One Viral Internet Mystery Just Got Harder to Research

The mystery of the Lake City Quiet Pills website is one that has kept the internet guessing for years — and now it might be just a touch harder to research. According to a post on Reddit, the current owner of the site has asked to be excluded from the Internet Wayback Machine on Archive.org, meaning that any secrets potentially buried in older versions of the website are now likely lost to time. This comes not long after a reported hack and an ominous notification sent to users.

Since the site had already been active for years before it became internet-famous, and since there were messages found buried in the site’s metadata on a handful of occasions, internet detectives have been exploring old backups of the site on the Internet Archive for years. It’s unlikely that anything of substance was still hidden away there, but the elimination of the Wayback Machine as a tool ties off potential investigators from a primary source not otherwise available to them.  

“Lake City Quiet Pills” is supposedly a colloquialism for bullets (named for an ammunition factory in Missouri). It gained internet notoriety in connection with “Milo,” supposedly a hitman who ran the site, along with an image-hosting board used primarily for scantily clad photos of women of barely-legal age. Another user posted a claim that Milo, formerly a moderator for Reddit’s since-banned r/jailbait subreddit, had died suddenly, which led to curious users digging into the Lake City Quiet Pills site.

In the years since, there has been a lot of disagreement. Was it all some kind of elaborate hoax or ARG? Was Milo hiring out assassins? Or was it somewhere in the middle, where the site was facilitating some kid of shady activity but it was being greatly overstated by its staff? That last one seems to be the most popular theory.

Some have speculated that Lake City Quiet Pills was tied to the assassination of Hamas officer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in January 2010. There is virtually no credibility to that allegation, but it has persisted due to an the assassination’s timing lining up with cryptic  plans for a “memorial party” for Milo. And as with any Reddit mystery or ARG, it’s extremely difficult to get people to let go of the more sensational possibilities in favor of a more mundane explanation that has more evidence behind it.  

For a better rundown, you can see Nexpo’s fairly authoritative rundown of Lake City Quiet Pills here: