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The internet can be an invaluable source of knowledge. If you want to learn a new language, there are countless resources out there. And if you want to find out the history of any piece of technology, the World Wide Web’s got your back. But along with all of the wonderful things we can learn about online, there are some pretty disturbing stories out there too.
Netizens have recently been recalling the most terrifying and upsetting rabbit holes they’ve ever gone down online, so we’ve compiled a list of them below. From learning all about cults to finding out about brutal historical events, we certainly don’t recommend going down any of these rabbit holes yourself. Good luck getting through this list, and be sure to upvote the topics that you’re glad you don’t know too much about!
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
The more I read about cults, the less I think I’d be immune to joining one. You start out thinking, “How could anyone fall for that?” Then you learn about sleep deprivation, isolation, love bombing, sunk-cost fallacy, and gradual escalation. It’s way less about intelligence than timing and vulnerability. That rabbit hole was genuinely unsettling.
Bored Jellyfish 4 hours ago (edited)
I had a teacher (taught psychology and sociology classes in high school) that created a special unit just for cults because at that time (late 70s) there were numerous stories about young college students getting sucked into them because they were vulnerable being away from home for the first time. He went over the methods they used and what they looked for in targeting their victims. It was invaluable information! He was a teacher ahead of his time. He also touted the evils of sugar consumption, which we thought he was going overboard about as a health nut and he was teased for it, but he turned out right about that, too.
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#2
Chip-Chan. Back in the late 2000s, people found a livestream of a woman living in a tiny apartment in Seoul. She believed a corrupt ex-policeman had implanted a "stalker chip" in her ankle that kept her asleep for up to 20 hours a day and controlled her mind.
What made it disturbing wasn't a ghost or a jump scare, it was watching raw, unedited, severe mental illness play out in real-time for years. She set up multiple webcams streaming 24/7, covered her walls in hand-written signs warning viewers about her "pesterer," and spent days sleeping in contorted positions on the floor, barely moving. You’d drop into the stream at 3 AM and just watch this woman completely trapped in her own psychological nightmare, totally oblivious to the thousands of strangers watching her every move.
#3
The Denko thread.
On an early Japanese precursor to 4chan a dude started live posting about watching a girl he was obsessed with. The goons all egged him on to stalk her and post while he was doing it.
It eventually hit the point where they realised the creep guy was legitimately terrifying this girl and that they were enabling a dangerously unstable loner.
#4
This is niche, to say the least, but about 8 years ago I was being harassed online by a Sufjan Stevens fan blog. I found her main account and it turns out she had erotomania over Sufjan Stevens that manifested in almost a decade of obsessively blogging about hum, the “signs” he was sending her, and her IRL stalking him (while claiming he was the one stalking her).
#5
Back in 2012, a mysterious group started posting ultra complex puzzles across 4chan, deep web sites, and even physical locations worldwide (posters taped to streetlights in Tokyo, Paris, and LA). To this day, nobody knows for sure who was behind it or what the actual end goal was whether it was high-level intelligence recruitment, a secret society, or something far weirder.
#6
The scam-call-center rabbit hole. It starts with “annoying spam calls” and ends with documentaries about people being trafficked and forced to scam strangers for a living. Truly disturbing.
#7
Epstein files.
#8
There's a rather robust alternate universe wiki called Conservapedia. It was created by the son of some rather politically prolific white supremacists, and has nearly 60,000 articles chock full of gibbering insanity. You can get lost gazing into this maw of madness.
#9
The Sarah Saga.
Clearly mentally ill girl moves in with a group of young professionals while lying about her employment status etc. She refuses to pay rent or contribute in any way, invites her friends over, repeatedly trashes the place, and won't leave etc.
At first the other housemates do everything they can to support her, then their support turns to desperation as she clearly has no intentions of helping herself and is happy to just ruin everyone’s lives. The story is told in a blog by the other housemates.
#14
I was curious about the epstein files and decided to spend around 10 minutes reading them. Around 3 hours afterwards I was just left in shock on how many people were involved with it and how they are still so popular and beloved even though it's revealed in the files what they have done.
It honestly made me feel awful for months and it makes me sick how we just have to work and live life like nothing ever happened while they continue doing the same things to this dayz.
#15
Early 2000s era family PC that didn’t have a lick of antivirus brought the scary internet rabbit holes to me!
#16
Elan school. A survivor wrote a very long visual blog detailing it. Unbelievable
Edit: blog is elan.school.
#18
Missing 411 - as a father and avid outdoorsman. I now prefer my son to hike in front of me so I know where he is. Ugh.
Edit: well apparently I’m a big dummy, lol. I watched a couple videos and browsed a few websites on the topic and it made me scared of my kid disappearing. I can’t speak on how the research was done or who the author is, but reading about kids going missing and thinking about going through that myself is just scary to me. I don’t care for the theories fyi. But if there are a few kids that were later found, and it’s still part of the bigger story that they weren’t, then that kinda s***s.
#20
I saw bits and pieces of a lot of the images from the Epstein files in 2016. I did acid after my finals (as you do), was tripping balls and reading Reddit, randomly saw an old post about Jeff Mangum being a time traveler, which led to 4Chan threads and dossiers about pizzagate, the Wayfair stuff, and Epstein himself. It was a wild afternoon. Thought nothing of it for years, half of me hoped they were just conspiratorial b******t. Then when they released some of the Epstein files this year, a lot of the pictures they showed on the news were the stuff that I saw.
#21
I found thinspo one time. Omg. It’s just really sad and depressing. I’m sure the manosphere is just as cringe, but in a different way.
Breadcrumb. 6 hours ago
They're not even trying to hide it anymore. Eating disorders seem to be more socially acceptable today than 10 years ago. We swung back on this one too.
#22
U/eric-r and u/anotherlittlepiece.
not really scary, more mysterious/creepy. not really sure what happened between them or why eric disappeared. definitely worth looking into though.
#23
The old internet mystery of who was behind Satoshi Nakamoto. Every answer just created five more questions.
#24
I once went down a rabbit hole about unexplained maritime disappearances and the number of ships that just… vanish. Then I started looking at the Bermuda Triangle theories and somehow ended up reading about deep-sea creatures we still haven’t properly documented. Slept with the lights on that night.
#25
Pied Piper.
Seriously. That whole story is so d**n dark. So many weird theories on where that story came from, what it represented. Was it rats he led out of that town, was it kids? Was the Piper just an allegory for the Black D***h?
Strangely fascinating and it burned about 4 hours.
#28
Weird, religious-adjacent conspiracy theories.
My mother fell for one of these, and then more and more. Now her belief system is a Frankenstein's abomination of many conspiracies and other weirdo garbage all rolled into one.
It's all interconnected in one giant web. All the conspiracies you've heard of and haven't heard of, old or recent, all grouped together under one giant complex web of connections.
Now couple that with spiritual beliefs (also part of the web, but not a "conspiracies theory" by definition), that forbids critical thinking as heresy, and you have a recipe for disaster.
My mother is now a person who believes in her stuff with the energy of a religious zealot, forbids criticism of her and the belief system itself, and since she's done away with the mental faculties to question what she's exposed to, she then falls into and believes *all* the conspiracies she's exposed to following that.
The cult-like religious adjacent spiritual beliefs came first, laid the groundwork for everything else, and then all the conspiracies got incorporated in later.
She's a mess and I warn anyone to stay as far as away as the can from "The Secret" and "The law of Attraction". That s**t is dangerous.
tom (bat/man) 4 hours ago
now i am going to have to look up the secret and the law of attraction
#29
Falling down the urbanist rabbit hole and getting "orange pilled".
It was a shock to realize how much private motor vehicle ownership has contributed to designing our built environment around cars rather than people.. and how many d****s are directly and indirectly associated from that. But yet it's a statistic that is actively ignored by most people due to motonormativity.
#30
Brazilian cartels have done some insane s**t to journalists. Tim Lopes is the one that really sticks with me. Don't look it up but if you do report back so other people don't.
#31
There was a woman that had her personal cooking show/blog on youtube and /ck/ developed a huge fascination about her because she was pretty cute ngl, but it went too far, people were posting absurd s**t in the threads as they always do, I'm sure you can imagine what kinda s**t 4chan can come up with.
People started taking screenshots of the posts referencing this women and sending them to her. She rightfully so, freaked the f**k out and deleted her entire online presence.
#32
JFK/RFK assassinations.
Some of it's just bunk but you if start looking at the story a little more in depth and the people involved and then look at both together and politics at the time...
Considering the people in power had both the means to manipulate evidence and witnesses and reason/ability to k**l them both, it really becomes was it simply rouge sh**ters or was it coup d'état?
Very scary if it was the latter.
#34
I've been down plenty of horrifying internet rabbit holes over the years, mostly on Wikipedia.
One rabbit hole I've gone down a few times is that I looked up a bunch of "crowd crush" disasters on Wikipedia. These are incidents in which there's an extremely large gathering of people crowded together so tightly that people become unable to move and breathe with other people pressing against them. People d*e in crowd crushes, and the crowd is so big and noisy that most others in the crowd don't even realize it's happening. Sometimes people d*e standing upright, and other times it's because they fell down and people stepped on or fell on top of them. It's a truly bizarre and shocking way to d*e.
I've also looked up many missing person cases on Wikipedia. Those are always creepy to read about, and I rarely look at those articles anymore because they disturb me so much.
Another rabbit hole I started to go down, but soon stopped because I didn't want to look anymore, was right here on Reddit. A few days ago, I discovered r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, and it was so disheartening and discouraging to see it. I dislike AI in general, and about this specifically, it's so sad that people are viewing AI tools the same way they'd view a human companion. Don't tell me "It's just a joke" or something. It's not. They actually feel emotionally attached to these bots and even generate pics of them going on dates with them. They don't think there are any downsides to treating a bot as if it were human...
#35
I watched a fantastic French movie based on true events called BPM. It’s about ACTUP activism in France and from there went down a rabbit hole about the AIDS crisis and how it was NOT handled by the American government back at the height of the pandemic.
Hearing Ronald Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, crack jokes about how the disease is getting us rid of gays is something I’ll never forget.
Asides from BPM, I highly recommend reading All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South by Ruth Coker Burks. She cared for dying men whose families had disowned, feeding them, helping them any way she could, even giving them proper burial in her family cemetery.
I just want you to add that I’m not gay but an active, vocal ally because love is love, and I can’t stand injustice.
#37
The Epstein Files. I found the ‘baby’ stories horrifying and devastating on so many levels and had a hard time assessing what was true and what wasn’t, as the files were really just a dump of random, unverified tips and info mixed with actual evidence. The whole thing is such a mindf*ck.
#38
Not sure if it's strictly an internet thing, but the Burari incident in India. An entire family of 8 was found hanging in their home.
#39
Group 764
CSAM, s*xtortion, satanism, very long prison sentences. The Wikipedia page does a pretty good job explaining who they are.
#40
The Life of Elliott Rodger.
I used to be kind of an incel myself, without the blatant hatred for women but with thoughts like "Im a loser women will never want me and all women are b*****s".
I never went as far as to genuinely wish violence of women or s******y active guys my age but I was full of resentment, envy and anger.
Listening to a hours long podcast about Elliott's life hit way too close to home and many of the thoughts he had, I had too in the past when I was an "incel lite".
The difference is that I had enough morality and common sense to not direct my anger and resentment towards not women nor s******y active guys and to not wish actual harm on them bevause they hadnt done anything wrong to me. But the resentment, the desperation of Elliott... hit like a train because thats exactly how I felt back in the days.
For the record though: I'm good now. 44 years old. Finally had my first relationship at 26, have had several flings and relationships since then and I'm in a loving relationship for 4 years now.
Breadcrumb. 6 hours ago
Sounds like you really did hate women. How did it happen, when you realized women are people too? I've always wondered what got a incel to change.
#42
I started reading about the Toolbox Killers and read about the tape they made while k*****g a woman.
That tape is used to desensitize FBI field agents to t*****e and e*******n.
Turns out in my little rabbit hole journey i found out that there's a direct transcription of the tape. I read the transcript and really really wish I hadn't.
I started sweating just reading it and by the end my regret was like a stone in my stomach.
A few years later I had a baby girl.
I STILL think about what I read sometimes. Its so horrific and inhuman that its never left me and never will.
F**k.
#43
Fell into a multi-hour hole reading about unresolved missing persons cases on a forum called Websleuths..started with one case out of curiosity and ended up 4am deep reading about people who vanished without a trace decades ago, some with genuinely unsettling details that never got explained. Had to close my laptop and just sit there for a minute.
#44
I don't even remember how or why, but I once lost an entire afternoon to reading up on the subject of Kobe Bryant's plane crash and maaaaaaan...I don't know if there's ever a "good" way to learn the term "degloving," but THAT SURE AS HELL WASN'T IT.
#46
Foalcon in the brony fandom. I have a friend who draws ponies as part of his overall art career occasionally, and because of this I've gone down the pony rabbit hole just to see why there are SO MANY people obsessively spending money on it.
I can't deny the characters are cute and the artists are insanely good.
But I'm one that loves looking into the VOID. I turned off filters on one of their art sites to see what the top art was and.. holy s**t. Page 1 they had a filly doing unspeakable things to one of the adult stallions. This image had 4300 upvotes. 4300 people accept a FOAL drawn as a FOAL with a stallion. Then I kept scrolling through pages. So much of the most popular art was "foalcon" as I learned from the tag on it.
Either bronies have a massive p**o problem or society has lost its mind.
#48
Not so much scary, but unsettling.
'Mostly Harmless' - an unidentified* hiker Doe. Spent so much time scrolling through random Appalachian Trail photos, hoping to tie this guy to an event, get closer to his name...then ended up coming his d***h scene photos. Haunting. Those photos being available served no purpose and are something I've never been able to fully shake.
*At the time.
#49
I was playing an ARG on a forum almost 20 years ago. I forget the premise, but I ended up digging into some information tangently related to the topic looking for info. I stumbled on a newsgroup concerning a Saudi Prince and plans/blueprints for a power plant in the US, i remember asking the mod if this was part of the game and he informed me I should probably contact the FBI.
#50
Final Fantasy House. The idea of a cult based on a 90s video game taking over so many people's lives was kinda bizarre to me, and it apparently ties into a few similar stories from later dates too. Also recall hearing that the folks involved tried to get involved in other fandoms in a similar way.
#52
Wouldn't call it a rabbit hole, but the old internet in general. Web 1.0 and early Web 2.0. The guardrails didn't exist. You saw all sorts of things, whether you wanted to or not, and that was *fun*. There's a reason those of us who were there are near-completely desensitized. To this day, I still kind of think censorship in all its forms is b******t. Show me unfiltered reality, no matter how awful. I would rather know.
#54
Usage of herbal medicine or alternative medicine. Why scary? You'll have these people pass these strange exams based on ancient books written by gods, prescribing medication that is causing liver failure in all ages. You have xyz problem? Take this pill made in same area as mercury or arsenic because apparently cross contamination isn't a thing and enjoy jaundice and liver failure later. The whole aspect of it, the education they do, they acceptance in society, the prevalence of it spreading to other countries as if it's normal to have herbel meds being the primary medicine in pharmacies is terrifying. The whole "pregnant mothers need to be treated with incense first, painkillers later" is madness. .
#56
Missing persons cases. You start with one Wikipedia article and three hours later you're looking at forest coordinates, unsolved 911 calls, and questioning whether you should ever go hiking again.
#57
Pozing and negging I think it was called. It was an AIDS f****h forum. Getting infected, infecting. That sort.
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