Strange Mysteries Solved By Reddit And The Internet

Here are some mysteries solved by Reddit and the internet!

September 28, 2023・

23 min read

The internet is a big place, and it’s full of bizarre mysteries. Many of them are never solved but every now and then, self-proclaimed internet detectives band together from across the globe to dive down the rabbit hole and uncover the truth. And sometimes they succeed!

From an apparently cursed arcade machine to a spine-chilling photograph of unknown origins, let’s investigate some seriously strange mysteries that were solved by Reddit and the internet!

Post-it Notes Left In Apartment

If someone went to the effort of breaking into your home, you’d expect them to make off with your TV or something, and not plant a bunch of cryptic post-it notes. Yet back in 2015, Reddit user RBradbury1920 posted to a legal advice thread when he suspected someone of doing exactly that.

In the post, Bradbury explained that over the last few days, he’d been waking up to find strange notes stuck around his bedroom, written in handwriting that wasn’t his own. The notes ranged from mundane reminders to save his PC documents to ominous claims that his landlord wasn’t letting the mystery writer speak to him.

Bradbury lived alone and there was no sign of breaking and entering, so he assumed his landlord was trying to scare him, but he had no idea why. So, in an effort to catch the intruder in the act, he’d set up a webcam to record at night. However, on checking the files the next day he found they’d all been deleted!

The Reddit post exploded as people tried to get to the bottom of it all, but everybody was stumped. Until one commenter by the name of “Kakkerlak” posted his two cents. Kakkerlak posited that there was no mystery intruder at all and that Bradbury himself was responsible for the notes.

But how? Three words: carbon monoxide leak. Carbon monoxide, or CO, is a poisonous gas produced by some home appliances that can make you seriously ill if you breathe it in. Plus, it’s colorless and odorless, so the only way to know it’s even there is through special CO detectors. And one of the symptoms of CO poisoning is amnesia.

Could Bradbury have been forgetting he wrote the notes? Seems plausible, but what about the deleted camera files? And the handwriting? Well, after checking his CO detector, Bradbury made another post. It turns out that Kakkerlak was right!

He’d suffered brain swelling due to a carbon monoxide leak and was writing the notes himself in a confused state, then completely forgetting about them. It was so bad that he couldn’t even recognize his own handwriting! As for the deleted cam footage, it wasn’t deleted, it’d never been recorded in the first place! Bradbury had been so out of it that he hadn’t set the camera up properly.

10 months later, he reported that he was still recovering from the effects of the poisoning but felt positive about his future. So, Kakkerlak probably saved his life! Hopefully, Bradbury made a full recovery in the end and got a nice payout from his landlord.

Large Vessel in the Basement of Psychiatric Hospital

Personally, I can’t think of any good reason to go exploring an abandoned 19th-century psychiatric hospital, but Reddit user and fearless explorer BonelessHotdogs seems to disagree with me. There’s one close to his home and having apparently never seen a horror movie in his life, BHD decided to explore the totally not haunted location back in November 2022.

After sneaking in through an unlocked door, he traversed the halls and crept downstairs to the basement, where he came across something that absolutely baffled him. Sat silently in the gloom was an enigma. Was it some kind of doorway? If so, where did it lead to?

After getting a closer look, Boneless concluded that the strange structure was actually some sort of device, with a door on each end and rusted gauges on the side. The word ammonia was written on one of them, but that was the only clue that the explorer had!

I’d have just assumed that it was some kind of horrific trap from the Saw movies and run away screaming, but Boneless was hungry for the truth. So, he got home and uploaded photos of the unknown device to Reddit. Was it some kind of furnace? If so, for what?

After a myriad of suggestions had been ruled out, one wise Redditor was able to unveil the truth. It wasn’t a Saw trap, a door to unspeakable horrors, or a furnace, it was an autoclave. Autoclaves use steam and pressure to sterilize equipment and are commonly found in healthcare settings.

That particular one was so huge because it was designed for the mattresses and bedding of patients! As for why it said ammonia on it, the compound can be used to increase the strength of any disinfectant used in the sterilization process. So maybe not as dramatic as you were hoping for, but at least that thing isn’t actually the work of a sadistic madman!

Find Satoshi

In 2005, an alternate reality game was released called Perplex City. Players bought packs of cards containing random puzzles, solved them, and followed the clues they provided to try and find a cash prize hidden somewhere in the real world. The game has largely been forgotten over the years because its creators abandoned it after the first prize was won.

However, one card from 2006 was never forgotten. That puzzle, titled "Billion to One", featured a mysterious unknown man with some Japanese text simply reading "find me." Players had one clue; the man’s name was Satoshi.

Some people became obsessed with this mystery and quickly established a website dedicated to the search. Surely with the power of the internet, it’d get solved in no time, right? Wrong. The web was a very different place back in the prehistoric 2000s, and the conundrum would mostly need to be solved through word of mouth.

There was some level of success when someone figured out Satoshi snapped his selfie in Kaysersberg, France, but nothing else of note was uncovered for years. Time went by and it seemed the mystery would never be solved but then, in December 2020, Reddit user th0may blew the whole thing wide open.

Reddit user th0may opted to run Satoshi’s photo through an AI facial recognition software and found an image. The fella on the right holding a beer looked awfully familiar and a little extra sleuthing uncovered even more images of the man, along with a page on his company website!

Was it really him? The community fired off an e-mail and waited with bated breath. Then, after what was probably the longest 24 hours of their lives, they received a response, it was Satoshi!

14 years after the search began, it had finally come to an end! Satoshi had forgotten what he was supposed to actually reveal, but given that it’d been over a decade I think we can forgive him! However, because the puzzle was solved with AI tech unavailable back in 2006, can we really say it was fair?

I Feel Fantastic

If you spent a decent amount of time on the internet back in the 2010s, you probably remember the video "I Feel Fantastic." For those not in the know, it’s a strange bordering on disturbing clip featuring a creepy singing robot.

The unsettling video sprang up seemingly out of nowhere and went viral, spooking everybody unfortunate enough to stumble across it. The leading theory at the time was that the android in the video was created by a crazed criminal who would dress the android up in the clothes of his victims.

Sounds a little farfetched, but the thing was undeniably creepy. The original video was mysteriously taken down, but re-uploads continued to haunt the internet for many years without explanation. Until one writer called Yitzi Litt set out to investigate.

Litt managed to track down images of the strange robot to obscure "android appreciation websites" dating back to 2001; which were apparently a thing. Those sites listed the creator as one John Bergeron.

Big John was apparently attempting to create a revolutionary android for use in the entertainment industry. Named “Tara”, the one in the video was a prototype that cost him $2,000 to create, or some $3,400 today. His plan was to mass-produce her, but considering we have never seen Tara performing a world tour, it never ended up happening.

Instead, we got one very freaky music video and a whole lotta questions. So, there you go! No crazy criminal there, just a man trying his best to invent something special. Tara may be creepy as hell to us, but I’m sure she was a labor of love for her creator.

Cursed Teletubbies

The Cursed Images sub-Reddit is full of twisted pictures that are designed to make your skin crawl. None I’ve seen have quite stuck with me like the image of what looks like a group of people in second-rate Teletubbies costumes looking like they’re about to perform a Satanic ritual with a small child.

To say there’s something “off” about it all is a gross understatement. Because of the uncanniness, it’s been posted and re-posted everywhere, usually alongside stories about how it’s cursed.

Then, in 2022, Redditor Bhabhi posted the image on the Internet Mysteries sub-Reddit with a newfound determination to find its true origins and everything changed. Eagle-eyed commenters pointed out that because of the bed’s style and the IV drip in the corner, it’s probably in a hospital.

On top of that, the poster on the wall features soccer player Dennis Bergkamp, who played for the British team Arsenal from 1995 to 2006. Given this info, the pic must’ve been taken in the UK around the late 90s. With that in mind, YouTuber Scare Theater did his own digging, and with some nifty reverse image searching found the first time it was ever posted.

Redditor JayF1984 was responsible apparently, he’d seen it on the wall of a hospital in England under the heading "Celebrities Who've Visited Us.” Unable to ignore the sheer creepiness, he’d taken the snap, uploaded it to the internet, and the rest is history! So, it looks like those demons genuinely intended to put a smile on the face of that poor kid!

Mysterious Markings In A Field

When Reddit user robbo_66 started scanning through Google Maps in Hampshire, Southern England, the last thing he expected to come across was evidence of alien activity! Indeed, robbo stumbled on these bizarre markings in the middle of a field in 2022 and was utterly confused.

They look kind of like crop circle patterns, right? But none I’ve ever seen before. Could this finally be proof that aliens have landed? Desperate to know, robbo did what any sensible person does nowadays, he posted the mysterious image on Reddit.

Shock horror, it was quickly determined that the markings probably aren’t alien landing sites. They’re actually trial trenches and a whole lot of them! Basically, before any major construction project can take place, the area needs to be checked for archeological significance.

If there were ancient structures or artifacts just beneath the surface they could be permanently lost, so a few trenches are dug to see what can be found. The fact that this area has so many means people probably thought it was hiding some really juicy stuff.

Whether it actually was, we can’t say for sure. But another Redditor unearthed a proposal for a shopping area in the exact location, so we at least know the reason the trenches were dug in the first place. So, no UFOs this time. Unless it’s all a cover-up of course.

Geedis

Back in 2017, comedian Nate Fernald was browsing online for some retro pins to add to his collection when he stumbled upon an exceedingly odd little trinket titled Geedis. Having never heard of it before, Fernald found himself strangely allured to the weird badge.

A Google search turned up nothing though and the seller of the mystery pin had no idea when or where it was acquired. Fernald now, was even more interested. So, he posted a pic of the pin to twitter and begged the internet for help. Not knowing what Geedis was was driving him crazy!

And before long, Geedis had infected the minds of a whole host of Fernald’s followers too. Incensed, the self-professed Geeders set out to discover the origin of the pin and even set up their own subreddit dedicated to the hunt. Amazingly, the search gained so much interest that within a few months, thousands of internet sleuths had taken up the cause.

Eventually, a Twitter user found a lead. They’d managed to track down an old sticker sheet featuring none other than Geedis, alongside some other wacky characters. It was enigmatically labeled "The Land of Ta," as if from some long-forgotten fantasy franchise.

Another caption on the sheet informed them that it was created by a paper and branding business named Dennison in 1981, so the sleuths got to work trying to get in touch with its former employees. However, the company had since merged with another and it proved impossible to find anyone who used to work there before the merge.

So, as Dennison had been based in the city of Framingham, Massachusetts, they contacted the Framingham History Center to see if they’d know anything. Lo and behold, the center responded with good news. They had several Dennison sticker sheets in their archives, including, The Land of Ta! The sheet was legit!

The center put the Geeders in contact with some employees at Dennison, and though their memories were rusty, they remembered the sticker artist, Sam Petrucci. Sam had unfortunately passed away, but his children were happy to help. They looked through his old files and found the original sketches used in the sheet!

So, case closed? Well, not really. We still don’t know why those stickers were commissioned. Geedis and The Land of Ta remain as obscure as it gets and the Dennison employees were adamant they never produced the enamel pins. So who did? Who would go to the effort of producing expensive pins for a fantasy franchise nobody’s ever heard of?

Polybius Arcade Game Urban Legend

Back before videogame consoles were a thing, people had to leave the house and head to an arcade to play games. But arcades were kind of mystical in a way, you never knew what games you’d find when you popped inside one! You’d just better have hoped you didn’t find Polybius.

Polybius was a spooky arcade cabinet from 1981 that apparently had some pretty nasty side effects on people! Supposedly players experienced seizures, insomnia, night terrors, hallucinations, and more.

According to legend, men in black would lurk near the machines and examine the data they’d gathered from players when nobody else was around. What they wanted to know, we can’t be sure. Then, after just a single month of being released, the mysterious machine vanished forever, leaving no trace of its brief existence.

Decades later, in 2017, YouTuber Ahoy decided to investigate the myth properly. He scoured the internet for any mention of the game and was eventually led to a website called Coinop. The site held a vast database of old arcade games and seemed to have the first online mention of Polybius.

A man named Kurt Koller ran it, and according to a former writer for gaming magazine Gamepro, Kurt had told them about the legend in 2003. After they subsequently featured it in an issue that year, word of Polybius spread like wildfire!

Ahoy reached out to Kurt and he refused to admit it, but everything points to him inventing the Polybius myth in an effort to drive traffic to his website. So, it seems Polybius never really existed. But with Kurt refusing to play ball, who knows? Maybe the men in black gave him a visit and told him to keep his lips tightly sealed.

Lovecraftian Nightmare Caterpillar

As much as we love Resident Evil, we all know virus-infected monsters aren’t real. But when Reddit user “pbjburger” went out onto his lawn one morning in 2019, this belief was challenged in a shocking way. He found a weird creature squirming around on one of his chairs!

The strange beast was about the size of a bottle cap, and PBJ was desperate to find out whether it posed a threat. So, you guessed it, he snapped a pic of it and posted it on Reddit. The post quickly gained traction, and though the majority of commenters were just as scared and stumped as PBJ was, one person recognized the little creeper.

It was actually a moth larva! Specifically, of the hag moth, and despite how they look, both larva and moth are harmless to humans. Or at least, mostly. The larva can’t do any serious damage, but it is coated in defensive spines that can be irritating and painful if touched. So just leave him alone and he’ll leave you alone.

Sea Wall Door In Biarritz

In 2020, Reddit user jerrycat88 posted this uncanny image mentioned below, to the "What Is This Thing" subreddit. He’d spotted a strange door in the side of a sea wall in Biarritz, France.

Who’s using it? Does some horrible creature lurk in there just waiting to crawl up the side and snatch someone? Thankfully, Reddit stepped up to quell jerrycat’s fears! Believe it or not, the image doesn’t show a horrific portal to the underworld at all, it’s just a tide gate!

A tide gate can be opened or closed whenever needed to prevent flooding. The doors lead to special overflow areas, so if there’s a storm the extra water can run into the opened doors instead of rising up over the edge and onto the roads.

FBI Caught Spying on Student with Tracking Device

When Californian resident and avid Redditor Khaled went to a mechanic with his buddy, Yasir, in 2017, they discovered that a strange device had been stuck near Yasir’s car exhaust. Khaled’s immediate thought was that it was some sort of tracking device, though after showing it to his pal’s roommates, they thought it was a bomb!

Concerned, Khaled turned to Reddit and posted a photo of the strange object with some extra context. Yasir had apparently been of interest to the FBI because of his late father. Why exactly is unclear, but the boys believed it had something to do with his role as a Muslim leader.

The organization had previously tried to contact Yasir but backed off when he lawyered up. So could the FBI have been secretly following him!? Reddit quickly identified the object and it wasn’t good news. As feared, it was a Guardian GPS tracking device.

Sales of such a tracker are limited only to the army and law enforcement, so it was totally the FBI’s doing! The duo had no idea what to do with it, but they wouldn’t have to think too long. Within just 48 hours of the post, FBI agents showed up to get the device back from Yasir!

The truth was, they’d been monitoring him because of a Reddit comment made by none other than Khaled! Supposedly, he’d been propagating extremist ideas, but in reality, he’d just posted a short comment about shopping mall security.

And because of it, Yasir ended up getting tracked just for being a known friend of Khaled’s. Yasir was rightfully annoyed by this and tried to sue the bureau, though he was unfortunately unsuccessful. Hopefully, the officers who planted the tracker got at least a firm reprimand.

Have You Seen This Man?

Since January 2006, thousands of people across the world have supposedly dreamt of this man. Sometimes he acts nice, other times he acts maliciously. But it’s always the same man. In 2008, a website appeared asking that very question to the whole world and featuring a host of testimonials from people who claimed to have dreamed about him.

Shortly after, posters started appearing in different cities across the globe, each bearing that spooky image and the same text. Then, one year after it first appeared, the enigmatic website went viral. Suddenly there were more eyes on the mystery than ever before and it only got stranger.

Over 10,000 people wrote to the website’s email address reporting their own experiences of the curious man. Paranoia over who he was had erupted into a fever pitch. However, users on online forums like 4Chan were more skeptical. They thought the entire concept was fishy. So, they performed a techy little maneuver called a reverse IP lookup on the website.

Long story short, they discovered that it was affiliated with a guerrilla marketing site! Guerrilla marketing essentially means promoting a product or idea by unconventional means. Could “this man” be nothing more than one big marketing ploy?

It certainly seemed possible, but there wasn’t enough evidence yet. Until the following year, in 2010, that is when in another dramatic twist the creator of the website came forward and revealed himself!

Italian sociologist and marketer Andrea Natella had seen the growing skepticism surrounding the project and confirmed not only that he was behind it, but that it was indeed all a stunt. The sketch of the mystery man was based on Natella’s father, and those initial website testimonials were nothing but lies!

Perplexingly, Natella never revealed what the campaign was supposed to advertise, but the site was never updated or taken down. In fact, people continue to believe “this man” is a real phenomenon! Which isn’t actually far from the truth.

The 10,000 people who emailed Natella when the stunt went viral weren’t all lying, many of them probably did see the man in their dreams. Though, only because they were influenced by seeing the image in the first place. It remains super weird that we don’t know what Natella was trying to sell.

Cellphones Spotted in Old Pics

A YouTube video posted in 2011 shows a seemingly ordinary old video of a Charlie Chaplin movie premiere from 1928. But it goes from an interesting piece of historical intrigue to an episode of the X-Files within seconds when an elderly woman steps into the frame, holding what looks exactly like a cell phone!

What’s more, an old photo from the Second World War went viral in 2022 for the same reason! The image, taken in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1943, shows groups of US soldiers chatting with each other while a strange man in a light coat seems to be holding another cell phone!

The web was sent into an absolute frenzy. Who were those people? Were they really time travelers? Some dismissed the objects as portable radios, but they weren’t invented until 1941, which wouldn’t explain the Chaplin clip. Another theory was that they were ear trumpets, a type of old-school hearing aid. But the devices in question are far too small. Were they real-time travel then?

Several commenters pointed out that, while the devices were clearly not ear trumpets, they could still be a certain type of hearing aid. Specifically, a compact, carbon-amplified one that was held up to the ear and patented in 1924.

While there’s no way of entirely confirming that explanation, it makes a lot of sense, much more than the idea of time travel! So, those guys aren’t time travelers at all I’m afraid just two regular people that were hard of hearing. Less Doctor Who, more Doctor Who Said That?

11B-X-1371 Mystery

The less information you have on something, the more unsettling it has the potential to be. Enter 11B-X-1371, a disturbing DVD that was mailed to Johny Krahbichler, the editor of the Swedish tech blog GadgetZZ, in 2015. Take a look:

The whole video is comprised of strange visuals, uncomfortable noises, and that man in a plague doctor outfit. After watching it, Johny was more than a little creeped out, especially when he realized the footage wasn’t just a prank, it seemed to contain coded messages.

Strange symbols and alphanumeric text flashed up in some frames, and the plague doctor had a blinking light on his hand that appeared to blink in Morse code. Perplexed, Johny posted the video on his blog and it wasn’t long before internet sleuths got to work on it.

There was a ton to unpack. One of the codes translated into GPS coordinates for the White House, and the Morse code was an anagram for a threat on the President’s life! The mystery deepened when one clever Redditor used a nifty program to translate the video’s audio into imagery and found the bizarre image below.

Most of us would have destroyed the DVD and fled the country but Johny kept on working with the internet detectives and one of them actually figured out where the whole thing was filmed! The former Zofiówka Sanatorium, south of Warsaw. Even with the codes cracked and the filming location found though, the video still didn’t make sense.

Who made it and why? Those questions remained frustratingly unanswered until the initial frenzy died down, then a man named Parker Warner Wright suddenly came forward claiming he was behind the video. By now, many others had falsely claimed the same thing in the months prior, but this time was different.

Wright actually released a sequel video on his YouTube channel, with a similarly catchy name. “11B-3-1369” features the return of the same plague doctor, proving that Wright was indeed behind the mask! According to him, it was just an art project all along. Although, he also said it does have a message, which nobody has managed to decipher yet.

Seattle Zombie Woman Mystery

Everybody has spent some time thinking of their own zombie apocalypse survival plan. It’s all a bit of harmless fun, after all, something like that would never happen in reality. But in May 2021, a shocking event made the residents of Seattle believe it could. A TikTok user uploaded a haunting video of a bedraggled zombie-like woman stumbling through the street and screeching:

The chilling clip sent shockwaves through the web and caused rampant debate on TikTok. Some claimed that the so-called “zombie” was just an unwell woman in need of help, while others touted that she was possessed by a demon. And yes, some even believed that really was the start of a zombie apocalypse!

Days went by, and suspiciously, there was absolutely no news coverage or official update from TikTok on the matter. But those in the know needed answers, so they took the investigation into their own hands. Some other clips of the woman had surfaced in which she was approached and eventually detained by police.

Our budding detectives knew police have bodycams to record incidents like that, so if they could just get hold of the cop’s footage they’d gain more insight into what happened that day. YouTuber Rebecca M.S. got straight on the case and requested it from the police and a few months later, they sent it to her! It revealed a shocking revelation.

The cops go from caring and concerned to confused and annoyed when they realize the woman is actually just wearing makeup. That’s right, further digging uncovered that the so-called zombie was one Kimberley Kassai, and the whole horrific stunt was a COVID vaccination protest!

She was probably trying to say the vaccines could make people zombies and it’s safe to say that people were not happy with Kimberley, as well as wasting police time, she’d worried the entire internet sick! As a result, she’s locked down all her social media.

If you were amazed at these strange mysteries solved by Reddit and the internet you might want to read about TikTok mysteries! Thanks for reading