Mortis - Internet Mysteries

[Music] due to the countless amounts of strange websites on the internet it's intriguing to see when one seems to stand out from the rest in the earlier days of the web stumbling across a creepy website was something much more novel as opposed to today there was no precedent to a good online mystery Internet users today revel in the idea of exploring such oddities just for the sake of being entertained that being said that doesn't necessarily mean that an older Internet mystery cannot be captivating today we're gonna take a look at one of those early mysterious websites of the internet that has been no stranger to speculation in fact there is so much speculation regarding this individual website that all it details surrounding this makes getting to the bottom of it incredibly difficult so today let's try and make sense of all the rumors of mortis com let's start off this video with a reddit post as it will give us a brief summary of the topic before we actually start to dissect this mystery I want to point out as well this person is by no means the first person to post about this but this post does have a good collection of info that provides a very good starting point so a while back I stumble across this internet mystery while researching Lake City quiet pills calm and came across an equally intriguing internet mystery related to a mysterious website called mortis calm apparently this website when it was active it was created in 1997 and has since been shut down this page came up with a login and password screen that according to some experts was extremely hard to hack into with some resorting to brute force applications and having little to no luck in getting past the login screen it got a lot weirder when more people started to look into it because more and more connections and links were starting to be made with this website some of the strange aspects were the website seemed to be linked to a dentist office a lawyer and a high-end security firm Usenet files were discovered to be linked back to the website there were apparently encrypted with password protection and had weird titles some of the file sizes were huge one of the biggest being 39 gigabytes in size which got people wondering what this website was hiding all references to the site have since been removed from the internet including a wiki page and there's not much information regarding the website itself the website was apparently owned by a mysterious individual named Thomas Ling although it was speculated that this was an alias as there seemed to be great difficulty in trying to gather and ascertain any information about him other than he was an artist at one point over a dozen other websites were linked to mortis com and they were just as mysterious and weird one of which had a white chess piece and nothing else it was also reported at one time that Thomas Ling apparently came out and said that this site was just for his wedding photos and nothing more however all this did was prom or people to work even harder to get through the login page and discover for themselves what was really going on people also found other very bizarre connections such as the site being linked to empty vacant lots and warehouses and people who are listed as something to do with the website were all deceased this fueled speculation that this site was a front for something or much more sinister web site was also from various accounts from people who tried to hack in very difficult to get past the login screen and that the website was very well protected there was anyone around during this time who actively was involved in this little internet mystery and can shed some light and give more details as there's still so much to this site I'd love to know about that got lost when the week he got taken down I'd love your help and input as I'd love to clear up this mystery thanks guys within this poster Opie leaves quite a few links to different archived threads from 4chan quite a few of them are taken down keep in mind this post isn't that old either so these archive threads have disappeared recently however our Opie does leave quite a few updates as people start to comment the first update is just him saying that he's going to update the post the second update to this post our hope he links another thread from 4chan on the technology board which will reference in a bit as it is one of the only few ones remaining the third update to this thread it reads the following another persistent story which is hard to back up stated that the feds apparently became involved with the site for some unknown reason and shut it down however another Reddit user who claimed to be there claimed it was actually Thomas Ling who shut it down himself for unknown reasons which story is true is hard to say it also opens up more questions and provides few answers if the feds part of the story is true why did they shut down the site and become involved it was Thomas Ling who came along and shut down the site himself I can only assume it was because of all the attention he was getting and he decided to shut it down before anyone got close to discovering what he was up to update four states there were other websites that were backtracked as belonging to Thomas Ling that were just as weird in equally mysterious as mortis calm which included Cthulhu net this one was said to contain nothing but a white chess piece with a very eerie sing dead but dreaming whatever that means then there was Karen Ling calm Joshua Ling org Ling's burro calm eternal night calm and dental fillings at any a side note here there are a lot more web sites that people have overlooked in this thread as well as many other threads like this I did my own research on this and we'll get to that and once we're done with this back on the reddit post it reads to my knowledge no one really found out what the purposes were for these web sites either and some of them are believed to be defunct now to here ROP adds more updates including first-hand testimonies from people claiming to be around for Chan at a time one of the testimonies reads the following though it's no longer uh the strangest web site I've encountered is definitely mortis com I used to browse the export or the paranormal board on 4chan pretty regularly one night someone posted asking if there was any updates on the website called mortis I decided to visit the site and see what the hubbub was what I found was seemingly uninteresting completely black background with the word mortis in lowercase white lettering absolutely nothing else weird but not worth investigating I thought I tried clicking on the word and a login box came up when I checked back to the export people were talking about trying to log in no one was getting anywhere a few people did enough research to learn that there were many terabytes of information being stored here yeah you read that right terabytes hundreds if I remember correctly but something absolutely ridiculous we all had our theories most of them disturbing a lot of people suggested we give up trying to get in for our own safety depending on what was in there but most people disagreed and kept trying eventually people were tired of trying generic user name and password combos someone decided to ask the G or Technology Board to hack their way in instead of trying to brute force people tried for weeks to get in we learned that the website to one mr. Ling who owned multiple other anomalous websites which were also interesting but irrelevant we learned more and more about Ling but never got past the login box I gave up but others kept trying a few months ago I decided to look around and see what progress had been made apparently the FBI stepped in I think they actually contacted some of the people trying to get in and crack the login but I wasn't around at the time this happened soon after the website and all others owned by mr. Ling just went down I would still like to know what's in there but it was fun getting involved with some of the biggest conspiracy theorists on the interwebs on something so fun I'm gonna skip through this thread the next first-hand account because we already know a lot of this information the next first-hand account comes from a user named mental underscore illness I was in all the IR season stuff and all this happened the FBI had no involvement sadly the due to home the site came into our IRC chat and told us it was just family photos or something when we asked him for proof that we were talking to the grill guy he changed the front page of the website to some text explaining himself then quickly took it down it was all very very fishy he had another site which showed an image of a night chess piece and offered a login when you clicked on it nobody got into that one either I don't remember the URL okay there's a ton of information here but this gives you a general understanding of this mystery as a whole and how many rumors regarding this website have been created the hard part here is confirming all the rumors circulated throughout this post there's a lot of conflicting information if we want to create a logical understanding of what's going on with this website we need to be able to verify things ourselves as I said previously many of the links to 4chan threads as well as any other archived threads have since been lost or dead if there is one thing we can say for certain just from all these rumors is that the creator of the website obviously knows what it's used for and we know who that is it's Thomas Ling so let's start there a great way to learn more about Thomas Ling is to look up what websites he created for reference what I'm about to look at is public records they're required when you register a website under your name if we do a reverse DNS lookup for the name Thomas Ling we find twenty five domains created under this first and last name the first one ever created was mortis calm as well as the following websites I will say it does seem like Thomas Ling is out of his way to remove this website from existence this truly shows whatever is on this website is definitely trying to be hit and left in the past we know this because someone contacted the wayback machine to remove sites from their archive I just want to point out that I've looked through the Wayback Machine quite a bit and I've only seen this a handful of times so since we can't even view what the original website looked like we're gonna have to look through the other websites by Thomas Ling to get a full picture of what was going on however we need to actually find websites by Thomas Ling the one who created mortis calm but the thing here is that when you do a reverse domain search anyone with the name Thomas Ling would fall under this search and we need to narrow it down even further if you still don't understand what I mean by this for example if your name was something really common like John Smith then you would be lumped into this list with a bunch of other John Smith's that had registered websites on the public record the list of websites I believe to be helpful in this situation are the ones that all seem to be under the same domain registrar which goes by the name pair networks Incorporated if you're unfamiliar with what a domain registrar is it is essentially a company that is involved in reserving the name of a website for you most of these websites under this registrar are created around the same time as mortise com here are a list of those websites keep in mind I had to go through these one by one and find valuable information all pertaining to this these websites are Cthulhu net dental fillings com eternal night calm exército calm Jeffrey Ling org Joshua Ling org Karen Ling comm Ling's bore Oh calm mortis calm and Thomas Ling DDS calm since we already know about mortis calm that was just a page with a login and that we can't really check out the past history of the website let's look at the next one in the timeline that was created an entire year later in 1998 this website is exército calm which I forgot to mention is also redacted from the wayback machine here's the thing though this website is actually still up regardless of not being on the Wayback Machine going to this website we find a directory with a few labeled items quilts dot HTML quilts underscore files robots.txt and a folder called sale the only one that I found helpful in this case was the quilts HTML link if we click on quilts dot HTML we get redirected to a page that shows a wide variety of quilts on a website that looks to be an art portfolio for someone who makes quilts as a hobby and wants to share them with the world in 1998 this would have been a lot more common to have something like this for an art portfolio because you didn't have places to share your little DIY projects like you do now I believe this website belongs to Karen Lange and I'll explain why on the titled post of the home page we can't click anything but we can see is that this woman has made a quilt for two people on their first birthday Joshua and Jeffrey which if we go back to the list of our domains that I said would be helpful what do we see Joshua wing.org and Jeffrey Lange org as well as Karen link aam what I want you to take note of on this website is the logo in the top right dfi which I can't click on here but I will explain in a minute the next website I want to take a look at is dental fillings comm which is archived on the boy back machine on the first capture the web site it is noted to have two offices that belong to dental fillings as a business these locations have long since vacated from this business and they aren't related to this business at all anymore and that really doesn't help us at all moving on if we navigate over to the FAQ section we can pretty much learn everything we need to know about this site here once again we see the dfi logo that belongs to dental fillings which was also on the other website I will say that this business did in fact exist despite what a lot of people online mentioned about this being a fake business there is documentation of dental fillings incorporated being opened and closed as an employment service these Incorporated filings in the state of California have Thomas Ling's name written right on them I will also note this business entity was suspended by the Franchise Tax Board in the state of California and this is in fact public record that is viewable to anybody who looks up this individual business entity however due to the nature of other names being involved in this document I don't want to show it here as there's no reason to it seemed like all this business did was find filling positions for dental assistants with the rise of new job search websites this kind of became obsolete I would guess this business was suspended in 2012 however what I want to note is that it was actually founded in 1998 something that may have led to the rumor that this wasn't a real business was because the website actually lies about the age of creation it says that it was actually in 1968 when the business was founded however we know it to be 1998 moving on before we get to the weird websites there is still one normal one that remains our list that is Thomas Ling DDS calm which is still up and belongs to a dentist in San Francisco funny enough this website was registered closely to the time of the dental filling company closing looking at all of his Yelp reviews we can see that this guy is a pretty nice guy so please do not harass this guy asking him about mortis this mystery has been around for a while and if he wanted to come forward and talk about it by now he would have so please just let this guy do his job all right now let's move on to the more cryptic websites on our list Cthulhu net another website that is believed to be owned by Ling not much is known about this website but that's probably because it was nothing to it in the earliest captures the wayback machine the site actually said Cthulhu dotnet will awaken soon send us your email address and we'll keep you posted Cthulhu at Cthulhu net as far as a chess piece being on the site like our Opie mentioned I think they obviously misremembered this there's absolutely nothing to click on this website or at least the wayback machine doesn't allow for it as far as the chestpiece rumor do you remember Joshua Ling org well if you go to the oldest capture from the wayback machine in July of 2011 here is a black chess piece this is what is shown on many of the other websites of Ling's including Lanesboro calm my best guess here is that since there was nothing to these sites the names that were used on these sites were basically as a way to reserve a domain for their kids the web site Karen Ling comm even had the phrase future home of Karen Ling calm and its earliest capture and then thereafter it became a black chess piece indefinitely he's likely using this black chess piece just as a placeholder for the web sites that he doesn't use for Cthulhu net he does the same thing but with a phrase which is different as to why Ling picked up the name Cthulhu Don my best guess would be that this was an attempt that domain flipping this is essentially when you buy a domain sit on it for a while and try to sell it for more money in the early days of the internet something like Cthulhu would have been highly sought after if he could get it net a.com or any type of website with that domain name interestingly enough if you look at the Google Trends of January of 2004 the interest in domain flipping was the highest actually ever recorded funny enough this domain was registered in March of 2004 just two months later as far as any connections to any other businesses I believe that may have stemmed from people looking into other websites by people named Thomas Ling I found no connection to a security firm or any other business in my research but I definitely could be missing something that has been deleted with the passing of time like I said previously almost all of the original threads are now missing from the archives but I still believe I have a very logical explanation as to what is going on with this site so let me get into the evidence for my theory as far as searching the files that were actually found to be linked to the site there are still bits and pieces left regarding the things downloaded there the first thing I would like to mention that is referenced on one of the original 4chan threads however references are now deleted thread they mentioned that there was an embed media player found on the websites code a media player in case you're unfamiliar would be used to play video so if they wanted to host videos there they could watch them wherever or if they wanted to play music they could listen to it online before we get this next piece of evidence which is much more substantial I have to explain something first when people were finding files for more Descamps the way they found it was through a Usenet search engine called bin search the way they connected this is that when they found emails from mortise and mortise com they then use that to search on bin search under various different news groups basically if you have the email and you knew the news group that this individual was in downloading content or receiving it from then you could piece the two together I know this is a very rough explanation but it gets the point across I know I probably got something wrong in there but you get the general gist most of what people reported and what I'm about to show you was that mortise and mortise com was downloading movies and other files that had random names I will also note like I said so the files had random names the general consensus is that most of the content was downloaded from a news group on Usenet called all binaries HDTV which would explain the individual large file sizes look at this post from 2011 where one 4chan user posts the following found some downloads posted by this guy jibberish names at 25 gigabyte drive crazy 3d BD 25 part 2 without a password someone with fast internet can help out this post was dated Friday September 23rd 2011 keep that in mind if we simply Google Drive crazy 3d what comes up is a movie called drive angry and for some reason this was a commonly searched term on Google this movie was with Nicolas Cage that was shot in 3d and released in February 2011 and then sent to DVD May 31st 2011 while you can never say for certain this leads me to believe that this group was likely ripping DVDs in other films to upload to more Descamps as the search was found in September if this is true this makes a ton of sense it would explain exactly why this site was housing so much information BitTorrent didn't even come out until 2001 and more Descamps was registered in 1997 likely this was a private group that was making their own little version of Netflix family and friends would probably buy DVDs rip them and share them at catalogue for other families to watch for free however if this group of people was sinking money into DVDs and server hosting this large you'd expect this group to be making some kind of money as a result to offset their costs remember how ROP and the original thread rumoured this website was shut down by the FBI well do you also remember that little screen that used to appear before every DVD and VHS movie there is absolutely no way to know this for sure ever happened but this would make actually perfect sense on Thomas wings website he claims to have graduated dental school in 1992 mortis was made in 1997 and his dental filling company was made in 1998 I hypothetically see the motivation for creating something like this if we think about this guy's life situation he's a family man he needed to provide for his kids and wife after being the work force for about five years perhaps this is a way to start and pay for his new company I really don't know I'm just speculating but that's my best guess as to why this guy named the website mortis calm which is Latin for death that I don't know how you'd think you would have picked something more obscure but perhaps he thought in the early days of the internet that not nearly as many people would just go to random websites in conclusion as far as I know this is the most sense that anyone has ever made out of this website that only has seemed to garner speculation in rumors this website has been passed around in so many top-ten lists creepy internet mysteries but it seems like no one wanted to do 30 minutes of research into the subject matter which is actually really pathetic it's truly crazy how one little site can garner the Internet's attention and so much speculation and what I can only describe is a really prolonged version of the game of telephone I have to say though this has been a fun one to look into and a fun one to piece together due to all the rumors it's really nice to set all this stuff aside and get a clear answer in my opinion however I might not be correct if I'm missing something and I glaringly overlooked it let me know but for now let's put this one to rest you if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing or checking out my other content that is all bye bye

Channel: Barely Sociable

Views: 1,643,374

Rating: 4.9009862 out of 5

Keywords: mortis, mortis.com, mortis mystery, internet mysteries, internet mysteries solved, 4chan stories, 4chan mystery, reddit mysteries, 4chan mysteries, 4chan mystery solved, cthulhu.net, mysteries

Id: 1ci3l7pnfdk

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019