On Monday, Sept. 30, TikToker Katie Santry (@katiesantry) shared with her 2 million followers how she thought her house was “haunted.” This, she said, was to numerous strange happenings, like her laptop screen mysteriously cracking and items on her desk being in disarray.
But the most sinister part came when she started digging a hole for a backyard fence. During this, she and her husband unearthed a concerning rolled-up rug.
The TikTok rug gate saga explained
What followed was a lot of update videos, live streams, police intervention, and even the attendance of sniffer dogs. All of this was to determine whether there were human remains in the rug. (Spoiler alert: there wasn’t.)
As the homicide detectives did their thing, things went viral, and, since we can’t be normal about anything anymore, things started getting even weirder.
Users across platforms like X were saying how “invested” they were in the saga, while TikTokers made videos of their own expressing morbid delight. One TikTok, for instance, was captioned: “Scrolling until I find out there is a body rolled up in that dang rug.”
In the comments section, users shared their theories about the rug and discussed how invested they were. The spectacle of this event metastasized to the point that ABC 6 launched a live stream for minute-by-minute updates on the rug.
Ultimately, it was a false alarm. The investigation confirmed there was no dead body inside the rug. While this surely should have been a happy ending, followers of the saga were not pleased, with many lamenting how this made the whole chain of events a “let-down.”
So, what does this all show? Our empathy has been replaced with a grisly desire for the next dopamine hit in an IRL “true crime” situation. And, more than anything, total and utter brain rot.
