◆ Biography ◆
In the shadowy recesses of the early Internet... long after the age of chain emails, yet before the reign of polished influencer culture, there existed a strange figure whispered about only in the corners of small middle school friend groups. Their name drifted from hallway to hallway like a dare spoken in hushed voices, quite literally only known as The Anonymous Hacker.
To outsiders, nothing about them seemed remarkable. Their YouTube channel, first created to sometime in 2016, looked like the discarded remnants of a bored teenager. Videos were only a few seconds long, created with the now defunct YouTube Video Editor, consisting of nothing more than scrolling text slides. Most of them bore the same message, over and over, typed in stark white letters: "I'm back."
They stole content. They reuploaded random clips from other creators or from the actual Anonymous channel. They spammed nonsense. The channel looked like a joke, and everyone who saw it treated it like one.
At first, The Anonymous Hacker's stunts were small. They lurked in the chats of low-view streamers, mostly other students or just completely random people, sending cryptic threats and demanding that stream titles be changed to "being hacked." It was stupid, childish, almost performative. But the victims, usually 11 to 14-year-olds, didn't know any better. Some panicked. Others played along knowing it was incredibly stupid. All of them felt watched.
But then, as winter break ended and 2017 rolled in, something shifted. The childish trolling stopped, the tone changed.
The next messages people received weren't silly taunts or spam. They contained real information; Private details no middle schooler ever expected a stranger to know. Home addresses. Bus routes. Names of teachers. Photos pulled from private accounts no one remembered posting publicly.
The transformation was eerie. The choppy text-slides now seemed more like masks, placeholders hiding something calculating beneath. Then came the first upload that was totally bizzare.
It was simply titled "Blake Academy".
The video showed a school bathroom. It was tilted, shaky, filmed with something that barely qualified as a camera. The tile pattern, the sinks, the wall colors... anyone who attended Blake recognized it instantly. There was no ambient sound except the faint hum of fluorescent lights. No figure on screen. Just the camera drifting, almost nervously or something. For the kids who went there, it felt like a punch to the gut.
Rumors started overnight. Someone swore they'd seen a student wandering the halls with a phone out getting ready to record some nonsense. Someone else claimed the doors were propped open earlier than usual. Someone whispered that a substitute teacher had gone missing that day. None of it was confirmed of course, but it didn't even matter. Afterall, fear thrives on vagueness and ambiguity.
Hours later another upload appeared: "still hiding." Same bathroom. Same shaky footage. Same sense of someone breathing just behind the lens. Then another just titled "cant escape."
This time the camera moved, it was up a staircase, the familiar metal railing glinting under dim lights. Whoever was filming knew the layout. They weren't lost. They were navigating.
The descriptions of the videos then started mentioning students by name, some clearly from the school, others rumored to be from nearby districts. Maybe they were targets. Maybe they were friends of the uploader. Maybe the names were added to stir chaos. Middle schoolers filled in the blanks themselves.
Some said Nathan had seen the hacker in person. Some said Micah fought them. Some just insisted both were in on it. But no adults could confirm any version, and no kid could agree on the details. The absence of truth only strengthened the myth.
That same night, another upload: "Blake Overnight Almost Caught."
It showed a floor tile pattern almost identical to the school's, illuminated only by a really cheap flashlight shaking in someone's hand. The camera bobbed erratically as if the person holding it was running or hiding.
Some students swore the janitors talked about hearing footsteps. Others said the police had been called. Some claimed their parents got emails about a security concern. None of these details ever proved real. But kids spread them like gospel either way.
Sometime later came the video titled "Rochelle School of the Arts."
Another school. Another chillingly casual description claiming the uploader would be ."staying for a bit.". More names sprinkled into the description, perhaps classmates of someone, perhaps strangers entirely.
Adults would have dismissed it as someone wandering their local district with a phone, as stupid as it is to even dismiss. But to the kids who watched in real-time, it felt like the hacker could appear in any hallway, behind any stall door, outside any classroom. It became a local legend. A dare. A threat. A story teachers brushed off but kids whispered endlessly about.
The last upload was unnervingly simple: "still here." Just white text. Black background. Made with the YouTube Video Editor as usual.
The channel stopped uploading altogether. No explanation. No reveal. No moment of closure. Some students said the hacker was caught. Some insisted they moved schools. Some believed the videos hid clues no one had ever managed to decipher. And a few, usually the quiet kids, the ones who paid too much attention to digital shadows suggested something else, that this wasn't the beginning or end, just the one window of time where someone glimpsed the figure behind the curtain.
Most people who grew up in that community forgot the details over the years, but not the feeling. The feeling of checking over their shoulder in the school bathroom. The feeling of refreshing a YouTube channel nobody should care about. The feeling that someone their age, or someone close enough to know what hallways looked like but far enough away to hide was watching.
But the Anonymous Hacker never returned. Their story became one of those local myths that never leaves the area. You can mention it casually today to the people who knew about it... mentioning the videos, the names, the shaky footage, and someone who went to those schools will still go quiet for a moment. Or perhaps just laughing it off as some really shitty joke. But they remember.
And no one ever figured out who was behind the camera.
