Hello! This is my very first entry! I'll be talking about a pretty infamous internet mystery: mortis.com. I wish this website was available to link to, but the only remaining slivers of it are screenshots and forum conversations. I've been fascinated by it. So grab a snack, get cozy, and strap in as I give you a recap of what is known about this mysterious website!

Prior to Mortis.com, there were many internet mysteries; one in particular that comes to mind is CICADA 3301, a game of sorts of elaborate puzzles that led those who were equipped to solve them to the next clue as the game wanted to be solved. It seemed like the goal of the ruse they had put on was the solution to it and finding capable people. Mortis.com, however, seems to be a mystery that would rather go unsolved.

The domain was registered sometime in 1997 but wasn't discovered until much later in 2012, when mumblings about the website surfaced on 4chan.com. While the site was still up, a visit to the domain would bring forth a simple log-in page, prompting for a username and password. users deciding to go and dig into the website code before realizing the website was hosting an extreme amount of data, some of the files being upwards of 39 GB and some even alleging the total amount of data hosted being terabytes of information. This is very unusual because this amount of data would be unrealistic for one person to store, let alone financially Viable at the time.

The wiki page was pulled from the internet in addition to being pulled from the Wayback Machine, meaning that no actual archive of this website lives on after its death in 2011. (I have rarely seen this; however, according to WBM, the owner of said website would have to request this.) Because of the lack of information and local backups of the website, I hope it will be a lesson for future internet historians. Archiving and keeping things like this for future netizens is crucial. Anyway, there are over 20+ websites connected to Mortis.com through the man they are registered to,including but not limited to

Cthulu.com, karenling.com, joshualing.com, and dentalfillins.net

all owned by Thomas Ling. Who is Thomas Ling? The first lead was a man named Thomas Ling who lived in Sydney, Australia, and while this lead was promising, it turned out that the address attached to said Thomas Ling from Sydney was just an empty plot of land. This was the fate of many leads from around the world. All of them lead to empty or vacant lots. There were also many Thomas Lings already past. There are current links that point to Thomas Ling, who is a dentist (dental fillings anyone?) or a lawyer, and a very wealthy lamp company, "Luxo Lamps" (with revenues of $500,000 to $1 million). All connections were found using Usenet files from the website or websites associated with Thomas Ling. When someone supposedly talked to Thomas Lin, he reportedly came out and said that this website was merely for his wedding photos. This is slightly probable because there was a media player built in. But I find this highly unlikely, as digital camera usage was extremely low, especially in 1998. Also, why would you name the website containing pictures from a beautiful day of your life after the latin word for death? We can confirm that Dentalfill-ins was in fact a business at some point that opened and closed, and that makes the business at least verifiable. Another peculiar facet of this mystery is that all of the people listed as being involved with these websites are actually deceased. I found an archive from 4chan claiming someone downloaded 10 GB of data, then the plug was pulled on the website, and they never spoke about what they saw on that 10 GB. That archive can be found here Something else to mention is that on cthulu.net was also a personal blog of sorts for Thomas ling, and it looks like a normal travel blog

Users were able to obtain file information from mortis.com using binsearch, a free indexer that essentially searches thousands of files for the specific files you are searching for using Smail and newsgroups associated with the website itself. From what I understand, it kind of works like a search engine of sorts, and people found titles of files containing movie titles or even just gibberish titles. People were speculating that it was likely a private group ripping DVDs and sharing them. It's likely this was the explanation, but we may never actually know what was being hosted on mortis.com.