True Internet Horrors: Chip-Chan, Local 58, and The Plague Doctor

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

The Why Files

Science, Life Sciences, Documentary, Society & Culture, Fiction, Science Fiction

4.8 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2026

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 West Virginia, a public access TV station started broadcasting messages that didn't belong to it. The signal told you not to look at the moon. Then something reversed the signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Gather round. This happened in 2008.
0:09.3	A user on 4chan discovered something on an unsecured webcam, a feed from Seoul, South Korea,
0:15.8	a woman's apartment.
0:17.2	She was lying motionless on a thin mat surrounded by towers of boxes and trash.
0:21.7	The 4chan user thought she was dead.
0:24.2	Then she moved.
0:26.0	The woman sat up, wrote something on a whiteboard and held it to the camera.
0:30.4	Broken English.
0:31.6	My name is Chip Chan.
0:33.1	Police officer put Chip in my ankle.
0:35.6	He control my brain.
0:38.6	She collapsed back onto the mat, unconscious.
0:41.4	20 hours later, she was still there.
0:44.1	Same position, she hadn't moved a muscle.
0:46.5	The internet had found its new obsession.
0:48.4	The internet had found its new obsession. Before the stream, she was normal.
1:04.6	Jane, a Korean woman in the 30s, who wrote a blog.
1:07.6	She talked about restaurants.
1:09.0	She gave movie reviews.
1:10.3	She talked about her weekend
1:11.2	plans, her friends, her job. Ordinary life documented in ordinary ways. Then around 2006,
1:17.3	the post changed. She wrote about footsteps in the hallway that stopped outside her door,
	...

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