So I was going through a folder with stuff I had saved from 4chan's /x/ during my teens and found this really weird image (with the file dating to 29/05/2013) of a kid with a Sonic the Hedgehog OC Facebook profile called "Chandlor Thehedgehog", holding a copy of Black Ops 2 for the Xbox 360 with a caption about how he doesn't go outside and only plays Call of Duty. At a glance it just looks like a funny post, but once you brighten up the image there's clearly something pretty weird behind him? It's definitely not impossible that this could just be another person and everything that looks odd here is just the result of low light noise but as hard as I try, I cannot not see a weird, uncanny skeletal bald thing with an exposed ribcage. I wanna say it could be a skinny old man but really, I've never seen a living person look *as* emaciated as this thing does?
What brought me to making this thread is that there seems to be almost nothing about it online. Google, Bing, and Yandex's reverse image search options gave me exactly zero matches, and TinEye only gave me a single archived 4chan thread where someone had reposted the collage. By using the archive's own reverse image search function, I was able to find a couple of other threads where people had reposted the image, but only one of them actually had something of a discussion going on. First, the anon who presumably made the collage came out and talked about how it was discovered:
The original thread was from march 2013, the OP only posted the left pic so we could laugh at the autism (thehedghehog), after a while someone looked a little closer and asked if anyone else can see it. Someone took the pic and changed the lighting to reveal that spooky thing in the backround and people shat their pants. I just took the two pics and put them side by side.
And then here's someone's alleged backstory, which honestly sounds like creepypasta bullshit made up after the fact to me but I'll leave it here for the sake of posterity anyways:
Shit, I have a screencap of the story behind that picture, but it's on my iPad which I currently don't have access to.
Basically that kid in the background was a homeless kid that was living in the woods. No parents, didn't go to school, very basic knowledge of English, etc. The kid that took that pic befriended him and had secretly been letting him play at his house for like 5 months. In the mean time, his mom was becoming more and more paranoid because she kept finding these dead animals in the woods and hearing strange noises in the house when her son wasn't home (both caused by this weird homeless kid). Anyway, that kid uploaded that pic to Facebook, and his mom quickly found out about it. She fucking lost it when she saw that figure in the background. Her son didn't want to get in trouble for keeping that homeless kid around and whatnot, so he told her he had no idea what the thing in the picture was, and it really messed with her. She was paranoid as fuck for a while and started getting less and less sleep, so her son felt guilty and finally told the truth one night when the kid was spending the night there. He led his mom to his closet to show him the boy and explain the story, and his mom went on to lock the homeless kid in the closet and beat her son out of anger. She told all of that to her nephew, who was the one who was posting about it. He declined to go into further details after the last event due to legal trouble or something.
Unfortunately, this is where the trail goes cold, I basically can't find anything else on the archives or elsewhere. Again, I want to believe that the explanation really is something as mundane as "weird lighting makes normal person look weird", but I honestly, just can't see it, it really looks like some weird unsettling mummified corpse instead. If anyone can dig out more info on it, it would be great to satiate my curiosity.