Where Did These Pictures Come From?

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Today, I'll be covering different obscure cursed images and their origins.

[00:00:04]Where did this photo come from? What could possibly be the context for this?

[00:00:08]Sit back, relax, leave a like if you end up liking it, and enjoy the video.

[00:00:13]Before I get into it, I thought I'd also ask for you to subscribe if you haven't already done that because I'm almost at the big 300,000 subscriber milestone.

[00:00:22]Anything helps. I appreciate you for watching regardless of doing anything, but let's get into it.

[00:00:30]To begin, we have this classic internet picture. It's presumably a take on the evil cell phone tower conspiracies, and it's pretty amusing to look at. You have the crying girl whose head is halfway disintegrated and the flip phone at the center of it all shooting out harmful data circles to the world. You've probably seen this image before or at least an edited variation of it. While the original is quite popular, edits like these are just as recognizable.

[00:01:02]My personal favorite is the one with the dog, which is another entry later in the video. Now, as for finding the madman behind this work of art, it was rather easy. I right-clicked the image and searched with the Google Lens tool as I always do, which showed me a ton of different sites that had the picture.

[00:01:18]The one I clicked on led me to an Instagram post made back in October 2024. The post is a compilation of different art made by the same guy who made the cell tower image with the caption saying "Conspiracy collages by David Dees." It also talks about how the artist is anti-Semitic and racist, but uh I'll get into that in a second. All I needed for now was the creator's name, and it was apparently David Dees. I searched his name on Google and came across a Flickr page that has a bunch of David's artwork from 2007, and there's a lot of good stuff here. The main theme I noticed in this selection of David's work is 9/11 related conspiracies. This one has former president George Bush wearing a shirt that says 9/11 was an inside job. And I don't know. Just kidding. Just kidding, it's a joke. I liked this one a lot. It's a solid commentary on how the Patriot Act is a violation of the US Bill of Rights. And if you know anything about that, it's pretty based. Funny imagery aside, a lot of the conspiratorial motifs found in David's art are still somewhat relevant in the present day. I guess a lot of these issues have always existed in some capacity in the United States, but David was really on it in the early 2000s.

[00:02:29]Free speech, welcome to the new America.

[00:02:32]Soy Slop Surveillance, Autism Vaccines, and a trail of American coffins coming from a Middle Eastern country that we maybe shouldn't be involved in. Anyway, the pictures I was just showing are exclusive to 2007. This is only a small sample of David D's elongated and highly controversial career. So, who is this guy? David was born in 1957 and began his journey as an airbrush artist in the 1980s. He quickly obtained an impressive portfolio working for the likes of Sesame Street Magazine, Disney, Coca-Cola, Life Magazine, and he even illustrated a lot of the Sea Monkey designs in the 2000s. I thought that one was the coolest collab for some reason.

[00:03:14]It wasn't until a few years after the 9/11 attacks that David went down some internet conspiracy rabbit holes.

[00:03:21]Because of this, he began making political artwork about these conspiracies and online ideas, which would end up getting him fired from Sesame Street Magazine. I guess he had expressed some anti-Semitic things around the workplace and his employers didn't take kindly to that. After he had lost all his professional opportunities to work with big-name brands, he went full-time making his now infamous art. I was searching around and I found this book called The Art of David D's Volume 2 and found this excerpt from one of the closing pages to be interesting. Here's some wise words from the man himself. Um I won't read the entire thing cuz it's pretty long, but I'll shorten it a little bit. Hi, you made it through. I hope you enjoyed the ride. My background is actually in commercial art. I started off airbrushing back in the 1980s in advertising illustration, and over my 40 years, I phased into entertainment, packaging of videos and movies, and then children's books and cartoons. It was October 2006, while living in Europe, that I designed the first piece of political art. And now, 2016, 10 years later, the effect these activist images have had on waking up millions worldwide through the internet is astonishing. I made too much noise, so Sweden finally kicked me out, and I am back in the United States and live in a sunny wine valley in southern Oregon. Show this art around, look into flat Earth, tell everyone you know about chemtrails, GMOs, fluoride, our media-manipulated minds. Thanks for being awake. Write me, David Dees.

[00:04:54]As you can tell, David was a pretty eccentric character, and I say was because he passed away in 2020 to melanoma, a serious kind of skin cancer.

[00:05:04]He made his art up until the day he died, and a lot of people actually speculate that the constant exposure to fumes from his days of airbrushing led to his cancer and paranoia. There was a really good documentary made about David during his final days called Do You See What I See, and I'd recommend you watch it if anything I've talked about fascinates you. The YouTuber Whang also has a video about this that summarizes the documentary pretty well and goes into David Dees. Now, for context about the image we're talking about, I couldn't find an exact title for it or a creation date. So, I found one of David's old websites and used the Wayback Machine to look at it from back in the day. I went to his gallery page and scrolled for like 5-10 minutes cuz there's so much artwork and I came across the image at the very bottom. I opened the picture in another tab and it's titled selftied.jpeg.

[00:05:58]Along with this, the string of numbers in the link leads me to believe that this was published on May 22nd, 2015.

[00:06:04]That makes sense to me, but this could also just be a random string of numbers.

[00:06:09]But yeah, that's pretty much the story of David and the iconic meme photo. He's also made plenty of other recognizable pictures like this one, this one, and so many more. If you want to check out his old websites, I'll leave a link to them in the description. I'm a bit conflicted with how I feel about David as there's a lot of art he's made that I genuinely like or just find really funny. Yet, there's just as much artwork that's harmful and offensive to a lot of people for you know, for good reason. He has been an advocate for human rights in a lot of war-torn places. It's up to you I guess to to decide how you feel about David. As a Mexican, I'll let this one slide.

[00:06:50]>> [music] >> This is definitely the most popular photo I'll be covering and it's one that probably traumatized you if you were a child on the internet in the early 2010s. I remember being absolutely terrified of this. Like anytime it would pop up on a YouTube video or just in passing, it would be the only thing I could think about for what felt like days. It's truly a disturbing image and one that needs an explanation. I believe it first came to prominence when it was used in the Russian Sleep Experiment Creepypasta. On August 10th, 2010, a user called Orange Soda on the Creepypasta Wiki shared the classic story. For those unfamiliar, the Russian Sleep Experiment is about a fictional test that was performed on prisoners during World War II. The test was to keep the prisoners awake for 15 days straight and during that time, everything goes bad, the prisoners lose their mind and eat each other, and everybody dies. The infamous picture is supposed to be one of the Russian test subjects during the sleep experiment, and a lot of people, including myself back in the day, believed this to be a real photograph from that story. But, like I said, it's not real, it's just a creepypasta. If you haven't read or ever listened to this, I highly recommend you do, as it's one of the most iconic, classic internet horror stories ever.

[00:08:10]Anyway, a lot of people probably came across this for the first time on this YouTube video that has 34 million views.

[00:08:18]It's a narration of the Russian Sleep Experiment, and I thought I'd mention it, as this is a piece of YouTube and creepypasta history. All four of surviving test subjects also had large portions of muscle and skin torn away from their bodies.

[00:08:33]The digestive tract of all four could be seen working, digesting what was apparently their own flesh, which they had been eating for many days. Shoutout to the OG, I read creepypastas. I don't remember where I first found the backstory for this entry, but it's been a piece of information that's existed in my head the last couple of years, and I've always wanted to talk about it.

[00:08:54]It's fairly common knowledge at this point, but the creature in this photo is actually a Spirit Halloween animatronic called Spasm. Spasm was released in stores from 2005 to 2009, and here's a video of what it would do.

[00:09:15]The guy who designed the animatronic is called Jordou Shell, and this is his Instagram. I found a post of his from 2022, and it says the following, "Over 20 years ago, I created this piece dubbed Spasm for Morbid Enterprises. It was popular, but it became massive when a creepypasta story was created using this character as proof of something called the Russian Sleep Experiment. It then became a meme. So, a friend of mine and myself decided to bring the character back as a full head latex mask, and here is my sculpture for it.

[00:09:48]Swipe to see the original piece I did for Morbid Industries and how they used almost the exact photo I took in my studio for the creepy pasta story.

[00:09:59]First off, shout out to Jordou for creating such a creepy character and being very talented at the stuff he does. He seems like a pretty cool guy.

[00:10:07]What's interesting to me about this post is that he says, "Swipe to see the original piece I did for Morbid Industries and how they used almost the exact photo I took in my studio for the creepy pasta story." This is a bit confusing to me because it sounds like he didn't take the original photo of Spasm, and if that's the case, I'm not sure who actually photographed this.

[00:10:28]Maybe Jordou did take this picture and I'm just not understanding what he's saying in the caption. Maybe I'm dumb.

[00:10:33]What is certain is that this is not from a twisted Russian experiment. It's just an animatronic. There is rarely anything sinister that ever happens on the Jade and Salads channel, but this next entry is pretty messed up. So, people with a sensitive stomach, you've been warned.

[00:10:49]Also, I thought I'd show this. You can buy Spasm on eBay for a small price tag of $2,500.

[00:10:56]I hope I can have him one day. It would be pretty cool to have on my front porch during Halloween time. Maybe if I'm lucky enough, I can be like this Redditor who found Spasm at a thrift store for $10. That's crazy.

[00:11:10]I tried to warn you about the following image. Here it is. This dog, who's been given the name Joshua for whatever reason, has been a popular picture online in many different ways. Different ways like morphing the dog into David Dee's art. This one is also a personal favorite. I discovered the origins on Know Your Meme, so shout out to them, and it's a pretty underwhelming story.

[00:11:33]There was a now deleted Facebook post of a guy putting up some puppies for adoption, one of them being Joshua and black Joshua. They're pretty cute pictures and through the powers of the Spanish-speaking internet, it bloomed into a ton of different Spanish memes. A lot of these memes are like money related or like satanic related or something. They're like evil Joshua posts. The first ever time I saw this dog, I think it was just like a GIF that has the dog and it says Joshua underneath it. So, there's a ton of variety here. There was also a rumor at one point where I guess people said that the photo came from a animal gore video where Joshua was allegedly cut open and with something super gross, but that is not true. I hope he's living a good life with whoever adopted him.

[00:12:25]This next entry was one of the longest goose chases I've ever been on while making YouTube videos. And before I tell you anything, I did not find the origins. I need one of you guys watching to leave a comment as to where this came from. I know as soon as I post this video, I'm going to get a comment in like 5 minutes of someone being like, "Oh dude, it's obviously this guy. It's from here." So, I'm looking forward to that comment. I might pin it, but uh yeah, it's up to you to find this.

[00:12:52]Anyway, it's a very deep-fried picture of a guy smoking something out of a soda can. I feel like I've crossed path with this guy multiple times while on the internet, but I have no idea who this actually is or where he came from. Long story short, I tried reverse searching it. I looked through tons of Reddit posts asking for the origins, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and still found nothing substantial. What I have found are three alternate images of the dude smoking.

[00:13:24]I found the third picture on a Facebook post from August 2nd, 2018. What's notable about this one is that we can actually see what he's smoking on. It's some sort of vape pen that says Snoop Dogg. Up until this point of the search, I hadn't found a post of this dude that predated 2019, but the Snoop Dogg vape that he's smoking on, that came out in September of 2015, meaning that this photo was probably taken around that time because, you know, the vape came out in 2015. I don't think he'd be smoking on a years-long vape. That would probably be bad. Smoking something out of a can is also pretty bad. So, I don't know. That's all the information I have, so please leave a comment if you know who this is. I'm looking forward to finding out that it's just some Brazilian weed Facebook like micro-celebrity, but yeah. Thank you.

[00:14:14]The next image is from an old Twitter thread from late 2024. Someone posted this picture with no caption and no context. Then somebody would respond to this and say, "If you posted this image 15 to 20 years ago, there would have been several creepypastas written about it." That is pretty true and pretty funny, but where was this picture taken from? Initially, I felt like this resembled the kid from Home Alone, but with some scary editing and a deep-fried filter on top of it. I also recognized the hallway as the upstairs hallway from the Home Alone house. I looked up Home Alone upstairs hallway and found this image. Ladies and gentlemen, that is pretty much identical to the background scene in the December First Dent photo.

[00:14:56]I'm pretty sure we got him. We got him.

[00:14:59]Just to further solidify my suspicions, I found this clip taken from Home Alone on YouTube, and it shows the exact frame seen in the photo, but without all the scary edits.

[00:15:12]This image is without a doubt an edited screenshot taken from the first Home Alone movie. I'm not really sure what the meme is here, but I found a version of it without the deep fried filter.

[00:15:23]Um I don't think this is my best investigative work. I think most people would assume this is from Home Alone, but I'm proud of myself.

[00:15:31]I'm sure most of you watching have seen this picture of SpongeBob in a scary hallway. It's commonly used in memes or as a reaction image, but I've always wondered who made this and where's the background from. I did nothing to find this image as the answer is on good old Know Your Meme, and it says that the still of SpongeBob used came from a 1999 episode called Home Sweet Pineapple.

[00:15:56]They also credit the original creator of the meme to a Twitter user called Angel Winter whenever they posted this on December 18th, 2020. That face when I'm never going to escape my own personal hell. True, that is so freaking true. Oh my gosh. The scary hallway scene in the background was taken from a level in Silent Hill 2. I've never actually played any of the Silent Hill games before, but in that community, this hallway is commonly referred to as the SpongeBob 40 Benadryls hallway, which is pretty funny.

[00:16:34]Thank you for watching until the very end. I hope you learned something new.

[00:16:37]If you didn't know, I recently started releasing music and I'm about to drop my first album sometime soon, like hopefully next month if everything goes according to plan. Hopefully, you can check out the first two songs on any streaming platform of your choice. My band is called Message Boards, even though it's not really a band, it's just me doing everything. Uh but yeah, it would mean a lot if you checked it out.

[00:16:58]I love music. Hopefully, you like my music. So, there's my plug for that. As always, here's a little showcase for some of the best fan art on YouTube. I love you guys.

[00:17:26]>> Here's a little shout-out to all the fans I met. I'm going to blur it out cuz I don't know if these kids' parents or want their faces online, so it's blurred out. But, thank you guys. All of you were super nice. And finally, here's a shout-out to everybody on my Patreon.

[00:17:41]AJS Calante, Angel Cat, Audi Boop, Aster LX, All Shucks, Bass Make, Beaver Maluga, Bella M, Boy Kisser, Bottles, Kate Filson, Chin Pat 66, Cherry Bomb 64, Desmos, Decoy Cairo, Doctor Deagle, Doctor Feelgood, Dusty Antler, Eso Boomin, Evan W, Eyeball Dude, Fur TKM Daxy, Giovanni Cruz, Gratera, Artemis Shelton, Jerra, Johnny Vioka, Josh S, Josh Wynn, JW Zam 77, KN8, Camp Waffle 2020, Lottie Dottie, Mommy Trash Sack, Matt Sat On A Cat, Mick Stinker, Must Lord, Noxil Dreams, Matt McCusker, Royally Oily, Serpent Center, Shiny Breaks In, Slender Slime 462, Takai Mirasaki, and Toaster STF.

[00:18:19]I will bleed >> [music] >> I will bleed all day.