True Internet Horrors: Chip-Chan, Local 58, and The Plague Doctor
4/3/202644 min
Gather round for three stories the internet found and couldn't put down. A DVD arrived in Sweden with no return address — on it, a figure in a plague doctor mask standing inside an abandoned psychiatric hospital where hundreds of people were executed. The audio carried photographs hidden in frequencies the human ear can't detect.
In Seoul, a woman livestreamed herself 24 hours a day from a filth-filled apartment, claiming a corrupt police officer had implanted a chip in her ankle to control her sleep. Thousands watched. Nobody came.
And somewhere in...
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAJ Gentile· Host0:00
[fire crackling] Gather around. This happened in 2008. A user on 4chan discovered something on an unsecured webcam, a feed from Seoul, South Korea, a woman's apartment. She was lying motionless on a thin mat surrounded by towers of boxes and trash. The 4chan user thought she was dead. Then she moved. The woman sat up, wrote something on a whiteboard, and held it to the camera. Broken English. "My name is Chip Chan. Police officer put chip in my ankle. He control my brain." She collapsed back onto the mat unconscious. 20 hours later, she was still there. Same position. She hadn't moved a muscle. The Internet had found its new obsession. [upbeat music] [fire crackling] [owl hooting] [tense music] Before the stream, she was normal. Jane, a Korean woman in her 30s who wrote a blog. She talked about restaurants. She gave movie reviews. She talked about her weekend plans, her friends, her job. Ordinary life documented in ordinary ways. Then around 2006, the posts changed. She wrote about footsteps in the hallway that stopped outside her door, cars that waited outside her window. She constantly felt like she was being watched. She wrote about a police officer who kept showing up places she