57 Internet Rabbit Holes People Wish They'd Never Discovered

Listening to recordings of live numbers stations.

Fell into a multi-hour hole reading about unresolved missing persons cases on a forum called Websleuths..started with one case out of curiosity and ended up 4am deep reading about people who vanished without a trace decades ago, some with genuinely unsettling details that never got explained. Had to close my laptop and just sit there for a minute.

Foalcon in the brony fandom. I have a friend who draws ponies as part of his overall art career occasionally, and because of this I've gone down the pony rabbit hole just to see why there are SO MANY people obsessively spending money on it.

I can't deny the characters are cute and the artists are insanely good.

But I'm one that loves looking into the VOID. I turned off filters on one of their art sites to see what the top art was and.. holy s**t. Page 1 they had a filly doing unspeakable things to one of the adult stallions. This image had 4300 upvotes. 4300 people accept a FOAL drawn as a FOAL with a stallion. Then I kept scrolling through pages. So much of the most popular art was "foalcon" as I learned from the tag on it.

Either bronies have a massive p**o problem or society has lost its mind.

Looksmaxxing, there was like a week where I was unironically trying it.

Early 2000s era family PC that didn’t have a lick of antivirus brought the scary internet rabbit holes to me!

Missing 411 - as a father and avid outdoorsman. I now prefer my son to hike in front of me so I know where he is. Ugh.

Edit: well apparently I’m a big dummy, lol. I watched a couple videos and browsed a few websites on the topic and it made me scared of my kid disappearing. I can’t speak on how the research was done or who the author is, but reading about kids going missing and thinking about going through that myself is just scary to me. I don’t care for the theories fyi. But if there are a few kids that were later found, and it’s still part of the bigger story that they weren’t, then that kinda s***s.

I saw bits and pieces of a lot of the images from the Epstein files in 2016. I did acid after my finals (as you do), was tripping balls and reading Reddit, randomly saw an old post about Jeff Mangum being a time traveler, which led to 4Chan threads and dossiers about pizzagate, the Wayfair stuff, and Epstein himself. It was a wild afternoon. Thought nothing of it for years, half of me hoped they were just conspiratorial b******t. Then when they released some of the Epstein files this year, a lot of the pictures they showed on the news were the stuff that I saw.

That protein unraveling disease.

I once went down a rabbit hole about unexplained maritime disappearances and the number of ships that just… vanish. Then I started looking at the Bermuda Triangle theories and somehow ended up reading about deep-sea creatures we still haven’t properly documented. Slept with the lights on that night.

Brazilian cartels have done some insane s**t to journalists. Tim Lopes is the one that really sticks with me. Don't look it up but if you do report back so other people don't.

Wouldn't call it a rabbit hole, but the old internet in general. Web 1.0 and early Web 2.0. The guardrails didn't exist. You saw all sorts of things, whether you wanted to or not, and that was *fun*. There's a reason those of us who were there are near-completely desensitized. To this day, I still kind of think censorship in all its forms is b******t. Show me unfiltered reality, no matter how awful. I would rather know.

Usage of herbal medicine or alternative medicine. Why scary? You'll have these people pass these strange exams based on ancient books written by gods, prescribing medication that is causing liver failure in all ages. You have xyz problem? Take this pill made in same area as mercury or arsenic because apparently cross contamination isn't a thing and enjoy jaundice and liver failure later. The whole aspect of it, the education they do, they acceptance in society, the prevalence of it spreading to other countries as if it's normal to have herbel meds being the primary medicine in pharmacies is terrifying. The whole "pregnant mothers need to be treated with incense first, painkillers later" is madness. .

The Epstein Files. I found the ‘baby’ stories horrifying and devastating on so many levels and had a hard time assessing what was true and what wasn’t, as the files were really just a dump of random, unverified tips and info mixed with actual evidence. The whole thing is such a mindf*ck.

The Life of Elliott Rodger.

I used to be kind of an incel myself, without the blatant hatred for women but with thoughts like "Im a loser women will never want me and all women are b*****s". 
I never went as far as to genuinely wish violence of women or s******y active guys my age but I was full of resentment, envy and anger.

Listening to a hours long podcast about Elliott's life hit way too close to home and many of the thoughts he had, I had too in the past when I was an "incel lite".

The difference is that I had enough morality and common sense to not direct my anger and resentment towards not women nor s******y active guys and to not wish actual harm on them bevause they hadnt done anything wrong to me. But the resentment, the desperation of Elliott... hit like a train because thats exactly how I felt back in the days.

For the record though: I'm good now. 44 years old. Finally had my first relationship at 26, have had several flings and relationships since then and I'm in a loving relationship for 4 years now.

The Sarah Saga.

Clearly mentally ill girl moves in with a group of young professionals while lying about her employment status etc. She refuses to pay rent or contribute in any way, invites her friends over, repeatedly trashes the place, and won't leave etc.

At first the other housemates do everything they can to support her, then their support turns to desperation as she clearly has no intentions of helping herself and is happy to just ruin everyone’s lives. The story is told in a blog by the other housemates.

Seeing videos of the Ronnie Mcnutt incident uncensored.

Elliot Rodger’s autobiography is still one of the craziest reads.

Final Fantasy House. The idea of a cult based on a 90s video game taking over so many people's lives was kinda bizarre to me, and it apparently ties into a few similar stories from later dates too. Also recall hearing that the folks involved tried to get involved in other fandoms in a similar way.

JFK/RFK assassinations.

Some of it's just bunk but you if start looking at the story a little more in depth and the people involved and then look at both together and politics at the time...

Considering the people in power had both the means to manipulate evidence and witnesses and reason/ability to k**l them both, it really becomes was it simply rouge sh**ters or was it coup d'état?

Very scary if it was the latter.

The Toy Box K***er.