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You can’t really have a podcast that discusses the internet without talking a lot about Google. So this episode is all about Google’s role in real-life missing persons cases and other crimes. We’ll start with the story of William Earl Moldt.
Moldt was a 40-year-old man with a pretty average life. He was a mortgage broker. He was about 6 feet tall, and about 225 pounds. He disappeared back in 1997. He’d been out drinking at a strip club the night before, calling his girlfriend from there at about 9:30PM, telling her he was going to be leaving soon. He was confirmed as leaving the bar at 11PM. -
Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band originally formed in Canada in 1994. They’re an experimental rock group who has had quite a bit of success. Their most popular song is called East Hastings, and it was featured in the 2002 film, “28 Days Later”. Anyone who has seen the movie likely remembers that haunting song as the film’s protagonist wanders around a deserted city.
That’s not the only success the band has had though. Throughout the years, and despite the various drama that bands have with members leaving and hiatuses to pursue other projects, they’ve collected quite a cult following and they still produce music today. So while you may not have heard of this band, all you need to know for the purposes of this podcast are that the band is popular in many circles with rabid fans dying to hear their music.
In 1994 shortly after forming the band, they assembled at a small studio in New Brunswick to record an album. This album had a very small run. Just 33 copies of this cassette tape were created in total, and over the years all cassettes vanished. Despite the best efforts by the fans to track down the missing album, they were unsuccessful. The album was destined to be lost forever. Even the band didn't have a copy. -
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This is the story of Bianca Devins, a young woman who put too much trust into a man she’d met online, and a man who used a murder to elevate his social media clout. We’ll go over the role technology played in this crime and the distribution of the horrific photos taken at the crime scene, how always looking for more internet influence can sometimes lead to bad decisions, and how the internet was used to stalk and ultimately murder a young Instagram Influencer. But if we dig a little deeper into this freakshow, I think we’ll find that this story is also about how, sometimes, the good of the internet can overpower the bad.
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This is a story about how the internet played a part in both the propagation and the collapse of a large, multinational network of child pornographers.
We know from shows like To Catch a Predator that, sometimes, law enforcement will pose online to bait potential or active predators into a trap. And that’s how this story starts as well. An agent chatted online with a group of people who fantasized about kidnapping, raping, killing, and eating small toddlers and infants. -
n October of 2009, a user on the internet took to comment sections on various blogs and articles and started leaving comments about key lime pies from a restaurant named Kutchie’s Key West Cafe. Comments like this are one of the reasons the internet is so great. In fact, entire social networks are devoted to leaving reviews like these, like Yelp. Even Google and Apple Maps have restaurant reviews built into the respective apps. If you find a restaurant or a dish you enjoy, it makes sense to take to the internet and spread that advice.
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Jennifer Ringley made history on April 3, 1996. At the time she was a junior attending Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Like so many college kids, she wanted to use technology to share her life with friends, family, and strangers alike. This was years before social media and instragram, so Jenny had to get clever if she wanted to share what was going on in her life.
Without access to smartphones and constant internet connections, Jenny instead hooked up a webcam to her computer and set up a website that would update every 3 minutes with images taken from that webcam. -
In 1999, Kaycee Nicole created an account at an early social media network called CollegeClub.com. Social media networks and CollegeClub were quite new at the time, and Kaycee, an eager, smart and ambitious high school senior from Kansas, was ready and willing to help the small, but growing, site. She offered her help with administrative tasks and quickly made friends with the staff there. In fact, she quickly made friends with just about everyone, including other users on the site.
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In 2006, a user on 4 chan accidentally stumbled across a live stream of a Korean woman’s apartment. The woman on the camera was sleeping so deeply that the 4-chan user believed her to be dead, but she did awake and quickly hid behind some hand-written signs, written in Korean. He posted his discovery to 4-chan and thus begins the story of Chip Chan.
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This internet freakshow begins on Angelfire of all places. Back as the web was evolving, services like Angelfire and Geocities provided web space and hosting that enabled anyone to create their own websites. These days, the services have faded away to other, easier services. For most people, social media serves their needs to get their stories out to the public. If you’re interested in longer-form blogging, Wordpress sites are a good way to publish your story. But back in 2001, if you had a story to tell, you were likely opening an Angelfire or Geocities account, learning basic HTML, and publishing your story via FTP. And that is the internet world in which we find Ted the Caver. Published in December 2000 and up until May of 2001, the site is set up as a very primitive blog, updating users on the journey of a caver named Ted, along with his associate, known only as ‘B’.
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In some ways Sharon Lopatka was an extremely ordinary woman. Classmates would later describe her as “as normal as you can get”. At age 30, in 1991, she married a construction worker named Victor. Sharon was interested in the internet early, and made her living with various businesses online. She created websites for selling home decor booklets, writing ad copy, and several websites devoted to psychic readings.
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On June 25, 2015, a YouTube user named Obscure Horror Corner uploaded video to his channel of this bizarre video game named Sad Satan. Obscure Horror Channel says that, through an anonymous tip on his YouTube channel, he found and downloaded this game. The game’s origins were a total mystery, attributed only to a random forum post by a person known only as “ZK”.
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On August 5th, 1996, at 3AM a user started posting hundreds of messages to various newsgroups across Usenet. User’s names and email addresses were random and partially obscured typically, and the messages were posted to at least a dozen newsgroups including alt.religion.christian, alt.religion.christian.boston-church, misc.education.homeschool.christian, rec.music.christian, uk.religion.christian, and news.admin.net-abuse.misc.
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On April 17, 2019, a user posted 2 pictures to Facebook. One looked like a drawer and, written it Sharpie, it said, “the truth is under”. From what we can only assume was the bottom of the same drawer, more Sharpie text read, “The body lies at…” followed by a series of GPS coordinates. The Facebook user who posted this posted alongside the photos text that read, “it was donated to the store i work at a few months ago. Pics were taken but i don’t know if anyone followed through with a report. It was sold later that day.”
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On May 4th, 2018, a reddit user named Dementor_of_New posted on /r/RBI (an acronym for Reddit Bureau of Investigation) about a mysterious voicemail his significant other had received on June 9, 2017. The weird thing about this voicemail, although it was sent on June 9, 2017, it was not actually received on the phone until May 4th, 2018. The voicemail contained audio of a woman begging for help. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on how you look at it, the original audio from the call has been removed from the internet and I couldn’t find the original recording.
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Carl Herold was something of a prolific YouTuber. His YouTube channel has almost 20,000 subscribers, totalling nearly 4 million views. His site, "Computer Science for Everyone" had a noble goal. It was meant to teach programming lessons to anyone who had the patience to sit through the videos he created. Later, he even hosted users one-on-one, answering their questions and live-streaming the whole experience so others could learn by watching. The website is long gone by now, but thanks to the internet archive and google caches, you can still peruse the site and learn some programming. In this episode we explore Carl's other, darker and more sinister life.
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"I Feel Fantastic" first appeared on the internet in 2004. It features a song being sung by a robot named Tara. The robot is definitely an inhabitant of Uncanny Valley. The result is a very creepy, eerie vibe even when she’s just standing there doing nothing. As she starts to move, it gets even weirder. The movements are very robotic, as you’d expect from an Android built by an amateur in 2004. In this episode of Internet Freakshow, we explore who made this robot, and the video, and dive deep into the rumors of the creator being a serial killer.
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4chan is a large internet bulletin board that hosts topics on a wide array of subjects. While they sometimes have the reputation of being dangerous or malicious hackers, that is only a small subset of the site. A lot of the posts on the site are just simple prank jokes, memes, creepypasta or green text. There is some truth to the darkside, though. On this episode of Internet Freakshows, we explore some of the dark underbelly of 4chan.
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I’m sure most people listening to this have seen the TV show Hoarders. What if, instead of trying to clean up those hoarder's houses, you instead just gave them a camera and asked them to cook some of their favorite dishes? Well, you may end up with the type of video you see from MasaoHF's YouTube Channel. This episode of Internet Freakshows explores Masao's cooking, his apartment, and some history as to who Masao may be.
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A user joined a paranormal chat room in the October 14, 2000. He went by the name Time_Travel0. At the time, he claimed he had been drinking wine and spoke rather nonchalantly about being a time traveler. The others in the chat room had other odd stories, like claiming to have been reincarnated over 50 times, so most in the chat room did not challenge his story too hard. Time_Travel0 was quite candid about his history, or maybe I should say future. In this episode of Internet Freakshow, we take a closer look at John Titor. He is either a time traveler or an internet troll. You decide.
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