A girl in Ohio is being haunted by ghosts. Or perhaps she’s not. There’s a lifeless physique buried beneath her home, rolled up inside a rug. Or there’s truly no physique in any respect, regardless of indicators from cadaver canine.
This week’s greatest drama on TikTok tells the story of a girl from Ohio who was constructing a fence in her yard, solely to uncover a mysterious rug buried on her property. Viewers speculated that her house could possibly be a possible homicide scene, and all of a sudden, native content material creator Katie Santry was on the middle of her personal real-life true crime story, unfolding video by video on TikTok.
Before discovering the rug, Santry had roughly 6,000 followers on TikTok, the place she largely shared content material about her life as a mother, discussing difficult matters like being pregnant, miscarriages, and divorce. However, in simply 4 days, Santry’s TikTok content material took a dramatic flip after she discovered the suspicious rug. Her followers, now climbing towards 2 million, have witnessed every part unfold, from the preliminary discovery to the arrival of police and cadaver canine at her home and a subsequent excavation.
The thought of a potential physique in somebody’s yard is unsettling sufficient, and having hundreds of thousands of individuals watch it’s even crazier. Still, Santry appeared to take consolation in realizing that others had been witnessing it. Commenters even inspired her to proceed digging (which we don’t suggest).
Stories like Santry’s have gotten startlingly strange — not the potential lifeless physique half, however the expertise of turning into the principle character of the web on the drop of a hat. The identical factor occurred to Reesa Teesa, a TikToker who posted an hours-long sequence known as “Who TF did I marry?” and ended up with a TV adaptation within the works primarily based on her life. Hailey Welch (Hawk Tuah lady) went viral for a lewd remark she made in one other creator’s video when she was randomly interviewed on the road in Tennessee. Now she has a podcast on Jake Paul’s community that’s ranked fifth amongst all reveals on Spotify.
Unlike different sudden TikTok stars, Santry isn’t new to social media. Fourteen years in the past, she and her sister had been early YouTube vloggers, posting “Glee” recaps, ideas in regards to the Twilight sequence, and even interviews with the Jonas Brothers. Though Santry left that chapter of her life behind, she clearly realized find out how to inform a compelling story on the web.
By Thursday, murder detectives confirmed up with two cadaver canine to analyze the dug-up space. Santry livestreamed their go to on TikTok, as viewers anxiously watched on. The cadaver canine each sat by the opening within the filth, signaling that the canine sensed one thing was amiss. Soon, Santry’s house was cordoned off with yellow police tape.
The following day, cops and crime scene investigators arrived with tools to dig up the world. Thankfully, no human stays had been found, however this solely makes the rug much more perplexing to viewers.
“Maybe the crime occurred on the rug, and it was buried to conceal evidence,” steered one follower.
Other followers had been disillusioned there wasn’t a physique in spite of everything, highlighting the web’s morbid fascination with true crime tales.
The true crime style has boomed during the last decade, partially as a result of reputation of the podcast “Serial,” which spawned a whole bunch of different reveals in the identical style. As the web made unfathomable quantities of public data extra simply accessible, some true crime followers grew to become hobbyist detectives, an ethically murky pursuit.
Netflix chronicled one such phenomenon within the docuseries “Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer,” which was one of many streamer’s hottest releases when it premiered in 2019. The sequence follows two web vigilantes who arrange a Facebook group in 2010 to trace down a person who posted a video of him killing cats. As the web group investigated, the story by some means turned even darker when the perpetrator struck once more,…
