The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

As a skeptic I love a good mystery - the kind of puzzle that Arthur C Clarke would write a book or make a TV show about. A couple of weeks ago I found a set of YouTube videos about a contrived mystery - one that's been deliberately created, rather than many of life's “mysteries” that come about because of misunderstanding and a lack of scientific understanding - or real mysteries where there's nothing otherworldly, but just a lack of information that would explain the backstory to a situation.

In this classification of mine, something like the Voynich manuscript would be a contrived, man-made mystery. These kinds of mysteries are created by someone to give the appearance of being otherworldly, but they have an obviously human origin, even though we don't know the details of their creation - and, incidentally, those details of who, how and why are usually the real unsolved mystery, and can be fun to dig into.

Conversely to these contrived mysteries, an example of a natural mystery would be the chupacabra, where dead livestock that have likely been fed on by scavenging carnivores have given rise to the idea that there's a bloodsucking cryptozoological animal out there. People who aren't familiar with zoology, animal feeding, bite mark analysis and more have tried to explain what to a layman looks like a strange occurrence, and have totally missed the mark.

Of course, many “mysteries” are a mixture of these two - bigfoot, for example, likely started as accidental misidentifications of local fauna, but people have piled deliberate fraud on top of this, using gorilla suits to try to make a quick buck and adding to the mess and confusion.

Finally, an example of a real mystery would be the Somerton Man, the strange case of the body of an unknown man being found on a beach in Adelaide. I'd recommend reading the Wikipedia page of this case if you love a good mystery.

Anyway, the videos I found were about one of the classic computer games of my youth, Doom - which I'm sure many of you have played. There's still an active modding community around Doom, building new enemies, levels and the like. And yes, I'm talking about the 1993 pseudo-3D game, with sprites for characters, rather than any of the more recent, properly 3D incarnations (although I have to admit I have a soft spot for the frenetic pace of the most recent Doom and Doom Eternal games).

The three videos were created by someone who obviously has a deep understanding of the original Doom computer game, and in them he detailed a mysterious game file (or WAD) that had appeared on a popular Doom modding forum last year. The file was said to be the resurrection of an old project to build a 3D representation of their house, but the forum thread contained an odd backstory about a dead friend, sleepless nights, a rising sense of dread, etc.

When people started to take notice and download the level to play it, they were greeted with what at first appeared to be a fairly simple, basic level - a good attempt to recreate a real house in a 3D environment. But as people played through the game, weird things happened like the house decaying, mirrors acting strangely, and staircases becoming endless traps.

The following videos do a great job of breaking down the technical aspects of how this level works, as well as walking people through all the sneakily hidden bonuses, easter eggs and hard to reach special endings - and if you're a fan of Doom I'd recommend watching them.

The real mystery of this game is who actually created it. Despite its suggestions of demonic forces being at play, and (spoiler alert) the reveal from a QR Code that the person who supposedly made the level having died before he started posting on the forum, there's still a fascinating question of who put all the effort in to create this clever story, both inside the Doom WAD and elsewhere, on forums and other places on the internet.

One thing that caught my attention while watching these videos was that there was a song playing in an abandoned car in part of the level, and this song was referred to as “the most mysterious song on the internet”. So, off I went trying to find out about this mystery within a mystery.

This mystery, in contrast to the Doom WAD I learned about it from, is one of those real mysteries. In this case, there was a man called Darius in West Germany in the 1980s who used to record music from the radio. Years later, after the advent of the internet, he digitised his audio tape recordings of the tracks he hadn't been able to identify and posted them on a website, asking for help to name them. One particular track has evaded identification, and the story was popularised in 2019 when a Brazilian teen picked up on the mystery and tried to solve it through posting online wherever he thought he could find help.

To this day, the song has not been identified, although the story of people's efforts can be read on Wikipedia. As I'm sure you're dying to hear this classical masterpiece, here it is in all its glory - a better quality copy than the original one that people were obsessing over, from a tape that Darius' sister, Lydia, found while renovating her house.