The internet can be an invaluable source of knowledge. If you want to learn a new language, there are countless resources out there. And if you want to find out the history of any piece of technology, the World Wide Web’s got your back. But along with all of the wonderful things we can learn about online, there are some pretty disturbing stories out there too.
Netizens have recently been recalling the most terrifying and upsetting rabbit holes they’ve ever gone down online, so we’ve compiled a list of them below. From learning all about cults to finding out about brutal historical events, we certainly don’t recommend going down any of these rabbit holes yourself. Good luck getting through this list, and be sure to upvote the topics that you’re glad you don’t know too much about!
#1
The more I read about cults, the less I think I’d be immune to joining one. You start out thinking, “How could anyone fall for that?” Then you learn about sleep deprivation, isolation, love bombing, sunk-cost fallacy, and gradual escalation. It’s way less about intelligence than timing and vulnerability. That rabbit hole was genuinely unsettling.
13points
#2
Chip-Chan. Back in the late 2000s, people found a livestream of a woman living in a tiny apartment in Seoul. She believed a corrupt ex-policeman had implanted a "stalker chip" in her ankle that kept her asleep for up to 20 hours a day and controlled her mind.
What made it disturbing wasn't a ghost or a jump scare, it was watching raw, unedited, severe mental illness play out in real-time for years. She set up multiple webcams streaming 24/7, covered her walls in hand-written signs warning viewers about her "pesterer," and spent days sleeping in contorted positions on the floor, barely moving. You’d drop into the stream at 3 AM and just watch this woman completely trapped in her own psychological nightmare, totally oblivious to the thousands of strangers watching her every move.
What made it disturbing wasn't a ghost or a jump scare, it was watching raw, unedited, severe mental illness play out in real-time for years. She set up multiple webcams streaming 24/7, covered her walls in hand-written signs warning viewers about her "pesterer," and spent days sleeping in contorted positions on the floor, barely moving. You’d drop into the stream at 3 AM and just watch this woman completely trapped in her own psychological nightmare, totally oblivious to the thousands of strangers watching her every move.
11points
#3
The Denko thread.
On an early Japanese precursor to 4chan a dude started live posting about watching a girl he was obsessed with. The goons all egged him on to stalk her and post while he was doing it.
It eventually hit the point where they realised the creep guy was legitimately terrifying this girl and that they were enabling a dangerously unstable loner.
On an early Japanese precursor to 4chan a dude started live posting about watching a girl he was obsessed with. The goons all egged him on to stalk her and post while he was doing it.
It eventually hit the point where they realised the creep guy was legitimately terrifying this girl and that they were enabling a dangerously unstable loner.
11points
#4
This is niche, to say the least, but about 8 years ago I was being harassed online by a Sufjan Stevens fan blog. I found her main account and it turns out she had erotomania over Sufjan Stevens that manifested in almost a decade of obsessively blogging about hum, the “signs” he was sending her, and her IRL stalking him (while claiming he was the one stalking her).
9points
#5
The scam-call-center rabbit hole. It starts with “annoying spam calls” and ends with documentaries about people being trafficked and forced to scam strangers for a living. Truly disturbing.
8points
#7
Pied Piper.
Seriously. That whole story is so d**n dark. So many weird theories on where that story came from, what it represented. Was it rats he led out of that town, was it kids? Was the Piper just an allegory for the Black D***h?
Strangely fascinating and it burned about 4 hours.
Seriously. That whole story is so d**n dark. So many weird theories on where that story came from, what it represented. Was it rats he led out of that town, was it kids? Was the Piper just an allegory for the Black D***h?
Strangely fascinating and it burned about 4 hours.
8points
#8
The Station nightclub fire incident. Just don't. I think it really messed me up.
8points
#9
Weird, religious-adjacent conspiracy theories.
My mother fell for one of these, and then more and more. Now her belief system is a Frankenstein's abomination of many conspiracies and other weirdo garbage all rolled into one.
It's all interconnected in one giant web. All the conspiracies you've heard of and haven't heard of, old or recent, all grouped together under one giant complex web of connections.
Now couple that with spiritual beliefs (also part of the web, but not a "conspiracies theory" by definition), that forbids critical thinking as heresy, and you have a recipe for disaster.
My mother is now a person who believes in her stuff with the energy of a religious zealot, forbids criticism of her and the belief system itself, and since she's done away with the mental faculties to question what she's exposed to, she then falls into and believes *all* the conspiracies she's exposed to following that.
The cult-like religious adjacent spiritual beliefs came first, laid the groundwork for everything else, and then all the conspiracies got incorporated in later.
She's a mess and I warn anyone to stay as far as away as the can from "The Secret" and "The law of Attraction". That s**t is dangerous.
My mother fell for one of these, and then more and more. Now her belief system is a Frankenstein's abomination of many conspiracies and other weirdo garbage all rolled into one.
It's all interconnected in one giant web. All the conspiracies you've heard of and haven't heard of, old or recent, all grouped together under one giant complex web of connections.
Now couple that with spiritual beliefs (also part of the web, but not a "conspiracies theory" by definition), that forbids critical thinking as heresy, and you have a recipe for disaster.
My mother is now a person who believes in her stuff with the energy of a religious zealot, forbids criticism of her and the belief system itself, and since she's done away with the mental faculties to question what she's exposed to, she then falls into and believes *all* the conspiracies she's exposed to following that.
The cult-like religious adjacent spiritual beliefs came first, laid the groundwork for everything else, and then all the conspiracies got incorporated in later.
She's a mess and I warn anyone to stay as far as away as the can from "The Secret" and "The law of Attraction". That s**t is dangerous.
8points
#10
Back in 2012, a mysterious group started posting ultra complex puzzles across 4chan, deep web sites, and even physical locations worldwide (posters taped to streetlights in Tokyo, Paris, and LA). To this day, nobody knows for sure who was behind it or what the actual end goal was whether it was high-level intelligence recruitment, a secret society, or something far weirder.
7points
#11
You really don't want to know how we found out how much water is in the human body.
7points
#12
There's a rather robust alternate universe wiki called Conservapedia. It was created by the son of some rather politically prolific white supremacists, and has nearly 60,000 articles chock full of gibbering insanity. You can get lost gazing into this maw of madness.
7points
#13
I found thinspo one time. Omg. It’s just really sad and depressing. I’m sure the manosphere is just as cringe, but in a different way.
7points
#14
That protein unraveling disease.
7points
#15
I was curious about the epstein files and decided to spend around 10 minutes reading them. Around 3 hours afterwards I was just left in shock on how many people were involved with it and how they are still so popular and beloved even though it's revealed in the files what they have done.
It honestly made me feel awful for months and it makes me sick how we just have to work and live life like nothing ever happened while they continue doing the same things to this dayz.
It honestly made me feel awful for months and it makes me sick how we just have to work and live life like nothing ever happened while they continue doing the same things to this dayz.
7points
#16
I've been down plenty of horrifying internet rabbit holes over the years, mostly on Wikipedia.
One rabbit hole I've gone down a few times is that I looked up a bunch of "crowd crush" disasters on Wikipedia. These are incidents in which there's an extremely large gathering of people crowded together so tightly that people become unable to move and breathe with other people pressing against them. People d*e in crowd crushes, and the crowd is so big and noisy that most others in the crowd don't even realize it's happening. Sometimes people d*e standing upright, and other times it's because they fell down and people stepped on or fell on top of them. It's a truly bizarre and shocking way to d*e.
I've also looked up many missing person cases on Wikipedia. Those are always creepy to read about, and I rarely look at those articles anymore because they disturb me so much.
Another rabbit hole I started to go down, but soon stopped because I didn't want to look anymore, was right here on Reddit. A few days ago, I discovered r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, and it was so disheartening and discouraging to see it. I dislike AI in general, and about this specifically, it's so sad that people are viewing AI tools the same way they'd view a human companion. Don't tell me "It's just a joke" or something. It's not. They actually feel emotionally attached to these bots and even generate pics of them going on dates with them. They don't think there are any downsides to treating a bot as if it were human...
One rabbit hole I've gone down a few times is that I looked up a bunch of "crowd crush" disasters on Wikipedia. These are incidents in which there's an extremely large gathering of people crowded together so tightly that people become unable to move and breathe with other people pressing against them. People d*e in crowd crushes, and the crowd is so big and noisy that most others in the crowd don't even realize it's happening. Sometimes people d*e standing upright, and other times it's because they fell down and people stepped on or fell on top of them. It's a truly bizarre and shocking way to d*e.
I've also looked up many missing person cases on Wikipedia. Those are always creepy to read about, and I rarely look at those articles anymore because they disturb me so much.
Another rabbit hole I started to go down, but soon stopped because I didn't want to look anymore, was right here on Reddit. A few days ago, I discovered r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, and it was so disheartening and discouraging to see it. I dislike AI in general, and about this specifically, it's so sad that people are viewing AI tools the same way they'd view a human companion. Don't tell me "It's just a joke" or something. It's not. They actually feel emotionally attached to these bots and even generate pics of them going on dates with them. They don't think there are any downsides to treating a bot as if it were human...
7points
#17
Early 2000s era family PC that didn’t have a lick of antivirus brought the scary internet rabbit holes to me!
6points
#18
Elan school. A survivor wrote a very long visual blog detailing it. Unbelievable
Edit: blog is elan.school.
Edit: blog is elan.school.
6points
#19
I watched a fantastic French movie based on true events called BPM. It’s about ACTUP activism in France and from there went down a rabbit hole about the AIDS crisis and how it was NOT handled by the American government back at the height of the pandemic.
Hearing Ronald Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, crack jokes about how the disease is getting us rid of gays is something I’ll never forget.
Asides from BPM, I highly recommend reading All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South by Ruth Coker Burks. She cared for dying men whose families had disowned, feeding them, helping them any way she could, even giving them proper burial in her family cemetery.
I just want you to add that I’m not gay but an active, vocal ally because love is love, and I can’t stand injustice.
Hearing Ronald Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, crack jokes about how the disease is getting us rid of gays is something I’ll never forget.
Asides from BPM, I highly recommend reading All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South by Ruth Coker Burks. She cared for dying men whose families had disowned, feeding them, helping them any way she could, even giving them proper burial in her family cemetery.
I just want you to add that I’m not gay but an active, vocal ally because love is love, and I can’t stand injustice.
6points
#20
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.
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.
5points