Ong’s Hat.

A funny little name. A name on a map of a town that can’t be found.

Emerging on the nascent public internet at some indeterminate point in the late nineties, Ong’s Hat was the prototype for what would become a genre of participatory literature called the alternate reality game, or ARG. An ARG is part adventure story, part puzzle, part esoteric mystery, part scavenger hunt, part online community, all quite weird. They are mostly played on public forums, to capture the widest audience, but their content often spans multiple platforms, and typically multiple media. There have been many thousands of ARGs now, tiny and massive, but one of them was first, and it was wilder than the rest.

Ong’s Hat was by turns surreal, goofy, cosmic, and sinister, drawing heavily on classic counterculture and conspiracy theory lore. In the very early days of the worldwide web, it was doing something in a dispersed form that Mark Z. Danielewski would shortly be hailed as a postmodern genius for doing in the novel House of Leaves: playing adeptly with our ideas about how and why we find things to be true. What makes us believe a thing is real? The course of the game, its story, exists only in inaccurate second-hand reports and archived materials stripped of context now. By accident or by design, all the original online content has long since subsided into the digital sands, but the ghost of Ong’s Hat haunts us still.

Alternate Reality Game, Incunabula, Joseph Matheny, Ong's Hat

None of this is Real: Episode 79- Internet Mysteries: Ong’s Hat and Cicada 3301

September 8, 2020 admin

This week we’re talking about one of the very first internet mysteries, and a complicated puzzle still waiting to be solved.

Show Link: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/none-of-this-is-real#/login-register

Incunabula, Ong's Hat

Small Town Secrets: Celebration, FL/ Ong’s Hat, NJ

September 4, 2020 admin

Ong’s Hat WAS a place set deep in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The 17th-century town was more of an outpost with just a few buildings. It was known as a rowdy place. The town got its name from a man named Jacob Ong who after a fight with a woman threw his beloved hat up in the air. It become stuck in a tree and he never retrieved it. But Ong’s Hat may have served a different purpose in more modern times, it may have been a place where fringe scientists and cultist gathered to travel into other dimensions.