. You wouldn't have to stop playing a game after you beat it. You would have a different experience every time you jumped into a multiplayer match, theoretically making for an endless amount of fun.
Whatever effort was absent from putting together a single player campaign was instead funneled into making the best enemy AI system possible. The team's intent was to make artificial players that will be indistinguishable from human opponents. They ended up creating an incredibly dynamic AI system, one that could react to different situations based on the personality of the specific character the AI was playing.
These bots could respond to up to 50 different commands from the player, and they could even be talked to in the game chat. On the internet today, you'll find anecdotes from players who thought they were having a conversation with the real person and were surprised to find out they were actually talking to a bot player.
To this day, Quake 3 remains a huge milestone in the quality of enemy AI, one that even many modern games fails to achieve. There have been multiple papers and studies revolving around Quake 3 bots. But in 4chan in 2011, there was a much less formal and much more unsettling look into the possibilities of this AI system. In September of that year, anon would start a thread detailing some of the things I've already told you about Quake 3's AI system. They then go on to outline an experiment they set up.
It involved running a server with only Bob players to see how they would fight each other when there's no human involved. This isn't exactly an original idea. I'm sure we've all watched at least a couple Bob matches play out in Super Smash Brothers or something. The difference with this experiment, though, was that after OP had set it up, he forgot to shut it down and it ran for 4 years.
When finally checking in on the bots after this huge period of time, the 4chan user discovered something strange. The bots weren't fighting anymore. They were all standing still. OP thinks that maybe it's just a glitch, so they change the map and start a new game. But the same thing happens. The bots all just stand still and don't fight each other.
One anon suggests that maybe the bots figured out that the best way to win the game is to not play. Nobody dies if nobody kills. Perhaps they've achieved world peace. Another anon wonders what would happen if a human were to join.
Would the ceasefire be broken? OP decides to try it out and this is what he says. Okay, that was pretty [ __ ] weird. I joined the server and the bots still just stood there, but the [ __ ] up thing was that they would rotate to look at me. I walked around a little bit and they all just kept looking at me. So, I grabbed a rail gun and fried one of them.
They all ran for the nearest weapons, took me down, and then the server crashed. OP goes on to say that the match was a free-for-all. There were no teams, so the bots should have been attacking each other just as much as they were attacking the human player. But that didn't happen.
Opie then goes on to check the AI logs for the bots, which are each 512 megabytes, which corresponds to about 500,000 pages of text. Each bot had this amount of data attached to it. The OP tells us that these are tactile logs, records of what did and didn't work in a specific play session, or in other words, they're memories. That's all there is to this thread. Just like the other ones we've discussed, this only survives in a screenshot.
The original thread was never properly archived. This story also wouldn't stay isolated to 4chan, however, and it would actually make the rounds a few years later as a new story with the headlines claiming that Quake 3 bots had figured out how to achieve world peace all on their own without human intervention.
But did they actually? Most people who encounter this story assume that is fabricated. And while I do agree with that, let's just entertain how it may have come to be if it were in fact real. The first line of this post mentions that Quake 3 bots use a neural network, which is implying that they can learn and have emergent behavior. This is not true.
While Quake3 AI is very advanced, there isn't any sort of integrated machine learning. And while the bot is designed to react to the player and the environment around them, these reactions are static and don't come about as a result of learned experience. This is enough to debunk this story somewhat, but there is one thing that could make this tall tale somewhat plausible. Bugs.
If a server is running a game for 4 years straight, the likelihood of some bug just absolutely crashing the game logic happening is pretty high. I've played a decent amount of Quake 3 in the past, and while I've never had the enemy AI crash out on me before, I have had something similar to the story happen to me 9 years ago while playing the PS2 version of Unreal Tournament.
I don't have footage of it, but I distinctly remember one time the enemy AI just stopped dead in their tracks and didn't fire at me. They would still turn to face me, but they didn't attack me, and I was able to win the match by just killing them over and over again. This happened in the first level of the game. 4 years means 35,000 hours of 16 bots playing a death match.
I think the likelihood of some bug occurring that crashes the AI logic at some point during that time is pretty high. But while this does make the story somewhat plausible, there is another part of this whole creepy pasta that basically proves that it's completely made up. This thread was posted in 2011.
Yet the screenshot that Opie shares from a computer they were supposedly running a Quake 3 server on for 4 years clearly shows us running Windows 7, which came out in 2009, making impossible to have run a server persistently since 2007. This story is creepy, but it's 100% fake. Of all the video game creepyp pastas to a comeo of 4chan during this golden age, this one in particular flew under the radar, which is too bad.
It is fake, but I mean, just about every other famous video game creepy pasta is as well. And I think this one's actually pretty interesting. These sorts of stories work well because they take a concept that you're personally familiar with and make it creepy. This next story plays on that same concept, and this one is not fake. Nothing can strike fear in you quite as much as seeing something from your everyday life twisted into something grotesque.
Sure, a rickety old Victorian manor or a decaying graveyard can be scary, but that's what you expect of those places. And on top of that, they exist outside the confines of your normal life. But when that element of the unknown enters your daily routine in some way, it feels more invasive. Like that sense of order and safety you're used to isn't quite as strong as you thought it was.
When you consider this, it suddenly makes sense why something like a broadcast intrusion is so terrifying. It's like an invader worming their way into your comfortable, orderly routine and breaking it in some manner. Even if it doesn't present you with a tangible danger, it still acts as a stark reminder that any part of your life, no matter how safe and civilized it may seem, can still be turned upside down. As such, we're very used to hearing about famous cases like the Max Headroom incident or Captain Midnight.
But over the years, there have been many smaller occurrences that haven't received nearly as much attention. Some broadcast interruptions are only even remembered at all because one person just so happened to be recording their TV or radio when it happened with no other documentation existing.
In 2013, on 4chan's export, a user would make a post outlining one such case. The OP states said that in 1995 when they were 15, they used to stay up late listening to their radio, occasionally recording interesting segments on his integrated cassette recorder. During one such recording session, the audio abruptly changed to something disturbing.
All of it was captured, but the traumatized OP stuck the tape in a desk drawer and vowed to never share it with anyone. I guess they changed her mind. Here's what was on the tape. [Music] [Music] [Applause] The screeching and breathing keeps sporadically repeating interspace with the occasional inhuman sounding mode.
This keeps going until 2 minutes and 30 seconds in when a frenzy but monotone voice starts speaking very quickly. 1988 John Burn son of John and Chris. December 21st 1988 Barry Valentino son of Barry Senior brother Scott Mark and Lisa Ann's friend. February 1985 Frankenhe brother Robert from Jackie father Michael our friend it's hard to make out exactly what this voice is saying but it almost seems like they're reading several obituaries with many dates names and family relationships being frantically hurled at the listener supporting this theory is the bell that occasionally rings out
during the reading August 22nd 1985 IO Margaret Anton this resembles A death bell, a form of handbell used in the UK up until the Victorian era. A bell ringer would pass through the streets announcing the name of the deceased and ringing the bell. In medieval times, dead bells were used to repel evil spirits away from funerals.
Billy, December 21st, 198, Barry Valentino, son of Barry Senior, brother Scott, Mark, and Lisa's friend. The mumblings eventually devolve into incomprehensible whispering, which cuts off after a minute and a half. The radio host then announces that the following program has been delayed. You're tuned to WKCR FM New York 89.9 on your dial. Colombian music is running a little late.
It will be starting in a few minutes. That's all there is to the recording OP had made, which was from New York's WKCR, a station run by Columbia University. Anons in the thread would speculate on the authenticity of the recording and they'd also uncover information on some of the names were mentioned in the frantic speaking sections of the audio.
Each name brought up was accompanied by a date which helped narrow down the search. Barry Valentino, for example, was one of the victims of the 1988 Panam bombing. Frank Oppenheimer was the brother of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. These two are the only people mentioned that have some sort of a story.
The other names only lead to online obituaries with no further information, and there's nothing really significant that links all these people together. This mystery wouldn't stay isolated to 4chan for very long. About 2 weeks after the expost, the OP would write something for the no sleep subreddit, which if you're not familiar with is basically the creepy pasta subreddit.
He provides the same writeup with a few extra details, but also adds a very strange section at the end of the post. Unfortunately, and for this, I sincerely apologize. It never ever stops. I told you this was just something I'd found, and I swear to you, that's true. It really did happen that way. It's more than that, though. I don't really know how long it takes. A few weeks or months from now, when you're alone, and suddenly you hear that keening, quavering sound rise up like it's crawling out of your spine and into your skull, you'll understand.
When that night comes, if you listen closely to what comes after that horrible sound, you'll realize that the woman will be reading your name, new names. You'll play it for your friends, your family, add their names. I hope desperately that if I can make the list long enough, add enough names, then they'll take mine off and leave me alone. I'm sorry.
You might be thinking that this is obviously just a creepy pasta at this point, and you're not entirely wrong. The YouTuber Scare Theater would actually reach out in 2023 to ask OP about the Reddit post, who would admit that the last part was indeed made up to add a little spice to the story. But he also says that that's the only fabricated section.
He maintains that he did in fact record this supposed intrusion on his tape deck back in the '90s and still doesn't have an explanation for it. But internet salutes weren't entirely convinced. A lot of people have speculated that the general highfidelity of the recording might discount it from being a genuine tape recording of FM radio in the '90s.
They say that this was likely all made digitally, but I'm not sure if I fully agree with this. The specific highquality aspect of this recording people point to when trying to out it as a fake is a dynamic range. This recording has a lot of it, and that's not really normal for broadcast radio. That is indeed true.
Most commercial FM radio stations will use these really heavy broadcast limiters which squish a sound to make it louder. in turn erasing a lot of the original dynamic range of the source sound. What people are missing here, though, is that this is a recording of a college radio station.
These non-commercial stations tend to broadcast much more quietly than their for-profit counterparts, especially when a station is broadcasting a genre that inherently has a lot of dynamics, like classical, which is a genre of music featured right before this particular broadcast intrusion happens. If you have a radio handy right now, which you likely don't, but if you do, try scanning through the stations and see if there are a couple that sound a lot quieter than the others. Chances are those are probably college or community run stations.
Another part people are missing here is the sound of the cassette tape. I've personally used cassette tapes a lot in the production of my own music, and I'm pretty familiar with how they sound, and this whole recording has a very consistent cassette tape sound. There's a clear, very tape sounding noise flur audible throughout the whole video, and it has a very consistent quality loss as well.
That's not to say this wasn't just faked using actual cassette tapes, which is entirely possible, but saying it was for sure created digitally is not something I personally agree with. My theory is that this supposed intrusion was likely just something made by the students who were broadcasting at the time.
College radio can get really wacky, and this definitely wouldn't be the strangest thing put on the airwaves by teenagers. If you tune in to your local college radio in the middle of the night, you'll see what I mean. We've touched on a few big topics so far, but there is one thing that we've been neglecting. Creepy passes. But it's not what you think. You see, creepy passes nowadays might refer these sprawling long fictional stories.
But there was a time when a creepy pasta just referred to a disturbing blurb of text and/or image that you would copy and paste between threads. And they were often very short and designed to be consumed quickly. You're not going to sit on a 4chan thread for 2 hours to read the entirety of Barasa.
While the modern creepy past is always fictional, the older variant often reflected supposedly true events. This is a side of internet culture that doesn't really exist anymore. And I want to dedicate the next session of this video to go over a bunch of these short traditional creepy pastas that used to circulate on 4chan.
Charlie Nan was an amateur folklorist who traveled throughout the south and southwestern United States during the early years of the 20th century, collecting tall tales and stories of the supernatural. According to his wife, Ellie, Charlie was once told a story one day by an Oklahoma farmer about a strange woman who lived alone on an isolated property in the panhandle.
The farmer claimed that the woman was not a woman at all, but something else. Something that hid his true nature beneath a headscarf and was never seen without a large dog by its side. Newton was apparently intrigued enough to try searching for the woman during one of his research road trips. He was never seen again. His wife, Ellie, was later contacted by a Tulsa Palm broker who remembered reading about her husband's disappearance in the papers after finding his name engraved on a camera sold to him by a customer. The palm broker returned the camera, and Miss Nan
had the film inside developed with the hopes of finding a clue as to her husband's whereabouts. This was the only photo on the roll. Unfortunately, neither the location of the property nor the name of the farmer who told him the story was recorded in Nunan's notes. This story was originally posted to 4chan in 2013.
The idea of one of these old-timey folklores meeting their end at the hands of some entity squirreled away in some isolated pocket of rural America is quite interesting. But the story is completely fake. According to this blogger who did some digging into the creepy pasta back in 2014, this photo is actually a substantially doctorred version of a picture posted to a 2009 blog. It depicts a native woman from New Mexico named Virginia Romero carrying two buckets of water in a field.
The dog and the eerie glowing eyes were added in with Photoshop. In 1999, my family visited Disneyland where we happily rode the small world ride. I was 12 at the time and my sister was six. We loved every moment and our parents smiled with nostalgia. At one point near the end, some of the lights suddenly shut off. and emergency lights illuminate the ceiling.
The moving display parts shut off and crew members wearing red overalls walked along them to help passengers in the boat onto the stages and direct them out of the building via emergency exits. A voice came over the loudspeakers. Disneyland thanks you for your visit. Please evacuate the attraction in an orderly fashion.
Keep looking forward and follow the directions of staff. Thank you. The staff wouldn't tell us much as they quickly ushered us out of the building. Ambulances were outside and a police car was parked in the main walkway. At the time, my mother still had her camera out and snapped a few photos of the crewman and close-ups of the mechanical children now frozen around the ride.
This was the last photo on the reel, aimed at the ceiling of the attraction. This creepy pasta comes from a screenshot that dates back to 2011. The accompanying photo shows what appears to be one of the mechanical children from the ride floating in the middle of the air. It's admittedly a little unnerving, but this too is a fabricated story.
The photo in this creepy pasta is actually a screenshot from a YouTube video depicting what it's like to ride a knockup version of the Small World Ride in a Chinese theme park. I'm not too sure why the animatronic is suspended near the ceiling, but within the context of this video, it obviously isn't meant to be disturbing.
In 2003, Indian officials ventured deep into the jungle to investigate multiple missing persons reports from a nearby city. They ended up stumbling across a tower of silence. Zoroastrians used these sites to dispose of corpses in the open air.
These sites aren't uncommon in parts of India, but there were a few things that were off about this one. None of the bodies could be identified, and none of them matched any of the descriptions of the missing people. The bodies were also untouched by any animals with only maggots and flies being found on and near the corpses.
In the hole in the middle of the tower, officials found a festering pool of blood several feet deep. One of the villagers who had accompanied the officials accidentally kicked a bone into the pit which caused a sudden release of gas, splashing some of the officials with rotten blood. After being taken to the hospital, each victim came down with a fever and quickly grew delirious, which got so bad that some of them even began attacking the hospital staff. The fever eventually killed all of them.
This story, which originally found its way onto the internet in 2012, is obviously made up, but the picture is actually real. These towers of silence really do exist. They're open burial sites used by followers of the Zoroastrian religion.
The idea is to leave a body out so it'll be eaten by buzzards and other animals at which point the skeleton is thrown into the pin in the middle. You can find some disturbing looking pictures of these open burial sites, but they are a normal part of the religion. The idea is to keep the environment, which is a sacred part of the belief system, free from the contamination of a festering dead body.
While exploring an unmapped section of the Grand Caverns in 1895, amateur smaller/photographer Owen Jeff was conducting photographic experiments using super long exposures to see if anything at all could be captured in the total absence of light, also known as cave darkness. He would situate himself on level ground, extinguish his lantern, and then open the lens of his homemade box camera for as long as he could stand the darkness. During one of these experiments, he had heard something approaching from the deeper recesses of
the cave. Frightened, Jeffree abandoned his experiment and set off one of the flash bulbs he used for taking traditional photos underground. According to the report he later gave to a local newspaper, Jeffree saw three humanoid creatures staring at him from the shadows and took off running in the other direction and didn't stop running until he was topside. Several days later, he returned with three other men to retrieve his box camera.
This is the image that was recorded on the film inside. This creepy pasta was originally posted to V in 2013, and there's not a whole lot of information about it online. The 4chan post appears to be the oldest source of the story and photo, and it didn't spread around much outside the image board.
One interesting place it did spread to, though, is the Bigfoot community, which is a pretty funny crossover. The photo itself doesn't appear to be authentic. When doing photo forensics, you can see clear signs of editing around the supposed glowing eyes. This process is called error level analysis.
I won't explain completely how it works, but any colorful and bright area of this analysis layer that exists only surrounded by black is a clear sign of something being digitally added to the photo at some point in time. And we can see that here. The history of the painting is actually a little clouded as it's changed hands so often, usually after short periods of time. For whatever reason, people always seem to be in a rush to get rid of it.
When gazing upon the painting, people have frequently reported feeling uneasy, as if a nagging feeling tells them that someone is standing behind them, watching, and that the girl in the painting is actually looking towards this unseen presence. People invariably turn around to tell themselves that nothing is there.
Though this does little to quell their fears, as most are then sure that the girl in the painting is now watching them. Anyone who has spent time alone in the same room as a painting will become unnerved and have to leave, convinced that they're being watched from behind no matter where they face.
And many also report hearing light footsteps, shuffling, and even breathing. It seems that these uneasy feelings and audible phenomena are not stopped by removing the painting from the property. And the entire atmosphere of a home can be permanently and negatively affected by simply displaying the image briefly.
In most documented cases, once the negative effects have been experienced, they tend to stick around. Disturbingly, these events have been reported not only in the presence of the painting, but also reproductions of it, such as prints, photographs, or digital screens. This is a pretty decent creepy pasta, but it's one that has pretty obscure origins.
I guess it's just not that widely known. It took me quite a while to figure out where this might have come from, and I think I may have managed to track down a potential source. Doing a combination of imageback searches and searching through archive URLs of a Polish creepy pasta site called Strasha Etoria, I was able to find a post from 2013 that included a slightly larger version of the painting.
This post credits someone named Leah as the author, but it also says it was sourced from another Polish site called Pel. This link appears dead on the surface and also isn't in the internet archive, but that's because this is linking to a specific post.
When browsing pages in this form, you'll notice that the pages iterate in multiples of 15. Changing the 981 in the URL to 975 brings you to a properly archived page. This mirrors the exact story posted on strateia and it in turn credits a site called hauntedtoyshop.co.uk as a source. And this link is properly dead. It's not in the internet archive either. I'm willing to bet that this haunted toy shop is a source of this image.
Judging by the pages that are archived, this site seems to be some web 1.0 you know, collection of creepy pastas. We may never get proper confirmation, but I'm willing to believe that this is where the story came from. Oh man, I can't believe we forgot about this, but what about the painting? Where does that come from? Unfortunately, I can't answer that either.
Image back searchers led nowhere, but if you happen to recognize it, please write a comment. I hope you enjoyed this walk down memory lane, guys. At some point, I might wind the clock back even more and do a video about 4chan stuff from the 2000s, but probably not for a while. Before we go, take a look at that.
Can you see it? I don't know if it's like visible in the camera. Yeah, I think you can see it there. Does that look familiar? This is actually the wallpaper that was in the back rooms photo. Well, not the exact wallpaper, but the exact same kind from the same manufacturer and time period. This was sent in to me by my buddy Regularly Blue.
I'll link his channel down below. Thanks for watching, guys, and I hope you all have a very happy Halloween. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]
