Early Internet Conspiracies Centered On a Creepy Ghost Town
The Ong’s Hat story might be the first attempt at altered reality storytelling
Technology made the world much smaller in the early 1990s. New connections gave people opportunities to share large chunks of information, perhaps even new worlds. Users soon consumed data they never seen before. Some even encountered new experiences. In a couple corners of the internet, the Ong’s Hat narrative blended reality, virtual worlds, and fiction to pull the audience into its experience.
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From 1988, curious people might have encountered pieces of a legend set in Ong’s Hat, an abandoned town in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The story opened with a jazz musician, Wali Fard, who bought around 200 acres of the nearby land in 1978. Soon, he set up the Moorish Science Ashram — a place of studies for psychology, spirituality, and counterculture beliefs.
To draw followers, Fard circulated his religious pamphlets. Althea and Frank Dobbs, twins with Princeton PhDs, sought out the spiritual leader because they had read one of these papers. The Dobbs siblings created a laboratory in a trailer and founded the Institute of Chaos Studies. To aid their experiments in the late 1980s, they created a new sensory…
