Zardulu: Urban Legend Maker or Giant Hoax?

We’re all interconnected these days—if you’re reading this, you are capable of using the internet. No doubt you’re also online a fair amount of the day for other reasons, be it doom scrolling, trolling, wasting the finite amount of minutes you have left playing a match 3 game or trying to work out what happened to that person you dated however many years ago. I daresay you have also come across the occasional news story and maybe even some slightly off-beat piece that seems to unite a portion of the population for a scant few moments before we all break apart again.

These off-beat pieces are generally light in tone compared to the hellscape of our actual reality, and usually involve children and/or animals. They are something apolitical that everyone who sees them can agree are either funny or interesting enough to warrant spending a few seconds of our lives feeling slightly less awful. If they rack up enough views on social networks, this can bestow upon them the title of “going viral”.

If they then make the jump to larger news or entertainment networks such as Buzzfeed or genuine news channels, you can officially call them “viral sensations”. Well, when I say “officially”, that’s my personal definition, not a legal one, but I don’t think I’m wrong.

Even if you’re not chronically online, you might nod in fond remembrance of at least a couple of unscripted viral hits from years past such as: Charlie Bit my Finger, Star Wars Kid, Keyboard Cat, Jasmine Masters saying “and I oop”, “the dress”, left shark, pizza rat, “I like turtles”, Moo Deng the baby pygmy hippo who has basically gone viral for being a baby pygmy hippo, and one of my favourites, BBC Dad. This was from 2017, when Robert Kelley’s live video interview with BBC World News was interrupted by his young daughter confidently busting into his office, followed by his baby son enthusiastically cavorting along in his baby walker. His horrified wife then swung in on her knees to drag the pair out, all in full view of the camera. Good times.

There was one example in that list that you may be less familiar with than the others, or maybe not if you lived anywhere near New York in 2015, which I happened to. I’m talking about Pizza Rat. In September 2015, a man called Matt Little uploaded a video to YouTube titled: “New York City rat taking pizza home on the subway (Pizza Rat™)”.

As you may have surmised from the title, the video, taken on his phone, shows a brown rat dragging a New York slice down several steps of a subway staircase before it hides from Little at the bottom of the stairs. It then pops out again but it’s unclear if it ever managed to take its prize all the way home. Because of how close Little got to it, plus the fact that it combines several New Yorky themes into one short clip, not to mention all the ninja turtle references, Pizza Rat got millions of views within a couple of days, as well as being picked up and mentioned by online blogs and news sites.

As of January 2025, the clip has over 12.5 million views on YouTube.

This seems to be a genuine video of a real event, i.e., a man was walking down some subway steps late one night and happened to see a rat hefting a whole slice of pizza in front of him. So far, so not-that-out-of-the-ordinary. Rodents are common in underground stations and pizza is common everywhere in New York city so putting the two together doesn’t really amount to anything that strange. Except. Let’s hold that thought for a moment.

If Pizza Rat didn’t totally steal the limelight for rodent fans on social media, another challenger soon stepped up to vie for the vermin crown. In November 2015, Selfie Rat made its debut. Ostensibly just a blurry close-up of the underside of a rat’s nose and whiskers, it was the story behind Selfie Rat that helped it achieve the hallowed title of “going viral”.

This one had a video to document the rat taking the selfie. Here’s the scene: a commuter hanging round in the Crown Heights subway station sees a man sitting against a pillar, taking 40 winks. He also sees a rat hanging around near the sleeping man and gets his phone out.

The rat climbs onto the man’s lap—shudder—and manages to take an accidental selfie when it treads on the phone the man has left lying on his leg. The man then wakes up, sees the rat, jumps up and has to keep getting close to the rat again as he manages to drop his phone at least twice in his haste to get out of there. He later checked his phone and saw the memento his furry friend had left him, thus Selfie Rat was born.

If you’re smelling a rat here, so to speak, we’ll come back to these but first, let’s move on to Pita Rats! In January 2016, two months after Selfie Rat, which was itself two months after Pizza Rat, a woman called Laura Duch (pronounced Dootch) was at another subway station in Herald Square and videoed two rats cooperatively trying to drag a large round whole piece of pita bread up the subway stairs. After making a little headway, a small piece falls off and they end up just taking that away instead.

Duch said in a later interview about the whole viral rat video trend: “I’m not looking to have a viral video. I never was, but I just thought that I could not not film that.” Fair enough, most people probably would have done the same, not me though, I think I would be trying to work out how I could get back out into the sunlight without having to go past two rats on the same stairway, the blood pounding in my ears the entire time.

Let’s move away from rats now, thank goodness, and take a look at a few other animal stories that hit the headlines around the same time period as those we’ve just mentioned. In June 2015, a few months before Pizza Rat, a man called Richard Jones and his family were walking about in a national forest in Florida when they saw an alligator in the river. Richard’s son then apparently startled a raccoon out of hiding which leaped into the river, and happened to land on the alligator.

It jumped off after a second and ran away. If this sounds far-fetched, Richard managed to take a snap of the gator-riding raccoon which was made public for all the world to see.

The picture did the rounds on social media, often with the sentiment along the lines of: “meanwhile, in Florida” and the raccoon getting photoshopped into various other situations. It also made the news sites although some, including the BBC, presented it as a bit of an oddity without speculating on whether it was a genuine moment or not. It also drew comparisons to a photo snapped in London a few months earlier of a weasel riding on a woodpecker.

In October 2015, the world was introduced to “Bagel Pigeon”, which, as you might be able to guess, was a photo of a pigeon perched on a railing somewhere in Midtown, wearing half a bagel like a necklace. Because of the proximity in time to Pizza Rat—this image popped up two months later—almost every outlet that carried the story made comparisons such as “Move Over, Pizza Rat, Here Comes Bagel Pigeon” from NBC and “Bagel Pigeon is Giving Pizza Rat Serious Competition” from HuffPost. Food & Wine speculated that it might be “even more New York than Pizza Rat” but I personally disagree.

Back in Brooklyn, another strange animal story was making waves around the same time as Selfie Rat i.e. November 2015. In an event not totally unlike something from The Simpsons, a man fishing in the Gowanus canal, or rather, as per the New York Times: “the murky, tainted depths of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn”, managed to hook up a surprising catch—a catfish with three eyes, the extra one being on top of its head.

A video which was initially sent to Gothamist, a New York based news blog, showed the cameraman approaching a guy on a bridge with a fishing line. The man behind the camera had been told that there was a three-eyed fish on the bridge so he’d come to take a look and voila—a dead catfish is lying by the fisherman’s feet, with a third eye on the top of its head. The fisherman does not venture any further details and doesn’t seem especially excited by the catch, which deflates the cameraman’s enthusiasm a bit.

There is also something that looks suspiciously like pita bread on the ground next to the fish. Was that used as bait? Or was it maybe a connection to the forthcoming Pita Rats?

I lived in that area of Brooklyn for a while and had only left a couple of weeks earlier so missed out on the local news story if not of the year, then definitely of the day. This story also achieved viral success, with multiple other news outlets picking it up, although some more sceptical than others, with the New York Magazine hedging its bets with a headline of: “Was a 3-Eyed Catfish Really Caught in the Gowanus Canal?”

Here are a couple more examples of strange viral stories that caught the media’s attention. In December 2017, Spanish language channel Telemundo aired a video taken in Miami of a large iguana that a man found in his toilet. In the video, the man says he went to use the loo, sat down, felt something and realised he’d been bitten.

Yes, on the ballsack. He jumped up and saw a 2 foot long iguana in the bowl that he likened to “Godzilla”. He dropped the lid and ran out of there.

He returned with a camera, or someone else filming, lifted the lid and the huge lizard flails around before eventually managing to clamber out. An older relative who lives with him tries to scare it away by waving a hairbrush at it and it eventually makes its way out of their house for destinations unknown. No-one knows how it got there in the first place but one theory is that a neighbour tried to get rid of it down their toilet first and it climbed in through the pipes.

Lastly, in March 2018, a bizarre creature washed up on a beach in southeast Georgia, USA. From the short video, it looks like a kind of mini Loch Ness monster, or what I imagine the Loch Ness monster could look like, with what appears to be intestines or innards hanging out. It’s dead and decaying but you can make out a flipper, tail and a long neck. The strange remains gained traction online but the specimen was never formally identified, as, while photos were sent to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources who even passed them on to the Smithsonian, the creature had disappeared by the time anyone went to look at it.

Ok, we’ve got some stories involving animals that set corners of the internet and even news outlets alight for brief moments in time but so what? Doesn’t this kind of thing happen all the time? Well, here’s where this story gets interesting because when is something real? If it seems reasonable?

If you can see it? If you can touch it? If you personally experience it in some way? What if you find out that that thing was, in fact, completely engineered?

Would that make it less real? Would your experience be the poorer or the richer knowing that something out of the ordinary was created to bring you joy?

In this article, we’re going to be finding out about the mythmaker slash art hoaxer slash viral trickster known as Zardulu, and there may be more levels to decode than first meets the eye. Thanks to YouTube commenter Pomshka who suggested this ages ago and summed it up nicely by saying “if there’s something weird and unexplainable that goes viral, chances are that it’s Zardulu!!!” Three exclamation marks, no less. So yeah, all the above mentioned examples have either been claimed by or credited to the mysterious artist known as Zardulu.

Let’s go deeper into this pizza rat hole.

Zardu-who?

Zardulu first crossed my, and probably any other person who’s heard of her’s radar thanks to an episode of the much-missed podcast, Reply All. The story was featured in episode 56 which came out in February 2016, after the initial rash of rat activity. Alex Goldman investigated the story and found out that yes, Selfie Rat was definitely the work of someone going by the pseudonym Zardulu.

She has also claimed credit for Pizza Rat, although Matt Little who took the video claims it was completely genuine but we can see where it might have been a staged thing later on. As far as I know, she hasn’t claimed the Pita Rats as her own, but due to the similarity and circumstances of this video in comparison to Pizza Rat and Selfie Rat as well as a couple of other points we’ll come on to later, I think the chances are pretty high that this was also one of Zardulu’s works.

While her activity appears to have peaked in the twenty teens, Zardulu did maintain a presence on social media for a while, although her facebook page hasn’t been updated since 2021 and her last post on X was in November 2023. Her X account, or Twitter as it was known then, was activated in September 2015, right in the middle of all the rat stuff. For someone who wanted to create viral moments, it seemed she did want people to realise it was her after all.

Well, sort of. It seems that in order to fully appreciate these moments, you did need to know that someone was behind them. This then made any future similar stories a bit more fun as you could speculate whether it really was a pigeon sitting there randomly with a bagel round its neck or whether this was, in fact, a carefully curated scene set up by an urban legend maker.

For the record, Zardulu’s X profile is “Sorcerer. Soothsayer. Painter.

Sculptor. Writer. Proto-AI Disinformation Artist.

Preeminent video, photo and story fabricator.” Her current picture is someone wearing a bearded mask and an elaborate robe obscured behind some glass or a screen. There are two sets of arms pressing forward, one feminine and one masculine.

This is actually quite an arty step up from her previous incarnations, one of which was a robed figure wearing a goat head and her original profile pic was a quite lo-fi looking person in a papier mache mask. We presume they’re female as you can see long pink hair, evidence of boobs under the robe and nice hands with black pointy nails. For ease of reference I shall continue to label Zardulu as a woman.

She’s wearing a wide-sleeved purple outfit with gold embroidery and a purple and gold hat that reminds you of something Zoltar the animatronic fortune teller in “Big” would wear. The mask has tufts of woolly hair stuck on to make eyebrows and a beard. She’s standing in front of what looks like a plain green bed sheet and is holding a golden staff topped with a cut-out of a rat eating its own tail.

It looks deliberately shonky but also, you get the idea that that might have been the best they could do at the time.

It was because of the attention Zardulu was getting from the Reply All episode that she started the social media sites in the first place, posting inspirations of hoaxes past such as the Cardiff Giant and also giving hints of which viral animal story was of her making. She was also outed as being behind Selfie Rat in January 2016 by John Del Signore on the Gothamist site. The man who had jumped up after the rat crawled on him in the subway and took a photo on his phone was one Eric Yearwood.

An anonymous source contacted Gothamist to say that Selfie Rat was a hoax and that Eric Yearwood was the man in the video. When Del Signore contacted Yearwood about it, he admitted he was in a staged video and spilled the beans on having been contacted by a mysterious person named Zardulu.

He was also interviewed on Reply All where he told host Alex Goldman that he’d been attempting but failing to live his New York acting dream when he’d been contacted out of the blue by an email from Zardulu. She’d said she’d pay him a couple of hundred dollars to be involved in a video but neither of them would rat each other out, so to speak. Yearwood was a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade, or UCB, which is a theatre school that teaches sketch and improv comedy skills but he had no idea how or why Zardulu picked him.

He went to her studio where he found a load of trained rats going through little obstacle courses and even doing things like swimming across a little pool to get certain objects. They were originally going to do the Selfie Rat piece in a subway car but couldn’t find an empty one that would work for the third person filming the encounter at a distance so Yearwood just had to pretend to fall asleep on the platform instead. And yes, when you watch the video, it does look extremely not natural.

Eric Yearwood, bless him, isn’t that great of an actor in this footage. If I were him I definitely would not add this to my audition reel. He leaps up unconvincingly for someone having a supposed wild rat crawling on him, then he has to lean down again twice to retrieve the phone that he keeps fumbling.

The rat, instead of scarpering, just sits there the whole time. The photo was a real rat selfie though, the phone was left unlocked with the camera on and some peanut butter on the shutter button. This was quite early on in Zardulu’s slew of public antics and Yearwood tells Reply All that his little cameo was just one little act the artist was dropping.

He says: “She has a big vision and she was describing the project as a piece, a puzzle piece, in this grand tapestry of illusions that she wants to create in New York City.” He went on to say that there were all sorts of “industrial stuff”, “geometric shapes that she had cobbled together from iron and wood” and “there was a big suit made of hair. It looked like human hair, it didn’t look like fur.

So that was bizarre.”

Bizarre indeed. The article published in Gothamist was under the title “Was Pizza Rat a Hoax?” which immediately posed the question as to whether everyone’s favourite little pizza hauler was, in fact, just another rat trained by Zardulu. Matt Little who was the person who videoed Pizza Rat has maintained the stance that it was not staged at all and he and his friend Pat Baer were just walking to the subway late one night and happened upon the creature doing his thing.

John Del Signore, the author of the Gothamist piece, contacted Little before running his article with the angle that he knew it was a fake video so if Little wanted to have any say in it, he’d have to contact him immediately. Speaking to Reply All, Matt Little said it was: “very flattering that he thought I was smart enough to fool the entire world this way.” He then goes on to express disbelief that anyone would have the time or inclination to even bother faking something like this.

While Little has always said his footage was not a hoax, he is also a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade. It should also be pointed out that Del Signore says another anonymous source who signed an NDA with Zardulu was also a member of the UCB. Does this mean anything?

It might or it might not. Apparently there are many, many people attached to the UCB and PJ Vogt, the other host of Reply All says “that theatre is huge. There’s like thousands of people associated with it.

Two people, both being quote unquote ‘UCB People’ is like two people having gone to the same, like, mid- to large-sized university.”

OK, so maybe that aspect is just a coincidence, or maybe Zardulu is intentionally seeking out people from the UCB universe because they fit her criteria of needing someone with a background in acting and probably comedy as these stunts aren’t exactly deathly serious pronouncements on anything. For the record, Little’s friend Pat Baer is yet another UCB member.

At this point, you might also be wondering who would bother taking the time and effort to stage something as banal as this for zero payoff. Who cares if a rat wants some pizza or accidentally takes a photo of itself? Well, exactly, it’s hardly “news” and yet here we are, talking about these things which did manage to tap into something at the time.

Del Signore did manage to correspond a bit with Zardulu who does not always respond to queries. This comes from his article “Was Pizza Rat A Hoax?”:

Reached by email, Zardulu did not deny involvement in the Pizza Rat or Selfie Rat videos, but refused to discuss her work: ‘I’m not interested in an interview and I’m not interested in the story.’ Zardulu continued, ‘I anticipated a betrayal, as I was threatened with such, but not from anyone with this email. I think there are better stories to tell. Why wake the world from a beautiful dream when the waking world is all so drab?’

It’s also possible that while Little might have thought the his Pizza Rat was real, Zardulu was pulling the strings the whole time. Eric Yearwood, the Selfie Rat man, had seen her rat training set-up first hand and thought it more than possible that it was a Zardulu stunt. In Reply All he rewatches the Pizza Rat video and says: “hmm, well I have to say, the main rat that Zardulu uses is named Whiskers. And that did look somewhat like Whiskers.

Zardulu’s capable of doing things that you can’t even imagine. And so the possibility that some people took a video that they didn’t know was created by Zardulu, I mean, it’s not beyond the realm of the imagination.”

Interestingly, Zardulu has never claimed credit for the Pita Rats video and, even when speaking to Reply All about it, Laura Duch, who filmed the two rats trying to take a pita bread home, didn’t think there was anything fake about the scene. However, in talking about it, Alex Goldman’s producer cuts in to ask, perchance, if there had been anyone else around when she was filming to which Duch responds: “Um…” If you have seen the video, there is a man to the side who is talking to the rats and waving something in their general direction. Duch just thought he was a homeless man at the time and totally ignored what he was doing.

You can’t see that much of him or clearly make out what he’s saying but the fact that there’s someone there, interacting with the rats does cast doubt on how natural the scene is. Alex Goldman also says that Duch told him “there was also a woman standing near her at the bottom of the stairs who was asking people not to get too close so Laura could film.” Hmm, Pita Rats seems more staged by the minute!

Let’s leave the rats alone again and circle back around to some of the other stories. Zardulu claimed credit for Bagel Pigeon by posting a photo of a taxidermied pigeon with a bagel round its neck in front of one of her papier mache masks and a booklet called “The Founding and Manifesto of Zardulism by Zardulu”. This was about 6 months after the original Bagel Pigeon picture came out.

There is also evidence on her X profile of being behind the three-eyed catfish in the Gowanus canal. In April 2016, about 5 months after that story, she posted a screengrab from a news piece about it. This came a couple of weeks after Zardulu was outed again in a New York Times article titled: “The Artist Behind the Three-Eyed Fish and Selfie Rat, and Other Hoaxes” by Andy Newman.

In this article, Newman heard from a man called Greg Boz, who was described as “an improviser and comedian”, although it doesn’t say if he was a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade. Boz confirms that for $100, he was given five taxidermied catfish, each with a fake extra eye stuck on the top of their head. He was supposed to hang out on the bridge with a fishing rod and pretend he’d just caught it.

He also says the man in the video that ended up going viral is not him, so presumably he was an even worse actor than our man Eric Yearwood. Andy Newman also posted a photo of Boz’s five fish to his Twitter account the day after the story came out, along with another photo showing the underside of one of the fish where you can see “Zardulu” written in gold so I think it’s clear that she was definitely behind this one. And despite the uncertainty around Pizza Rat, when Newman got in contact with Zardulu via email, she did hint that she was indeed behind it, telling him: “one day I might be hiding behind or around a corner coaxing a rat to drag something down a staircase”.

Deeper and Deeper We Go

OK, now that we’ve got the main gist of this down, let’s go off into a couple of other directions. The first one is a path I didn’t even think of until I randomly scrolled through Zardulu’s media feed. You might not remember this and I wrote it as a throwaway line a few minutes ago, but the raccoon on the alligator photo was likened by media outlets to the weasel-on-woodpecker photo taken by Martin Le-May in East London, in 2015.

Well, in July 2017 more than two years later, who should post a photo of a masked wizard holding a taxidermied weasel attached to a woodpecker? You guessed it—Zardulu. She also posted a couple of close-ups of what seem like test shots of the tableau from a digital camera’s screen.

This can mean one of two things. One—the viral sensation that was “weasel on woodpecker” was, in fact, a faked scene created by Zardulu with or without Martin Le-May’s knowledge, although how he could not have known it was fake seems a bit preposterous. Maybe Zardulu or someone was hiding in the trees and lobbed the dead animals in front of Le May, or maybe there was fishing line strung between two strategic points or something.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem likely that he wouldn’t have been in on it. I did contact him via Facebook to see what he had to say either way but he hasn’t got back to me yet so I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Zardulu also doubles down on this one, with a couple more “behind the scenes” stills posted in July 2020, tagging Nat Geo. And then she triples down: her last post on the platform in January 2023 was another photo of the taxidermied animals with the caption “Going through my archive of hundreds of post-truth works. Anyone recognize this famous couple?” So yeah, it sure seems that she’s trying to take credit for this.

However, on closer inspection, I’m not so sure. The woodpecker is noticeably different, with Zardulu’s having a large red patch under its eye which is a thinner red line in Le May’s photo. This leads me to point number two: Zardulu is claiming credit for things she did not do.

I believe in this case, she retroactively mocked up the scene to either pretend it had been her all along, or to prove that she could have faked it if she’d thought of it first. Or maybe to throw doubt on the authenticity of the original shot even if she had nothing to do with it. Zardulu does seem to operate primarily in the US and New York in particular, so a random stunt in a peaceful area of east London doesn’t really fit the M.O. Still, if it does turn out to have been her, I think I would be more delighted than anything else.

To follow this thread, can we actually confirm that Zardulu is behind any of these things we’ve just spent however long talking about, or were they all just random happenstance and she has managed to forge a reputation for having conjured them up? Well, we know that Selfie Rat and the catfish were hers. The sea monster was too as it pops up in an exhibition we’ll talk about in a minute.

Thanks to the whole weasel and woodpecker debacle, I’m kind of doubting the raccoon on the alligator now. I mean, the raccoon definitely looks a bit stuffed in the photo and Zardulu did post a photo of her holding the two taxidermied animals but again, it could possibly have been something she did later, after the real event happened. There is always a lag between the event and any claim, so she probably has time to create the fake props, although I have no idea how long it would take to stuff a small alligator and a racoon.

I also have thoughts on Bagel Pigeon. Yes, she posted a photo of a stuffed pigeon with a bagel round its neck but if you compare her pigeon with the photo of the original Bagel Pigeon, I can easily be convinced that they are two different pigeons. I don’t know how easy or hard it is to change the position of an animal once it’s been stuffed, but the pigeon on Zardulu’s Twitter is standing on a flat surface with its tail behind it.

OG Bagel Pigeon is perched on a railing with its tail hanging down. There is also some white stuff around Bagel Pigeon’s eye that is missing from Zardulu’s pigeon and the bagel it’s wearing looks plain while Zardulu’s has poppy seeds and sesame seeds on it.

Now sure, both things could still be true—Zardulu could have been behind Bagel Pigeon and Weasel and Woodpecker and could have shown alternative or different versions of the props on her Twitter feed but she could also have jumped on to something and claimed credit to add to her mythos when she didn’t actually have anything to do with either. Not that that’s necessarily a negative thing when you’re setting out your stall as an urban magic mythmaker.

In a conversation prior to a gallery show opening in 2018, Zardulu corresponded via email with journalist Sarah Cascone and gave an excellent summary about managing to score so many viral hits: “My greatest challenge has always been to create them before reality beats me to it, or perhaps it’s something more. I don’t think I create a false reality, I’m creating a reality that hasn’t yet happened. I am finishing the sentences on the tip of reality’s tongue.”

Zardulu as an artist is such a contradiction. There is a much deeper level to some of the pranks she’s pulled over the public and the media in particular, but also there is such a childish and silly element to most of them that it wipes the deeper meaning out. Let’s take Toilet Iguana as an example. If you recall, a man was bitten on the nethers by an iguana in his toilet—a pretty silly story.

This was staged by Zardulu and videos of the news broadcast were even entered as a submission to Miami Art Week in 2017. The piece was titled “The Usurpation of Ouranos”.

Andy Newman who gave us the Gowanus catfish story also wrote a piece about toilet iguana for the New York Times. Here’s what he says about this: “The iguana escapade, Zardulu said, retells the myth of Kronos, who rebels against his father Uranos, who had imprisoned his children in the underworld. Kronos rises from the underworld, castrates Uranos and seizes the throne. Underworld, throne—you get it.”

So there you go, a much deeper meaning behind the story. On The Art Newspaper, Helen Stoilas gives us some more background on the link between the two, explaining: “In her video, the iguana plays the role of Kronos, Zardulu explains, adding that the god’s rule was credited with bringing a Golden Age to Greece. ‘So, this piece is not only symbolic but also a ritual designed to usher us into a time of peace and prosperity of our own.’” And then the piece was accompanied by a hilariously childlike drawing of an iguana biting a man’s balls.

The headlines generated from this stunt ranged from the speculative: “How do so many iguanas get in Florida toilet bowls?” from the Tampa Bay Times, to the ridiculous such as “Bearded Drag Queen Bitten in Balls by Iguana” from Unilad. I suppose it’s worth pointing out that yes, the man involved in this stunt is drag artist with a beard, Gio Profera.

Other exhibits in the gallery show included the raccoon on the alligator under the title of “Shores of the Acheron” which is a river in Hades, the underworld in Greek mythology, and “Ketos Troias” which refers to a sea monster also of Greek myth. This was Zardulu’s fake monster that supposedly washed up on shore in Georgia. There are also a couple of other stories she has claimed credit for that we haven’t already mentioned—namely a man finding his lost prosthetic leg in a beaver dam which was entitled “Hegesistratus’ Sacrifice” presumably after an ancient Greek who cut off his own foot to escape his shackles, and a chicken smoking a cigar.

This was given the title “The Chasm at Delphi”, which relates to an ancient times story of a deep chasm releasing vapours that the oracle at Delphi would inhale and then be able to give her prophecies. But also, it’s just a chicken with a cigar in its beak.

These exhibits were represented either with taxidermied tableaux or models and, in fact, the weasel and woodpecker make a cameo appearance on the same stand as a beaver holding a prosthetic leg. In this version, the weasel is turned so that it would be facing the camera if the woodpecker was flying to the left. In the original photo by Martin Le May, the head of the weasel is turned away from the camera. I still don’t know what to think about this one.

I think it’s fair to say that on the face of these stories, nobody’s thinking about ancient Greek myths or oracles or anything, they’re just briefly amused by a photo of a chicken doing something human so really, it’s only when you know that these events have been staged that you can then go down your own rabbit holes and find out more about what inspired them, which really, can only be a good thing. Speaking of rabbit holes, here’s the last one we’re going to dive down today but it’s also a bit of a doozie.

Is Zardulu Even Real?

We know that “Zardulu” is behind these urban art stories and she’s presenting as a masked female who lives in New York BUT what if “Zardulu” isn’t actually this person but someone else, or even a whole collective under that name? We have mentioned the Upright Citizens Brigade and know that at least 3 people involved in various rat videos were members which may or may not be a coincidence. Personally, I am more than a little suspicious of Selfie Rat man, Eric Yearwood.

He waxes on a bit too lyrical about everything he saw and learned in Zardulu’s studio and sure, he might be milking his 15 minutes of meta-fame but he over-hypes the whole thing to an extent that seems a bit fake. Towards the end of the Reply All segment, he says: “It’s a good thing that Zardulu is using her powers for good. Because if she were to use her powers for evil, that would not be good.”

When asked to give a “doomsday scenario” by Alex Goldman, he says: “Well, a doomsday scenario would be that Zardulu is using her abilities to create myths to completely disorient our federal government. All of (…) the utilities in the city, all of our metropolitan infrastructure, mass hysteria, people’s lives being upended, just panic in the streets. I think that Zardulu could cause complete Armageddon.”

Maybe a tad much for someone involved in one video featuring a tame rat and a bit of peanut butter but there you go.

There is also cause to be suspicious of Matt Little of Pizza Rat fame. While he has continually denied any involvement from other sources in the video he took, he is still more than happy to talk about the Zardulu aspects of it and even deflects attention away from himself when asked by Alex Goldman if he might have been “an unwitting pawn in some kind of massive Zardulu illusion. Or micro Zardulu illusion.” Matt says he wouldn’t be able to tell and then asks Alex: “Are you Zardulu?(

…) If you’re Zardulu you have to tell me. It’s the law.” Alex Goldman says he’d love to have the vision Zardulu has but he doesn’t, so he’s not Zardulu, to which Little just replies: “Yeah.” If I were Alex Goldman, I think I would have asked if Little was Zardulu and see what his reaction would have been.

Another name attached to the story is Greg Boz, who was involved in the three-eyed catfish story. Here’s where these supposedly unrelated strands start to come together. According to a piece on Huffpost by Hilary Hanson, Boz and Eric Yearwood know each other in real life, have worked on UCB projects together and have been friends on Facebook since 2015. According to Boz, though, the fact that they were both involved in separate Zardulu projects is just a coincidence.

An email from Zardulu to Gothamist’s John Del Signore seeks to break the links suggesting Yearwood, Little and Boz are actually part of the hoax. She said: “I’ve come to realize that the group of improv artists I connected with over the last year or two has begun to unravel. They are looking to gain notoriety by connecting themselves to my works.”

These words are starting to ring kind of hollow now, though, when even more information comes to light. According to emails between Yearwood and Del Signore, Yearwood actually met Zardulu three times and totally weird stuff happened each time. In their first meeting, one of her pet rats had died. According to Yearwood: “She showed me the rat’s dead body.

It was covered in flower petals, and laid out on a tiny gold platform. The platform was suspended a few inches off the table with magnets. It was kind of incredible. She said to me ‘When one of my disciples steps into eternity, another must take its place.

Are you ready to become my disciple?’ I said ‘I don’t know.’ and she said ‘You must choose.”

Kind of intense for a first meeting. The second meeting involved: “a bonfire, and strange images were drawn on fabric and suspended all around on the tree limbs. Then Zardulu appeared, but there were three Zardulu’s… Three people wearing the exact same robes and Zardulu mask. They spoke simultaneously and said ‘You must choose the true Zardulu’.

They all did some display in front of him and he randomly chose Zardulu number 2 but they then said: ‘You chose poorly. We are all Zardulu, and Zardulu is none at all.’ before running away screaming.

In his third meeting, Zardulu apparently painted runes on his face. Yearwood never really mentions this anywhere else and it just seems like he’s spinning an increasingly preposterous tale. Del Signore is not taken in by any of it, finishing his article by saying in all caps “WE WANT TO BELIEVE… IN SOMETHING THAT ISN’T SO VAPID PLEASE SAVE US FROM THESE UCB ACTORS.”

The woman posing as Zardulu could be anyone, a friend, a member of the group, a paid model. The main form of communication with Zardulu and the media is via an email address that anyone can reply from. You’d have no way of knowing if a pink-haired, long-nailed masked wizard is behind the keyboard or just a bored out of work actor.

And the last thing we’ll mention is the manifesto on Zardulism that can be seen in the background of the bagel pigeon on her, or their, Twitter feed. It’s title “The Founding and Manifesto of Zardulism by Zardulu” and features a woodcut print of a robed female figure removing or putting on a mask and holding a giant key. Inside are a few pages in a gothic calligraphy font, although there are also several pages of weird runes or symbols.

There are also a few images including a stylized fish with three eyes, a skull with a keyhole in the forehead and something that looks like a mustachioed Bigfoot.

The manifesto bemoans the death of mythology and states that in our modern society: “All that once truthfully lived is now a mere effigy. Images have displaced authentic human interaction.” It goes on to state that “Zardulism is the art of creating and perpetuating myths.” It even heavily suggests the theory that “Zardulu” isn’t actually one person, but indeed a group of people, individually called “Zardulists”.

Near the end it says: “Zardulist myths may only be revealed to other Zardulists. Both, in turn, have an obligation to assist in the creation and perpetuation of the other’s myth. The power of the Zardulist is immense but increases exponentially when the efforts are combined.” See?

Whoever wrote this is saying that there are multiple people involved. It ends with an appropriate description of Zardulu’s stunts as “pearls of merriment for the world to enjoy”.

To explore the “Zardulu isn’t a pink haired woman but rather a collection of unsuccessful male comedians” theory a tad further, let’s reintroduce Greg Boz, the catfish man who is friends with Eric Yearwood. He sent a Zardulu manifesto to a HuffPost reporter, saying Zardulu had given it to him personally and it was his only copy. However, he had also sent photos of it beforehand and the copy the reporter received had noticeable differences to the manifesto in the photos i.e.

Greg Boz definitely had more than one manifesto. When this was pointed out by HuffPost reporter Hilary Hanson, Boz didn’t really have a good explanation, only stating: “We must have had a misunderstanding.”

For me personally, I think that Zardulu is a collective composed of at least two people, Yearwood and Boz. I’m on the fence about Matt Little and his friend but it wouldn’t surprise me much if they were part of it. Nobody knows who the official masked face of Zardulu is.

Re-reading a Gothamist article about this, it seems that John Del Signore had the same thought as me about Zardulu retroactively creating props from existing stories, although it also seems like he’s gone really, really far down this particular rabbit hole. Regarding the Gowanus catfish, he writes: “It is also plausible that Boz spent a few months making the fake fish himself, based off of the fish in the video, and exploited an opportunity for free exposure in the Times, which only has his word to go on. (If you think that’s crazy, you haven’t spent much time hanging around attention-starved improv comedy actors.)”

I think he’s off in this particular instance, however, as the catfish was 100% a hoax any way you look at it. Catfish wouldn’t be able to live in the Gowanus canal and any experts seeing the photo have unanimously agreed that it’s just a taxidermied fish with a fake eye glued to the top of its head. This means that Boz would have been recreating something that was fake to begin with which seems like a big waste of time.

Let’s wrap this baby up.

Conclusions

We don’t know exactly how many viral stories can be attributed to Zardulu as she has hinted that there are many more than we know. Also, some just won’t have achieved the same level of internet fame as others but you have to admit that she has had a knack of knowing what would catch people’s attention in a way that was, on the face of it, not too unbelievable.

Do we know for sure that she was behind everything currently attributed to her? No, and there’s no real way of knowing either, but just the fact that it could be a piece of urban mythmaking and not just a mangy old rat dragging some food down some steps does make you take more notice of the world around you.

Do we know that “Zardulu” is a lone artist enlisting the help of guileless members of the public to help her in her viral endeavours? No, and I think that the evidence actually points to a group of Zardulists working under the name rather than one solo artist, but again, it’s kind of hard to prove either way. If they aren’t Zardulu, Greg Boz and Eric Yearwood sure seem to know a lot about her and her philosophy and have the props and manifestos to prove it. I can’t really work out if this then makes the concept of Zardulu a hoax in itself or just a means of hiding their identity while making funny little animal news stories.

For all the deep mythological back stories to the images produced, at the end of the day the stories are reported as iguanas in toilets and a pigeon with a bagel round its neck. Unless you know Zardulu is behind them, you’d have no cause to wonder if a man being bitten on the testicles by a reptile was an allusion to Kronos rising from the underworld and castrating his father, you’d just double-check your toilet for a couple of days before sitting down.

I think, whatever the aim of Zardulism, it’s been a success. People have been delighted and intrigued by many of the stories, videos and pictures. Journalists have had field days with the original stories and any follow-ups that there was actually somebody behind them. The manifesto states: “There are myths that have done great good and there are those that have done great harm.

Zardulist myths exist outside this spectrum as pearls of merriment for the world to enjoy.” In this aspect, I think it’s mission accomplished.

Zardulu hasn’t posted anything on her or their social media since January 2023 so maybe the project has just run its course, or maybe there’s a whole slew of videos of rats with various bread items just waiting for their turn in the spotlight.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Zardulu?

Zardulu is an urban legend maker or a viral trickster known for creating viral animal stories and urban myths. The identity and true nature of Zardulu are shrouded in mystery, with some believing it to be a single artist and others suggesting it could be a collective.

What are some of the viral stories attributed to Zardulu?

Some of the viral stories attributed to Zardulu include Pizza Rat, Selfie Rat, Pita Rats, Bagel Pigeon, the three-eyed catfish in the Gowanus canal, the raccoon on the alligator, the weasel on the woodpecker, the toilet iguana, and the sea monster in Georgia.

Is Pizza Rat a genuine video?

Matt Little, who filmed Pizza Rat, maintains that it was a genuine event. However, there are suspicions that Zardulu might have been involved, as she has hinted at being behind it and has a history of creating similar viral stories.

What is the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) connection to Zardulu?

Several individuals involved in Zardulu’s viral stories, such as Eric Yearwood (Selfie Rat) and Matt Little (Pizza Rat), are members of the Upright Citizens Brigade, a theatre school that teaches sketch and improv comedy skills. This has led to speculation about potential connections or collaborations.

What is the manifesto of Zardulism?

The manifesto of Zardulism, titled ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Zardulism by Zardulu,’ discusses the art of creating and perpetuating myths. It suggests that Zardulu is not a single person but a collective of individuals called Zardulists, who work together to create viral stories and urban legends.

What is the significance of the three-eyed catfish in the Gowanus canal?

The three-eyed catfish was a hoax created by Zardulu. Greg Boz, an improviser and comedian, was paid to participate in the stunt by pretending to have caught the fish. The catfish was actually taxidermied with a fake eye glued to its head.

What is the theory about Zardulu being a collective?

There is a theory that Zardulu is not a single artist but a collective of individuals, possibly including Eric Yearwood and Greg Boz. This theory is supported by the manifesto of Zardulism, which suggests a group of Zardulists working together to create viral stories.

What is the deep mythological backstory behind Zardulu’s stories?

Many of Zardulu’s stories have deep mythological backstories inspired by ancient Greek myths. For example, the toilet iguana stunt was inspired by the myth of Kronos rebelling against his father Uranos, and the sea monster was titled ‘Ketos Troias,’ referring to a sea monster from Greek mythology.

What is the current status of Zardulu’s social media presence?

Zardulu’s social media presence has been inactive since January 2023. The last posts on her Facebook page were in 2021, and the last post on her X (formerly Twitter) account was in November 2023.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Zardulu: Urban Legend Maker or Giant Hoax?
• Hero image source by Julian Lupyan / openverse, cc0.