Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - Internet Mysteries That Were Solved This Year

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

From the Mandela Effect, to a bunch of concerning Instagram accounts of AI generated children, to a mysterious curtain from Norway, we're looking at the craziest internet mysteries that were solved this year. In this episode we cover The Fruit Of The Loom Mandela Effect, Celebrity #6, and SmartSchoolboy9 Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to bonus content as well as other perks. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to bonus episodes and more when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The internet, to me at least, feels like a kind of mystical place. As someone who's obsessed with history and deep dives and rabbit holes, the internet is where everything that's ever happened has been uploaded for us to browse through. It's like a library where human history has been collected and sorted for us to learn about. But every now and then, something will appear there that no one can make sense of. A true internet mystery. Sometimes it's a song no one on earth can identify, a terrifying image that has no source, or a memory that we all seem to have of something that never existed. And that can feel really eerie because five and a half billion people on the planet

have access to the internet. And if none of them have the answer, what does that say? So today I'm going to be telling you about some of those mysteries. But because it's the end of the year, I actually thought it would be good to cover ones that specifically were solved this year. I say solved kind of in quotation marks because there's

one that I want you to be the judge of. Our first mystery involves the Mandela Effect, a false memory that a lot of us had that some people say they got to the bottom of this year. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. If you're starting to think about what gift you're going to get the men in your life, forget the cliché gifts like socks or ugly sweaters and get him something he'll actually love and use. The Chairman Pro Package from Manscaped. Let's get into it. The Chairman Pro has not one, but two interchangeable skin-safe blade heads.

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for those who are not familiar. It's when a group of people remember something one way, when historical record shows that it happened another way. The name comes from a time in South African history when a lot of people remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Really, Nelson Mandela died in 2013. But the term was coined in 2009 by Fiona Broom

once she realized that she was not alone in remembering him dying in the 80s. Recently, a Redditor asked, quote, which Mandela effect messed up your head most? And you can tell in the comments just how freaked out people are by this. There are, of course, people who remember the Baron Stain Bears being spelled Stein,

S-T-E-I-N, not Stain, S-T-A-I-N. That one really gets people upset. There's also those that remember in Cinderella, the evil witch saying, "'Mirror, mirror on the wall, "'who's the fairest one of all?' Well, she doesn't actually say that. She says, "'Magic mirror on the wall,

"'who's the fairest of them all?' Which is especially disorienting when you realize there was a Snow White movie in 2012 called Mirror Mirror. Or if you're like me, you remember with every fiber of your being a movie called Shazam that starred Sinbad. It was like on Disney and maybe the late 90s and I have memories of Sinbad being in this movie. But come to find out the movie was actually Kazam with Shaquille O'Neal.

And I have especially a bone to pick with this one, because how do so many of us remember this fake movie that never existed? But there is one Mandela effect that comes up a lot in this thread, and it's something that I didn't think really needed to be debated. It's whether or not the brand Fruit of the Loom ever had a cornucopia in its logo. Fruit of the Loom is a clothing company known mostly for its underwear, and they've been around since like 1851. That's 170 plus years of people being able to recall the logo for the company.

I mean, I can see it now in my mind's eye. A cornucopia with its little tail in the sky and a bunch of fruits like apples and grapes spilling out of it. And that's how a ton of people on the internet remember the logo as well. But apparently, according to Fruit of the Loom themselves, the logo never had a cornucopia. And if you Google it today, you will see a pile of fruit without one. One user on Reddit said, quote, I remember being a kid and asking my dad what the brown thing on the logo on his old undershirt was and him telling me that it was a cornucopia. And this person, I will say, is not alone.

The memory of the cornucopia is not just online. In 2012, South Park released an episode with a quote cornucopia brand tag in Cartman's underwear clearly playing on Fruit of the Loom and a Fruit of the Loin spoof that also had a cornucopia is also featured in the 2003 movie Ant Bully. A 1995 article published in the Philadelphia Daily News reporting on the layoffs taking place at Fruit of the Loom, titled the article, Cornucopia of Job Cuts. And yet, in 2022, Fruit of the Loom tweeted, quote, Did it hurt when you realized our logo never had a cornucopia?

People started freaking out about this after they read the tweet and they went through their old Fruit of the Loom clothes only to find that the logo on the tags did not include a cornucopia. And then shortly after that someone found a Fruit of the Loom commercial from 1987 and it showed that the logo didn't have a cornucopia either. But how did so many people remember the logo this way? And beyond that, how did so many other pop culture moments spoof Fruit of the Loom by using a logo that never existed? So this kind of stayed an internet joke for a while. People would find more evidence of Fruit of the Loom

having a cornucopia in the logo, and then the brand would tweet that they never had one and so on and so forth. But it wasn't until this year when the issue got put to bed for good, or so they say. So in January of this year, a Reddit user called SasquatchEaster posted a picture that confused people even more.

They had found a thrift store that promoted the brands shoppers could find inside of the store with murals on the walls. And lo and behold, they had a Fruit of the Loom logo painted on the wall that had a cornucopia. And then on March 10th of 2024, ex-user Kurtz Prime posted another photo that should have ended the argument for good. He replied to the original Fruit of the Loom tweet, the one that read, Did it hurt when you realized our logo never had a cornucopia?

With a picture of a faded old t-shirt with a cornucopia on the tag. And this set the whole debate ablaze again. So internet sleuths who wanted to find the answer to this question once and for all, went all the way back to the 1973 trademark that was filed by Fruit of the Loom. And on this trademark registration document

that Sluths found, the company had to describe what the trademark would look like and any variations of it that would be included. And there on the document, the logo was described as having quote, baskets of fruit, containers of fruit or cornucopia parentheses horn of plenty. quote, baskets of fruit, containers of fruit, or cornucopia, parentheses, horn of plenty. But what's even weirder on top of all of that, on top of the trademark literally saying

there was a cornucopia in the logo, is there's a drawing that accompanies this description, except that drawing only contains fruit. There's no cornucopia in it. And some conspiracy theorists thought that maybe the company had made a mistake when filing the trademark and instead of dealing with the consequences of the mistake they just tried to bury the evidence. But Snopes compiled every iteration of the Fruit of the Loom logo from 1917 on, and clear as day in those images, none of them feature a cornucopia. But Snopes actually went a little bit further, and the story does get a little bit weirder.

And they found that actually the 1973 patent that was filed with the cornucopia was rejected in 1980. That was never the official patent. The one that was refiled and accepted in 1981 did not feature a cornucopia. It wasn't written that the logo would have the cornucopia. So Snopes even took it further and found that actually the Kurtz Prime photo that was posted on X of the t-shirt with the logo was Photoshopped.

And three other photos that were found in the wild of what the old logo supposedly looked like were also Photoshopped. So Snopes officially put the argument to bed of this year. Fruit of the Loom, in fact, did not ever feature a cornucopia in its logo, no matter how much you think you remember it being there. But what do you guys remember?

Do you remember the logo having a cornucopia in it? Or is all of this obviously some sort of fake internet phenomenon? Let me know what you think. This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you bump on repeat and you have to share it with your friends

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$45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Okay, our next internet mystery that got solved this year has to do with a very mysterious image that was found on a curtain in Finland of a person who may have never existed. A mystery known as Celebrity No. 6. So on January 28, 2020, a Redditor named Tonsta H posted in the subreddit Movies to ask about a mystery that had been plaguing them for some time, the post read, quote,

"'I have had curtains made of this fabric for over 10 years,' parentheses maybe from 2008, but I still haven't recognized all movie stars. Hopefully you can help me.'" The image they included with the post of the fabric was this turquoise tapestry made up of eight different squares. Each featured an Andy Warhol pop-art-esque stylized portrait of a group of eight celebrities. Each celebrity was drawn using two colors, white and turquoise. The poster believed the

celebrities were famous at the time the fabric was originally made, so around 2008 let's say. But now, over 10 years later, some of those once familiar faces had become a mystery. And not only that, the fact that they were only two-tone images rather than exact pictures made them even harder to identify. Tonsta H wanted help figuring out who all of the celebrities were. They had already gotten a few people identified.

Ian Summerhalder from Vampire Diaries was celebrity number seven. Orlando Bloom, who was popular at the time for Pirates of the Caribbean, was celebrity number eight. But there was something else interesting about these images. They seemed to be pulled from actual photos taken of the celebrities, like they each had a source image that they were drawn from. Jessica Alba was clearly celebrity number four, though the original poster hadn't found a matching photo, so they were also asking for help finding the source photos for the images. And after this was posted on Reddit, the

internet really did its thing. And just over a day, the community managed to identify Victoria's secret model Adriana Lima as both celebrity number one and celebrity number three, while celebrity number two and number five were matched as Josh Holloway and Travis Fimmel. Josh Holloway was in the very popular show, Lost, at the time, and Travis Fimmel had starred in various WB shows, including Tarzan.

Thousands of internet sleuths were searching the web for corresponding images, and they were finding them rather quickly. After Jessica Alba's source image was finally found to be from the 2007 Kids' Choice Awards, the original poster posted, quote, "'Number six is now the last one to solve.'" It should have been easy.

The rest of the celebrities were found in just one day. But little did they know, they were rallying investigators from all across the internet for a four year search into someone that time forgot. Celebrity number six was a sketch drawn in turquoise and white of an attractive androgynous woman with her hair half pulled back. She had a sharp jawline and low set eyebrows over her fox eyes. She was gorgeous, but it wasn't obvious who she was. I've seen this image of her and she looked sort of like a few different people, which really meant that she looked like no one specifically.

But Reddit took the deep dive seriously from the start. And over the next year, guesses quickly began to pile up of both women and men, from Sharon Stone to Taylor Kitsch to digitized renderings that matched Celebrity Six's bone structure to River Phoenix's. But nothing was a perfect match. And there was never any source image found to confirm that Celebrity Six was any of those people. So, Tonsta H called in reinforcements. They brought their quest to more subreddits,

like the Tip of My Tongue subreddit and internet mysteries, but each community struggled to name this person, who in theory was famous just over 10 years ago. The guesses started getting more outrageous in order to cover a wider group of people. Like one person at this time guessed maybe the celebrity was Amanda Knox. It was not. And also there were these like convincing photos of Evangeline Lilly, who was another actor from Lost.

Those were dropped into the thread. And though she looked very similar to Celebrity No. 6, it wasn't a perfect match and there was no source image to confirm. I have spent all day on this, one redditor wrote. How can this sub of all places not identify someone who was supposedly famous enough to make it onto this curtain fabric. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion we are being gaslighted. And maybe they were? Maybe a European company in the early 2000s strategically placed a fake person on a set of children's curtains knowing that one day it would drive the internet into a shared psychosis.

Not super likely, but maybe. It did make people feel like they were once again subject to the Mandela effect. Like this was a person who just vanished from our timeline. Someone who was once famous, who just didn't exist anymore. It was the equivalent of walking into a thrift store and seeing a Shazam poster

with Sinbad on it because yes, I'm still not over that. But it's at this point where because this story had taken off worldwide to no avail, Tonsta H provided a bit more of additional context in hopes that it would help the investigation. They said that they had bought the fabric from a Finnish department store called Antilla. And they also said that they moved out of their childhood bedroom where the curtains

were hung in 2009. So the fabric must have been purchased before then. One poster who went by username Eremotravels took that information and started digging even further. They started by designating a search window from 2007 when Jessica Alba's Kids Choice Award red carpet photo was snapped to 2009, the latest the curtains could have been purchased. And they ordered vintage Antilla catalogs from these years through the Finnish Business Bureau. At the same time, Tonsta H was able to deduce that the fabric's official name

was figures from these digital archives on Antilla's website. Now that they knew more about the fabric, they just had to find the designer who would be able to confirm which celebrity portrait was used. Except there was a problem with that. They discovered that the store was actually bought in 2015 by a company called 4K and

after that Antilla went bankrupt, which wiped out all of the digital archives and left all of its stock to be discontinued forever. So it felt like the end of the road. But then, Aramo Travels made another discovery. Yes, the Antilla stock did get discontinued. That is, except for the popular Anno collection, which the fabric figures happened to be a part of. Quickly, Aeremo Travels managed to send an email to a Czech retailer that still sold the collection.

Maybe they had answers like who the designer was. And finally, after four years of searching, the celebrity number six mystery was just one response away from being solved. But the answer that they received just didn't add up. They were informed that the fabric was made in 2015 and the community knew that this information was false because the fabric was in the original poster's home in 2009. the fabric was in the original poster's home in 2009. But they also learned that there was probably not a designer that made this fabric. A former Antilla employee contacted the search efforts and revealed that quote, there was only one in-house designer working at the Anno brand,

but they barely designed anything themselves. Most of the designs came from the Swedish company who had connections with India or China or were bought from theirs. And this, once again, felt like the end of the road for search efforts. They were never gonna find the designer. So that meant they were just going to have to keep guessing, but they had been doing that for four years

and no amount of reverse Google image searching was working. That is until this year. On September 8th, 2024, the post that changed everything went live. It was titled in all caps, C6 has been found. The post came from user Steven Morse, who was new to the community, but he had gone back to the picture it all started with and edited the image into oblivion to make it look

less like fabric and more like a human. And then he reverse image searched his edit. Before this, people then he reverse image searched his edit. Before this, people were just reverse image searching the illustration, the turquoise and white illustration that they had. No one had attempted to make a human model. When he did this, there was one woman's photo that popped up too many times to ignore. Her name was Leticia Sarda. If you don't recognize that name,

don't worry, you're not alone. Leticia was a Spanish editorial model during the 2000s. She was by no means a household name and hasn't remained as famous as the others on the fabric, but she was a very real person. They were able to locate the exact picture that the illustration was based on. It was from a photo shoot she did for Women Magazine.

At long last, celebrity number six was found. And ironically enough, this made her more famous than ever. It turns out that while thousands of internet stalkers looked for her for years, Letitia was busy raising her two children in Tenerife. She had quit her modeling career in 2009 and just never looked back. One day, she got an email from a stranger asking her to provide an original photo used to design a colorful graphic of her face and this was the first time that she learned the internet had been searching for her for years. She said that their passion made her happy in a

certain way because quote they made a lot of effort you know to just find a person on a fabric. For our last story, I have truly one of the most bizarre things I have ever read about. Actually, it's more than bizarre. It's disturbing and gross and shocking. And tragically, it does involve children. Though thankfully none were harmed, but I just wanted to give that as a warning about what's coming.

This is the very troubling case of Smart Schoolboy9. On April 15th of this year, a Reddit user called Numerouscut792 was scrolling Instagram just like any other day when they came upon a few Instagram profiles that they couldn't make sense of. Not really knowing what else to do, they ran to the subreddit Instagram for answers. Numerous cuts post was titled, quote, creepy accounts pretending to be kids. It included seven screenshots of very strange posts by three separate accounts

that all seemed to be fake school children. Some of the images appeared to be AI generated and others appeared to be an adult dressed as a child. But these weren't just regular children as you can imagine. One account, TruthSticks11, featured a blonde child with pale white skin like a corpse's. He had these bright icy blue eyes and a distorted smile outlined by thick cherry red lips.

The boy looks incredibly uncanny valley, and each photo of him included a big text block written out like a personal diary about trying new hairstyles and Brexit, just a bunch of random stuff. The bio of the profile read, quote, beautiful boy and account looked after by me, a degree educated mother, choosing to stay anonymous, good original written work, advice and compassion. Numerous cut 792 bravely

asked, quote, is this an age play thing or something more sinister? It didn't take much searching around the profile to see that it was in fact something more sinister. By scanning TruthStix11's following and likes, sleuths found an account named Girl Chloe Six, which posted similar content on an account said to be run by a parent, but seemed to feature images of a real girl. There were frequent captions about her obsession with heels.

Quote, after coming home from school, education isn't over once the blue blazer, gray jersey, neat tie, white shirt, heeled mini boots are in the wardrobe," read one of the captions. Chloe's profile also featured posts about the dangers of online predators, but the writings were vague and confusing. One post read, quote, don't be deceived by the deceivers, often pretending to be young boys online. Was that a warning for us, the viewer? It was clear that these profiles were fake. It was just a little confusing who would actually be running them,

but it seemed like it was definitely someone pretending to be a young boy online. Both accounts only had a handful of followers and they were not following many accounts but both were following a third account with the handle SmartSchoolBoy9. This profile was also posted to Reddit by numerous cut and it was by far the most horrifying of all the profile. SmartSchoolBoy9's Instagram was laid out

the same as the other two. The bio read, quote, "'Account looked after by mum. "'I'm a mixed race schoolboy, age 10.'" The posts were mostly reels featuring lots of confusing text, just like the other profiles. But at a closer glance,

anyone could see that this user was not an AI image of a child or a real child. Smart Schoolboy9 was an adult whose true age was masked by white face paint and digital manipulation, making him look akin to the uncanny valley child on the Truthsticks11 account. The videos he posted showed himself putting on this high pitched voice, methodically sticking out his tongue and urgently moving his hands back and forth. He was also making out of place noises like raspberries or kissy sounds, and he covered his body with these colorful digital stickers.

Through examining these accounts, Reddit pieced together that the voice Smart Schoolboy9 spoke with was eerily similar to the voice on TruthStix11 profile. Let me know if you like school as well. Whatever plot was going on here, it seemed like all the accounts were in on it together, and they were all being spearheaded by Smart Schoolboy9. Like, he had created a strange digital world of distorted children. By May of this year, it seemed like Smart Schoolboy9 had created far more than three accounts.

Someone had uncovered dozens of associated profiles across multiple platforms, and combing through the likes, comments, and follows of Smart Schoolboy 9, a profile named Stephanie Schooley was found. Stephanie was another AI-generated child created with those big wide eyes and bright thick lips. Disturbingly, her profile was actually more sexual in nature than the others,

though she was described as being only 12 years old. In some of the Stephanie posts, it's clear that the adult man running the account is dressing up like her. In one image, he wears the same bright lips and pale makeup as the AI children, but he's also wearing a wig and schoolgirl clothes. It's strange to see, but it still wasn't clear why the person was doing this. Someone commented that maybe the pale face,

red lips and tongue coming out was from a drowning fetish. Others agreed and said, quote, I have a theory that the uncanny editing is due to his obsession with exaggerated childlike features. This might be why he paints his face white and exaggerates his mouth and paints his teeth to make them stand out. Someone else wondered if maybe this was all part of a twisted game, like it was just a consenting group of adults playing a really

messed up ARG or alternate reality game. Whatever the case, it felt like there was a ticking clock to figure out what exactly was happening though because it involved children. And more sleuthing revealed that some of the accounts were now starting to comment on profiles of actual children. Under one photo of a child, Smart Schoolboy9 warned them that there are creeps out there on the Internet who comment on photos of boys their age and they should be warned.

On top of that, sleuths found that some of Smart Schoolboy 9's edited posts used non-AI generated photos of children that didn't have a public origin on the Internet. How did he get these privately sourced images? Well, it seemed like he had taken them himself. He also had posted photos taken in secret of children on playgrounds. Poems that were posted by the fake profiles heavily alluded to child kidnapping, bondage, and even cannibalism. These suggestive topics paired with the videos of a man roaming around

the streets with potential access to real school children raised major alarm bells. So people on the internet started pouring through the posts looking for any clues they could find as to who this mysterious man was. And that's when someone on Discord caught onto a trend. An adult's name was occasionally mentioned in the fake profiles captions. That name was David. David's relation to the fake children was never clarified and his face was never pictured, but he seemed to be important in this world. These internet sleuths were able to trace landmarks in some of Smart Schoolboy 9's videos, and they realized that all of this was taking place in an area outside of London.

Sleuths also unearthed a strange quote in a local newspaper about the necessity of enforcing school uniforms. The name of the concerned citizen being interviewed was David. David Alter, a 59-year-old local man. Through these clues, the group felt that Smart Schoolboy Nine's true identity had been unmasked and their findings were said to be handed to the police. But even with the authorities allegedly stepping in,

the internet's investigation did not end there. On August 25th of this year, YouTuber Nick Crowley released a 27-minute mini-documentary which delivered a fascinating recap of the internet's hard work to a larger audience. Go watch it if you haven't, it's great. After Crowley's digital expose, the original Smart Schoolboy9 page was finally taken down. And that's all fine and great, but many people were still worried. This person could just make more profiles.

And also they were clearly going to places where children were and snapping photos of them. So removing their Instagram profile was just a bandaid on a much larger problem. So people of the internet were determined to pull back every layer of this case, and the path led them to a small English city of Doncaster. And then on August 27th of this year,

another Reddit user shared screenshots of an ongoing discussion in the UK subreddit, rdoncaster. There, urban legends about David Walter Alter had become the talk of the town. In fact, so many disturbing accounts were flooding the sub that moderators would eventually ban his name altogether. One redditor claimed that a man named David from Don Doncaster quote, got jailed for stalking a teenage pupil who attended a nearby Hallcross Academy. This comment alleged

the man in question had innocently insisted he was researching for a book he was writing called The Spirituality of Girls. These rumors contributed to Reddit's assertion that David was not only a real person, but one that was a real threat to public safety. There was also some evidence that he was using other aliases like David London and David Stansfield. And by tracing these aliases,

an older Smart School Boy Nine female persona came to light and the fake little girl's name was Ziya Patel. Ziya posted on an alumni Facebook group for a prep school called Stockwell Manor. In a long post from 2019, Ziya wrote about her 11-year-old friend Stephanie, which we've heard that name before in this story, and the post talked about Stephanie's

older brother, whose name was David. According to Zia's secondhand story, this fictional David had a bad experience as a pupil at Stockwell Manor in 1974. David had a girlfriend who made him happy, but an abusive teacher punished him in front of everyone with a walking stick, which ruined his reputation. This felt like a thinly veiled attempt to plant Easter eggs about his real life. The fact that Smart School Boy 9 used Stockwell as a last name on some of his social media

dupes further solidified Reddit's theory that David Alter attended the manor. So people started digging into the backstory of Stockwell Manor, and what they found was kind of shocking. News reports in the Evening Standard documented the conviction of a teacher named Jeff Morell. Morell worked at the prep school from 1973 to 1983 and was later found guilty of 12 counts of sexual assault. If the real smart school boy nine attended Stockwell Manor, Reddit speculated there could be a strong chance that David crossed paths with a predator

before his own dark future. It seemed each new piece of information learned fueled the internet's desire for vigilante justice. And despite Reddit's community guidelines, Discord rules, and Nick Crowley's advice, users have blasted David's private address and harassed the problematic account's DMs. A deleted TikTok showed the smashing

of a car window in Doncaster, though it was never confirmed to actually belong to David Alter. And as of today, there haven't been any arrests in this case. And though the master account, Smart Schoolboy9, has been disabled, new posts from Stephanie Schooley, Zia Patel and David London

have been spotted as recently as September of this year. There are still so many questions surrounding the case of David Alter, including why he was doing this. But the mystery of who was behind these accounts may have been solved. I myself am very guilty of getting caught up in these internet mysteries. I love lost media and tales from the dark web. I also know how I get when I'm really focused on a mystery. I'll lie in bed at night just staring staring at my ceiling, thinking about it.

I'll look up internet records and go down all these rabbit holes. And what's nice about mysteries that seem to exist in the ecosystem of the internet is there can be thousands of people, just like me, obsessing over them. And that's why a lot of them tend to get solved. But what has always been scary to me

is when they're not solved. When the combined mind power of people from all over the world can't get to the bottom of something. There are mysteries that exist in that category, but that's something for a future episode. For now, happy browsing. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me,

Kaylen Moore. Additional research and writing by Marissa Dow. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grace and Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Head over to heartstartartspounding.com.

Until next time, stay curious. Ooh.