Mystery: 62.10401554464931 24.459908986464143

A still frame from the video in question. Source: Cool Interesting Stuff.

Internet mysteries: they’re a lot like Bethesda games. On the surface, they offer you the world and then some. However, once you so much as lay a finger on the door handle to let them in, they crumble into dust and fall apart. Then a dragon spins around and flies away spraying fire everywhere.

Indeed, Internet mysteries are far from the most magnificent things out there when it comes to compelling content. Though that doesn’t immediately mean they’re bad. If you’re a talented writer, you can explore beyond what’s presented to show the greater picture. This is where a serious divide comes into play when it comes to the innumerable amount of videos and articles about your dime-a-dozen Internet mysteries; the so-called “greatest” of them. You know, the Markovian Parallax Denigrate, A858, Unfavorable Semicircle, and every ARG this side of the Milky Way. Because of this, I often believe that most Internet mysteries fall into one of three categories:

The first is that they’re an art project. Some artsy student threw together some bizarre imagery that would make Lars von Trier gush over the deep meaning as to why the maggots are crawling on the woman. As a result, the denizens of the Internet think it’s a confession to a murder and it makes it to about a dozen top ten lists where people put a red circle around Mick Jagger’s lips, signifying that he too is behind Paul McCartney being the father to Ariana Grande.

The second is that it’s an ARG, or “alternate reality game”. Basically, a very bored person makes a game where people go outside and don’t practice social distancing. These kinds of games are very popular and actually quite cool. I had once contemplated making one myself, but I’m neither clever enough nor do I have any reason to make one. I also don’t think there’s any point to making one when there are enough out there to satisfy most fans of ARGs.

The third and final category is that the answer is something mundane, boring, and ultimately very normal. A supposedly creepy website was made by someone for fun, a creepy video was made for a contest or for school, or any other “mysterious” piece of content on the Internet was, well, just made because the user wanted to make it.

That brings us to today’s supposed mystery. It’s called 62.10401554464931 24.459908986464143 and it’s one of those “lesser known” Internet rabbit holes because it never took off. Though just like any other titan of the Internet mystery genre, it has its own base of truth seekers that suspect there is something malicious behind this video. So let’s journey down the rabbit hole and see what the truth is.

The Story

Our story today takes us to the land of YouTube. Specifically, to a channel named “626544984949854984858948l1”. I did a Google search to try and find if there was any special meaning to that mishmash of numbers with a single vertical bar in there, but it yielded nothing. As such, I’m going to guess that it’s a deliberately cryptic username for the sake of being deliberately cryptic.

As for their channel, there’s one video that was uploaded five years ago on August 9, 2014 named 62.10401554464931 24.459908986464143 (I’ll call it 62.1 from here on out) and has a meaning to it that I actually know about. It’s a pair of coordinates that leads to a forest located in Finland; specifically in Mänttä-Vilppula. That will be relevant later though. For now, let’s focus on the content of the video. It’s two minutes and nineteen seconds in length and plays out a lot like most videos of its type. There’s a lot of blurry imagery, creepy sounds, warped audio, and imagery that butchers the concept of contextualism. Everything lacks meaning and as such, you’re left with a video that’s as devoid of understanding as someone who decided to try to build a Sherman tank without understanding how to tie their shoelaces. There’s also footage of a person giving birth, which I must say is something I could go without seeing, but I’m not in any position to speak when I’m the person who writes about serial killers. Ah, but I digress. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the video for your viewing pleasure.

Weird, right? That’s what most people claim and that’s honestly the only reason I wanted to cover it. It’s “weird”, but weird doesn’t make for a mystery on its own. I think that my desire to write about this is weird, but I don’t question it. My desire to write about it is there and therefore, I want to take advantage of that desire to put out content that people may enjoy. As such, I wanted to look into the video a bit more than I otherwise would.

The comment’s section is by and large filled with mundane replies; people who are interested in it. Some comments stood out to me though. There was one person who stated the following:

I watched this video Thank God my poop went smoothly because I watched this video

Thanks for sharing, bud.

Another user stated the following:

2. humans and take it by using the train, .. and I see in the map around there like there is a road that goes through the ground, it means that the passing of the train is underground ... already ... the point is they ask for help to stop the experiment ' an human who was there, yes if he made a live video it would definitely be discovered, so he made a video like this ...

Finally, one other user stated:

If you people are wondering what this is it is basically a bunch of random creepy clips put together in a weird way.

I think you’re onto something, bud. Though I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The comments aren’t exactly revolutionizing the means of researching the purpose of a video. As such, I had to use some good old fashioned detective skills to get to the bottom of this and by that, I mean I had to use Google. So, I got to work looking up this video.

And I checked.

And I checked.

And I gave up.

Yeah, to be quite honest, there’s nothing to this story. Aside from some podcasts that have done episodes on it and a few lists that have it on there, there’s nothing to follow up on. I even tried checking 4plebs (the 4chan archive), but to my amazement, no threads mentioned this video. In a last ditch effort, I went to Reddit and checked to see what was on there. Unsurprisingly, there was a post from September 1, 2014 from a user named NoseGore. The post reads:

I accidentally typed some numbers to the address bar and this came up...

This struck me as odd sounding since the odds of you typing in the required numbers to get results similar to 62.10401554464931 24.459908986464143 seems astronomically low. Though to entertain the idea, I tried typing in that sequence of numbers without the periods in them. I was met with results that made me really suspicious. While there are results for podcasts that pop up related to the video, they all came out after the post was made…

By years.

They’re all for the episode done by the podcast Clouded Mysteries. The episode was released on September 13th, 2016. So to say I was suspicious of this would be an understatement, but I decided to continue to entertain the idea that somehow, NoseGore may have hit the jackpot on typing in the right number sequence. So I went to Bing.

Same results.

I went to Yahoo.

Same results.

I went to Aol.

Same results.

I went to Ask.

Same results

I went to DuckDuckGo.

Same results.

I went to Tor.

Same results.

I went to Yandex (a Russian search engine).

Same results.

I went to Baidu (a Chinese search engine).

Same results.

I went to Wolframalpha.

Same results… okay, not really, I got nothing there whatsoever.

This leads to believe that NoseGore is either the luckiest man on Earth or he was the one who made the video. Most of his posts are for the online game RuneScape, so it’s not like I can pin this on him as he only has one post made. Though it’s something that I thought was worth bringing up. Also, before anyone potentially goes to ask him about the video, his last post was three years ago. I don’t think he’s using the account anymore.

Now then, with that, the story of 62.1 comes to an end. Everything else I could find was a dead end or a repeat of everything we already knew or is as easily accessible as typing in the video’s title into Google. Now begins our trip to the theories section.

Theories

1. It’s an art project

To kick things off, the first theory is that it’s an art project. This is very common when it comes to creepy videos on the Internet and I think there’s no better proof to back up such a claim than 11B-X-1371 (better known as the Plague Doctor Video). If you aren’t familiar with it, here it is.

Creepy, no? When that video surface, tons and tons of people thought that it was something super insidious. It doesn’t help that the background to the video was enigmatic too: a tech blogger got it in the mail and watched it. It was like he was targeted by the person (or persons) who made it. So there had to be something really dark behind it, right?

Well, no.

In the end, it turned out that a man named Parker Wright made it as an art project and the whole thing was perfectly explainable. While some dispute this claim and think Parker is lying (an accusation we’ll cover sometime this year), most have accepted it as the truth and have all but moved on. As such, the same explanation can be applied to 62.1: a video that was made as an art project. The only difference is that it didn’t end up taking off like 11B-X-1371 and instead faded into obscurity much quicker.

2. It’s an ARG

This theory is one that I actually consulted a friend of mine—Jif—on. He’s one half of the YouTube channel Debunk File and you should check out their content. It’s quite entertaining (also, I’m morally obligated to promote them after they helped me; hi, Jif!) and a nice, realistic take on the YouTube horror community (which I think can be a bit on the biased side towards believing everything it talks about). Anyways, I asked Jif as to what he thought about the video and, in his eyes, it’s an ARG—or Alternative Reality Game.

Now admittedly, Jif did most of the research into the video itself. I’m someone who, to be quite honest, never looks much into these types of videos because in my eyes, it’s usually nothing special. So when I sent the video, he immediately went:

A coded title, distorted clips from movies, distorted audio

Definitely an ARG.

That would be the end of that if he hadn’t decided to go snoop around for the weird face, which he told me was from The Adventures of Mark Twain. At that point, I wanted to tell him all I wanted his opinion, but he seemed delighted that I’d ask for his assistance (or so it’d seem to me). About a day later after asking him and me telling him that everything I found was kinda silly and he’s now telling me, “That’s what I told you, Vertigo.”

Yes, Jif, I’m aware you told me that. No need to make me feel like the inferior detective.

Okay, joking aside, most of the argument for this theory comes from how the video is, as Jif put it, a checklist of every cliche and trope that an ARG uses. As he stated earlier: it has a coded title, it uses distorted imagery from various movies, shows, and other forms of media, and it distorted the audio to add a “creep” factor. For all intents and purposes, 62.1 looks and acts like an amalgamation of every ARG that’s ever existed. As such, the argument more or less makes itself thanks to its lack of originality. Case closed, right? Well, not quite. While I’d love to say that the two of us put the case to rest because of our unmatched detective skills, there’s another theory that has circulated in the most fringe of fringe groups. So let’s jump into that.

3. It’s the confession of a murderer

Our third theory is a long one. Some have speculated that that location is in fact where a killer may have buried a body—or bodies—of his or her victims. This theory is by no means something unique to 62.1 and has been applied to a host of other strange videos on the Internet. One of the more famous ones is that of the YouTube channel “Deeper”. That was an ARG that used an array of unsolved murders to take players on a very psychological journey. As it stands, the owner of the channel has supposedly passed away, but some speculate that it’s a part of the game and that it will start up once more.

As for 62.1, there’s no concrete proof to back up the idea that it’s the real deal when it comes to a video confession of some sort. All there really is is the speculation of those who wish to believe there’s something darker and much more sinister at play. In an effort to prove if this belief has a basis in reality, I went out on an online expedition to see if there were any missing persons (or murder) cases in Finland at—or around—the time the video was posted.

I started my expedition by looking up the population of Finland in 2014. According to a quick Google search, it was 5,471,753. To give a bit of context to that number, the population of the state of Minnesota was 5,457,173—and is the closest state I could find in the way of population. While the both locations have a fair number of differences, I figure it’s the closest I could do in the way of a domestic setting for myself. Feel free to call me out, but I’m running with it.

Moving on though, my next location was to check the murder rate per capita for both locations. In 2014, Finland had a murder rate of 1.14 for every 100,000 inhabitants. Minnesota on the other hand had a murder rate of 1.6 for every 100,000 inhabitants. No word on how many of the murder victims in Finland are left over Soviets, but I’m sure that’ll fix itself over time (eventually).

Historical jokes aside, this to me proves a few things. The first is that Minnesota’s definitely the less desirable place to live if you don’t want to get killed. The second is that Finland is an astonishingly safe place to visit, let alone live in. Well, at least back in 2014; I didn’t check if crime has gone up or down in recent years as it’s not relevant. I’m sure things have changed and whether that’s for better or for worse is something I don’t care about at this point in time because I refuse to get on an airplane for the foreseeable future. Anyways, moving on, my next destination was to finally get into the nit and gritty of crime in Finland. As such, I Googled Missing Persons in Finland. The first result I got was from 2006; something I deemed close enough to the original post date of 2014 to be relevant. It’s very common for a serial offender to keep mementos from his or her crime spree for decades. This could be for pleasure or simply as a keepsake of sorts and given that the span here is eight years, I think it fits that sort of mindset well. Anyways, the source for this is the European Union and states that upwards of 2,000 people are reported missing each year. Most of these disappearances occur in the summertime, though according to the report: most of these disappearances ended with the person being found or returning home.

So what about those that don’t?

Well, that’s where I hit a roadblock. There’s no database from what I can tell—likely having to do with the low crime rate. The closest I could find was a Facebook group called Missing People Finland that had 78 likes and a whopping four posts on it; two were made in 2015, one was made in 2016, and the fourth and most recent was made in 2019. From what I can tell, none of these posts involve people who are missing in Finland.

Just like any real missing persons case though, I was undeterred by this and kept on searching. Unlike a real case, I wasn’t screaming the name of a Finnish person into the air and getting the ire of my local community for not being indoors because of the quarantine. So instead, I just Googled my next expedition location: Unsolved Murders in Finland. This result, to me delight, actually got some decent leads for this theory. For the sake of brevity though, I’m going to go off of their summaries that are on Wikipedia. While certainly not the most reliable of websites, these cases aren’t something I want to linger on for that long.

The first I’ll go over are the Lake Bodom Murders. This case is almost sixty-years-old; it took place on June 5th and was a triple homicide. Maila Irmeli Björklund and Anja Tuulikki Mäki, both 15-years-old, and Seppo Antero Boisman, 18-years-old, were stabbed and beaten to death while inside of their tent. The man suspected of committing the murder, Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson, who was 18-years-old at the time and was one of the campers, was believed to be the one responsible. However, he’s never been officially charged with the crime and to date, the case of the Lake Bodom murders remains unsolved.

I was curious if, somehow, this could’ve been related in the sense that maybe a piece of evidence had been buried in the forest. Upon checking Google maps though, I found that the distance between Mänttä-Vilppula and Lake Bodom is just barely under three hours; two hours and fifty-eight minutes to be exact. Ignoring how the idea that Gustafsson or the killer burying something either meaningful or related to the crime over half a century later, recording it, editing together a bunch of meaningless imagery, distorting the audio, and then posting it onto YouTube is in of itself a stretch, most killers don’t tend to move around if they committed only one. Unless you’re a drifter or like Ted Bundy, you don’t move outside of your “hunting ground”.

The second is of a man named Ivan Belov. He was apparently a Soviet officer and naval captain and a victim of something called the “Helsinki Lauttasaari Incident”, which occurred on November 3, 1944. I could find precisely nothing on this case, but Wikipedia states that Belov is the subject of a Finnish play called Matkalla Porkkalaan. The Wikipedia page for that is as well fleshed out as the one on Belov, so I’m inclined to believe that either this is some insignificant piece of history or I’m seriously overlooking something. Either way, I’m doubtful that there’s any connection—even if I tried to stretch the possibility of a connection from here to the ends of the Andromeda.

The third case is one that actually falls into the realm of possibility. It’s called the Ulvila Murder Case and took place on December 1, 2006. The victim was a 51-year-old man named Jukka S. Lahti. A social psychologist and father of four children, police suspected his wife, but she was later acquitted. As such, the case remains unsolved.

I entertained the idea that, somehow, the killer of Jukka may have done something with, say, a piece of key evidence by burying it in the forest and pulling all of the tricks that I mentioned in the Lake Bodom murders summary. They decided to create some sort of faux-ARG to get caught a la the Zodiac with his letters and what have you. So I decided to first start off with how far Ulvila is from Mänttä-Vilppula. Shock of all shocks: it’s two hours and twenty-eight minutes. So me entertaining this idea was shot down like a Turkish airplane over Russian airspace; next.

The fourth case takes us back to 1976. A 25-year-old airport clerk by the name of Susanne Helene Linholm was found raped and murdered in the cellar of her Käpylä home. Prior to that, she was seen at Hotel Hesperia in Mannerheimintie and then left to go to Helsinginkatu. After that, she vanished and wasn’t found until she was dead. To this day, the case remains cold, though some were arrested. Alas, the lack of evidence to prosecute them meant that no case could be formed and they were released.

As is the case with the other stories, the distance between the locations is great; two hours and fifty-three minutes in this case. However, given the potential for a video to be used as evidence in a court (however flimsy it may be), I don’t think anyone who could potentially get away with both rape and murder would be willing to try their luck. Then again, I’m no psychiatrist, so I won’t even bother speculating.

This next one is both the oldest case and one of the most famous in Finland. It’s the murder of 17-year-old Kyllikki Saari. She was last seen alive on May 17, 1953 when she was cycling home. However, she was ambushed by persons unknown and murdered. Her body wasn’t found until October 11 of the same year in a bog Over half a century later, her killer remains at large—if they’re still alive. As is the case with every other location, the distance is over two hours from forest, but I also doubt that anyone who was still alive would confess to such a crime through a YouTube video.

The sixth case is the only one that I think could feasibly make any sort of sense. It’s called the Hausjärvi Gravel Pit Murders and took place in the 1990s. Three—possibly four—women were the victims of a man who’s now become known as the Järvenpää Serial Killer. The first woman, Helena Meriläinen, managed to escape from the man. The other two, Tuula Lukkarinen and Maarit Haantie, weren’t so lucky. The former of the two was discovered in the woods near a gravel pit, having been mutilated and raped. As for the fourth, it’s never been confirmed if she was a victim of the same man and her name is unknown.

Like the other five cases, the case is over two hours from the site of the coordinates in the 62.1 video. However, one argument can be made in the realm of it being tied to this case: Maarit’s body was never found.

Now granted, I’m being something of the devil’s advocate here when I speculate on that really being the case. While it’s true that some killers do keep the body (or bodies) of their victims, most don’t typically just decide to dispose of the body after upwards of a decade (potentially two). So do take this idea with a grain of salt before you immediately jump to the conclusion of, “Yes! This is what the video means!” Especially if there’s no gravel pit near the site where the video takes place. While there are exceptions to a killer breaking his or her modus operandi (the aforementioned Zodiac did this), there’s no reason to suspect that this killer would be the same. One exception doesn’t mean that you immediately need to put forward the idea to confirm what you think is the truth.

With those six cases out of the way, I was more or less out of ideas. There’s nothing in the way of missing persons or murders. I scoured as much as I could to find any sort of way to make this theory not seem like a joke and the closest I got was one serial killer from twenty years ago. Of course, plenty of people will think that this is truly the case solely on principal, evidence or no evidence. I digress though, let’s move on.

4. It’s nothing

The final theory is that this is simply nothing. There is no meaning, there is no greater purpose, it was a video made by someone who wanted to stir up interest in some nonsense they made, sat back, and watched as people speculated over it like it was the next Cicada 3301. Heck, it’s possible that the creator of the video has outright forgotten that they even made the video or that they don’t care anymore. This is one of those angles that I think a lot of people overlook because they always seek out a grander picture when the reality of things could be as simple as someone being bored and slapping something together and putting it online to see how people react.

My Take

Folks, this is nonsense. I’m sorry, I don’t like to be so blunt and quite frankly, harsh, when it comes to something I can’t definitively prove or disprove, but there’s nothing here that dictates something insidious or, for that matter, invidious. It’s a video with weird imagery, an image of a forest, and distorted audio. For all intents and purposes, it’s the most milquetoast ARG-type video you can get without having someone in dark clothing walking around with a knife or hatchet. I cannot stress enough how annoying it is when I go out looking for an Internet mystery to write about and all I get are videos like this one that people put on their top ten lists because they invoke a sense of “weirdness”. Yes, they’re weird, but so are earwigs and I don’t immediately scream that I just saw an alien crawl across the ground.

Now yes, I did spend a considerable amount of time on the theory that this was the confession of a killer—be they a serial killer or not. However, I didn’t do that because I was convinced that this was a video by one. Rather, it’s exceedingly common for people to swear up and down that any creepy and cryptic looking video was made by a murderer. I’ve seen this with Deeper (who I mentioned earlier). I’ve seen this with many LARPers on 4chan. I’ve seen this with 11B-X-1371, which admittedly didn’t have to do with a killer, but nonetheless caused the same level of speculation as every other supposed dark and insidious video. In every single one of these cases, nothing special came to light and they’ve all ended up fading into the nethers of Internet legend. Some still talk about these videos, but they’re all nothing more nowadays than videos people watch to be scared or discuss as being “covered up” or some other nonsense like that.

So what do I think is the purpose behind 62.1? I think it was likely an ARG that never took off. It has all of the makings of one and, to echo Jif once more, it checks off all of the requirements for a generic ARG video. As for why it didn’t take off: not everything takes off like one would hope it would. I don’t think it’s the fault of the creator so much as I think it’s just a general lack of interest in some ARGs. Not everything is made equally and let’s face it, when anyone can make an ARG, you’re likely to get drowned out in a sea of people wanting to be the next Cicada 3301.

Conclusion

I think that we all wish for some deeper meaning to anything and everything we find on the Internet that is any way, shape, or form mysterious. If it shows creepy imagery and shows locations that are desolate, we instinctively think to ourselves that it must be the next great game of cat and mouse between us and a psychopath. The fact of the matter is though: anyone can make a cryptic video, share it online, and attract the attention of the general populous. I myself have thought about doing just that so I could see what people would do in response. The only reason I didn’t is because I thought it would be redundant. Everyone and their grandmother has made a weird video and shared it, so I’d merely be diluting the pool with more meaningless imagery.

Of course, don’t let me deter you from believing what you wish to believe. If you believe that this video has some truth to it, let me know in the comments below. I’d love to know if I somehow missed something.