10 Strange Attempts To Start Internet Mysteries

Although the Internet is a great place for solving mysteries, it is also the birthplace of many more. Often, there isn’t much information available about these bizarre websites and videos, but it can be fun to puzzle out what’s going on.

10 Karin Catherine Waldegrave

In 2011, a bizarre woman named Karin Catherine Waldegrave from Canada began posting a large number of nonsensical posts on Facebook. It was especially strange that she replied to her own ramblings—sometimes as many as 700 times.

According to her profile, she had a PhD from the University of Toronto. Supposedly, she had also traveled through different countries and learned languages such as French, Estonian, Latvian, English, Russian, Gallic, Latin, and German.

For such a seemingly educated person, the posts seemed like the ravings of a mad woman. Although some posts initially sounded normal and coherent, they soon slipped into unintelligible phrases.

Her account featured several photos, yet they all showed signs of damage to the film. In the midst of posting her nonsense, she began mentioning several well-known conspiracies involving the FBI, the CIA, the “men in black,” the Nazis, and the “elite.”

Readers didn’t know if she was schizophrenic or if she was posting some sort of espionage communication. It was also unclear if these postings were made by one person or by several people accessing the account.

Waldegrave’s ability to post extremely long paragraphs within seconds or minutes of each other seemed to be humanly impossible. Was this some sort of automated posting done by a mysterious coder? If so, why?

Although she seemed normal on the surface, she suddenly began replying to her own messages for 12 hours a day. Were these rantings truly some secret intelligence that she had about well-known conspiracies? Or was it all made up?

As of early 2016, the whereabouts of Karin Catherine Waldegrave are unknown. After deleting her account from Facebook, she disappeared without explanation. Some speculate that she was put in a mental hospital while others believe that she is missing or dead.

However, there is a Facebook fan page that keeps tabs on her. Some people have found Facebook accounts with similar postings that they believe to have come from Karin. Others believe that she switched accounts because she was receiving too many friend requests.

9 62.10401554464931 24.459908986464143

The video above was posted to YouTube on August 9, 2014, and has since stumped many people as to its purpose. It was posted by a user known as 626544984949854984858948l1. Little is known about the video or the person who posted it.

The video contains images of everything from a creepy dark forest to a face morphing into a skull. There are also several different sound changes—from music to indistinguishable voices.

The video cuts out for about 30 seconds before flashing its last image: a dark, lonely road. Some believe that the mishmash of footage is a hoax. Others feel that there is a deeper message to the video, much like the Cicada 3301 puzzles. Even more eerie, a Google search on the title of this video takes you to coordinates for a forest in Finland.

8 Oct282011

After a mysterious website known as oct282011.com popped up, no one could determine its purpose. Prior to October 28, the website contained a countdown with bizarre puzzles and messages that no one could figure out.

The site changed often and seemingly at random. It contained many different images—from hidden text to scientific diagrams to bizarre broken links. Many believe that it is some sort of rapture website because the Mayan calendar predicted that October 28, 2011, would be Armageddon.

When the date came and went without incident, however, the mystery deepened. At one point, a mysterious phone number was posted on the site. Those who called the number reported a variety of disturbing noises when the phone was answered.

Unfortunately, on April 26, 2015, the website went down and is now completely blank. The blank site contains a robot.txt file that stops anyone from viewing the archived contents of the site.

No one knows who is behind this, but some believe that they may be involved in a cult. Numerous people on various message boards have debated the purpose and origin of the site, but there are no answers so far.

7 973-eht-namuh-973

Since around 2003, the website 973-eht-namuh-973.com has been captivating people all over the Internet. The website starts with a page that features an upside-down triangle with the word “abracadabra.” But the site contains many other odds words, images, and numbers that have defied explanation.

There seems to be a strong emphasis on religion and numerology, but no one is sure why. A WHOIS lookup showed that the domain is owned by a British artist named David Denison.

Some people have speculated that the site contains a puzzle like those posted by Cicada 3301. Others believe that it is just the ramblings of a crazy mathematician. The deeper you go into the site, the more unsettling the pictures and text become.

While it is clear that the domain name spells “the human” backward, the importance of the numbers “973” is unknown. The numbers appear frequently throughout the site without any real explanation.

There is a forum run by the site, but there is only one post from 2007 with the words “UNIVERSAL MIND THE MIND OF HUMANKIND.” Despite this, David Denison is active daily.

6 John.com

No one knows the origin or purpose of john.com. The site contains many basic pictures that link to log-in pages. Each log-in page requires an unknown code.

A redditor has examined the coding used to create the site, which seems to notify the website’s owner when someone gets in. The most recent record shows that the site’s owner is John Little of Cupertino, California.

Both coders and mystery hunters have unsuccessfully tried to break the passwords. Some speculate that a top secret chat room lies behind the log-in screen. Others believe that it is a test. Furthermore, no one knows if each link is independent of the others or if all the passwords are needed to gain access.

The site has been around since 1994, but it is unknown if the same person has owned it the entire time. The domain name is believed to be worth a lot of money if it is ever sold.

5 Illuminatiorder.info

Although there are thousands of websites all over the Internet claiming to be part of the Illuminati, one stands out: illuminatiorder.info. On the home page, there is an Illuminati-looking pyramid with two sphinxes in front.

If you click on the left sphinx, a riddle appears that must be answered to gain access to the site. The riddle is: “What speaks with one voice yet walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon and three feet in the evening?”

Once this riddle is solved with the word “human,” the visitor is taken to other cryptic puzzles. Some have managed to get past the front page, but no one seems to understand the purpose of the website.

The site also contained a strange clock counting down to September 9, 2012, at 13:23:33. Although the clock unnerved many people, no one really knew why it was counting down. The clock remains on the site but without the countdown.

Other areas of the site contain hymns from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Some people believe that Illuminatiorder.info exists to have a cyber gathering of a sinister world order, but others believe that there is really no purpose to this massive site.

Illuminatiorder.info is apparently owned by Mark Pace, a journalist and satirist who also owned whitehouse.org and used it to make fun of George W. Bush.

4 Markovian Parallax Denigrate

During the early days of the Internet, the global message board Usenet was spammed with mysterious messages that no one has been able to decipher. The messages began in 1996, and all of them were titled “Markovian Parallax Denigrate.” The spamming lasted for hundreds of messages.

Even though the posts had the same title, the content of each message was bizarrely different. The messages seemed to contain a massive, random compilation of words. Some clever users tracked the email of the poster to a woman known as Susan Lindauer.

Lindauer was a journalist who was arrested for her work as a spy for Saddam Hussein. Her alleged connection to the messages spurred many 9/11 conspiracy theories. Even so, she has never admitted to posting the messages.

When the alleged link to Lindauer was discovered, the Wikipedia page for this phenomenon also vanished. The words and phrases have been analyzed repeatedly by some of the Internet’s best and brightest, but no one has solved the puzzle. Some people believe that the postings are a cipher or coded message. There is only one of these messages still archived at Usenet.

3 F04cb41f154db2f05a4a

Around 2013, a reddit user named f04cb41f154db2f05a4a began posting a mysterious code that no one has been able to decipher. However, in the midst of the coded messages, the user posted two strange messages in plain English. The first post was just the word “help.” The next post was “please help us.”

Despite these pleas for help, the ciphers continued. Some believe that the messages use a Base64 code, but no one has figured out what the messages say. Furthermore, it is known that the user posting these messages is not a bot posting arbitrary text.

The user has been posting the messages on their own subreddit and has commented in code twice on the board about the A858 mystery, which we talk about in the next entry.

The same coded messages are also posted in the user’s sidebar. What’s extremely exciting about this bizarre Internet mystery is that the user seemed to go on hiatus for eight months.

People have speculated that these codes stand for everything from names to phone numbers to terrorist communications. But if so, why would the user randomly post two unnerving help messages back-to-back in plain English? Is there a deeper mystery that needs to be solved?

Click here if you would like to join the group dedicated to solving the codes.

2 A858DE45F56D9BC9

While reddit can be a place to solve mysteries, it can also be a place to create them. One reddit user known as A858DE45F56D9BC9 has been posting massive strings of random text every day for years.

The posts are watched daily by redditors who have attempted in vain to decode their meanings. People are unsure whether the poster is a bot or a human. What is extremely odd is that the postings seem to interact somewhat with the people who comment. For example, after being called the “Stonehenge of reddit,” A858 posted a string of letters and numbers that was decoded into an ASCII picture of Stonehenge.

Some believe that other messages posted by A858 are steganography but not all of them have been decoded. For a better explanation of how the user fragglet decoded the Stonehenge message, you can click here. Fragglet explained that some of the codes using hexadecimal data can be decoded, but the others aren’t as easy.

When the excitement about A858’s posts peaked after the story was reported on Boing Boing and The Daily Dot, A858 mysteriously deleted all of the old posts and vanished. Five months later, A858 returned for no apparent reason.

1 11B-X-1371

As shown above, the mysterious 11B-X-1371 video features a man in a plague doctor costume standing in what seems to be an abandoned building in a forest. The shaky video shows the person eventually holding up a gloved hand that contains an odd blinking light.

Later, the plague doctor looks down at a box with alternating right triangles. The video contains a sound track of electronic, hissing, and buzzing noises that coordinate with the irregularly blinking light.

This creepy video became popular in October 2015 when editor Johny Krahbichler of GadgetZZ posted that he had received it in the mail. Then he posted the video on his blog and put a link to it on a subreddit.

Other Internet users had posted the video earlier but without the widespread interest. Although the creator was unknown, the location appeared to be the former Zofiowka Sanatorium south of Warsaw.

In November 2015, a Twitter account was created by a man named Parker Warner Wright who claimed to have made the video as an art project. He said that he was a US citizen living in Poland who had left two discs containing the video in public places—one in a subway and the other on a park bench.

Wright challenged viewers to replicate his plague doctor costume. He also tweeted that another video would be posted “in exactly 1.444 metric hours.” At the scheduled time, a similar video called 11B-3-1369 was posted with this description: “Their [sic] lies unlock our dissent.”

Many people didn’t believe that Wright had created the original video because the newer video showed someone in a different costume. Wright countered that he had wanted to make a better cloak for the second video.

By this time, more secrets of the original video had been decoded, including a string of text on the CD that was Base64 for “11B-X-1371.” A spectrogram of the buzzing sound revealed the phrase “You Are Already Dead.”

Images of women being tortured and killed were also concealed within the video, but they were from obscure horror films and the murder investigation of a Boston Strangler victim. The Morse code in the video contained plaintext for “red lips life tenth,” an anagram for “kill the president,” and the encoded latitude and longitude of the White House.

Click here for more of the bizarre messages.

Shelby is an undergraduate at Arizona State University studying psychology and biochemistry. She is constantly fascinated by the mysteries of the world around her. Next year, she will be going to medical school to continue studying and discovering the medical mysteries around her.