Conspiracy-laden notes keep popping up in cereal boxes & Pennsylvania parks

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Ok, which one of you has been playin games...Brotherman territory?

Neatly folded notes crammed with just about every conspiracy theory and internet buzzword imaginable keep popping up in rural Pennsylvania, some illegally tucked inside cereal boxes and others pinned to pine trees in state and local parks.

Unfolded, the notes are mostly indecipherable, containing a coded run-on sentence of secret societies, sci-fi movie mentions, and name drops like “Musk”, “Bill Gates,” and “Oprah.”

“It’s tied to Saturn, Lord o/t Rings/time,” one line reads.

The FBI, Food & Drug Administration, and elected officials in Pennsylvania are all aware of the notes, but no one’s been caught in the act of actually planting them.

Philly had its own strange “note” phenomenon with its Toynbee Tiles, which were found embedded into city streets and, eventually in other states, with messages about Stanley Kubrick and Jupiter, mostly in the 1990s and 2000s.

While the Toynbee Tiles had an art house vibe, the Schuylkill Notes feel a bit  darker. Some notes mention international conflicts and hate groups, and are often riddled with intentional misspellings and out-of-place apostrophes, making them all the more confusing.

“Secret society (SS) ties to terror’m, shoot’gs, staged confront’ns & other crises aren’t report’d but JFK/Lincoln warn’d of SS,” another reads.

Amateur web sleuths have taken up the case, mostly on Reddit, and they’ve dubbed the bizarre messages the “Schuylkill Notes” because so many, initially, were found in Schuylkill and surrounding counties.

“The content of the notes themselves, it’s clear they’re warnings, not threats,” one early member of the Reddit group r/schuylkillnotes said.

The notes, which often differ slightly in content, have also been found in Huntingdon and Lycoming Counties. One Reddit user mapped out dozens of specific locations where notes have been found, including Walmarts, Goodwills, and various locations on the Appalachian and other trails. The bulk of the discoveries appears to be situated between Allentown and State College.

Zachary Zimmerman, 23, was hiking in Lebanon County’s Swatara State Park while squirrel hunting last month when he discovered a handful of the notes attached to trees and wrapped around stones.

“I picked it up and read it and it really doesn’t make any sense to me,” Zimmerman, a Lebanon County native who lives in the Adirondacks, said.

Zimmerman said he thought about calling the Pennsylvania Game Commission or Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, but didn’t. He kept a few notes and left others in the woods.
“It’s just a bunch of crazy stuff,” he said.

It’s unclear exactly when the notes began appearing in Pennsylvania. Some posts say 2015 and at least one recalled something similar happening in the 1980s, in the Poconos. In December, a Luzerne County man named Joe Miller found a note in a sealed box of Lucky Charms.

“It’s the note that really bothers me,” Miller told WBRE/WYOU out of Scranton. “These notes are found inside food like kids’ food.”

While elected officials have notified the FBI, Carrie Adamowski, a spokesperson with the agency in Philadelphia, said she could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.

Wendy Wilson, a spokesperson for Rep. Matt Cartwright in northeastern Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, said an officer received an anonymous call reporting that 20 notes had been found on state game lands in Mainville, Columbia County.

“So far, there have been no reports of people getting sick from these notes, but we don’t want to take any chances and we want to find out who is doing this,” Wilson said.



The FDA, according to a spokesperson, is aware of the situation, and said the agency “evaluates product defects and other complaints that it receives.” Tampering with food products, the spokesperson said, is a federal crime.

On Reddit, at least one discussion asked whether the note’s original creator or copycats could be in the group. Zimmerman said it seemed like a lot of work for one person and he wondered whether people were copying them and putting them out for attention.

Anyone who finds a note, particularly in a food item, is asked to call Pennsylvania’s FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator at (877) 689-8073. Notes found in state parks can be reported to DCNR here.

Conspiracy-laden notes keep popping up in cereal boxes and Pennsylvania parks

Schuylkill Notes

[Ninurta]

From my perspective, I'd say they are a dry run to test dead-drop "tech" for an underground cell forming in that area. Testing for effectiveness, what gets found by civilians (and therefore doesn't make it to the intended recipient), and how investigations into them proceed.

It should be clear to most everyone that cell phones and internet messages are not secure comms, so they are falling back on old Cold War techniques of dead drops for secure comms channels, and testing them.

Someone is getting serious about forming an underground resistance, with cutouts to avoid rolling up several cells with a single arrest. You can't roll over on people when you don't know who they are.

It's the notes that DON'T get found by third parties, the ones that make it to their recipients, the ones that are not heard about in the news or on the streets that will be the effective ones.

Same thing seems to be going on around here, with "flags" to alert those in the know that there is a message in a drop appearing in trees at the roadsides here. Those "flags" can be anything, so long as it is agreed upon before hand by the communicants. I just call them "flags" like the flag on a mailbox that alerts the postman there is outgoing mail in it.

Christmas time was great, with Christmas tree balls appearing on trees at the roadside at random. The casual observer would just think someone was going overboard with Christmas spirit.

Just a budding young underground cell testing their communication network.

That's just my 2 cents worth of opinion.

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[EndtheMadnessNow]

@Ninurta - I like how you think! Nothing these days as it seems is too far fetched.

[GeauxHomeLittleD]

Or it could just be a bored weirdo like me who learned about the Toynbee Tiles and decided to have their own go at messing with people's heads.