When someone unexpectedly disappears online it can leave a lot of questions in the wake; what happened? Where’d they go? Will they be back? Luckily a paper trail isn’t as easy to pick up as it is to place down.
Long ago there was a person called “Meow” that was established in multiple social circles and numerous friendships. One day though they up and vanished. Nearly half a decade after their disappearance a group of past friends set out to discover what happened, where’d Meow go? Through multiple clues, look ups, and dot connecting the end result would lead to an unexpected but conclusive ending. So buckle up and get ready to chase a phantom with many faces.
Let’s go through some oddities and characteristics before we hop on the trail.
Meow’s Characteristics:
-was a fan of the Dark Souls series
-stayed up extremely late very often
-claimed to have residence in Ohio
-claimed to be mute and never spoke
-claimed to be female
-very into role playing
After the disappearance Meow’s a peculiar thing started to occur, some of Meow’s accounts started to delete. But not all accounts are deletable, like STEAM accounts. When Meow disappeared a new person claimed to have been the original owner that was lending it to Meow. They said Meow was doing other things now in life, that she was great and considering college again, and so on. That’s a nice ending to this all, perhaps Meow just was tired of the internet for whatever reason, left all her friends behind and is now socializing and partaking in greater activities. Aaaaaaand then the “original” owner removes all friends, privatizes profile and changes URL’s.
All’s well that ends well…
So let’s get started.
Friend#1 - Friend of Meow
Friend #2 - Friend of Meow
Friend #3 - Friend of Meow
Meow - A Ghost Themself
True Meow - ???
It started when Friend#1 and Friend #2 were discussing past times, past groups, past people… Meow? You remember that person? What do you think happened to them? And so curiosity was sparked.
Friend#2 remembers that when you gift someone on steam a gift a receipt of sorts is sent to the person being gifted. This receipt happens to include the email address of the person who sent the gift. Niiiice. It’s a start. The email address itself is a little odd, it is seemingly a random name with no numbers.
Googling the email gets nothing, well, almost nothing. Turns out the email address is 1 letter off from being a street name in Ohio, the state Meow had claimed to live. Alright, so why would you make an email after a street let alone use it to create a steam account?
Since googling the email wasn’t getting anywhere Friend#1 was about to give up on the search but a day later recalled that reverse email search engines exist.
Bazinga, a match.
There was an issue though. The site wouldn’t offer any more information than it had in the picture; a blurred photo and some odd censored name… Thanks too lazy programming though, we could go further. The blur filter over the image was only weakly applied. Right-clicking the image and opening it in another tab alone brought up the image without the blur filter. Google reverse image searching that picture also happened to result in a limited pool of unique hits, great. 3 out of 4 of the hits were from 4chan and the other was from a YouTube page, excellent.
Boy do things start getting wonky here.
The Youtube page had the exact same profile picture that the reverse email search had found so seemingly, this was the person except… the entire Youtube page was the polar opposite personality you’d expect Meow to have. Where Meow was known to be out spoken and kind, this profile was full of vulgarity and racism and bad memes, a huge contrast. To further add to the mystery, they had a Robloxs account linked to their profile.
What the fuck was going on, is this even the right person? How old are they? I had to make sure this reverse email search was accurate. I searched myself, I was found. I searched a friend, they were found. I searched another friend, they were found. Alright, three is enough. This search engine *seems* to work, unfortunately.
Looking past the /pol/ “humor” the Youtube profile’s “About” section had some further information. Supposedly they were from Greece and had a link to their Google+ account. And here’s where some connections start to be made. The Google+ account shows they’re not just into role playing themselves, it’s a huge past time to them! They’re a part of 5 role playing groups, from Five Nights at Freddy’s to Undertale to Half-Life, they’re all over. They’re even an admin of one of the role playing groups! They also happen to be into Dark Souls, so much so they’ve uploaded their own videos on it. What a coincidence.
Scrolling down the Google+ account, past the cringy roleplaying, past the racism, past the 12 year old humor and past the fucking Roblox we get a hit. A steam library screenshot and what lovely information we get.
Cue Friend#3!
Friend#3 enters the fray when I tell them of the search and how far I am. And they get down to business and get results fast. Friend#3 realizes the screenshot shows they use the Euro, it also shows their steam account’s username *which happens to be unique and very searchable* in the top right.
To try and cut a very, very long story short, this steam account username was the key that helped find nearly everything pertaining to this person;
-Soundcloud
-Flickr
-TripAdvisor
-Newgrounds
-Minecraft account
-Multiple rp forum accounts
-A Greek city public forum records
After we sifted through all of this we felt pretty confident this person was in fact “Meow”. Lets just label them “True Meow” for simplicity. True Meow likes to role play, maybe a little too much as he has at least 5 accounts all dedicated to different characters, he also tends to delete past accounts and history as we found out. Was it mentioned they’re a “he”? Well True Meow is a “he”. We never found pictures of specifically him but his sound cloud has very low view count songs of a male character with avatars he’s used on other sites. Presumably it’s him singing. He’s went to large extents to conceal his voice on his role playing accounts (unlike his Greek accounts), as in one of his Google+ posts he mentions he talks funny or sounds off. But this is likely just a ruse to hide his Greek accent and allow him to stay immersed as his, often female, characters. Even videos titled “Reading of xxx….” He specifically deleted as they probably contained his voice while keeping up non-voice related videos. We should also throw in he claims to be 26 two years ago but who really knows.
This Greek, role play loving, Dark Souls playing character seems to be the True Meow. But wait, there’s a cherry on top.
Googling Meow’s original alias long enough you’ll stumble onto an IRC log for UNIX support. Guess who is posting in the IRC asking for help? Someone under the alias “Meow”. They also happened to link a German language photo. (In case you’re worried that the photo is German and True Meow is Greek, True Meow’s TripAdvisor showed one logged trip, to Germany.) Why is this the cherry on top though? Because we had no hard similar links between Meow and True Meow, it was all relying on the reverse email search and common hobbies between the two. Thanks to Friend#3 though we found our True Meow posting a UNIX bug report on the same site but this time under his exact Greek name, True Meow.
“Coincidence? I think not!”
Now we had a connection that both Meow and True Meow were caught related to other than the email. With that I think we found what happened to Meow and ultimately one of the oddest cat fishing experiences.
Did we get the wrong person?
There was some things that favored Meow’s outrageous vanishing story, even with all this evidence:
1. Meow gave all of us a handful of free games over time while we gave nothing. Talk about a poor cat fisher if the goal was to get expensive things in return.
2. Keeping up appearances wasn’t cheap. Not mentioning the other games, Meow gave us all a Starbound key before the game released. That’s about $50 alone just to keep up kind appearances.
3. A point Friend#2 likes to argue, the contrast is simply too great. The belligerent, racist, unfunny True Meow is so unlike Meow that it’s unbelievable, even if it was a catfish that went on for months.
Was this just a dude that wanted to, for whatever reason, role play as a female was willing to lose money to do it? Or is this the wrong person? Won’t ever truly know for sure but I’m going with the strong evidence and multiple coincidences that Meow has indeed been found and the disappearance solved.