Mortis.com

14/11/1997

Mortis.com was a single-page website designed with two-tone colors in mind.

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 document hosted on the sites were also tremendous, with one of the largest was 39 gigabytes in size.

That all on a contrasting landing page, which only include a username/password login page.

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.

mortis.com
Mortis.com only had a username/password login page on a black background.

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.

Cthulhu is a name of a fictional cosmic entity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft, and was first introduced in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu" in 1928. In the story, Cthulhu worshipers chant "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", which means "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

The site was last indexed in 2011 by The Wayback Machine.

Besides Mortis.com and Cthulhu.net, more than twelve different sites were connected Tom Ling.

As more and more people tried to crack the page and get to the bottom of Tom's website, they were met with strange and tortuous process that have no answer.

That until the enthusiasm for the site rose, and someone claiming to be Tom Ling finally showed up and explained.

Tom claiming to come from Australia, said that the site was hosting wedding photographs and nothing more. Tom 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.

Again fueled by curiosity, 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.

Then according to a post from a site archiving 4chan, 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.

But 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 months if not years, users on both 4chan and Reddit followed different leads, and they concluded things that sparked myths, various speculations, and a long list of internet history and mysteries.

Besides being mysterious, the word "mortis" is Esperanto for "death" in English. People speculated that the site had something to do with people who were dead.

What's more, 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.

This was until 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 of the site remained a question.

Even Archive.org that is known to document and store copies of accessible web pages on the internet, say that "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine", when searching for Mortis.com.

References to the site have been removed from the internet.

The real Tom Ling also remained unanswered.

In 2021, the site mortis.cc has been put online. Its website design and appearance really resemble, if not a clone of mortis.com.

Nothing much is known about this site, other than its simple login form. The owner is also not known, as the registrar has redacted its owner's data.

It was later realized that the website was only a copycat, as discussed by Reddit users on the r/mortisdotcom subreddit.

mortis.cc
Mortis.cc website.

In the end, Mortis.com is more than just a website. Its lore has made it a digital legend, a testament to human curiosity.

Mortis.com stands as a symbol of the web's infinite potential for wonder, intrigue, and enigma.

Its legacy is evident in the online forums, blog posts, and articles dedicated to unraveling its secrets. It serves as a reminder of what was during the internet’s early days.

In the modern digital age, where information is usually a few clicks away, Mortis.com stands as a testament to the enduring allure of the unknown.

It’s a reminder that even in the massively advanced interconnected world, some mysteries refuse to be unraveled.