Erstellt am: 21. 8. 2015 - 12:09 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Internet Mysteries
People are pretty good at pattern recognition. Sometimes too good, finding apparent causality where none actually exists. On the other side of the coin things that break out of expected patterns catch our eye and fascinate.
And lead to stories. Ghost stories, urban myths, regional folklore.
Did you have some weird person/place/thing in your neighbourhood as a child? That thing that had kids whispering amongst themselves, resulting in all sorts of crazy stories? We had a rundown house with an overrun garden and a mysterious old lady.
There were all sorts of stories about that person and house. It was haunted. She was a ghost, a witch, kids went missing in there or she had killed her husband and was living with the corpse.
Walking by that house on the way home from school was a nerve-wracking experience. We always walked just a little bit faster, and on the odd occasion we should see her looking out the door or window we frequently ended up running.
I never did find out what the story of that lady or her house was. Last time I went back it had been torn down, the swamp behind the house had been filled in and the whole area turned into another standard suburban subplot.
But now I have the web, and all sorts of weirdness that doesn't fit in to expected patterns. Like Tara.
Things that might be legitimate mysteries, or conspiracies, or maybe just weird viral campaigns. The latter tend to eventually be identified, but the others sometimes remain and become a part of online folklore.
The website www.urbanghostsmedia.com has two different posts covering some of the weirder and as yet undefined web weirdness. This isn't creepy-pasta, or obvious fiction. Even if 4chan is frequently mentioned.
8 Weird Mysteries of the Internet
8 More Unsolved Internet Mysteries of the Shadowy Online Realm