It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

In 2014, Engadget tried to get to the bottom of a peculiar internet mystery:

A series of 11-second videos have been driving the internet crazy. There are over 80,000 of them, and all they show are a series of blue and red rectangles moving around on screen in seemingly random directions. The soundtrack is equally obtuse, comprised of a series of varying sine wave tones. The mysterious videos, posted by YouTube user Webdriver Torso, have become something of an infuriating web phenomenon. […]

Are they encoded spy messages? Contact from aliens? Or, just plain, old test videos that have caught the collective imagination? A lot of internet man-hours have gone into figuring out what, or who is behind them, and we can exclusively confirm the answer. If you’re impatient you can skip right to the end for the reveal, but let’s take some time to recap the story so far.

The YouTube channel is still active, if you want to check it out yourself. It looks something like this:

It’s kind of a fun story – including the owners at some point trolling the internet sleuths – and I’ll let you read up on the answer in the post.

It all strikes me as a modern cousin of numbers stations, but also if you’ve ever worked on any sort of visual software, you probably have your own Webdriver Torso. When I was at Figma, my home screen often looked like this:

I’ve always been fascinated by these internal testing files, some of which have a life of their own. Here’s Wheel Boy from an internal FigJam testing session that became the “main character” for a bit inside the company:

I feel like a fun book could be written about these fleeting artifacts that never see the light of day and no one ever cares to preserve.