Internet Mysteries That Were Solved This Year

Written By Kaelyn Moore

From the Mandela Effect, to a bunch of concerning Instagram accounts of AI generated children, to a mysterious curtain from Norway, we're looking at the craziest internet mysteries that were solved this year. In this episode we cover The Fruit Of The Loom Mandela Effect, Celebrity #6, and SmartSchoolboy9

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TRANSCRIPT

The internet, to me, at least feels like a magical place


As someone who is obsessed with history and deep dives and rabbit holes, the internet is where everything thats ever happened has been uploaded for us to browse through. It’s like a library where human history has been collected and sorted for us to learn about. 


But every now and then, something will appear there that no one can make sense of. A true internet mystery. Sometimes it’s a song no one on earth can identify, a terrifying image that has no source, or a memory we all seem to have of something that never existed. 


And that can feel really eerie. Because five and a half billion people on the planet have access to the internet, and if none of them have the answer, what does that say?


So today, I’m going to be telling you about some of those mysteries, but because it’s the end of the year, I thought it’d be good to cover ones that specifically were solved this year. I say solved in quotation marks because there’s one that I want you to be the judge of.


Our first one involves the mandela effect, a false memory that a lot of us had, that some people got to the bottom of this year. Let’s dive in:


A quick recap of the Mandela effect for those who are not familiar. It’s when a group of people remember something one way, when historical record shows that it happened another way.


The name comes from a time in south African history when a lot of people

 remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980’s. Really, Nelson Mandela died in 2013, but the term was coined in 2009 by Fiona Broom once she realized she was not alone in remembering him dying in the 80’s. 


Recently, a redditor asked “Which Mandela Effect Messed up your head most?” and you can tell in the comments just how freaked out people are by this. 


There are, of course, the people who remember the Berenstain Bears being spelled S-T-E-I-N not S-T-A-I=N. That one gets people really upset. 


There’s those that remember in Cinderella, the evil witch saying mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all. She doesn’t say that, she says MAGIC mirror on the wall. Which is especially disorienting when you realize there was a snow white movie in 2012 CALLED Mirror Mirror


If you’re like me, you remember, like with every fiber of your being,  a movie called SHAZAM that starred Sinbad. The movie was ACTUALLY KAZAM with Shaqiel O’Niell. And I have a bone to pick with this one for a moment, because how do so SO many of us remember this fake movie?


But one that comes up a lot in this thread is something that I didn’t even think needed to be debated. It’s whether or not the brand fruit of the loom ever had a  cornucopia in its logo.


Fruit of the loom is a clothing company, most known for its underwear, and it’s been around since 1851. That’s 170+ years of people being able to recall the logo for the company. I mean, I can see it now, a cornucopia with i’s little tail in the sky, and a bunch of fruits like apples and grapes spilling out of it. 


And that’s how a ton of people on the internet remember it. But apparently, According to Fruit of The Loom themselves. the logo never had a cornucopia. if you google it today, you’d see a pile of fruit sans cornucopia. 

One use on reddit said:

”I remember being a kid and asking my dad what the brown thing on the logo on his old undershirt was, and him telling me it was a cornucopia,” 

And they’re not alone The memory of the cornucopia isn’t just online. In 2012, South Park released an episode with a “Cornocopia brand” tag in Cartman’s underwear. A “Fruit of the Loin” spoof with a cornucopia is also featured in the 2003 movie Ant Bully.

A 1995 article published in the Philadelphia Daily news reporting on the layoffs taking place at Fruit of the loom titled the article “Cornucopia of Job Cuts”

And yet, in 2022, Fruit of the loom tweeted “did it hurt, when you realized our logo never had a cornucopia in it?” 

People started freaking out about this, going through their old fruit of the loom clothes only to find that the logo did not include a cornucopia. A Fruit of the Loom commercial from 1987 surfaced which showed the logo without a cornucopia as well. 

But how did so many people remember the logo this way? And beyond that, how did so many other pop culture moments spoof fruit of the loom by using a logo that never existed? 

So this kind of stayed an internet joke for a while. People would find more evidence of fruit of the loom having a cornucopia, and the brand would tweet that they never had it, and so on. but it wasn’t until this year, when the issue got put to bed for good. 

So In January of this year, reddit user “sasquatch easter” posted a picture that confused people evne more. They’d found a thrift store that promoted the brands shoppers could find inside with murals on the walls, and lo and behold, they had the cornucopia logo painted on their wall.

And On March 10, 2024, X user Kurz Prime posted another photo that should have ended the argument for good. He replied to the original Fruit of the Loom post, the one that read “did it hurt when you realized our logo never had a cornucopia” with a  picture of a faded old t-shirt…with a cornucopia on the tag.

And this set the whole debate ablaze again. Internet sleuths desperate to answer the question once and for all found a 1973 trademark filed by The Loom.

On the trademark registration document, the company had to describe what the trademark would look like and any variations of it that would be included. And there, on the document the logo was described as having: "Baskets of fruit; Containers of fruit; [or] Cornucopia (horn of plenty)” 

but the accompanying drawing of the logo only contained fruit. Conspiracy theorists concluded the company made a mistake filing the trademark, and instead of dealing with the consequences, buried the evidence.

But Snopes compiled every iteration of the fruit of the loom logo from 1917, and none of them feature a cornucopia. 

They actually went a step farther, and found that the 1973 patent that was filed with the cornucopia, was rejected in 1980. That was never the official patent. The one that was refiled and accepted in 1981, did not feature a cornucopia. 

Snopes also found that the Kurz Prime photo of the T shirt with the logo was a fake, and three other photos found in the wild or on clothing were also fakes.

So, snopes officially put the argument to bed. Fruit of the Loom in fact, did not ever feature a cornucopia in it’s logo, no matter how much you think you remember it being there. 

Ok, our next internet mystery that got solved this year has to do with a very mysterious image that was found on a curtain in Finland of a person who may have never existed. A mystery known as Celebrity #6

On January 28, 2020, Redditor “Tontsa H” posted in the subreddit R/movies to ask about a mystery that had been plaguing them for some time. 

The post read: “I have had curtains made of this fabric [for] over 10 years (maybe from 2008) but I still haven't recognized all movie stars. Hopefully you can help me.” 

The image they included in the post of the fabric was turquoise tapestry, made up of eight different squares, each featuring an Andy Warhol pop art esque stylized portrait of a group of 8 celebrities. Each celebrity was drawn using two colors, white and turquoise 

The poster believed the celebrities were famous at the time the fabric was originally made. But now, over Ten years later, some of those once familiar faces had become a mystery. 

And not only that, the fact that they were only two tone images rather than exact pictures made them even harder to identify. TonstaH wanted help figuring out who all of the stars were

So they had already gotten a few people. Ian Somerhalder from Vampire Diaries was Celebrity #7, Orlando Bloom, popular at the time for Pirates of the Caribbean was Celebrity #8. But there was something else interesting about the images. They seemed to be pulled from actual photos taken of the celebrities, like they each had a source image they were drawn from. 

Jessica Alba was clearly Celebrity #4, though TonstaH hadn’t found the matching photo, so they were also asking for help finding the source photos for the images. 

After it was posted on Reddit, the internet really did its thing. In just over a day, the community managed to identify Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima as both Celebrity #1 and #3 while Celebrity #2 and Celebrity #5 were matched as Josh Holloway and Travis Fimmel. 

Josh Holloway was in the very popular show LOST at the time, and Travis Fimmel had starred in various WB shows including Tarzan. Thousands of internet sleuths were searching the web for the corresponding images and finding them rather quickly. 

After Jessica Alba’s source image was found to be from the 2007 Kids Choice Awards, TonstaH posted “#6 is now the last one to solve!”

It should be easy, the rest of these celebs were found in a day. But little did they know they were rallying investigators from all across the internet for a four-year search into someone time forgot.

Celebrity #6 was a sketch drawn in turquoise and white of an attractive androgynous woman with her hair half pulled back. She had a sharp jawline and low set eyebrows over her fox eyes. She was gorgeous, but it wasn’t obvious who she was. she looked sort of like a few different people, which meant she looked like no one specifically. 

But Reddit took the deep dive seriously from the start. Over the next year, guesses quickly began to pile up, of both women and men. From Sharon Stone to Taylor Kitsch,  to digitized renderings that matched Celebrity #6’s bone structure to River Phoenix’s. 

But nothing was a perfect match, there was never a source image found to confirm that celebrity 6 really was any of these people. So TonstaH called in reinforcements.

They brought their quest to more subreddits, like R/TipOfMyTongue and internet mysteries. But each community struggled to name this person, who in theory was famous just over 10 years ago. 

The guesses started getting more outrageous to cover a wider group of people. One person at this time guessed that the celebrity was Amanda Knox. it was not. 

Convincing photos of Evangeline Lilly, another actor from LOST, were dropped into the thread. Though she looked incredibly similar to celebrity #6, it wasn’t a perfect match and there was no source image to confirm. 

“I have spent all day on this” one Redditor wrote, “How can this sub of all places not identify someone who was supposedly famous enough to make it to this curtain fabric. Therefore I have come to the conclusion we're being gaslighted.”

And maybe they were. Maybe a European company in the early 2000’s strategically placed a fake person on a set of children’s curtains, knowing that one day it would drive the internet into a shared psychosis. Not really likely. 

It did make people feel like they were once again subject to the Mandela Effect. Like this was a person who vanished from our timeline. 

Someone once famous who just didn’t exist anymore. It was the equivalent of walking into a thrift store and seeing a Shazam poster with Sinbad on it. Yes I’m still not over that.

But it’s at this point where, because the story had taken off world wide to no avail, TonstaH, provided a bit of additional context in hopes that it would help the investigation. 

So, They had bought the fabric from a Finnish Department store called Anttila. They also said that they moved out of their childhood bedroom where the curtains hung in 2009, so the fabric must have been purchased before then.

One poster u/ArimoTravels took that information and started digging even further

They started by designating a search window from 2007 (when Jessica Alba’s Kids Choice Awards red carpet photo was snapped) to 2009, the latest the curtains could have been purchased

They ordered vintage Anttila catalogs from these years through the Finnish Business Bureau. At the same time, TonstaH was able to deduce the fabric’s official name was “Figures” from digital archives of Anttila’s website. Now, that they knew more about the fabric, they just had to find the designer, who would be able to confirm which celebrity portrait was used.

Except, there was a problem They discovered the store was bought in 2015 by a company called 4K. Soon after, Anttila went bankrupt, which wiped out all of the digital archives and left all of its stock to be discontinued forever..

But then, ArimoTravels makes another discovery. Yes, the Anttila stock did get discontinued. That is except for the popular Anno Collection, which the fabric “Figures” happened to be a part of! Quickly ArimoTravels managed to send an email to a Czech retailer that still sold the collection. 

Maybe they had answers like who the designer was. Finally, after nearly four years of searching, the Celebrity #6 mystery was just one response away from being solved.

But the answer they received didn’t add up. They were informed the fabric was made in 2015. The community knew this information is false since the fabric was in the original posters home in 2009. 

They also later learned that there probably wasn’t a designer that made this fabric. A former Anttila employee contacted the search efforts and revealed that  “there was only one in-house designer working at the Anno brand, but they…barely designed anything themselves. 

Most of the designs came from…the Swedish company…who had connections with India or China, or were bought from fairs”

This felt like the end of the road for search efforts. They were never going to find the designer. So that meant they were going to have to just keep guessing, but they had been doing that for years and no amount of reverse google image searching was working. 

That is, until this year. On September 8, 2024, the post that changed everything went live. It was titled, in all caps, “C6 HAS BEEN FOUND”

The post came from User StephanMorse, who was new to the community, he had gone back to the picture it all started with and edited the image into oblivion to make it look less like fabric and “more like a human.” 

Then, he reverse-image searched his edit. Before people were reverse image searching the illustration, no one had attempted to make a human model. When he did this, One woman’s photos popped up too many times to ignore. Her name was Leticia Sarda.

Leticia was a Spanish editorial model during the 2000s. She was by no means a household name, and hasn’t remained as famous as the others on the fabric, but she was a very real person. 

They were able to locate the exact picture that the illustration was based on- a photo-shoot she did for Woman Magazine. At long last, Celebrity #6 was found. And ironically enough, this made her more famous than ever.

It turns out While thousands of internet stalkers looked for her for years, Leticia was busy raising her two children on the island of Tenerife. She had quit her modeling career in 2009 and never looked back. 

One day, she got an email from a stranger asking her to provide the original photo used to design a colorful graphic of her face. This was the first time she learned that the internet had been searching for her for years. She said Their passion made her “happy in a certain way” because “they made a lot of effort, you know, just find a person on a fabric.

So, these mysteries are meant to be more strange as they go, and so for our last story, I have truly one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever read about. 


Actually, It’s more than bizarre, it’s disturbing, and gross, and shocking, and tragically it involves children, though thankfully none were harmed, so just a warning about what’s coming.  this is the troubling case of SmartSchoolboy9


On April 15, 2024, u/NumerousCut792 was scrolling instagram just like any other day, when they came upon a few profiles they couldn’t make sense of. Not really knowing what else to do, they ran to the subreddit R/Instagram for answers. 


NumerousCut’s post was titled “Creepy accounts pretending to be kids.” It included seven screenshots of very strange posts by three separate accounts that seemed to be of fake school children. Some of the images appeared to be ai generated, and others appeared to be an adult dressed as a child. 


But these weren’t just regular children. One account, truth_sticks_11,  featured a blonde child with pale white skin like a corpse’s. He had bright blue eyes and a distorted smile outlined by cherry red lips. 


The boy looks incredibly uncanny valley and each photo of him includes big text blocks written out like a personal diary about trying new hair styles and Brexit. The bio of the profile reads “Beautiful Boy and account looked after by me, a degree educated mother, choosing to stay anonymous, Good original written work. Advice and compassion.”


NumerousCut792 bravely asked, “Is this [an] age play thing or something more sinister?” 


It didn’t take much searching around the profile to see that it was something more sinister. By scanning truth_sticks_11’s following and likes, sleuthers found an account named Girlchloe6, which posted similar content on an account said to be run by a parent, but seemed to feature images of a real girl. 


There were frequent captions about her obsession with heels. “After coming home from school education isnt over once the blue blazer, grey jersey, neat tie, white shirt…heeled mini boots are in the wardrobe.” 


Chloe’s profile also featured posts about the dangers of online predators, but the writings were vague and confusing. One post read “dont be deceived by the deceivers, often pretending to be young boys online.” Was that a warning for us, the viewer?


It was clear that these profiles were fake, it was just a little confusing who would actually be running them.but it seemed like it was someone pretending to be a young boy online.

Both accounts only had a handful of followers and were not following many accounts, but both were following a third one with the handle SmartSchoolboy9. 

This profile was also posted to reddit by NumerousCut792, and it was, by far, the most horrifying.

SmartSchoolboy9’s profile was laid out the same as the other two, The bio read “account looked after by mum! I’m a mixed race schoolboy, age 10” The posts were mostly reels, featuring lots of confusing text, just like the other profiles. But  at a closer glance, anyone could see this user was not an AI child or a real child. 

SmartSchoolboy9 was an adult whose true age was masked with white face paint and digital manipulation, making him look akin to the uncanny valley child on the Truth Sticks 11 account. 

The videos he posted showed himself putting on a cloyingly high-pitched voice, methodically sticking his tongue in and out, and urgently moving his hand back and forth. He was also making Out-of-place noises, like raspberries or kissing sounds and he covered his body with colorful digital stickers 

While examining the accounts, Reddit pieced together that the voice SmartSchoolboy9 spoke with was eerily similar to the voice on truth_sticks_11’s profile

Whatever plot was going on here, it was clear all of these accounts were in on it together. And they were all spearheaded by SmartSchoolboy9. Like he had created a strange, digital world of distorted children

By May of this year, it became evident that Smart Schoolboy 9 had created far more than three accounts. Someone had uncovered dozens of associated profiles across multiple platforms. Combing through the likes, comments, and follows of SmartSchoolboy9, a profile named Stefanieschoolie was found. 

Stefanie was another AI generated child created with big wide eyes and bright thick lips. Disturbingly, her profile was more sexual in nature than the others, though she was described as being only 12 years old.  

In some of the stefanie profiles, it’s clear that the adult man running the account is dressing up like her. In one image, he wears the same bright lips and pale makeup as the AI children, but is also wearing a wig and school girl clothes. 

It’s disturbing, but it still wasn’t clear why this person was doing this? Someone commented that the pale face, red lips and tongue out comes from a drowning fetish.Others,agreed, and said “i have a theory that the uncanny editing is due to his obsession with exaggerated child-like features…this might be why he paints his face white and exaggerates his mouth / paints his teeth to make them stand out.”

Someone else wondered if this was all part of a twisted game. Maybe a consenting group of adults was playing a “really messed u ARG,” or alternate reality game. 

Whatever the case, It felt like there was a ticking clock to figure out what exactly was happening, though, because it involved children. And more sleuthing revealed that some of the accounts were now starting to comment on profiles of actual children. 

Under one photo of a child, smart schoolboy 9 warned them that there are creeps on the internet who comment on photos of boys their age, and they should be warned. 

On top of that, Sleuths found that some of SmartSchoolboy9’s edited posts used non-AI photos of children that didn’t have a public origin on the internet. How did he get these privately sourced images? He also had posted photos taken in secret of children on playgrounds.

Poems posted by the fake profiles heavily alluded to child kidnapping, bondage, and even cannibalism. These suggestive topics paired with videos of the man roaming the streets, with potential access to real schoolchildren, raised major alarm bells.

So sleuths started pouring through the posts, looking for any clues they could find as to who this mysterious man was. And that’s when someone on Discord caught onto a trend. 

An adult’s name was occasionally mentioned in the fake profiles’ captions. That name was David. David’s relation to the fake children was never clarified and his face was never pictured, but he seemed important. 

These sleuthers were able to trace landmarks in some of the SmartSchoolboy9’s videos, and they realized that this was all taking place in an area of London

detectives unearthed a quote in a local newspaper about the necessity of enforcing school uniforms. The name of the concerned citizen being interviewed was- David. David , a 59 year old man. Through these clues, the group felt SmartSchoolboy9’s true identity had been unmasked. Their findings were said to be handed to the police.

But even with the authorities allegedly stepping in, the internet’s investigation didn’t end there.

On August 25, 2024, YouTuber Nick Crowley released a 27 minute mini-documentary, which delivered a fascinating recap of the internet’s hard work to a larger audience.

After Crowley’s digital exposée, the OG SmartSchoolboy9 page was finally taken down. And that’s all fine and great, but many people were worried. This person could just make more profiles. And also, they were clearly going to places where children were and snapping photos of them, so removing their instagram profile was just a bandaid on a much bigger problem.

So Sleuthers were determined to pull back every layer of this case. That path led to the small English city of Doncaster.

On August 27, 2024, u/mildmanneredcannibal shared screenshots of an ongoing discussion in the UK SubReddit, R/Doncaster. There, urban legends about David “Walter” had become the talk of the town. In fact, so many disturbing accounts were flooding the Sub, that the moderators would eventually ban his name altogether.

One Redditor claimed that a man named David from Doncaster “got jailed for stalking a teenage pupil” who attended nearby Hall Cross Academy. This comment alleged the man in question had innocently insisted he “was researching for a book he was writing called ‘the spirituality of girls’” in the “late nineties or early noughties.”

These rumors contributed to Reddit’s assertion that David was not only a real person but one that was a real threat to public safety.

There was also some evidence that he was using other aliases, like David London and David Stansfield

By tracing the aliases, an older SmartSchoolboy9 female persona came to light. The fake little girl’s name was Zia Patel 

Zia posted on an alumni Facebook group for a prep school called Stockwell Manor. In a long post from 2019, Zia wrote about her 11-year-old friend Stefanie (which, we’ve heard that name before). The post talked about Stefanie’s older brother — whose name was David. 

According to Zia’s secondhand story, this fictional David had a bad experience as a “pupil” at Stockwell Manor in 1974. David had a girlfriend who made him happy, but an abusive teacher punished him in front of everyone with a walking stick which ruined his reputation.

This felt like a thinly veiled attempt to plant easter eggs about his real life. The fact that SmartSchoolboy9 used “Stockwell” as a last name on some of his social media dupes further solidified Reddit’s theory that David attended the Manor.

So people started digging into the backstory of Stockwell Manor, and what they found was kind of shocking. News reports in The Evening Standard documented the conviction of a teacher named Jeff Morrell. Morrell worked at the prep school from 1973 to 1983 and was later found guilty of twelve counts of sexual assault. 

If the real SmartSchoolboy9 attended Stockwell Manor, Reddit speculated there could be a strong chance young David crossed paths with a predator before his own dark future.

It seemed each new piece of information learned fueled the internet's desire for vigilante justice.  Despite Reddit community guidelines, Discord rules, and Nick Crowley’s advice, users have blasted David’s private address and harassed the problematic accounts’ DMs. A deleted TikTok showed the smashing of a car window in Doncaster, though it was never confirmed to belong to David . 

As of today, there haven’t been any arrests in this case, and Though the master account has been disbanded, new posts from Stephanie Schoolie, Zia Patel, and David London have been spotted as recently as September 2024.

There are still so many questions surrounding the case of David including why he is doing this, but the mystery of who was behind those accounts may have been solved. 

I myself am very guilty of getting caught up in these internet mysteries. I love lost media and tales from the dark web.

But I also know how I get when I’m focused on a mystery. I’ll be lying in bed at night, just staring at my ceiling thinking about it. I’ll try looking up internet records, and go down all these rabbit holes. And what’s nice about mysteries that seem to exist in the ecosystem of the internet, is there can be thousands of people just like me obsessing over them, and that’s why a lot of them tend to be solved.

What has always been scary to me though, is when they can’t. When the combined mind power of people from all over the world can’t get to the bottom of something. 

There are mysteries that exist in that category, but that’s something for a future episode. For now, happy browsing.

Kaelyn Moore
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