It’s hard to imagine the internet today without YouTube, which has become a popular
source of information and entertainment.
While videos about mysteries are pretty popular, the YouTube mysteries themselves are less
common.
But as with everything on the internet, we only see a small slice of what’s really
going on, and without the rest of the stories behind videos and channels there are plenty
of mysteries.
Number 1
Nicolas Sonderegger was a dancer with a small following on YouTube when he vanished in September
2018.
Nic was probably best known for his cameo appearances on the much more popular YouTube
channel, Explore With Us.
He lived in Salton City, a relatively shady and run down town with plenty of abandoned
buildings for the Explore With Us crew to film, and Nic was happy to show them around
in more than one video.
Nic was living with a man named Austin at the time of the disappearance.
According to some sources, Austin and Nic were joined at the hip and both worked for
Nic’s uncle.
In the early hours of 12th September, 2018, the pair came home and were getting ready
to go to sleep when they heard what sounded like a woman screaming.
Nic wanted to go and see what was going on, but Austin thought it was better they leave
it alone.
After a short debate, they decided to leave it be, given how dangerous the town was.
Austin went to bed but, when he woke up, he discovered Nic was missing.
He assumed his friend had gone to investigate the screaming after all and went out to search
for him.
Austin eventually contacted police when he couldn’t find his friend and informed Nic’s
family that he was missing.
A number of Nic’s personal belongings were found, including his wallet, at least one
of his boots, and his knife’s sheath, though the knife itself has not been found.
As he was the last person to see Nic, Austin has fallen under a lot of people’s suspicion.
People have found it hard to believe he could just fall asleep given what they had heard,
and as he was the only person to witness the conversation some have doubted the screaming
occurred at all.
It does seem strange that nobody else has come forward to report hearing the screaming,
especially seeing as the woman had sounded like she was some distance from Nic and Austin
and there were likely people closer to the source of the noise than they were.
Austin was apparently taken in by Nic’s family after his friend’s disappearance,
and the uncle either brought or helped Austin buy his own truck.
The uncle has also roused suspicion.
He had a criminal record and had been imprisoned for assault, although beyond this there doesn’t
seem to be much evidence to go with the theory.
The Explore With Us channel conducted a small investigation.
According to them, Austin stopped responding to their messages after they mentioned the
uncle’s criminal record.
This only added to some people’s belief that Austin was guilty.
However, the channel was also “ghosted” by Nic’s cousin, who corrected some mistakes
the channel made then stopped responding, so it could just be those close to Nic didn’t
want to interact them for whatever reason.
Whatever the case, Nick remains missing.
There is a substantial reward for information regarding his disappearance but so far nobody
has come forward.
Sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/igj863/missing_youtuber_nicholas_sonderegger/ https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/ca-nicolas-daniel-sonderegger-28-salton-city-area-12-sept-2018.404574/
https://www.crimewatchers.net/threads/nicolas-sonderegger-missing-from-salton-sea-beach-ca-7-sept-2018-age-28.1638/
Number 2 Social media has made it easier than ever
for fans to connect with their favourite celebrities, and with more and more information being shared
online it can be easy for fans to convince themselves they actually know the celebrities
they’re following.
Unfortunately, this can have very negative consequences, when stalkers take things too
far.
That was the case with Elena Cohen, who vanished from the internet in 2014 after gaining the
attention of one obsessive fan.
Elena was a singer-songwriter who began posting to YouTube some years earlier.
She was very talented, and gained around 10,000 followers, but was yet to make the jump from
the internet into the charts as some other artists had done around the same time.
The songs were mostly covers, but she also wrote and performed some of her own songs.
Elena’s channel peaked towards the end of 2011, but then she suddenly stopped posting.
What had been a regular posting schedule turned into a handful of videos over the next few
years, and then in 2014 she made all but one of her videos private.
At the same time, Elena’s name and the name of her YouTube channel had been appearing
on several forums, but it wasn’t Elena promoting her own music.
An obsessed fan had mentioned Elena in several posts.
He claimed to be a music producer, and had reached out to her to collaborate.
According to the poster, he had worked as her promoter and something of an agent, advising
her on whether she should sign contracts or not.
In another post, he claimed he was involved in a lawsuit against Elena, and wanted to
find information about her from a variety of sources.
It was clear he wasn’t just someone trying to make a fan page, but wanted to reach Elena,
who he referred to as an Unknown Artist, in real life.
The stalker would claim Elena was part of a conspiracy which also involved the singers
Lorde and Taylor Swift.
In 2012, he was arrested for what seems to have been breaking a restraining order Elena
had put in place, and even his own mother had, in his eyes, turned against him.
While he was imprisoned, it seems doctors tried to get him the mental health help he
needed, but he refused to take any medication and, when Elena posted a new song in 2014,
the stalker was back again.
After another bout of conspiracy theory posts, Elena removed herself from the internet for
good.
This was when she made all her videos private and deleted her social media accounts.
Since then, there has been no updates from Elena, though she recently made some of her
videos public again, suggesting she is safe and well.
What happened to Elena’s stalker remains a mystery, as he has also stopped posting.
Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJD3fyqjrTU&ab_channel=NickCrowley https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/6ulmyb/citizen_arrests_related_to_inept_or_corrupt/
https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/elena-cohen-youtube-elenaaaxx-singer-friend-of-lorde-underground.1159641/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/mvp73y/elena_cohen/
Number 3
Whether or not YouTube should be classed as a social media platform depends on who you
ask, but its safe to say it’s not the first site people think of when they want to reconnect
with old friends.
Most people would be pretty suspicious if someone left a comment on their video saying
they were an old friend and asking to reconnect.
But allegedly hundreds of people fell victim to a scheme that started just like this.
The story goes that a YouTube account going by the name Tom Edgington would leave a comment
on the community page of accounts with no videos.
These accounts only used YouTube as a viewer, their only activity was commenting on videos.
Tom’s message would claim they had been friends in elementary school, and used the
user’s real name even if it wasn’t included anywhere on their YouTube profile.
Tom would also leave a phone number for them to use to get in touch.
If the victim called the number, they would be greeted with the recording of what sounds
like a number’s station.
After that, the victim’s phone would be bombarded with calls, hundreds every minute,
from a variety of phone number.
The vicitms would have to change their number in order to make the calls stop.
Allegdly, hundreds of people in the California area were victims of this harassment.
The story supposedly appeared first on 4chan, when a user got in touch wth Tom Edgington’s
first victim and acquired a recording of the numbers station message.
He also contacted the number himself using an app to give himself a temporary phone number.
As had been the case with the other victims, the number was bombarded with calls.
The 4chan user answered one of the calls, and was greeted with a distorted recording
of The Buzzer, a creepy recording that is popular in the unsolved mysteries community.
Using either the numbers from the original call or by tracing the phone calls ameature
investigators supposedly figured out where the calls came from.
One reddit user visited the location, a relatively isolated mountainous area in California, and
found a bag of old, smashed phones.
There are some doubts about how authentic this mystery really is.
The person that supposedly uncovered the mystery is known to have created a number of mysteries
to create content in the past, and information about the supposed spam is limited.
Sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/mystery/comments/lfoxvx/does_anyone_remember_the_thousands_of_spam_calls/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFmrr4f6XkU&ab_channel=TheTekkitRealm
https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetMysteries/comments/lbk88g/youtube_comment_bots_baiting_users_into_calling_a/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Number 4
Earlier this year, a strange YouTube channel that had apparently uploaded a string of videos
in 2017 gathered attention.
The channel creator apparently had some ability to see into the future, and had predicted
the deaths of more than 250 celebrities.
The videos were all short clips, just a few seconds long, which featured the graphic of
an eye blinking and the name of the celebrity beneath.
Between the blinks, a date would be shown.
In each case, the date matched up with the date the celebrity in question died.
The list of celebrities included those that died of natural causes, and those who passed
away in freak accidents.
Even guessing the year these celebrities would pass away would be impossible, so a channel
that had apparently done this hundreds of times in 2017 seemed incredible.
Of course, it didn’t take long for people to figure out how this was done.
It wasn’t some world government taking out celebrities, but editing trickery.
All the videos were actually cut down from much longer videos.
The original videos were unlisted, meaning only people with a link directly to the video
would have access to them, and would include the graphic for every date, month, and year
the project would cover.
When the celebrity passed away, the channel creator would cut down the video so only the
relevant date was displayed and at the start of 2021 made all these videos public.
That way they still displayed the publication date of 2017, even though they had been edited
since then.
What did remain a mystery for quite some time was who was behind the channel, and why had
they done something which would be extremely time consuming and wouldn’t pay off for
four years.
A discord server popped up not long after the videos were made public, and the channel
creator, or someone acting as them, was active.
The server kickstarted an ARG or alternate reality game where players solved various
puzzles in a story about a global cult.
Finally, earlier this month, the players solved the final puzzle which led them to an archive
of all the unedited videos.
The channel creator put out a final video revealing himself to be a filmmaker and artist
named Kai and explaining his project.
The mystery has now been solved and while it was all just fun, it does highlight the
fact creators can go back and edit past videos without their actions being noticed by anyone
who stumbles across the video later on.
Sources: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW46W_VJNRkKlNH0tpiq8_w/videos https://twitter.com/RESTINPINK
Number 5
The 2010 Smolenski Air Disaster was a national tragedy in Poland, and one of the most significant
plane crashes to have occurred in Europe since the Cold War.
Then Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and a number of top government officials
were aboard the plane, travelling to Russia for a commemoration of the 22,000 Polish military
officers that were taken out by the Soviets during World War 2.
Everybody aboard the plane lost their lives in the disaster, a total of 96 victims which
included politicians, military leaders, and the plane’s crew.
The disaster occurred over Russian soil, near the military airfield of Smolensk.
According to official reports, there was a thick fog over the airfield at the time of
the disaster.
The pilot was forced to multi-task between landing the plane and communicating with the
control tower.
The airfield also lacked modern landing aids.
All this worked together to cause the pilot to misjudge the landing.
The left wing of the plane clipped a tree, triggering the crash into the nearby forest.
It was human error.
Reports from the Russian investigation team and the official Polish report came to the
same conclusion, though there were some differences in the two reports.
However, not everyone in Poland agreed with the findings.
Lech Kaczynski’s twin brother and the party he had represented both pushed for another
report.
There were definitely some oddities in the way the disaster was handled.
The wreckage from the plane is yet to be returned to Poland.
The victims were returned to Poland in sealed coffins, but many were placed in the wrong
coffin, and even the President had the remains of two other people with him in his casket.
Conspiracy theories that the disaster had actually been an assassination began to develop.
These weren’t fringe beliefs, but up to a quarter of the population of Poland believes
the crash was deliberate even 10 years after the incident.
So when a video of the immediate aftermath of the crash appeared on YouTube just 48 hours
later, it captured the attention of security agents in Poland.
The video is 1 minute and 24 seconds long, and appears to have been recorded on a cell
phone.
Two camera man gets close to the wreckage while a friend hangs back.
A loud siren like noise is heard and then three distinct snapping sounds which some
have claimed sounds like gunfire.
Investigators said the background noise and distortion made it impossible to say whether
this was true or not.
Who recorded the video has been something of a mystery.
According to military investigators, the original uploader went by the name Rastych, and they
linked him to a twitter user named Yura Budnyk.
Polish media reported the camera man was a mechanic named Vladimir Ivanov who worked
near the site.
The video also calls into question the official time-line, with response times given in the
official report not matching what appears to be the case
in the video.