“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!” said Alice as she tumbled into Wonderland and found herself in a world of bizarre adventures.
If there’s anything that can rival Wonderland’s allure, it’s the internet, where you can find strange and surprising things about almost anything.
But sometimes, curiosity leads to some truly unsettling places. These Reddit users shared the most disturbing online rabbit holes they’ve fallen into, and they’re definitely not for the faint of heart. Read their stories below and upvote the ones that left you shivering!
#1
My TikTok algorithm showed me a video of the worst motel in Georgia. I looked up the reviews and found one left by a young homeless guy clearly struggling with mental health / addiction that was living at the motel. It said the guy had left 200+ reviews. I clicked on his page and realized that he wrote reviews every day at every place he went to. Many were "they helped the homeless" or "they wouldn't give me food and I'm starving. F**k this place." I was basically able to see every place the guy stopped for almost two years. I went back to look further at the seedy motel reviews and the guys dad left one saying that he was grateful his son had a roof over his head. It crushed me. I don't remember the name of the motel but I was crying at 4 am.
Image credits: thatduderalph
#2
I forget the subreddit, but it shook me to my deepest fiber. It’s a Reddit where they ask you if you can ID where a photo was taken. At first I thought, oh cool, this sounds fun…
Some of the photos clearly had a small child edited out, they were f*****g trafficked and trying to find where the perp is who is committing the heinous act(s).
I looked thru every single post to see if I could help/recognize a landmark/indicator. Not every photo has a person edited out, but, you can just tell.
Realizing there’s people/children *right now* needing to be saved breaks my heart.
Edit: thanks Filiberto, the page is r/TraceAnObject, if you’d like to see for yourself.
Image credits: asian-jeff
#3
Definitely not the most outright disturbing but still incredibly disturbing and more inexplicable was the existence of the monkey hate community. And they’ll just sit around watching videos of baby monkeys commenting s**t like “next you gotta put that f****r in the microwave and watch him squeal”. The part that’s really confusing to me is how these people woke up one day and said “f**k monkeys in particular” Since it really does seem to be specific to monkey for them.
Image credits: thiccemotionalpapi
#4
Definitely the Russian scientist that sewed the top half of a dog to the back/neck area of another larger dog to see how long it would live. Like some human centipede [nonsense].
Image credits: LadyThrashALot
#5
One of the most disturbing rabbit holes I stumbled into was reading about abandoned, haunted amusement parks around the world. What started as an innocent curiosity turned into hours of looking at eerie photos, creepy backstories, and even watching videos of people exploring these decaying, forgotten places. It left me with chills, but I couldn't stop digging deeper!
Image credits: CatherineM1267
#6
On Reddit there used to be yearly thread for a while talking about supernatural experiences of Sailors. It was such a fantastic read . Every couple of years if I am bored and travelling I love to re-read them.
Image credits: mmIastro
#7
Datura trip reports rank pretty high. I've had bad trips on psychedelics, but nothing even remotely as f****d up as what people experience on deliriants like datura.
On psychedelics, no matter how crazy it gets, you at least know you're tripping. The s**t you see is clearly just overlaid on reality - you know you're hallucinating. That's not the case with datura. From what I've read, the s**t you see doesn't look psychedelic at all - it looks real. You might not even realize you're tripping.
Your dead grandpa is really in the room talking to you. Your friend is really getting brutally [attacked] in front of you. The giant spiders are really crawling all over you. It's all 100% real as far as you can tell.
Since you have no connection to reality, you can get into serious trouble or even die. You might think you're fighting a demon and then get arrested for assaulting a random person in a park. All bets are off with that s**t.
Oh and also it lasts several days.
Image credits: paraworldblue
#8
Fatal caving accidents. Nutty Putty, but also Floyd Collins too (don't Google these). Learned way more than I care to and it only ensured I will never go caving, at least not in caves tight enough to get trapped forever.
Image credits: comeallwithme
#9
I used to follow high fashion models in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Frida Gustavsson, Sasha Pivovarova, Vlada Roslyakova, Olga Sherer, Snejana Onopka (as you can see, I gravitated toward the Slavic models, mainly)--those were my favorites. I was looking up runway photos of either Roslyakova or Sherer and stumbled upon a blog "congratulating" one of the models in a candid photo for enjoying a breakfast of black coffee and a cigarette. The caption was, "We approve."
That was the day I learned that there was such a thing as a "pro-ana" community, or "thinspo." This was the opposite of a support group--unless your understanding of a support group was supporting each other's addictions and unhealthy coping mechanisms. They exchanged "tips" like sprinkling black pepper on lettuce to make you think you were eating more than you actually were. It was... frightening.
Edit: typo.
Image credits: Schneetmacher
#10
The Nuremberg Trial documentary. Not a modern documentary. The actual documentary made back after WW2 when they took the National Socialists to trial. Actual footage used in court. It's absolutely rough. Yet free in wikipedia where it's been out in HD. Amazon has it in the original pixilated form. IDK which is worse.
Image credits: heartcitybarber
#11
Watching the new videos about the TitanSub that was destroyed last year. While I have zero sympathy for the owner who was knowingly breaking the rules, dying in that sub, I feel bad for the crew that he conned into going.
One video that I watched last night suggested the possibility that they knew they were in danger and was trying to raise up to safety when they imploded and it wasn't a quick thing, like they knew for approximately a minute that they were moments away from instant death, but the death was so sudden and so violent that no one knew it happened, human brains don't work fast enough to process an implosion at that speed. .
Image credits: Square_Ad8710
#12
Bots will downvote me into oblivion and I won't be believed, but up until around 2005, if you looked up 'Balfour accords' on Encyclopedia Brittanica's website, it was shocking how much it disclosed. Even at the time the Wikipedia article and the Encyclopedia Brittanica's article were very different. It described how the Ottoman Empire, and the whole Middle East was carved up, and their oil was largely given to the conquering powers, IE France, Britain, US. "BP" only exists because it was founded as a company that was taking Middle Eastern war spoils (oil) and selling it through England. The borders of the countries as they are now are because that's how the west decided them to be. And they were purposely carved out in a way to prevent Persia from ever re-uniting.
The articles today hint at this and if you dig deep enough you'll find all this to be true, but back in the day the history was laid out in a very stark, obvious manner, and having read that and living today, I can see clearly the erasure of what really happened by way of framing.
#13
The logistics of crowd crushes.
Image credits: bagginshieldz
#14
I spent one night reading all about staircases in woods stories and was thoroughly creeped out, only to discover the next day that the stories were all fake.
Image credits: _dontjimthecamera
#15
The leg found at the OKC Bombing site.
Nutshell: A random leg was found in the aftermath of the OKC bombing back in '95. They identified the leg, and exhumed the corpse it belonged to. Only problem? He was already buried with two legs. Except one wasn't his. They swapped his leg, and set to work trying to find the owner of the other leg. DNA testing failed to find out who it belonged to.
...So whose leg was it? Nearly 30 years later, we have no clue. Some say it was a widely believed *third* accomplice to the bombing.
Image credits: Jack-of-Hearts-7
#16
Ant walking alligators.
Survivors of nuclear bombings. Very NSFL stuff.
The "alligator people" bit refers to their skin being so charred and cracked it looked like reptile skin, and their lips and eyes melted away, making them look like some sort of human-reptiles
The "ant-walking" bit is separate, referring to how they aimlessly followed each other around, crawling on all fours due to their ruined limbs, all while making a neverending murmuring noise as they tried to scream but had too damaged vocal cords and throats
The more detailed descriptions are probably worse than what you're imagining, but the veracity is also somewhat questioned. The book that describes all this was later withdrawn by the publisher for having several factual errors, exaggerations, using bad sources, etc.
Image credits: zed2point0
#17
Japan's SOS sign incident. Everything about it is weird and disturbing.
FrankSonata: For those who haven't heard of this one:
In 1989, some hikers got lost in Northern Japan. A search quickly began of the mountains in the area where they'd been, and helicopters found a huge "SOS" sign made from logs on a mountainside, visible from the air.
The missing hikers were found 2-3km away, and were successfully rescued. But when asked, they knew nothing about the SOS sign. They didn't make it.
It appeared another hiker also happened to be lost in the same area, so another search was conducted. Near the sign they found human skeletal remains, as well as a backpack containing personal items, including ID. It was Kenji Iwamura, a 25-year-old man who had gone missing 5 years earlier, and was a known hiker.
Records of aerial photos showed that the SOS had been there for at least two years, but no-one had seen it until other hikers happened to get lost in the area. And clearly it was too late for Kenji by then.
But analysis of the bones indicated a woman, so they weren't Kenji's. Yet there were no matching records of missing women in the area. Who was the mysterious woman who'd died, what happened to Kenji, and why did she have all his stuff?
The backpack also contained a cassette tape player, with the music of one of the tapes partially recoded over. It was a man saying he was lost on the mountain, unable to climb through the thick vegetation, and asking for help from anyone who listened. He didn't mention his name. Kenji's parents listened to it, but due to the poor quality (it had been lying in a backpack on a mountain for years) they couldn't say for sure if it was Kenji or not. Kenji's friend did confirm the tape was likely his, since it was music he had liked.
There are conspiracy theories that Kenji is still alive, that he was abducted, kidnapped, that the taped voice is an impersonator, that the woman is a spy, etc.
Analysis years later showed the bones were actually male, as far as can be ascertained. Weather damage and poor forensic work caused the initial error. (Of course, some people maintain that this is a coverup)
In all likelihood, Kenji died on the mountain, and the bones, belongings, and voice recording are all him. By coincidence, his SOS sign was only found years after he'd died, when other people got lost in a nearby area. Just a sad story of someone who died alone in the wilderness. But people love all the uncertainties, and get carried away, when really it's just tragic.
#18
Artifacts from Spanish inquisition Era. A couple of Books supporting their beliefs was enough to make one puke. Then they brought out various "devices" and the explanation scarred me for life. Can't believe that humans came with such seriously effed up things to be used on someone. I used to hate humans in general but had a little faith in humanity. After watching the documentary in wayback machine i doubt nothing much has changed. There were also 77 pages fully filled with the names of the victims and the name of the priests who "handled" them. It was a french documentary from 90's and I was just curious about Spain's history, very dark stuff that almost nobody outside Europe/Spain knows about.
Image credits: Practical_Airline_36
#19
That girl with munchausens that picked her legs to the bone so she could be a double amputee.
Image credits: Agitated-Mechanic602
#20
Diphenhydramine addiction.
No part of it sounds enticing, yet it's still abused. I don't know that I've seen any other d**g related sub be so adamant about avoiding it at all costs.
glitteryvomit: diphenhydramine is what began my descent into drugs. I had insomnia veeeery young and my pediatrician suggested Benadryl to my mom. I began sneaking obscene amounts the older I got. I didn't think twice about it. eventually it got worse but you know life decisions xyz.
sober from pills (it got to benzos/etc) for 7/8 years now. OTC pill abuse is an issue most day to day people don't see.
Image credits: White_Dynamite22
#21
Jfk assassination.
Image credits: Upper_Rent_176
#22
It's probably not that exciting but learning EVERYTHING Diddy did and we just let that s**t slide for decades. Also, seeing how many celebs are involved oooooh s**t so glad I'm not one of those people who has a Parasocial relationship with celebrities lol. It's awful and the stuff that's coming out now is only the tip of the iceberg. I feel like this is just old news being brought to light.
I can't stand Justin Bieber or Usher but damn, Diddler f****d them up.... like sent Usher to the hospital for a torn a*****e when he was younger.... s**t is f**kkkked.
Image credits: Inevitable_Client237
#23
Elisabeth Fritzl’s story.
to put it brief, her father imprisoned his own daughter in a self made bunker/prison, and kept her for over 24 years. In that time, she had 7 children, was r**ed nearly every single day, and Elisabeth’s dad was soon imprisoned for life, and caught because Elisabeth needed to take one of her kids to the hospital.
yea. don’t look at the details, please.
#24
The Sreberencia Massacre, which led to reading transcripts from the Hague war crimes trial. Absolutely horrifying.
#25
Hisashi Ouchi.
In 1999, the nuclear plant at Tokaimura had a radioactive accident, and Hisashi was the closest victim to the incident. It happened during the purification process of uranium oxide. There were 3 victims in total.
Hisashi survived despite being exposed to the largest amount of radiation on record.
And the Japanese kept him alive. Against his will. For 83 days.
It is the most painful, extended death I have ever read. They could have humanely ended his life.
But they kept bringing him back. To experiment. Despite all the injuries, skin loss, burns, and organ failure.
Do not read about it if you are weak/sensitive to graphic details.
Image credits: Onautopilotsendhelp
#26
Deep diving into the toy box killer, the tape he plays to his newly kidnapped victims is pretty disturbing even just reading the transcript. .
Image credits: ope_sorry_there
#27
Raw isis and cartel execution videos
I deeply regret both.
Image credits: scarlettvvitch
#28
I saw someone mention Junko Faruta so I looked her up.
Edit: The worst part was, I had no context before looking. I can’t remeber the exact circumstances, but it was a Reddit post that someone casually mentioned her name but as a missing person or something far leas than what it was. Certainly not the horrors that poor women went through and what happened after. But it was almost a casual mention. The only reason I looked her up was because I thought the name was quite unusual and rather interesting. So I was just wondering if she was famous in Japan or something to look up while being bored and meandering around Reddit. Little did I know…. This was quite awhile ago. Her name comes up frequently now, but it was almost unknown (internationally, I am sure it was well known in Japan) at the time.
VeryOddNaw: F***ed up thing is some of the guys who did that are still walking the streets without a care in the world, I have seen some people spam Junko’s image in there accounts though but still I want them dead or behind bars forever.
Image credits: Drachenfuer
#29
When eugenia cooney was on twitch. I was disturbed but curious about how she was able to be like that. I would watch her streams every once in a while and ask simple and vague questions that she would sometimes read. Just wild to me a human can live like that.
Image credits: New_Present4993
#30
What iv’e been kinda freaked out by recently is eating disorder twitter (#edtwt) and self harm twitter (#shtwt). Both communities overlap with eachother a lot and it’s insane to me seeing a large community of people ENCOURAGE eachother in this behavior. They have their own inside jokes, share routines, trauma dump, share compliments. They also take pictures of and document everything. You can scroll through profile timelines and see conditions worsen as their mental health descends. It’s honestly just a pretty disturbing thing to see from an outside perspective.
Image credits: N3SSDOGG
#31
That 19 year old girl that married an ~80ish year old man and live tweeted as he was on his deathbed.
Image credits: CoupleinAmerica
#32
A couple of medical conditions I had to study after I learned a loved one was suffering from at least one of them. Doing it out of curiosity is one thing, but when you're forced to do so in order to either improve your health or make it less serious... oh s**t.
Image credits: MissSara101
#33
Looking up my physical symptoms… i have health anxiety.
Image credits: GladDingo88
#34
Secret societies consumed my life for like 5 years.
Image credits: Senior_Low_2145
#35
Pimple picking / extractions at 3 am!
#36
Elan school was quite the rabbit-hole for me. Schools —if you can call them that— like these are f****d up and should not exist imho. ?.
Ytrog: A "school" where children with difficulties are sent to and it is an abusive hell basically.
Image credits: Ytrog
#37
Soft White Underbelly.
RealAnise: While SWU is often disturbing, I wouldn't put it in the same category as all of this other stuff. It's basically hundreds of videos of people discussing their lives, their work, their trauma, their experiences-- [escorts], addicts, that kind of thing.
#38
It actually happened recently. My friend and I were planning our trip to Japan on discord and looking at Google Maps, just seeing how far away we were actually travelling. We stumbled across some VERY weird islands, with VERY weird names. We came across this one island that had an airport, a church, and the names were extremely weird like 'banana' or something. The images you see from people using that location weren't real photos and the website to the church looked extremely fake. We dove a little into the history and just saw more and more weird s**t. The funny part is, you can't even see it normally on the map, you literally have to zoom in so much just for it to even appear.
Edit
HI
Banana
CIA airport code, LOL
weird reviews
It appears to be real, but goddamn this was funny at the time.
#39
I got sucked into the world of creepy pasta stories and ended up staying up nights reading about haunted websites and urban legends. It was eerie and I had to take a break to clear my mind!
#40
The guy who jumped from the cruise ship in the Bahamas got eaten by sharks. The subreddit is pretty interesting, after going down the rabbit hole, I'm convinced you can see sharks in the video.
#41
When I had around 13~14 years old I was browsing in the deep web and ended up reading a blog about how to invoke demons, but it said that I would go to hell if I tries then I never tested due the fear lol.
#42
Tabs vs spaces.
#43
Doomscrolled through BestG+r3's self-delete tag until the site ran out of articles for that tag or the site itself was shut down.
Found some.. interesting.. stuff. Like that Indian family that offed themselves, by hanging, to communicate with a dead relative, thinking they'll just back to life and untie eachother from their binds and nooses.
One tragic article that I remember very clearly was just video, of a woman - a mother of two or three - streaming her by hanging while her children cried and wailed around her. One of the children, seemingly too aware of what their mama is doing, tried to lift her up but to no avail.
#44
The JimJack336 Mystery.
TL:DR - Secretive wealthy man who uses a niche sim racing community as a cover for possibly money laundering or other financial mysteries that utilize shell companies.
Full explanation (Warning: Long and super mysteriously weird)
My favorite internet mystery that actually got me into internet mysteries is the JimJack336 Mystery. It is about a secretly wealthy person who goes by the name of JimJack336. He is known by that name because he had a Reddit account almost a decade ago with that name.
He was involved in a niche sim racing community and he helped create mods and content for it along with setting up modding groups for other members to team up and create mods with. He did this for a few years until he randomly went inactive one day.
This all sounds innocent and pretty ordinary until it was recently discovered that he was actually a wealthy secretive person who used the sim racing community for nefarious purposes that coincided with his use of offshore shell companies. The niche sim racing community had members suddenly come out and reveal that JimJack336 created the groups and the groups were actually named after his shell companies. This happened because several members from different groups found out that their groups were formed by the same guy named JimJack336 and no one really knew who he was or what happened to him or why he did all this.
The users also found connections between the modding groups and actual real life shell companies, especially one being named “Full Throttle LTD” and being based in the British Virgin Islands. (Look up the company on ICIJ)! There was so such drama in the community that the higher ups of the community had to ban discussions about JimJack336 so that the entire community won’t get derailed. They had to get the members of the modding groups to stop talking about it and to move on from all of it in order to focus on making mods for the community.
This led people to post about JimJack336 on many other subreddits and social medias like r/RBI, r/subredditdrama, etc, and it even spread to 4chan, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even a well known news agency wrote an article about it. However mysteriously many of the Reddit posts got taken down by Reddit admins for unclear reasons. The 4chan thread got taken down quickly and the news article was deleted in a single day. It wasn’t even Reddit mods taking down the posts, it was Reddit admins themselves.
And Google and Bing deliberately hide search results of JimJack336 and information relating to him. However a search on DuckDuckGo reveals a lot of information that aren’t available on Google or Bing. This made it obvious that the major search engines were deliberately concealing search results.
Additionally a month or two later, the niche sim racing community suffered a massive Reddit account ban wave and it involved the JimJack336 Reddit account (which was inactive for several years) along with several other modding group accounts to get suspended on the same day. That ban wave revealed that JimJack336 had control of several Reddit accounts and now the theory is that he got Reddit admins to suspend all the accounts so that people investigating the mystery would have more difficulty in doing so.
People in the community theorized on why some wealthy guy would create modding groups named after his shell companies in a niche sim racing community. Is it to use the sim racing community as a front? Is it to conceal money laundering?
Whoever JimJack336 really is, it is so f*****g weird that someone would use a niche community dedicated to a sim racing game as a front cover for their mysterious offshore shell company business. And whatever they’re trying to do, they definitely put so much effort into actually staying in the shadows and getting Reddit admins and the large search engines to take down posts about him and his activities.
#45
I landed in a telegram channel where people were manipulating or blackmailing underage girls to post nude pictures/videos and cut themselves with razors, including cutting themselves with the abusers name. It was an open channel with a deceptive name. Discord apparently has similar channels but they get banned faster there.
I uninstalled telegram shortly after that.
#46
Stumbled upon an antivaxxer group once …. the sheer tin foil hat stupidity was utterly astounding.
#47
Still in said rabbit hole but learning how torture has evolved and how we have given out the death sentence I’ve even looked up pictures of people that have been decapated I have even given my self Chinese water torture that was a fun 5 hours.
