Mortis.com – a single page website with two tone colors has been around since 1997, November 14th to be exact.
The website was first discovered by a 4chan user who was curious about an unknown website that host terabytes of data on its server.
The number of documents hosted on the sites were also tremendous, with one of the largest was 39 gigabytes in size.
THE DISCOVERY
On the landing page, the website only includes a username and a password login page. Most people at this point would simply turn away or think it may just be an admin login page of a website. On one hand, the URL conjures images of mortality, with mortis being the Latin word for death.
Whoever named this website either had a dark sense of humor or wanted the name to reflect something grotesque. But there’s something weirder about this website’s strange name and monochromatic color and design.
WEIRD AND WEIRDER STUFF
Based on curiosity, 4chan users turned to investigate, and connected the site to someone called Thomas ‘Tom’ Ling. When the name was further investigated, it turned out that the person owned other websites that are also mysterious. One of the weirdest websites beside the Mortis.com website, was called Cthulhu.net, which only had a single page upon which was written the words “dead but dreaming” in white on a black background, and nothing else.
The site simply had a white chess piece and that’s it. There were no other pages, no directions, no explanation, and nothing at all to click on.
What’s interesting and strange at the same time is that besides Mortis.com and Cthulhu.net, more than twelve different sites were connected Tom Ling.
What is this guy up to?
STRANGE TURN OF INVESTIGATIONS
After that, many people are very much equipped to find who this person is. People are curious and it led to a lot of investigations at that time. Many people tried to crack the page and get to the bottom of Tom’s website, and they were met with strange and tortuous process that have no answer.
To everyone’s surprise, someone claiming to be Tom Ling finally showed up and explained. Silly isn’t it?
Tom, then claimed that he came from Australia, said that the site was hosting wedding photographs and nothing more. He claimed to be a digital media designer, owned the number of websites people were questioning, and stored all the data in a server in Philadelphia. But when the 4chan investigators asked him for more proof, the so-called Tom Ling stopped replying.
People are hungry for answers, something to feed up their curiosities. People on the internet started digging deeper, and found that the site’s code had a media player embedded, suggesting that the site was being utilized to have motion pictures. There came an archive post stating that the Mortis website had numerous email accounts registered on its server, with names like Igor, Mortis, Blair, Child of Chaos, and some others.
What’s more, it was also found that Mortis.com can be linked to a dental firm, a prominent lawyer, a remote part of the Washington state, and a security company that in turn has connections to a video sharing group on Usenet, the predecessor of the World Wide Web.
You know what’s real scary? After tracing their physical addresses, they were actually empty lots and empty warehouses. This made Mortis.com again a mystery because speculation made investigators to conclude that the Tom Ling from Australia was lying, and he is not the real Tom Ling from Mortis.com.
For years, this go on and on until more internet mysteries and theories circulating about Mortis came and people are very much into it.
CONCLUSION
Mortis.com was discovered in the late 1990s, at a time where people use dial-up internet connection. Whether Tom Ling was lying or not, uploading gigabytes of data to the internet was not an easy task.
Speculations concluded that either Tom Ling paid a lot of money for that to happen, or had direct access to the server. When the FBI got involved, users stopped investigating and the website was taken down.
According to another source, the FBI had nothing to do with the site and it was Tom Ling himself who put the site offline.
The truth about the site remained a question, a mystery.
The real Tom Ling also remained unanswered.
