Spongebob Secret Is Keeping Fans Up at Night 24 Years Later

A 24-year-old Spongebob secret is still keeping fans up at night. SpongeBob SquarePants has been on since 1999. Since then, there have been 15 seasons and 311 episodes. And it is still on so these numbers will continue to go up. Whether it as culturally relevant or as successful as it once was, probably not. It is one of the biggest and most successful children’s cartoons of all time though, and it still has many fans.

This is perhaps most evident by how active the Spongebob Reddit page is. Not only are many — children and adult alike — still watching the show, but engaging in various and plentiful conversations about it as well. To this end, one of the top posts on the Spongebob Reddit page this week is a post dedicated to the unanswered questions from the show that keep you up at night. And it turns out there are many Spongebob secrets preventing sleep.

Some of these secrets include the fate of the Krusty Krab 2, who is the mom of Pearl, and of course what is the secret formula. The most popular reply to the post though, the secret fans agree is the one keeping them up at night the most, is what the embarrassing photo of SpongeBob at the Christmas Party is.

As some fans may remember, this mystery involves 2001’s Season 2 Episode 35 titled “The Secret Box.” In it, Patrick has a secret box that he’s obsessed with and that he keeps laughing hysterically about when he opens. The whole episode he won’t show SpongeBob though, until the very end of the episode.

At the end of the episode, SpongeBob, with Patrick’s permission, opens the box and finds nothing but a string. SpongeBob thinks nothing more of it, assuming Patrick was just being Patrick again, and then heads home. The episode then finishes with a final shot of Patrick, alone, who reveals when pulled the string reveals a secret compartment complete with an embarrassing photo of SpongeBob at a Christmas party. While viewers get to find out what’s actually in the box, unlike SpongeBob, they are never shown the photo. It is a painful tease, and a mystery that haunts SpongeBob fans to this day, or at least SpongeBob fans on Reddit.

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Of course, there are theories on what the photo is. The most prominent of these theories is that it is a shot from the Nickelodeon Holiday Party, but there’s no definitive proof to back up this theory. Alas, the world will probably never get to the bottom of this very important mystery.