Hoax Museum Blog: Websites

Kingdom Hospital — image Kingdom Hospital. It's the 'Hospital that brings out the best in you.' From its website you would think that it's a real hospital, until you start poking around it a bit. Then it gets creepy. It's a tie-in, of course, with ABC's Kingdom Hospital miniseries. But it's pretty well done. (submitted by Brian Flynn).
Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004.   Comments (3)

Brains for Zombies — image It looks like Amazon.com is branching out into a lucrative new market: brains for zombies. They're offering celebrity brains and tasty brains in addition to the more generic brains. In reality, the site is a spin-off of goats.com, the 'tasty yet morally ambiguous' webcomic. (Thanks to Charles Martin for the link).
Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2004.   Comments (2)

Decomposition Cam — image The folks over at SeeMeRot.com have engineered something rather unusual: a webcam set up inside a coffin so that you can see their friend's body decompose. At least, that's what they claim. The 'webcam image' appears simply to be an animated gif that cycles between a blurry and an in-focus image to simulate how a real webcam might behave. Plus, they have rather odd sponsors for a project of this kind... sponsors offering 'live sexy girl cams'. I suppose the logic is that once you get tired of watching the dead girl (they say it's a woman in the picture), you can head over and watch some live sexy girls. The site is registered to someone at 7985 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood. No suite number is given, so it's impossible to tell which business there registered it, but most of the stores in that area are in the 'adult entertainment' business. I suspect that SeeMeRot.com is a weird promotional gimmick dreamed up by someone selling porn. In other words, it's fake.
(By the way, the idea of a decomposition cam isn't unique to seemerot.com. Joey Skaggs included this concept in his FinalCurtain.com cemetery hoax. Skaggs's fantastical cemetery theme park was going to include a grave constructed by an artist named Joseph Sullivan that would show Sullivan's decomposing body on an above-ground monitor.)
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2004.   Comments (28)

Cannabis Window — image This UK website offers you the chance to buy cannabis online. No seeds. No hydroponics. Just cannabis itself, delivered to you by a special courier. Sounds like a stoner's dream. But if you actually try to place an order, it's all revealed to be a joke. (Thanks to Paul Farrington for the link).
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004.   Comments (2)


Shards O’ Glass — image Sitting here watching the Superbowl, and out of the blue a hoax website is featured in one of the ads: ShardsO'Glass.com. This company supposedly sells freeze pops embedded with shards of glass. It's a satire of how cigarette companies sell products that they also know are bad for people's health.
Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004.   Comments (8)

Eat Babies — baby Discover all kinds of recipes for cooking and eating babies at eatbabies.com. For instance, you might want to try baby soup or baby stir fry. The site is plastered with warnings announcing that it's all just a joke (I guess they must have got complaints), but I suppose it'll still attract criticism from people who think it might provide sick and twisted individuals with bad ideas. Personally, I think the site would have been funnier if it had provided recipes for eating the babies of poor people, thus playing off of Jonathan Swift's classic work, A Modest Proposal. (Thanks to Antonia for the link).
Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004.   Comments (5)

Caravaners Revolt — caravanBob and Denise are caravaners. In other words, they live in a caravan as they drive around the country. But they resent the way non-caravanners treat them. For instance, the way people in flashy sports cars sometimes make rude gestures as they speed by their caravan on the road. So Bob and Denise are organizing a campaign "to secure equality and respect for caravanners." They're hoping to mastermind a 'ring of aluminum' that will circle London on June 5th, created by thousands of caravanners going slow as they drive along the M25 that circles London. That's all well and good, but something smells fishy about Bob and Denise. They're just a little too offbeat and cutesy for their own good. Could they possibly be the creation of an advertising agency, along the lines of the recently seen Travelocity Gnome?
Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004.   Comments (0)

RYT Hospital — The RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center has been on the forefront of recent medical advances. They've developed a transgenic mouse with the cognitive abilities of a human. They've helped a man give birth. They've even developed nano-robots to deliver gene therapies and repair tissue. Pretty amazing stuff. And they've got a very slick website. Too bad none of it is real. (Thanks to Ross Harvey for the link).
Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2004.   Comments (24)

I See Jesus — Pareidolia is defined as the perception of meaningful images in random patterns. In other words, seeing things that aren't really there. For instance, people might see a face in a cloud. Or they might see the Virgin Mary in the window of a Boston hospital. When people start seeing religious images on the walls or windows of buildings, it almost always leads to good business for the business affected, as massive crowds flock there to see the image. So now there's a company calling itself ISeeJesus.com that will facilitate the appearance of religious images at your place of business via 'special prayer techniques.' How you take advantage of the crowds that will then flock to see the image is up to you.
Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004.   Comments (0)

Flatulent Technologies — Flatulent Technologies is a company that is committed to "extracting energy from everything that stinks or rots." Sounds like a great idea. The company's NYSE ticker symbol is even better: FART. Too bad a little disclaimer at the bottom of the company's webpage admits it's a parody.
Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (2)

Real Dog — Why own a living, breathing dog that you have to feed every day, when you can own a RealDog instead?
Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (2)

Haggis Hunt — Here's an interesting hoax website, courtesy of Anson Kennedy. It's haggishunt.com, which punctures the common misconception that a haggis is a sheep's stomach stuffed with meat and oatmeal. In reality (according to this site) a haggis is an extremely rare animal hunted by the Scottish. The site offers many educational haggis facts, such as that the sound the haggis is most sensitive to is plaid rubbing on underpants (I never knew!). And definitely check out the Haggis Cam.

Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (0)

Philanderers International — Here's another site that makes you wonder if it's real or fake: Philanderers.com. It's a service to help people who are married have extramarital affairs. My first thought was that it was a joke. But upon looking around it for a while, it appears legitimate. I wonder if any single people use this who want to have an affair with someone who's married? And here's an evil thought: if you ever try to cancel your membership, they could threaten to tell your spouse.
Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004.   Comments (114)

Taliban Reunited — Have a hankering to find out what your old terrorist chums are up to now that Afghanistan is occupied by the American military? Then check out Taliban Reunited, the site that lets terrorists get reacquainted with their former friends and acquaintances.
Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004.   Comments (0)

Memory Erasure — Lacuna, Inc. is a company that will erase troubling memories from your mind using a "painless non-surgical memory erasing process." But the site is actually part of the advertising campaign for an upcoming movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey.
Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2004.   Comments (0)

Columbine Paintball — Here's a site that's in incredibly bad taste, but it is DEFINITELY a hoax. It's Columbine Paintball. It purports to be a paintball arena in Cheyenne, Wyoming that allows you to play a paintball game inside a recreation of the Columbine high school. As I said, it's a hoax.
Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003.   Comments (7)

LordCo Centre — The religiously inclined can find shops tailored to their needs over at the LordCo Centre Mall. Book a cruise on Noah Cruise Lines, or have all your financial needs taken care of at MeccaBank. (Warning: the site automatically plays obnoxious music).
Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2003.   Comments (1)

Servonet — You can buy quite a few unusual gifts for Christmas over at Servonet. For instance, check out the Home Freebasing Kit, as well as the Power Fork. Interestingly, when you try to order one of these products instead of being asked to enter your own credit card number, you're allowed to select a number from their customer database. And then you get a message that their "shipping capabilities have been suspended indefinitely."
Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2003.   Comments (0)

MJ and JR News — Michael Jackson has set up a website that's serving as his Official Press Room. Apparently Jack the Ripper has now done the same. (Thanks to Kentaro Mori for the link)

Update: By the way, don't bother clicking on any of the links on the 'JR News' site. They all lead to spam. Evidently the JR News site is just a front for spammers.
Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2003.   Comments (0)

What Brand Are You? — This is one of those cases where a joke supposedly becomes reality. An advertising company (The Design Conspiracy) created a joke website called What Brand Are You?, whose purpose was to spoof the bizarre brand names that companies are increasingly dreaming up—names such as Aviva, Diageo, and Corus. Visitors to What Brand Are You could type in their name, their 'core values,' and their goals, and the supercomputer powering the website would then spit out a personalized brand name free of charge (my brand name is 'Acclivius'). In reality, the Design Conspiracy had just dreamed up a few silly names (about 150, they say) which were randomly offered when visitors hit the submit button. But apparently a number of companies liked the spoof names, because according to this BBC story twenty of them have now been registered as trademarks (Thanks to Andrew Nixon for sending in this link). Some of the spoof names that are now the brand names for real companies include Bivium, Libero, Ualeo, Winnovate, and Tempero.

The folks at the Design Conspiracy claim to be somewhat taken aback by all this... But the weird thing is that the companies who registered the spoof names all say that they've never heard of the What Brand Are You website. So something smells a little fishy. The skeptical part of me suspects that the Design Conspiracy might have slipped a few existing names (that they thought were silly) in with the fake names. Now they're enjoying the publicity of having their spoof names supposedly adopted by real companies. I could be being overly skeptical, of course, but 20 names out of 150 seems like a suspiciously high hit rate. This suspicion would seem to be confirmed when a simple search on whois.org reveals that the What Brand Are You site was registered on June 11, 2002, whereas the domain name for the Bivium Group (just to pick the first of the spoof/real names) was registered before this on May 22, 2002. In other words, the brand name Bivium existed before the Design Conspiracy listed it as a spoof name on their website. The pool of spoof names was seeded with real names.
Posted: Mon Nov 17, 2003.   Comments (1)

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