The Internet's Deepest Mysteries (Part 6)

The TikTok Mirror

It all began with a draft. Samantha Hartsoe, a 26-year-old resident of New York City, was annoyed by a cold draft that seemed to exist in her bathroom. She had been living there for a while, but it wasn’t until she returned from a weekend hiking trip that she noticed how cold it was making her bathroom. She asked her roommates if they could feel air entering their bathrooms as well, but nobody else had noticed anything.

Curious, Samantha began investigating what could be the cause of the cold air entering her apartment.

Upon searching the bathroom, she discovered that the air was coming from behind her mirror. Once she realized that the mirror wasn’t firmly attached to the wall and could just be lifted off, she did what anyone in 2021 would have done: Samantha began filming her adventure and uploading it to TikTok.

Four videos were uploaded in total. In the first video she explained the situation, and the second showed her removing the mirror for the first time so as to preserve her initial reaction. Behind her bathroom mirror was a hole in the wall. Her roommate, John, was filming and at first believed it to just be some wiring behind the mirror. But as Samantha peered through the hole, she could see it wasn’t just the inside of the wall—it was an entire secret room.

By the third video, it was time for her to pass through the portal into Narnia, or whatever the hell was on the other side of her mirror. John tried to stop her, but he clearly didn’t try that hard since he was still just standing there, filming her for TikTok. With a hair band holding a flashlight on her head and a hammer in hand for protection, Samantha crawled through the hole.

Once she had lowered herself into the hidden room, she immediately realized that she wouldn’t be able to reach the hole to climb back out, and that she would need to find an alternate exit. John handed the phone back to her so she could record the final video from inside while he presumably went to draft an ad looking for a new roommate in case she never returned.

Finding a secret room behind a wall in your apartment would be pretty creepy, but as Samantha navigated the space she had entered she suddenly realized it wasn’t just a room behind her mirror—it was an entire three-bedroom apartment. The apartment clearly wasn’t in use in any official capacity. The floors were torn up and there was an old toilet sitting in the middle of one of the rooms. And no, it wasn’t in the bathroom.

However, Samantha did see what she referred to as “signs of life.” There were some trash bags throughout the rooms, and there was an empty water bottle that clearly hadn’t been there very long. She also realized that all of the windows were wide open, the obvious source of the cold air that was leaking into her bathroom.

Unable to climb back through the hole by which she entered, Samantha eventually located and exited through the front door of this secret apartment and navigated her way back through the building to her apartment. Her final TikTok video ended with her hanging the mirror back up and stating that she was going to have a fun call with her landlord the next day.

While the obvious answer might be that it was just an older apartment that was being renovated, Samantha was insistent that she had never heard any construction sounds. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t really explain why the two apartments would be connected by a secret passage behind her mirror.

So how does this story end? Were the trash bags and water bottle a sign that some squatter was living behind Samantha’s mirror? Was she somehow oblivious to the sounds of contractors on the other side of her wall? Or was there some other explanation, perhaps that none of this even happened?

Chechclear.asf

The internet can be a pretty terrible place. We’ve mentioned various disturbing images and videos that have been passed around the early internet like goatse and tubgirl, but those are extraordinarily tame compared to Chechclear: one of the internet’s first beheading videos.

The film was made by Chechen insurgents during the First Chechen War in 1996. The victim was a Russian soldier who looks to be about 18-20 years old, and the video begins with him laying on the ground with a boot on his head. The insurgents put a knife through his throat and began to saw. It’s painful enough to watch the blood pouring from the wound, but for those that have seen it the most memorable part is the sound of air whistling through the man’s windpipe as it is severed.

After the execution begins, the film cuts to a later point where the head is no longer attached to the body.

Videos like these were surprisingly common during the Chechen Wars, and there are several of them available. The Chechens would record executions and leave the videos for the Russians to find as a form of intimidation. But once someone found that video, it would only be a matter of time before a copy got made, then another, and the next thing you know a growing community of people had borne witness to these horrors through black market VHS tapes. Or they could just speed up the whole process by airing it on national television, either way.

In 1999, the video was purchased by Russian media who aired it on Channel 2. At this point it was the beginning of the Second Chechen War, and Russia wanted to portray the Chechens as brutal savages to increase public support for the war. American media would report on videos of ISIS beheadings and show still images before the execution, but airing a full-on snuff film on TV news seems like a step too far.

In the early 2000s, the video began to show up on the internet on shock and gore sites with the name Chechclear.asf. ASF was a type of video format that was used for early video streaming, and it’s unclear whether the grainy video quality in the files available online were the result of the camera or the ASF file type. The video quickly became notorious, but there were several mysteries surrounding it.

First is the name. Nobody actually knows what Chechclear is supposed to mean. The Chech part is obvious since it was from the First Chechen War, but beyond that nobody really knows. That also assumed that the filename actually had any real significance, which is not a guarantee.

Next are the people involved. To this day, nobody has been able to identify either the victim or the executioner, and it is absolutely not for a lack of trying. There is debate as to whether the victim was even a Russian soldier or if he was a mercenary, and while several names of soldiers that went MIA have been suggested, it is clear from a cursory glance that none of them are the person in Chechclear.

Likewise, several people have been put forth as the possible executioner. Pretty much any time a Chechen soldier was arrested for war crimes that person was declared to be the identity of the person in Chechclear, but this was never actually the case.

The final mystery surrounding this video is as a piece of lost media. How can a video that is readily available on YouTube be considered lost media? The video described earlier is only 15 seconds long, and contains an obvious cut a couple seconds after the throat is first stabbed, jumping ahead to the final bit where the head is fully decapitated. However, there is believed to be a longer, five-minute version of the video that is what originally aired on Channel 2 in Russia.

Back in the early 2000s, online videos were extremely short. People were only just starting to make the switch from dial-up to cable internet when this video first appeared, so expecting people to try to watch a five-minute video that would probably take you days to download just wasn’t realistic. It’s claimed that the worst of what happened is in the 15 seconds that are online today, and the remainder of the video is just the Russian being beaten and humiliated before he is eventually laid down on the ground for his execution. These claims have existed for at least a decade, but to date no concrete information about a longer version of the video has been discovered.

If this video really exists, what, if anything, does Chechclear mean? And will either the victim or the executioner ever be identified?

The DIY Bonanza

In 2016, an unnamed Ohio couple was performing some DIY house renovations. The couple had purchased a house originally built in the 1940s with the intention of giving it a complete remodel. They started with the main living spaces on the first and second floors of the house, and everything had gone according to plan.

Once the rest of the house was done, it was time for the project that the couple had been dreading: the basement. They knew this was going to be the hardest part of the job, but it couldn’t be put off any longer. While the wife was at work, the husband began the next job: tearing down the old dropped ceiling.

He had been showcasing the entire renovation process on Reddit and Facebook, so when one of the dropped ceiling tiles came crashing to the floor revealing an object hidden in the rafters, he immediately took out his phone to start documenting.

Hiding in the ceiling, wedged tightly between some plumbing and the rafters, was an old, green and grey lunchbox. Being a considerate husband, he decided to wait until his wife returned home from work before opening it. It seems that he gave up working for the day and just stared at the lunchbox, dreaming about what fantastical treasures could be inside it.

When the wife returned home from work, the couple decided to delay the reveal while they speculated on what could be inside. He thought maybe it was filled with antique baseball cards while she guessed that maybe it was a bunch of old recipes. These were needlessly stereotypical, gender-normative guesses, and they were also both really stupid guesses.

This lunchbox had been very deliberately hidden, and for quite a long time. Sports cards would have been worthless when the case was first squirreled away, and your family’s secret recipe for paella from the old country isn’t special enough to require this level of secrecy. It had to be something that would actually have been worth hiding.

Once they finally got around to opening the lunchbox, they found three bundles wrapped in wax paper inside. One bundle contained $20 bills, the other $50 bills, and the third was $100s. The money was old, but crisp. There was thousands of dollars, with the dates on the bills ranging from 1928 to 1934.

Beneath the money was a newspaper from 1953, providing evidence as to exactly how long it had been hidden there. After a little investigation, the couple discovered that some of the old bills were rare, uncirculated bills that were worth more than face value. In total, the contents were worth $23,000.

Maybe the former owner of the house just didn’t trust banks. The bills were dated to the Great Depression, a time when confidence in banks was at an all-time low on account of them constantly going out of business. The latest dated bills were 1934, which coincides with when the FDIC was created to insure deposits.

Once the excitement of finding someone’s life savings had died down, it was time for the couple to get back to work. The husband found a second lunchbox hidden in the ceiling while his wife was again at work. This time they didn’t wait around, and immediately posted pictures of the contents to Reddit when she returned home. It was an identical lunchbox, but instead of a few bundles of cash it was completely packed from end to end with neatly placed and organized bills.

This money was newer than the bills in the first lunchbox, and much of it was in those bundles you get from a bank with the little pieces of paper around them saying how much is inside. There were $1,000 bundles of $20s and $5,000 bundles of $100s, along with some other loose bills. In total, the second lunchbox contained $45,000.

Now that they realized the house was full of treasure, the couple decided to investigate as thoroughly as possible. This led to what they described as a “secret door.” It was a plainly visible utility access panel that the realtor had told them led to the hot water heater. They never actually bothered to open the panel because they assumed it was just a tiny space with a water heater, but now that the house was revealing its secrets they felt it was worth taking a look.

Behind the access panel was not a water heater—it was an entire secret room. The floor was covered with large, mismatched carpet squares, but that was pretty much it. Though this secret room was unimpressive, it contained a door to an even more secret room. This other door had multiple heavy-duty locks, including a combination lock. Undeterred, the husband was able to eventually break all the locks and force open the door.

The new room looked exactly like the sort of room someone would want to hide. The walls had heavy layers of soundproofing and were covered with white tarp. On the floor was an old leather briefcase and a portable fire safe. They opened the briefcase first, since that didn’t require any effort. Inside was a collection of expensive, antique watches and other jewelry, as well as silver ingots. There were also envelopes full of large amounts of foreign currency.

Next, the husband forced his way into the safe. He was immediately greeted with a piece of paper that had the words “Save yourself” scrawled in dripping black ink. The inside lid had the words “Do not” painted on it in white-out. As for the contents of the safe? It was a pile of video tapes that were labeled in various and somewhat unclear ways. Based on the labels in the image posted to Reddit, it looks like the top layer of tapes were probably from 1994 and 1995 with some additional form of cataloguing.

But the tapes, which were already suspicious, took a more sinister turn when the label on one of them was shown to simply read “NO NO NO NO NO NO.” The couple thought better of watching the tapes, and did their best to leave well enough alone. Obviously that did not last long, and after a few days they finally decided to watch what was on the tapes. Despite claiming that the contents were horrific, they also said that they watched all six tapes to make sure they were all the same sort of content.

Immediately after they finished watching the tapes they called the police, who in turn called the FBI. The FBI showed up as fast as possible to confiscate the tapes and conduct an investigation, and the couple were ordered to remove all of their posts about their house renovations from the internet.

So what was on those tapes, and was it related to all of the hidden valuables in the home? Or was this all made up because someone has been watching too many house flipping shows?

Mima’s Room

Mima was a 1990s Brazilian pop star and member of the girl band “CHAM!” Because all of the best bands have exclamation points in their names, like “Attack Attack!” and “Attack! Attack!” Yes, those are two very real and unrelated bands, one from the UK and one from the US.

In 1997, Mima decided that she was going to follow in the footsteps of so many pop sensations before her and make the transition from music idol to serious actor. She landed a role on a drama called Double Bind. Originally this seemed like it might be an awkward translation, but apparently it’s an actual phrase.

Double binds are kind of complicated and nuanced, but the short version is that it’s explicitly or implicitly relaying two conflicting messages, like a mother cheerfully saying “I love you” to her child while slapping them hard across the face. These tactics are employed a lot by abusers, and can be a total and complete mindfuck for the victim.

In the show Double Bind, Mima was playing the role of one such victim. It was pretty dark content, up to and including her character being sexually abused. The good news is that this was the Brazilian version of 1990s basic cable rather than HBO, so the worst acts would have been implied or taken place off camera.

The bad news is that, despite being able to land the role thanks to her fame, Mima wasn’t an actor. It’s also believed that she had some undisclosed preexisting psychological condition that made this entire situation much harder for her to handle. To film 20 episodes of an hour-long drama would take roughly 160 days of shooting, probably all consecutively, and she was not mentally prepared for the psychological abuse that her character was supposed to be enduring.

Mima began having a difficult time telling the difference between fantasy and reality, a condition that reached new levels when she read a fan letter that led her to discover the website Mima’s Room. Mima’s Room was basically just a daily blog, written as a diary for the public. What had caught her attention in the fan letter and made her actually look at the site rather than ignoring it is that the site claimed to be written by Mima herself.

People lie on the internet all the time, and that wasn’t any less true in 1997, so her first thought would have been that it was some sort of hoax and troll. However, most of the details in the diary were accurate. It wasn’t all a bunch of deep, personal feelings that nobody else in the world could have possibly known, but whoever was writing Mima’s Room seemed to know what she was doing every day and had some amount of insight into her personally.

When Mima showed the site to her manager, she was told to just ignore it. Normally that “don’t read the comments” sort of mentality would seem like sound advice, but it may not have been the best advice in what sounds like it could have been a case of pretty severe stalking. It didn’t matter though, because Mima didn’t take the advice. She wanted to see just how much this person knew about her.

As the weeks of filming went on, Mima’s psychological state continued to suffer. Not only was the intense nature of the show having a serious impact on her mental health, but she was becoming increasingly obsessed with Mima’s Room. In the beginning it was almost entirely accurate, but the online diary began to significantly diverge from her real life, causing her even more confusion and unease.

In one instance, Mima’s manager walked in on her in a nearly catatonic state as she scrolled through the diary saying “So that’s what I did today.” Her psyche eventually became so damaged that she began referring to the author of the diary posts as the “real Mima.” Then, two weeks before filming for Double Bind concluded, Mima vanished.

Suspicion immediately fell on her manager. The belief was that she was angry at Mima for giving up her lucrative career as a singer (along with the manager’s 20%) in exchange for what was undoubtedly going to be a failed acting career. Her manager would have known her daily activities, details about her personal life that may not have been public, and about her fragile mental state.

Though authorities believed that she either ran the website herself or was feeding information to the person that did, police couldn’t find any evidence to link her to the site. They also couldn’t rule out the possibility of a stalker.

Ultimately, Mima was never found. But what happened to her, and who was responsible? All of society was responsible by stigmatizing mental health care, but who was responsible for creating Mima’s Room? Assuming any of this really happened, was it her manager, a random stalker, or something else?

Campus Gene Editing

In early 2009, a group of students from the University of Miami were wandering around campus one night while bored. Though the buildings were all closed after hours, except for the dorms, they happened to be privy to a little-known secret on campus. On the side of the Cox Science Building was an elevator that provided access to the roof of the building.

There wasn’t actually anything interesting to do on the roof. There were some HVAC vents, a locked door that led to the stairs, and presumably a nice view of campus. Your typical roof stuff. As Reddit user and obvious South Park fan “LovesToSpooge” explained, “The roof was just as boring as anywhere else at night. [We] only liked to hang out there because we knew we weren’t supposed to. And cause it was funny to ask each other ‘you wanna go on top of Cox?’”

But on the night that started all of this, the roof wasn’t empty. At first it appeared to be, but taped on the door to the stairs was a piece of paper with a QR code. LTS was the only one of them that had a smartphone, so he tried scanning the code. The page it took him to looked like it was blank, so he just shoved the paper in his pocket and decided to try it on his computer.

Later that night when he arrived back in his dorm, LTS looked at the website he had been directed to so he could type it into his computer. Rather than being a domain name, the website just used an IP address, a practice that was barely ever common in the first place and hadn’t been for probably 10 years at that point. When viewing the site on his computer, he saw that the page was almost entirely blank except for an unmarked button on the bottom corner of the page.

When he clicked the button, a message popped up that instructed him to check back the next day to begin the test. LTS tried the website again and the same thing happened. He went to the newly formed r/WhatIsThisThing subreddit to see if anyone had ever seen a website like it. His initial fear was that this was some strange way of infecting his devices with a virus, so he only posted screenshots of the site rather than the link so as not to spread the virus if there was one.

The lack of a link made people skeptical, but they instructed him on how to view the source code for the page so that he could copy and paste it. The helpful people of Reddit were able to look through the tiny bit of code and determine that it indeed was not a virus. All the button did was send his IP address to an anonymous email. By their estimation, this was to serve two purposes.

The first was to let whoever set up the site know that someone had actually visited it. There’s no way to know how long the QR code had been taped there before LTS found it, but now that he had, it meant that the site really might update the next day.

The other suggested purpose of this was to check the IP address. Universities often have their own dedicated range of IPs, so you can easily tell from a person’s IP whether or not they’re using the school’s network to access the internet.

A couple days later, LTS went back to the website and sure enough it had changed. The site was now password protected, with the prompt asking him to enter his IP. After doing so, he was presented, as promised, with a literal test of 100 multiple choice questions. He posted screenshots and the source code to Reddit again and began filling out the test honestly and to the best of his abilities.

Fortunately for our story, he checked back on Reddit before hitting submit. Whatever method was being used to grade the test was all being done server-side so they couldn’t determine that from the page’s source code, but after reading the questions they were able to convince LTS to change his answers.

The test was a psychological questionnaire of sorts. It was all opinion-based, but it had a very clear conspiratorial tone with questions like “Under which of these circumstances would news networks conceal the truth for the public good?” After changing his answers to the most unhinged, conspiracy-loving answers possible, LTS hit the submit button. A new page loaded that said, “You have passed the first test.

Here’s some reading material to get you started. Come back tomorrow.” Accompanying the text was a link to a PDF file.

The PDF was allegedly over 100 pages long, though he only screenshot about half a dozen pages of it to share. What he showed were the original blueprints for the Cox Science Building along with an altered version of the blueprints that indicated the locations of secret rooms and laboratories. There wasn’t any proof that these secret locations existed, at least not in anything that was shared online—they were just drawn onto the blueprints.

The other pages that were screenshot seemed to indicate the belief that there was experimental gene editing research going on. Again there was no proof, just a lot of conspiratorial talk. Interestingly, the ramblings did include the word CRISPR.

Had it specifically mentioned CRISPR-Cas9 that would have been a bombshell as the tool wouldn’t be invented until 2012, but the DNA sequence defined as CRISPR was first identified in 1987. All it showed was that the author had at least a vague understanding of the topic, but nothing that was uploaded gave anything even resembling proof of the conspiracy allegations they were leveling.

While those following the story were becoming less convinced in its authenticity, they were still anxious to see how it was all going to play out. The next day LTS went back to the website and entered his IP as a password. When he did, the screen simply read, “You shouldn’t have told Reddit. Stanford, 4th floor.”

Stanford was one of the dorm buildings on campus, but it wasn’t the one where LTS lived. It was the consensus among those that believed his story that the mention of a building and floor was just a random guess to try to intimidate him. If it was wrong, he may have felt it was some sort of instruction or hidden message. And if it was where he lived, it would likely have scared him shitless.

But not everybody believed his story. Some people believed that it was just a hoax, while others felt it was meant to be an Alternate Reality Game that LTS hadn’t planned out very well so he gave up on it. Obviously the information about a conspiracy was all bullshit, but did these events happen to LTS as he described? Or was it all pretend, a story that either he made up to fool the internet?

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the TikTok Mirror mystery?

The TikTok Mirror mystery involved Samantha Hartsoe discovering a hidden room behind her bathroom mirror in her New York City apartment. She found an entire three-bedroom apartment with signs of recent habitation, such as trash bags and an empty water bottle.

What is Chechclear.asf?

Chechclear.asf is a notorious video from the First Chechen War in 1996, showing the beheading of a Russian soldier by Chechen insurgents. The video became infamous online and was used by Russian media to portray the Chechens as brutal.

What mysteries surround the Chechclear.asf video?

The mysteries surrounding Chechclear.asf include the meaning of the name, the identities of the victim and executioner, and the existence of a longer, five-minute version of the video that was allegedly aired on Russian television.

What did the Ohio couple find during their DIY house renovations?

The Ohio couple found two lunchboxes hidden in the ceiling, containing a total of $68,000 in old and new bills. They also discovered a secret room with a portable fire safe containing video tapes and valuables like antique watches and foreign currency.

What was the content of the video tapes found in the Ohio couple’s secret room?

The Ohio couple described the content of the video tapes as horrific but did not specify what was on them. They called the police, who in turn called the FBI, and the couple was ordered to remove all their posts about the renovations from the internet.

Who was Mima and what was Mima’s Room?

Mima was a 1990s Brazilian pop star who vanished in 1997. Mima’s Room was an online diary that claimed to be written by Mima herself, causing her psychological distress and confusion as she struggled to differentiate between reality and fiction.

What happened to Mima?

Mima vanished two weeks before filming for her drama ‘Double Bind’ concluded. Suspicion fell on her manager, but no evidence linked her to Mima’s Room or Mima’s disappearance. Mima was never found, and her fate remains unknown.

What was the Campus Gene Editing mystery?

The Campus Gene Editing mystery involved a group of University of Miami students finding a QR code on the roof of the Cox Science Building, leading them to a series of tests and conspiracy theories about secret gene editing research on campus.

What was the outcome of the Campus Gene Editing mystery?

The outcome of the Campus Gene Editing mystery is unclear. The student who found the QR code, LTS, was instructed to go to Stanford, 4th floor, but it is unknown if this was a genuine instruction or a hoax. The authenticity of the events remains debated.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Internet’s Deepest Mysteries (Part 6)
• Hero image source by Юлія Гай / openverse, by-sa.