This Cat in the Hat Meme Trend Has a Disturbing Pattern

[00:00:00]If you've been on TikTok at all this summer, you already know the trend.

[00:00:05]Someone takes a clip from that old liveaction Cat in the Hat movie, the deranged, overlit early 2000s one, and lays text over it describing how a person died.

[00:00:17]How MF be dancing at prom just to overdose two weeks later.

[00:00:22]Or when the hate finally catches up to that one friend.

[00:00:28]something specific enough to get your attention, but obviously I never thought there could be any truth to it. I'm a forensic video tech for my local police department. So, I guess you could say I have developed a passion for looking into video trends and memes posted online in general. Knowing about how these things are produced really adds a depth of appreciation for everything that you see. Anyways, the first time I saw one of these Cat in the Hat memes, it was super forgettable.

[00:00:56]Nothing interesting from a technical standpoint and just some caption that said someone who bought a roundtrip ticket and never got to take their return flight in front of the Cat in the Hat hanging outside like a piñata.

[00:01:09]I scrolled past it, forgot about it within a few seconds.

[00:01:13]Then that night, I came across a comment from someone on an acquaintance's Instagram who I had gone to high school with, saying that my acquaintance had been in a small charter plane that went down during a business trip.

[00:01:25]No survivors.

[00:01:28]People in an old group chat I still lurk in sent an article about it, immediately followed by people saying things like, "Life so short." before the conversation moved on.

[00:01:39]I didn't say anything about the meme.

[00:01:41]What would I have said? There was a Cat in the Hat meme that predicted this. I was sure that countless captions were posted about plane crashes every day.

[00:01:50]Somewhere, one was always going to land close to something real.

[00:01:55]That's not even weird. That's math.

[00:01:58]However, the second time it happened, it got my attention more. The caption this time was about someone going quiet for a few days before anyone realized they had passed.

[00:02:09]About a week later, a woman two floors down from my apartment was found literally decaying on her bathroom floor by her sister after nobody had heard from her in weeks.

[00:02:20]That's when I started keeping track. I want to be careful about how I describe this part because I know exactly how it sounds and I've had the argument with myself already several times.

[00:02:32]Confirmation bias is real.

[00:02:35]I kept telling myself that. In fact, I wrote it at the top of the list, like a disclaimer to myself. This is probably nothing.

[00:02:44]Then I started to actually research and read through as many of these memes as I possibly could just to be more aware of them.

[00:02:51]By the fifth real life death, I'd stopped wondering if this was a coincidence.

[00:02:57]By the seventh, I'd stopped sleeping altogether. Not because the deaths were especially close to home. Most of them weren't, but because I knew I had stumbled across something massive, possibly earthshattering.

[00:03:11]I started trying to locate the original source, not individual accounts who had reposted the trend, the one everything downstream was built from. It took a while because the account that started it had already been through three name changes by the time I went looking, but eventually I found it. It was a small account, barely any followers, but it posted the first version of the trend before it caught on and was copied into oblivion.

[00:03:40]I found a contact email tied to the account buried in an old associated YouTube channel and I wrote an email to whoever ran it.

[00:03:48]I kept it casual, said I was a fan of the meme, asked where the idea came from and if they made it themselves.

[00:03:55]I didn't expect an answer at all, but I got one 2 hours later.

[00:04:02]They said the original meme wasn't theirs.

[00:04:05]They were a professional chef and had it given to them by one of their wealthiest clients.

[00:04:10]It was originally on a thumb drive and they had been paid to post it online.

[00:04:15]Other accounts were apparently paid, too. They said they didn't know why a family like that would want this out there, but figured what could it really do? And if they didn't post it, the people would just get someone else.

[00:04:29]The guy then told me to stop looking into it because the clients he works for are extremely powerful and were probably already aware of my presence even just at this point. So I did that at least for a while.

[00:04:42]But I just couldn't let go of my curiosity. Why would anyone with that kind of money want millions of people laughing at captions describing deaths over and over every day? How does that help them?

[00:04:55]That's when it started to make an uglier kind of sense.

[00:04:59]Maybe it was some kind of digital virus.

[00:05:01]Don't ask me how that's possible. And every now and then it strikes the person who saw the meme.

[00:05:08]But why would they want to do that?

[00:05:10]Population control. Maybe. I guess they could want to just eliminate a certain sector of society.

[00:05:17]I had read things online about the CIA, the Illuminati, and even reptilians being behind the whole thing.

[00:05:23]I guessed I just had to accept that I'd probably never know. At least until I received my own thumb drive in the mail.

[00:05:30]Against my better judgment and flooded with curiosity, I plugged it into an old laptop I had lying around and opened up the folder inside.

[00:05:39]What was in the folder was not something I could have ever expected. It was just one photo of someone holding a dusty old Cat in the Hat DVD in front of a PC.

[00:05:51]It looked like he was in the process of creating a meme from the footage.

[00:05:56]The strange thing was the computer seemed like really outdated technology in the photo. And was surrounded by digital screens and blinking lights, almost like a futuristic lab setting.

[00:06:08]There was a man in a lab coat in the background with some kind of mechanical implant in his eye, staring down at a screen below him, touching it with his finger.

[00:06:18]However, the most terrifying part of the entire photo was the person who was in the foreground of it, the one holding the DVD next to the old PC.

[00:06:29]It was an older man who looked exactly like me in a lab coat, only aged probably 20 years.

[00:06:39]Inside the thumb drive was a note as well. It just said, "We had no choice."

[00:06:46]I stopped looking into the trend after that. I guess whatever happens happens.

[00:06:52]All I know is I won't be a part of it as long as I have the power to stop myself, which according to that photo won't be forever.