Just a heads up. This is an episode about a shock website full of disturbing content,

but I did my best to avoid graphic detail.

On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, conspiracy theories, and urban legends,

examine the forces that shape our culture and tell the stories that create the realities we share,

and sometimes the realities we don't. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American History.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, when internet access was still new to most Americans,

one site in particular haunted the edges of the worldwide web like a hideous, poisonous spider.

It was a collection of extremely gruesome and sexually explicit images, many of which became dark memes,

spread by the turn of the millenniums, more nihilistic teens and young adults.

While making this episode, I mentioned the site to a handful of friends, all of whom remembered it,

both faint memories of the site's many rumors and vivid memories of the site's many horrors.

This shock site was the stuff of legend back at a time when the internet was a lot smaller,

when there were specific sites that everyone went to, like new grounds and eboms world,

that gave all of us the same innocent memes and flash videos, our salad fingers, our angry kids,

our home star runners, our hamster dances.

The now-defunct homepage of rotten.com is still accessible on the way back machine,

and it features an eerie skeleton creature with the words,

when hell is full, the dead will walk the earth, pure evil since 1996.

With the description, the soft white underbelly of the net,

eviscerated for all to see, a truly unpleasant experience.

Ceylon Magazine put it this way back in 2001, quote,

if it involves bizarre sex, gruesome death, or the sorted side of celebrity, you will find it on this site.

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