What is the mysterious thing about the "Chinese Urban Legend Iceberg Map" that has gone viral on the Internet recently?

Monster Circus | wen

Baidu's "urban legend" bar is a very interesting place.

More than ten years ago, Tianya and Tieba had many interesting divisions, and great gods and strange posts emerged in endlessly. Later, the logic of Internet operation changed, and the user circle expanded and sank, resulting in a drastic change in the atmosphere of social platforms...... Many people miss the unique atmosphere of the forum back then, so things like "Tianya Shenti" will still be revived from time to time.

But in fact, even in the already messy post bar, there are still some corners with the flavor of the ancient Internet. Urban legends are one of them, and if you're interested in weird culture and mysteries, it can keep you hooked for a long time.

First of all, we will introduce three concepts: urban legends, which are actually folklore stories with horror and mysticism, but they take place in the context of modern cities. The "Chongqing Boy in Red Incident" is a standard urban legend – and this one is dedicated to urban legends in China.

Recently, a game with a related theme has been released

This bar is based on two other concepts, one of which is its foundation "iceberg". Iceberg is a concept used by urban legend lovers all over the world. It is roughly a classification of various mysterious events at different heights of an iceberg map.

The more bizarre and mysterious the event, the lower it is, so the ordinary story rises on the surface of the iceberg, and the darkest is in the abyss at the bottom of the sea.

Many of the topics discussed in the Urban Legends Bar revolve around an iceberg of "Chinese Urban Legends". The iceberg has its own website, which deals with everything from unsolved mysteries to folklore, suspenseful cases, and even historical mysteries.

Main creator: Anti-seasonal cicada

The last concept is the "rabbit hole". This is also a word used all over the world, from "Alice in Wonderland", referring to Alice's book in which she follows a rabbit into a hole and thus sees a magical land.

In "The Matrix", Neo sees someone on the computer at the beginning and asks him to "follow the rabbit" in order to seek the truth, which is a rabbit hole meme. The meaning of this word is that there are some things in daily life that seem ordinary but are only slightly different, but if you really study this "little strangeness", you may suddenly fall into a hidden abyss.

And what the urban legend wants to do is to find those "rabbit holes" hidden around us in life.

Three concepts support the entire post bar, here, you can see a hardcore discussion of various mysterious events, covering a wide range.

There are no gods and ghosts in the world, so the urban legends are not talking about the gaudy supernatural literature, but on the contrary, they are looking for reasonable explanations under the surface of the anomaly. This process often leads to some strong reasoning, data collection, and even academic research.

Just like the aforementioned iceberg, there is the "Mystery of the Water Monkey", which was very popular a few years ago, and behind this legend, there is a lot of historical and folk cultural knowledge.

As for urban legends, they are not all made up, and some classic urban legends in the world have later been scientifically explained.

For example, in 2009, there was a mysterious incident: someone disappeared for many days, but the family received two strange text messages from the missing person's mobile phone, with some strange and illogical characters on them, like the recently popular "text uncanny valley".

Sounds like a pretend, right? In fact, this is a real case that has been reported by "Today's Statement". The truth is: the missing person was really killed, and the prisoner put the victim's mobile phone in his trouser pocket when handling the body, but when dragging the body, the body's elbow touched the button.

In Urban Legends, you can see many of these stories and decipherments. Today, let's talk about a few interesting things in the bar, note that this article is just a general paraphrase, if you find it interesting, then I suggest going to the original post and the bar to see, it will be much more fascinating.

Take the "uncanny valley of words" mentioned just now, for example, this popular concept roughly means that some corners of life hide text slogans that look normal at first glance, but are actually very weird, as if there are aliens hiding in the crowd that passes by you, and its strange shapes appear in the text, making people creepy.

Urban legends, will look for examples of the uncanny valley of words on various social platforms. But in addition to being addicted, they also have to study the truth behind it, because these people believe that there are actually many mental/physical defects among Internet users - and not stupid and trolls, who are aware of the proliferation of both.

Therefore, in the eyes of the friends of the urban legend bar, many strange expressions and strange chat records that have been hung out are actually because the other party has a certain disease, such as aphasia, and is a group of people who should be paid attention to, rather than clowns who are ridiculed by the group. So, they wanted to decipher the text.

For example, in a post, someone met a buyer who couldn't speak clearly when he was trading in Xianyu, and it was difficult to communicate.

In the original post, everyone initially ridiculed the buyer as a "pseudo-person" with intellectual problems, but the friend of the urban legend bar pointed out that the opposite side was neither a child nor an intellectual retard, but probably a deaf-mute with a low education who was struggling to communicate. Because many of the strange expressions of ta are actually typical sign language word order, such as expressing how old you are as many years as your age, saying your height as your high body, and using "了" as a question mark, all of which are characteristics of sign language.

Perhaps the most famous of these examples is the "Greek Female Model Incident". You may have seen this story, roughly speaking, around 2020, a netizen with the same name on all platforms claimed to be Nicholas Tse's wife, a Greek female model "outlet".

Her avatar is accompanied by pictures that are all weird, low-quality photos with a blue background, and the same style of avatar is also used for other people in her fabricated resume. Her writing style is also extremely grotesque, always mentioning explosions and the Blue Mouse Company out of the blue, reposting television station shutdown footage or encyclopedic introductions of various electrical knowledge, claiming to work for a high-tech company.

All the expressions are weird, but they seem to have hidden logic. So the friends of the urban legend bar began to reason about his life experience and decipher his expression in order to find the root of his psychological problems.

The reasoning process is very interesting, and it has been made into videos on Douyin and Station B. They first discovered that the blue mouse is the mascot in the game "Super Fire Squad 2", and in Greek mythology, the blue mouse is an auspicious image. So it's possible that it's a mental patient who confuses the two.

This character, in the game, is in charge of fighting fires, and bar friends speculate that this may have something to do with the repeatedly mentioned explosions. And it works in a high-tech company, and the service it provides is to resurrect ashes into human bodies.

The combination of this information naturally gave birth to the first conclusion: the outlet is a woman born in 1999 who likes Nicholas Tse, but because of an explosion or fire, she lost her relatives and was hurt herself, so she fantasized about the creation company to resurrect her family and fused all kinds of things she came into contact with every day into a fantasy.

Sounds a little convincing, right? But when they continued to dig, they found that something was wrong, and more and more new clues did not match this conclusion, so they had to reverse and start over.

The whole reasoning process lasted half a year, and many kinds of conclusions were born. Some of these speculations are not necessarily rigorous, but they are quite creative, for example, some people named Zhang Ya'e, Zhang Yajin, etc. appear in the data, and they need to deduce the relationship between these people, and Zhang Ya'e's character is once common, but now it is rare, so it may be an older woman, maybe a mother or grandmother.

Bizarrely, in the end, they really found the outlet, and even got the video records of him and his family, but they did not disclose it in order to protect the parties. It turns out that the outlet is a young boy with immature thinking ability who may have autism, so he created a character for himself to entertain himself, which inadvertently became an urban legend.

Why does he always mention explosions? Because this kid is a fan of "Angry Birds", there are many comments mentioning "explosion" in the game episodes he often hears, and he has also written explosion-related comments under the "Angry Birds" problem.

The truth may be anti-climactic, but what really attracts you is the social landscape of the problem, the reasoning process, the information gathered, etc.

In the bar, you can often see posts about the gods, some of which are even like sociological or folklore papers.

For example, there was a recent post about "Bamboo Bee and Queen Bee", a strange folk tale. The author found that many of the legends of the southern ethnic minorities had a similar story, so he began to collect them and wanted to find out why these stories inexplicably associate bees with bamboo.

The story itself is very magical, roughly speaking: the emperor of the Central Plains asked the protagonist's father to sacrifice a hundred human skins to make a palace, but the father was unwilling, so he was killed. The protagonist and the emperor managed to survive the battle of wits and courage, but they were finally framed and had to flee. In the process of escaping, he hatched the demon soldiers with bamboo and tried to rebel, but failed, lost the bamboo soldiers, and was beheaded himself.

Subsequently, the protagonist uses witchcraft to temporarily resurrect and sends bamboo to his wife to cultivate, so that the protagonist can borrow bamboo to truly resurrect. Who knew that the bamboo was sold in advance by the protagonist's mother, and after opening it, it was found that the bamboo was full of soldiers and horses, and it turned out that the protagonist still wanted to rebel.

In one version, the bamboo becomes a treasure hair

Finally, a bee flew out of the magic bamboo and went to sting the emperor. The emperor thought that the bee was the protagonist of the unjust death, and felt guilty/afraid, so in order to make up for the mistake, he made the bee the emperor for three days, that is, the "queen bee".

Some of the episodes you may have heard come from this story. For example, after the protagonist dies, he puts the severed head back and asks passers-by if he can live, and the passerby answers that he can, and he walks home. But when he came home and asked his mother the same question, she replied that she couldn't, and he died, much like a cat and a mouse.

The poster found that there are similar stories in the Zhuang, Dong, Dai, Jing, Gelao and Guangxi folks, as well as in the folklore records of 1928. These seemingly different legends may all be variations of the same story, and Queen Bee is also called Jin Lun, Queen Bee, and Jian Yi...... There should be some reason behind this.

Finally, after a long discussion and reasoning, the poster gave his own answer: he believes that this story of the severed head is a variant of "Jia Yong's Lost Head" in the Eastern Jin Dynasty Zhiwei novel "Sou Shen Ji", and these similar stories are actually traces of the Central Plains culture spread in the southern ethnic minority areas.

"Sou Shen Ji"

The bamboo and bee in the story come from a special insect "bamboo bee" in Guangxi, which the ancients believed to be two forms of a creature, just like Cordyceps. So in fact, this story is a kind of primitive worship of the ancient Chinese "metamorphosis theory", which evolved into the ancestor worship of tribal leaders.

The so-called metabiosis theory is that an organism transforms from one form to another under the influence of the environment. This is a belief and theory that evolved from the ancient Chinese when they observed nature, and they believed that there was divinity in this transformation.

You can see the shadow of this theory in many studies of Journey to the West and the Classic of Mountains and Seas. For example, Sun Wukong comes from a stone, and the Dapeng in Journey to the West may actually be a fish head, because it is transformed from a fish (kun) - the transformation of bamboo and bees comes from this.

So in urban legends, if you know where to look, you can really learn and see interesting anecdotes.

Bar friends will trace some dark corners of the Internet, such as 4399, there have been slightly evil games such as spanking, blowing beautiful women's skirts, and pricking crape myrtle Gege with needles. On the 4399 Little Flower Fairy forum, there were many children discussing how to abuse Little Flower Fairy, and the bar friend recalled that he was only in the second or third grade at the time, and the children on the forum were spreading such articles.

Who are those cars that sell CDs on the side of the road? Today's car music players have long become integrated, and there is no place to put CDs.

The police who arrested the gambler would explain in the bar that this was actually a sentry point in the gambling establishment.

Old folks from urban legends will discuss what secrets are behind those dark vocaloid tunes. And what exactly does it mean that "you have high-speed machinery entering China".

Sometimes they can really decipher the truth and find out that the MC Duomei City in the gibberish of netizens is actually a multimedia city, and MC stands for multimedia city - sounds stupid, right? But in fact, behind this problem is really a mysterious website that has been bothering everyone for a long time, and it has a more detailed decryption process.

Some of the old reasoning of bar friends will also be verified to be true. For example, in Pokémon, the bones on Caracalla's head are the remains of his mother, the weapon flame in the form of Alola is the soul of his mother, and the bones are bones found in the cemetery of his kind.

Urban legends, in fact, believe in science and materialism more than most platforms. Therefore, the doctor will refute some medical urban legends, such as the story of people being hollowed out by parasites, which must be false. Because parasites are very smart, they don't even block the intestines, because if they are blocked, people can't eat and have no nutrients to absorb, so parasites use chronic diseases to harm people, rather than simply "eating".

Why are there so many treacherous images of multi-headed people on the murals of the Eastern Han Dynasty?

The old man in the bar will find the source of the picture (Jining Museum), and then go to the local area to inspect it for himself, and find that these murals also have matching steles, and there are also strange nine-headed beasts on them. And all over the world, from Russia, to India, Northern Europe...... All have similar images of weird bulls.

They will come up with a variety of hypotheses, such as perhaps shaking their heads. Or, this is the remnant custom of the Eastern Han Dynasty when Chu believed in the three-headed god "Spring God".

You don't necessarily see the truth, but you always learn. Originally, in the ancient witchcraft worship, it was believed that the human soul rose and fell from the top of the head, and later, this evolved into as long as there are multiple heads, there are multiple souls, so it has more powerful soul power, and finally it has become a belief that worships many gods all over the world - the multi-headed god of India, the three-headed and six-armed god of China, and so on......

Urban legends are just that, it has so much interesting content, knowledge in various fields, but also cross-regional cooperation and the occasional humanistic spirit. So many people say that in this small bar, they feel the touch of the early days of the Internet: a spirit of intellectual curiosity of cooperation, exploration and sharing, and words that have something to say.

That's pretty much the end of this article - but if you don't think it's long enough, I've got one last post for you.

The starting point of this post is very mundane: someone is looking for a TV series from the 70s, only to find that this series, which has left countless traces, seems to have disappeared from history.

Initially, someone heard the song "Clouds in the Blue Sky" by the 70s singer Su Hong, which was said to be an episode of the TV series "Sea Rhyme".

However, the poster found that all the "Sea Rhyme" on the Internet are TV series of the same name, and the theme song is sung by Teresa Teng, and there is no such song at all. And when he searched for another "Sea Rhyme", he found that this movie did not leave any records, fragments, or even stills. At the same time, the name of the song is constantly changing.

In the public account of a post-60s music critic, the poster found a record of "Sea Rhyme", and the music critic specifically pointed out that the soundtrack of the play is very avant-garde, indicating that it exists. Later, the poster found composers, lyricists, directors and singers...... But the bizarre thing is that in the resumes of all of them, they just can't find this mysterious "Sea Rhyme", there is no picture, and there is no official movie information.

Soon, the post became a rabbit hole: more and more people participated in the research, so that a lot of side information about the TV series was dug up, enough to create a detailed Douban page. However, no matter what, no one can find any picture record of this TV series, whether it is overseas or domestic, it seems to exist and does not exist.

People went to the old book network to search for information, and finally found the CCTV collection of paintings from decades ago, maybe it was related to this TV series, but there was no information about the painter and the publishing house on the painting.

At the same time, someone went to the old music score network to check the score of "Clouds in the Blue Sky", and accidentally found another identical score, but the annotation was an episode of the TV series "Ocean Waves". He originally inferred that early TV dramas would have multiple names because of censorship, or because they didn't sell well, they would change their names halfway. But half of the soundtrack of "Ocean Waves" is different from the soundtrack of "Sea Rhyme", and some people mentioned that they have seen "Ocean Waves", according to the description, this is a different work from "Sea Rhyme".

Someone also found an article mentioning "Haiyun" in the People's Daily in 1986, but the introduction said that it was a military film, which matched some people's statements. But in the introduction of the soundtrack, "Sea Rhyme" is another prose film.

The most reasonable speculation is that "Ocean Waves" is a series and "Sea Rhyme" is one of the episodes, so both are mentioned in several places, including the lyricist/screenwriter's statement. And according to some accounts, the series is about foreign landscapes, and each episode has a different style.

The oddity of this incident is that, in the end, a large number of articles were found that mentioned "Haiyun" from the side, including Zhao Zhongxiang's biography, interviews with the director, and even the comments left by the composer and singer. Some people even bought a film record of "Sea Rhyme", found the text of the commentary at the end of the film, and even a record of the filming location.

The group of Sherlock Holmes dug through a bunch of books that can only be found in the second-hand book market, with a few relevant descriptions, but even with this level of searching, no one found any screenshots or official accounts of Sea Rhyme.

In CCTV's TV drama repertoire from the 70s to 2000, it is also not seen, it is like it has been erased from the world.

You know, in the whole process, they also came into contact with many forgotten TV series in the 7 and 80s, and all those episodes can find information, except for "Sea Rhyme".

A man found an old harmonica textbook with scores related to this TV series. The other songs in the same book are all famous, but the tunes related to "Sea Rhyme" have become colder.

This TV series did not seem to be unpopular at one time, and it was recorded by various viewers and practitioners. And the song "Clouds in the Blue Sky", everyone also found that the popularity is not low, and it was also sung by the famous singer Li Guyi.

So, where exactly did it go? Nobody knows.

Some people lamented that when collecting information, they came into contact with many mainland singers in the 7th and 80s, who were household names at the time, but now they and their songs have been lost. In just 40 years, a drama series that brings together a big bowl of soundtracks has also disappeared without a trace, and the power of time seems to emerge and materialize in the step-by-step exploration.

Perhaps in addition to the confusing and strange phenomena, the most touching thing about this post is these strange netizens who cooperate with each other to find the truth.

They rummaged through a large number of old books and memoirs, searching for any clues related to "Sea Rhyme". These old books have no electronic records, they are either physical books or printed copies, and there is no way to use the "search" function, so you can only find them line by line.

Some information has to be obtained through the cooperation of many people: if someone finds out where a certain information may exist and posts it on the Internet, those who can afford it will go to the second-hand book market to buy it. If someone finds that a certain book is only recorded in the library of a certain city, the locals who can afford it will go there to consult it.

In this way, more and more information is gathered and condensed little by little towards the point that leads to the answer. But there seems to be something unwilling to live up to the mystery brought by the "urban legend" in this matter, so until now, no one has found the truth about "Sea Rhyme", and all theories are not enough to convince the inquirers that this TV series seems to have disappeared into thin air so magically.

Looking for the story of "Sea Rhyme", I am afraid it is about urban legends, the best footnote. In terms of meaning, the whole thing really has no substantive "meaning", but it is still impressive, because it is still interesting and grotesque to explore cooperation on the Internet today; The incident itself seems like an unreal urban legend.

David Lynch, who just passed away, has a movie called "Blue Velvet". Roughly speaking, a college student living in the sun accidentally finds an ear on the lawn, which leads him headlong into a sickly twisted rabbit hole and sees the underground criminal world that usually does not seem to exist.

And when he finally got out of the rabbit hole and returned to the sun, he could never forget what he had seen, even if it was a lifetime away. Because at this time, he already understood: in every window, behind the seemingly beautiful blue velvet curtains, there may be a darkness that the sun cannot reach.

In fact, everyone likes this movie only half because of the truth of its narrative; The other half is: we just love to peek behind the secrets of Blue Velvet, which is also a game. David Lynch knows this, so he's always shooting works like this.

In an age where satellite photos are looming around every corner and Bermuda's seas are disenchanted, it's a fun way to relax with the occasional trip to an urban legend bar to see some strange stories. At the very least, it is far better than using the detective spirit to check the ingredients with the gang.

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