The internet is both a daydream and a nightmare, a place to connect and a place to dissociate, a place where you can meet the most incredible people, and also a space rife with predators and liars.
Anyone who has spent their time scrolling chat rooms, social media, and all of the offerings of the web is likely to have encountered some weird moments. But some people have stories that fill a whole movie plot, with all of the drama and twists and disappointments of a Lifetime movie gone URL.
In a popular Reddit thread, people shared the weirdest internet experiences and the stories range from catfishing, to fake deaths, to love stories.
1. From OP:
I have been on the web since '96 when I got into the chatroom/IRC scene in a HUGE way. I became (and still am) fascinated by how intimate and intense relationships can become when they are text only. I had and have many friends from those times, we were all experimenting with a new and fantastical media for communicating across the world. One friend called herself Cathy and we became very close over a number of months. I'm a Brit, she's a Yank so there was never any likelihood (or need) for meeting. Our conversations were wide and varied and I enjoyed her intelligence and wit.
We met in a large "adult" (i.e not strongly moderated) chatroom but it was conversation, not cybersex, which was the main focus of the group. We were part of a larger group of friends who spent a LOT of time online. In many ways the reason I am so fond of Reddit is because there is a similar vibe to that room and those days. Anyway, after about 12 months of chatting Cathy began to be a bit weird. Not inappropriate exactly, just odd. Difficult to tell when it's text only communication but she was a little off.
Within a couple of weeks I had received several emails from her which were just plain loopy, she hadn't responded to my replies and when she was online it was only briefly and she didn't reply to anyone. Then one day she came online but announced that it wasn't in fact her but her best friend Brenda using her account and that Cathy was dead, had killed herself. Over a strange and short conversation (in the main room) "Brenda" told us Cathy had shot herself in the bath the night before, that she had left a note which mentioned me by name and a couple of others in the room. She told us she was using Cathy's PC to let us know. Then she logged off.
I was pretty devastated. Remember, this is the EARLY days of the web, at least in the UK, and we were pretty much making up online etiquette as we went along, it was exciting but I realized risky. Over the next 24 hours I found myself responding physically and psychologically (I was a psych nurse with psychotherapy training at the time, so I spent a lot of time navel gazing) as one would if it was a friend or close associate. Sh*t was, to coin a phrase, real.
Then, of course, the real shit went right down the rabbit hole. I went back to the chatroom, for the support of my online friends. They quickly called me into a smaller private chatroom and the serious weirdness began. One of the guys in the room is a cop. He points out a couple of inconsistencies in Cathy/Brenda's story. Firstly, women statistically don't shoot themselves, apparently it just doesn't happen. Secondly, if she HAD shot herself, her house would have been considered a murder scene until proven otherwise and that Brenda wouldn't have had access to Cathy's PC for a long time if ever. We realized we had been had, the victims of some strange trick. Nowadays I'd call it trolling, but it wasn't like that then, or it wasn't for me. I was dumbfounded. My feelings and reactions had been very real, intense and painful. I wasn't prepared to believe anyone could do such a thing (I know, such naivete!)
Over the next few days and weeks the small subgroup of friends began to investigate Cathy's story. We first of all compared notes. Turns out she had told us very little about herself of any importance. We "knew" she lived alone, in a small town in Wisconsin and that she worked on the front desk of a local paper. The website of the paper (it had one, not everyone did then) made no mention of a death of a staffer or a suicide, nothing in the obituaries either. A friend phoned the paper and asked for her by first name and position but was clearly fobbed off after a muffled conversation.
This friend then drove 100+ miles and turned up at the paper, asked a receptionist about a friend called Cathy who worked there (remember we had no idea what she looked like) only to see the second receptionist run into a back office (we assume this was Cathy herself) The friend then left as she didn't want to precipitate a crisis. We were convinced, as much as anyone could be in what we were realizing was a foggy medium) that Cathy was alive and for some reason we were victims of a cruel trick.
What finally convinced me of the weirdness of the situation (and incidentally added a layer to my Web-Fu self defense) was that a Mod for the IRC channel let us know that "Cathy" had been logging into the chatroom the whole time under other names, apparently he could tell by her IP address or something. So this ostensible friend had faked her own death and then had sneaked back to watch her friends grieve...
A post-script to the story is that a friend who didn't come online so often later joined the group and told us that Cathy had once confessed to having a drink problem and being very lonely in real life. I was left with an abiding, but strong, fantasy image of a woman in a dark room, perpetually sipping whisky, lit only by a harsh monitor watching the effects of her own death play out on a bunch of strangers.
Although it is such a long time ago this is still a very real and strange "event" in my life. I still struggle to even find an adequate vocabulary for the whole experience. When a group of people from many different locations have a conversation in a chatroom, where does the conversation happen? I had a very real, visceral experience of being in a group, but that grouping never occurred. Cathy's "death" was an emotionally real event in my life, as painful and shocking as the sudden death of a real friend, and the awareness of her deceit came as a betrayal of trust.
As William Gibson so rightly said "there is no there there" so where did all of this strange, gothic story happen?
Although it was painful, then uncomfortable, then enraging then infuriating, this story, as I experienced it's unfolding, has shaped in a very real way my understanding of the internet and my awareness of how much I don't understand. What Cathy did would now be called Trolling, and I still don't understand the junkyard dog motivations of people who would do such things. But I am prepared to stay on the web and accept the risk (inevitability really) that one or two will pass my way.
tl;dr - PyloUK meets lonely woman in chatroom, they talk for many hours over a 12 month period. Woman fakes her own death, then logs back in under different accounts to see the reaction. PyloUK and several others do some investigating and find out they've been had. (thanks to sports_fan for composing this perfect tl;dr. Still don't know what tl;dr stands for though.)
I bought my Xbox release day, and all the usual games. I was an avid Halo 3 player. I loved that shit. I would often play custom games for hours on end, and meet new people, and make new friends.
Another fellow and I became near inseparable when we played. We always played together because we had each others backs. One day I mentioned the town I live in, and he nearly has a heart attack on the microphone.
He proclaims "I shit you not, I live there too". I didn't know how to proceed with this. So we stayed online buddies for a while. One weekend my buddies and I decided to have a LAN party, and were thinking of people to invite.
This was the perfect opportunity to invite my best online friend, I had back up in case he was a psychopath and wanted to murder me. Every time the door rang the room would hold it's breath collectively, waiting to see if it's him or not.
The fateful doorbell ring comes as was expected. We open the door, and standing there is a normal guy, who seems like he's not going to murder us. We set up the PCs and Xbox and get ready to have some fun.
Over the next four years my best friend and I have been hanging out as much as we can. We are near polar opposites, but we can just sit and be entertained by each other for hours.
tl;dr I met my best friend on Xbox live at random, turned out he lived in the same town and wasn't a murderer. Still best friends to this day.
Maybe not "weird," but funny. My brother and I used to play "Yahoo Graffiti" (basically like Pictionary) with random people in the Yahoo game room. And we used to cheat.
He'd be in one room, I'd be in the other. The word would be, say, "dinosaur." So I'd draw a rainbow. Everyone types, "rainbow," "RAINBOW!" "rainbow!!!!!!!!" then my brother types "dinosaur" and gets it right. And so forth for the next few minutes. We'd be on the floor laughing. Anyway, we got "banned until 2016."
My brother beat Ben Affleck in Warcraft 3 - The Frozen Throne.
How do I know it was him, you ask? Well, I remember my brother calling me into the room, and he was soloing against a guy named literally Ben.Affleck (or Ben-Affleck or Ben_Affleck, who the fuck cares) and my brother's name was Mommyspanksme (I was affectionately Daddyspanksme, and we were on the top 5 2v2 arranged teams ladder during many ladder seasons, we were good, maybe you've played us...) Anywho - my brother tells him something like nice name, glhf...so the guys like "ya man u2...funny thing is no one believes that this is really me, the actor." My brother laughs it off, and I watch him beat him 1v1 (he was decent, but not on our level).
Literally the next day we were watching g4tv (I think it was actually techtv still at the time, since we were still watching it) and they were at some game convention or another. Then they did a quick interview with Ben Affleck, most likely because he seemed out of place, and had no movie/game there that he was plugging/a part of. So he tells them that he plays TFT way too much (I think he actually said TFT, but meaning Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne) and that he goes by his name on USEAST.
Me and my brother just looked at each other with jaws dropped...
tl;dr: My brother beat Ben Affleck in an RTS (wc3 - TFT)
Definitely stumbling onto a video of my aunt getting gang-banged by four black dudes.
Someone made a novelty account on Reddit pretending to be my wife and pops up every now and then to reply to my comments making fun of me. I'm actually kind of flattered.
A friend (Friend A) and I were over at this other guy's (Friend B) house back in '96 (we're all guys btw). The guy whose house we were at had AOL. Friend A asked if he could use it. Something happened while he was using it and he just straight up left. I was like wtf but didn't think anything of it and just kept playing video games with Friend B.
Next day I asked Friend A what happened and he said he clicked on Friend B's mail and saw a picture of a dude exposing his penis. So back then we were just like "HOLY SH*T" and thought that some evil person was forcing a picture of his penis on Friend B so I talked to him and was like "yo man you should contact the police or something that's terrible!". That was that.
Fast forward to 2010, reconnected with Friend B via Facebook -- turns out he's openly gay. The thought had never occurred to me back in 1996 that he could have asked for someone to send pics of himself and that he could be gay. I just assumed it was some kind of horrific online predator of sorts. Duh!
Okay, first off, I'd like to tell you i'm an identical twin (and female).
I was just sitting at my computer minding my own business when a friend of mine online says something along the lines of "holy crap! i didn't know you had it in you!" of course I don't have the slightest clue in what he's talking about, so i ask him to clarify.
At this point I would like to state that I am a very modest person and take the idea of people looking at me even showing a considerate amount of skin very...discerning. I'm a very modest person and don't show my body on any sort of whim.
Apparently my twin sister what camwhoring on /b/ or omegle or something. Sh*t.
He didn't buy it when I tried to tell him that those pictures were NOT ME and my twin sister.
Apparently she got posted on motherless or something so every once in a while I have someone message me about it, and i have to explain it's my sister and not me (of course I'd deny it at first but sh*t still sucks).
TL;DR: my identical twin sister camwhores and I get recognized for it.
Throughout the years I became a frequent user of two internet forums. I made thousands of posts between them and met dozens of people. Some of these people actually have became the best of friends with me and we still do stuff with each other all the time (and in some cases we've met IRL). Anyway, I have two great friends I met this way. We are three internet amigos. We've done some pretty crazy stuff and dealt with weird people but one situation comes to mind as far as a "weird" internet experience.
One of these friends online moniker sometimes included Tungsten, and back when we all started using Skype to communicate instead of AIM, Xfire, or MSN (all at the same time), he used it in his name. Now, not a couple days after making his account he gets a random message from some lady name Alice Chen, or something similar, asking about Tungsten. He was weirded out, but he listened to her talk. After a while he coaxed her into revealing what she was really trying to do: get business. She was part of a PR department for some Tungsten plant/factory/business in China (supposedly). He, in response, started to tell her about our Company. Again, we've done some weird things over the years.
Long story short we had a P.O. Box somewhere in Pennsylvania for for a business named C & D Inc. We actually tried to make the business seem legitimate, and most of all: legal. Technically our little business was completely legal. We used it for weird things sometimes, but it was mostly a joke. Now, however, we found ourselves being solicited for business by a Chinese Industrial Equipment Manufacturer, and they were actually interested in our business.
We got so far in the process as to start negotiations, we had meetings (over the internet), and we were shown their "parts catalog" as well as many other things. The problem was when my friend originally started this all, he was completely joking and wasn't being legitimate and called my other friend a doctor. We were trying to shrug that off, and pretend that was not the case but we were worried about legal problems.
Eventually, our goal was clear: convince the business into sending us three machinery joints made from Tungsten, that we would potentially use in our business, that were measured to be able to fit aluminum cans in them i.e.: cup holders. It was a great fun, but eventually we decided that the legal risks were sort of an issue. Impersonation of a doctor or business, and the shipment of military grade material to a small town post office in the U.S.
We just ignored them and they dropped off the face of the Earth. We never got our cup holders, unfortunately.
So, it all begins in 2002, I believe...early summer time...AOL chatrooms hadn't become a crap hole yet. I was 12 at this time, and loved to go into chatrooms and meet new people. Well, I ended up meeting a girl in one. She was a year older than me, and we had a lot in common (video games, anime, manga, etc). One day she (and I don't know if this is true or not, to this day) decided to take a whole lot of pills. I talked to her the whole time telling her it'll be okay, and that life is worth living until eventually I got a message to the effect of "This is Lucca's mom, thank you. We're taking her to the hospital"
A little while after this we decided we were in love, and started "dating". We talked on the phone a little bit, and I remember I went to COSI (Now Imagination Station?... Oh Toledo..), bought something, and mailed it to her.
Eventually, she introduced me to her Japanese friend Keiko. We became friends too, and Keiko introduced me to her friends Jin, Akira.. Rei? I think. It's been awhile. Also to her sister Arisu (who went by Angel.. She was half British/Japanese).
In early 2003 Lucca broke up with me. It was pretty devastating, we had been e-dating for nearly a year. However, I moved on, and got to liking Keiko, and she said she liked me too. She was 3-4 years older than me. A few months later she sent an e-mail saying she didn't love me, she loved Akira. And then she got pregnant..
The babies name was going to be Jori, because I apparently did mean a lot to her. However, the baby died shortly after being born, and Keiko suffered depression, parents got a divorce. Finally in early 2004, she killed herself. This is when I really started talking to her sister, Angel.
She was closer in age to me, I believe only a year older. We talked for quite a long time and got over the loss of Keiko together, and eventually I grew feelings for her. Eventually she grew feelings for me. We were in love. This is also when Jin and Akira went to college in California and came to America (this of course being later in 2004). For the next year I made new friends that went to college, (me being 13 and talking to people in college? yeah I felt awesome). Angel and I kept being lovey dubby. Then shit went cray.
Angel ran away from home. I was terrified. Eventually she messaged me saying she was staying with someone she met while riding the trains.. She was raped. After about a week she managed to escape and go back home, but the damage was done. I tried as hard as I could to help her, but what can be done when something like that happens?
So then, in early 2005 my world was shattered.
"Hey You want the honest truth? There IS no Angel. In fact my name is Kate and I'm 18 years old. There is also no Jin, Keiko, ect. In fact, you were being played. You see, I like to think of myself as a practical jokester, my friends and I have been doing it for years :P. All those pics were taken from like people's dead LJ's, LJ's, and xangas and stuff. I hope you enjoyed us as much as we did, now we'll move on to the next loser who needs friends. Don't worry, this is beinging sent to you, the Lucca whatever her name is girl, and everyone else we've tricked recently. Sorry, but you've been HAD.
-Kate-"
For nearly four years I had talked to these people, trusted them, etc.
In the end, they were fake. Except for Lucca, who I talk to occasionally still.
I guess you could say it was weird. It was more. Tragic. I had learned to love and care about people who didn't exist. I think this is what caused me to distance myself from people for quite some time.
I still have all those emails...and I think a lot of AIM conversations somewhere.
Oh, and the letters and gifts that they sent me on my birthday one year. Yeah, they went all out. Pictures they drew, everything.
Well, here's mine. Time for lunch.
Back when I first discovered the internet I only had access to it on my phone. I joined one of the chatrooms on my mobile provider's site and sort of became a regular there seeing as I had free data back in those days. I got talking to this girl after a while and we eventually exchanged numbers and would talk on the phone for hours, send each other pics and shit. After about a year, I ended up taking a 3 hour train journey to go and meet her.
8 years later we still live together and have 3 year old twin daughters. That was pretty weird.
It started back in November 2004. There was a blog that I liked to follow, but the main author had decreased in posting. He started allowing others to "guest blog". One of these guest bloggers linked to another blog and said "i can't believe this guy's for real". I was intrigued, so of course I went to check it out. I fell in love with the very first entry I read. Unbelievably, head over heels, in love. Too bad, he had a girlfriend. And lived on the opposite side of the country. Unrequited internet crush.
I anonymously stalked for a little bit, catching up on all his previous entries. Finally, I commented on something he wrote. He was very responsive and polite. Over the next couple months, I daresay we became friends. Somewhere along the way, he and his girlfriend broke up. We began talking on the phone and traded pictures. By February 2005, we were a couple. But we'd never physically met.
Neither of us wanted to rush things, and I couldn't just pick up and go visit. We both worked very demanding careers and couldn't just take vacations without a lot of planning. By the summer, we were still together and wanted to meet so we began making plans for a trip. Then, one day, he didn't show up for our nightly chat. I worried and worried. A day or so later, he IMed me to tell me his sister had been killed and mom had been injured in a car crash. He was very close to his sister and his world had been torn apart. I felt so helpless and sad. I was across the country and couldn't be there for him. When he said it wasn't appropriate for our first meeting, I understood. I did my best to help him cope from the opposite side of the country.
A couple months pass, life moves on. We were still together but I felt frustrated by our inability to meet in person. Hurricane Katrina had hit and I felt I needed to do something. My career circumstances had changed, I had some more free time, and so I volunteered to go to Louisiana and help out for a few weeks. I was sent down in October and it was while I was there that I learned the truth. Another male blogger who blogged on the same site we did told me that my boyfriend had met yet another blogger, a woman who happened to be a flight attendant, in person when she had a layover in his town. And he wasn't who he said he was. It had finally gotten to him and he needed to confess, but couldn't do it to me because he knew how it would hurt me. She told this other blogger because she knew he'd tell me and that I'd probably believe it.
He had lied about almost everything. His name was different, he had sent me fake pictures, and there had been no car crash and his sister was fine. I was crushed. I had grieved the death of someone I'd never met, and she wasn't even dead. That really f*cks with your head.
I was furious. I tried calling him but he wouldn't answer. I got trashed and banged someone else. I just didn't know what to do with myself.
After I got home, I reached out to him again. I needed closure, understanding. I needed to know how he could do that to me, lie to me like that, when I was nothing but honest with him. He answered all my questions, and he answered them honestly. We spent hours on the phone and he answered every question I asked.
He was of a different culture, not American. He was Middle Eastern and Muslim. He didn't have much self-confidence in his looks but knew he could write. He borrowed a name and a picture and used that when necessary, but all writing was authentically his. He said he'd wanted to meet me but knew he'd be caught in his lies so had to do something drastic. (I still don't know what made him choose to fake the death of a family member.) He was broken-hearted, said he was sorry, and then said goodbye knowing I'd never speak to him again.
But he was wrong. I seem to possess a remarkable amount of empathy, and having dealt with poor self-esteem myself, I understood the appeal of pretending to be someone else. I could see how easy it was to get caught up online. I loved him, and I forgave him.
We rebuilt a friendship based on honesty and trust. January 2006, we met in person. Every moment was amazing. April 2006, I visited him again. I found an apartment and a job, and six weeks later I moved to his town.
We lived a beautiful life together for a little over a year. We were matched perfectly, and knew we wanted to get married. The only stumbling block was his culture, because his family would never accept me. We kept persevering, hoping we'd find a way through it. His career forced him to move a year after I'd moved to be with him, so I followed him again. Whereever he was, I wanted to be.
Three weeks later, he left me for an arranged marriage. He came to my place after work on a Monday, told me he was flying to his parents' home on Wednesday, and getting married on Saturday. And he did. I considered trying to stop the wedding, but didn't. He'd made his choice and while it wasn't the one I wanted, it was his choice to make and not mine. That's not to say it didn't fuck me up. It did. I'm still fucked up from it and it ended almost five years ago.
That was a pretty weird internet experience.
TL;DR Met someone online. Became a couple. He faked the death of his sister to get out of meeting me. I forgave him. We met a few months later, were a couple for more than a year, then he left me for an arranged marriage.
I don't have any horror stories, other than a couple of friends in college conversing with and eventually meeting underage girls (nothing sexual ever happened, as far as I know).
The strangest thing that ever happened to me is that I was in a random chatroom one night and started conversing with a girl from New York. I asked what area she was from, and she said she lived in an area of Queens that I was familiar with because a friend of a friend from my super-small (like 3000 people) hometown had moved up there when we were in middle school; I had actually met and talked to him when he was down for a visit probably a few months prior to this night.
I told her I knew somebody from up there, she asked who, I said his name, and she was like, "Oh my God, that' s my ex-boyfriend!" That's when I realized how small the world could be.
tl;dr Randomly ran into associate's ex-girlfriend from 700 miles away in chatroom.
Around 8/9 years ago I used to have a LiveJournal that I updated pretty regularly. I adored the thing and spent countless hours tweaking the style-sheet and writing epic-length posts about college, girlfriends etc. I became friends with a girl from Wales through it who I thought was pretty hot, and used to eagerly await her daily posts.
She frequently mentioned two guys, one who she supposedly lived with who she was close friends with, and the other a guy who was the singer in a band (this was before myspace really took off, pre-last.fm era, making it hard at the time to verify) who often got in to drink/drug related trouble with the police. These two guys also had LJ's, which were regularly updated, MSN accounts and often mentioned the girl. I had no reason at the time to doubt the authenticity (or existence) of these people, indeed the posts themselves on each of the three LJ's were extensive and well fleshed out, and seemed to genuinely have been written by different people. They each had large amounts of followers too, I should mention.
The girl used to comment regularly on my posts, and one day all of a sudden just stopped and deleted her LJ. I thought nothing of it as I had a lot of friends on the site, and this happened from time to time. She seemed kind of insecure so I guessed that she'd had enough of the site and had decided to ditch using it. What made the situation weirder was that the two guys (housemate and the singer) had also stopped updating their journals. Fast forward a couple of months, and I get a friend request on the site from a new user, which turns out to be this same girl.
She told me that she'd had a lot of stuff going on and hadn't had time to update her LJ, and just thought making a new one would be easier. I asked her over MSN about the two friends, to which she replied that her housemate had been sectioned and put in to care for severe anorexia, and the singer had died of a drug overdose. Naturally (though with a healthy degree of skepticism) I offered my condolences and tried to comfort her, leading to her telling me that she'd got a new boyfriend who she sent me a picture of.
This is where I got a bit creeped out. I should probably mention now too that at this time I lived with my parents about 25 miles away from London in a quiet suburban area of Hertfordshire (Around 200 miles away from where she lived). The picture she'd sent me was the profile picture of a guy who lived in the same town as me, who I knew from nights out, and occasionally talked to. I told her I knew him, to which she aggressively replied that I couldn't do, before blocking me, deleting her LJ, and ceasing all contact with me. The next time I saw the guy from the photo I told him about her, and he had no clue who she was, and was pretty amused about the whole thing.
tl;dr - Met a girl on LiveJournal who was masquerading as three different people who then created the fictional death of two of these people and claimed to be in a relationship with a guy from the same town as me who had never heard of her.
I'm female, pretty much grew up on the internet. I'd spend hours a day in AOL chatrooms as a tween. Around age 12, I began chatting to a guy who said his name was Joey, that he was around 18-19, and he lived in New York (I live in SC). We spoke online for about a year or two, very sparsely, and always very innocent. He'd send me pictures of himself; he was young and cute, he definitely looked teenage. He eventually asked if he could call me, and me being naive, I gave him our house number (we didn't have cell phones yet).
We talked on the phone about once or twice a month; he was funny, had sort of a higher-pitched voice, New York accent. Then things started getting weird. His age was always changing and finally he told me he was 30.. he began calling very late at night (anywhere from midnight-5AM), always from restricted numbers, and he was always very incoherent. I'm not very familiar with drugs so I'm really not sure what he was on but he was definitely high on something.
He was mostly silent when he'd call, but between breaths or what sounded like he was taking a drag, he'd say "Whatta ya doin? Who's wit you? Are ya cheatin on me?" and other weird and inappropriate shit. I'd tell him I was going to hang up and he'd say "Don't hang up." Once, my grandpa answered the phone, and he asked my G-pa if he had been having sex with me (wtf, right?) I'd tell him to stop calling, that my family was asleep, and hang up. He'd call back. This went on for the next couple of years. My family was enraged by it, I told them I was sorry for giving out our number, and they eventually blocked his calls. But not before making sure I was properly ashamed.
Last summer, I was on vacation and was interneting late at night. I ended up on omegle and had the weirdest conversation of my life.
I was talking with a guy who crafted this story that he was an angel in a human's body, using it as a vessel. I know he could have been lying but he seemed really invested in his tale. It sat uncomfortably with me because the conversation kept going on and on.
It was very much like reading a short story, except I was helping to write it with my responses.