The weird and spooky stories told by people who explored the internet's hidden websites

Sometimes you can find the everyday things on the Dark Web. But what makes it "illicit" is how you market it. Take this (very gross) example of something for sale on Silk Road:

DIY vasectomy kit on SR. it was a kit of weird dentist tool looking hooks and some tube thing. $20.

One person found a "wish pill." Here's the description:

Basically you take the pill, make a wish and it's suppose to make it come true. It just made me laugh how much they were trying to sell it off as something real, they made up fake elements that were supposedly found in nature and showed videos of them "making the pill" (Which was really just a bunch of blue lights being flashed at the screen).

They were selling it for a $100 a pill, sad thing is there were probably a few idiots who actually bought it.

Sometimes you may need something specific and you have nowhere else to turn. If that's the case watch out for a steep price tag. This Redditor explains:

A few years ago I went searching for rhino horn for a story, one guy said he had a couple of whole horns he'd sell for six figures. I had to pass.

Source

Surprises are often in store. And so are vendors with senses of humor. As is showcased with this story:

Silk Road. Circa 2013. Purchased what was promised as a "mind-blowing" experience. Received a Dust Buster two days later. Strangely, no complaints on my end.

From Quora:

There was an interesting PDF with easily 1,000 pages written by ex-inmates about how to survive in prison, how to get drugs in and out of prisons, gangs etc.

You can buy all sorts of counterfeit credentials, spanning from passports and degrees to logins for accounts like Netflix and Hulu.

One Redditor "found counterfeit medical degrees. Considered buying one for 999 bitcoin. Realized that was over $50,000."

From Quora:

The most interesting things I've found though are websites that basically help you change your identity completely.

For example for 6000$-10000$ you can get an american ID , passport , driving license and all the paperwork done so you can move to America under a name you desire. That's quite cheap if you ask me. I mean somewhere around ~8k$ just to get a new identity and start a new life in a new country? I could basically sell my house , spend 8k on the new id's and move to america and buy a flat with the rest of the money and start a new life all together.

And sometimes people are selling things you didn't even know you needed to buy online, like carrots or pretzels:

There was a German man selling pretzels, just pretzels.

Though Tor is said to hide your online identity, some people have found that to not be the case. Here are a few examples.

Even if you're using Tor, you can still be tracked. At least, that's what one Redditor says. The story:

I posted a comment on a video, and when I went back to that page to watch the video later, someone replied to my comment saying: "That is very astute of you Mr. (insert my last name)"

I didn't internet for like a week. my last name is not a common one.

A Redditor writes this creepy tale about using the internet before Google. The user was following the online trail of a site he or she found. Then he or she found a document made just for the user, making it known that the Redditor was not alone. "We see you," the message wrote.

The whole story goes that the user came upon a random page of what seemed to be "random thoughts from different people." So the Redditor decided to press further. Looking through the source, compiling the IP addresses of all the comments, this user was trying to figure out what connected the people on this site.

Then, something creepy happened:

I finally came upon a web server with a huge directory of HTML files and TIFF images, with a few smaller sub directories containing the same. nslookup returned no reverse records for the IP. A VisualRoute traced it as far as Colorado. The HTML files appeared to be records a psychologist or similar mental health professional would keep. The images were of faxes, apparently of both military and medical nature.

As I browsed from a sub directory back to the parent, at the top of was a new HTML file named something like "1-.HELLO-THERE.html". The time stamp was from right that minute. I opened it, and in plain text was the message "we see you". No quotes, all lower-case. About 15 seconds later the server dropped.

Though people tell tales of drugs and other illicit sites, sometimes people use the Dark Web just for silly purposes.

One user was playing what was called an Alternate Reality Game. This game, "No Love Deep Web," had users accessing Tor to hunt for various things.

This user got engrossed in the game. It ended with "me driving to New York to answer a pay phone at 3:00AM. That was cool."

Sometimes you find weird forums. Take this user's example:

I once found a forum dedicated to sharing recordings of the automated messages that tell you the next stop on trains. People would post the recordings that they presumably made themselves and then they would discuss them.

It haunts me to this day. I have so many questions.