Early Internet Conspiracies Centered On a Creepy Ghost Town

The Ong’s Hat story might be the first attempt at altered reality storytelling

Wharton State Forest, New Jersey. By Famartin from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Portal by Stefan Keller from Pixabay. Edited by the author.


Technology made the world much smaller in the early 1990s. New connections gave people opportunities to share large chunks of information, perhaps even new worlds. Users soon consumed data they never seen before. Some even encountered new experiences. In a couple corners of the internet, the Ong’s Hat narrative blended reality, virtual worlds, and fiction to pull the audience into its experience.

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