In June 2020, a group of teenagers using the app Randonautica followed random coordinates to a beach in Seattle — and found a suitcase containing human remains.
Transcript
Host:
It’s June 2020. Four teenagers are standing on a beach in West Seattle filming a TikTok.
They’re laughing. There’s a black suitcase wedged between the rocks near the water.
It looks at a place but it’s not alarming. Not yet. They joke about what might be inside.
Money. Something weird. Something random enough to go crazy viral.
Then one of them says there’s a smell. They stop laughing.
Minutes later they call the police and by the end of the night the story will be on national news.
And within days millions of people will believe the app predicted a murder.
But that’s not actually what happened. We’re gonna get into it tonight on The Midnight Drive.
We’re gonna get into it tonight on The Midnight Drive.
The world was still in lockdown. Streets were quieter than usual.
People were restless. Bored. Online more than ever.
In somewhere in West Seattle a group of teenagers decided to try something new.
They downloaded an app called Randonautica. The one that promised to generate random
coordinates based on your intention. By that point it was already gaining traction on TikTok.
People were chasing mystery. Looking for signs. Looking for something to break the monotony of
quarantine life. That evening the app gave them a set of coordinates along the shoreline near Elkie
Beach. So they went. It wasn’t some abandoned warehouse or deep forest or anything like that.
It was a beach. Open sky. Water. Rocks. The kind of place that feels ordinary.
Almost peaceful. When they arrived they started filming like so many Randonautica users did.
Half adventure. Half content creation. And then they noticed it. A black suitcase sitting
awkwardly among the rocks near the water. It looked out of place. Not washed up exactly.
More like it had been left there. At first their tone was curious. Even playful. What’s in it?
Money? Something weird? Maybe it’s something random enough to make us go crazy viral on TikTok.
But as they got closer the mood shifted. There was a smell. Not just saltwater.
Not just something damp or stale. Something stronger.
Instead of opening the suitcase themselves they stepped back and called the police.
That decision not to touch it is important because what authorities found inside would turn
a viral trend into national news. Inside the suitcase were human remains.
Additional remains were later discovered in bags floating in the water nearby.
The teens had unknowingly been led by a randomly generated coordinate to an active
homicide scene. The story spread quickly. Major outlets including CNN reported on it.
The viral TikTok video documenting the teens’ reactions circulated widely for many people.
This was the very first time they’d ever heard of randonautica.
And it didn’t look quirky anymore. It looked ominous.
Police later identified the victims as two adults. A 27 year old woman and a 36 year old man.
Investigators determined the case was a double homicide.
Eventually a suspect was arrested and charged.
Authorities were clear. The app did not predict the crime. It did not manifest anything.
It generated coordinates within a geographic radius. And by coincidence
those coordinates happened to land near where remains had been left.
But coincidence doesn’t go viral does it? Mystery does.
And suddenly randonautica wasn’t just an exploration app anymore. No.
It was the app that led teens to a body. That distinction really matters. It matters a lot
because the downloads suddenly surged. Curiosity spikes TikTok filled with videos labeled creepy,
terrifying. Don’t try this at 3 a.m. The Seattle suitcase became the defining story.
The origin myth of the app’s darker reputation. But here’s the thing that often gets lost
in the retelling of this story. The horror wasn’t generated by an algorithm.
It was already there. The app didn’t create a tragedy. It intersected with it.
And that intersection between randomness and real world violence felt symbolic
of 2020 in and of itself. A year when normal routines were interrupted by events
no one could have ever predicted. When the ordinary suddenly contained the unimaginable.
For the teenagers on that beach it was probably just supposed to be a strange evening adventure.
Instead it became a moment that blurred the line between internet trend and criminal investigation.
And maybe that’s why the story stuck. Because it forces a question that sits at the heart
of randonautica. When we go looking for something unusual are we prepared for what we might actually
find? Now here’s where it gets interesting. One detail that you will hear repeated over and over
and over again about the Seattle suitcase story is this. They set the intention of the app to death
or murder or something creepy or something dark. That version circulates constantly.
It feels narratively perfect. Of course they set it to death. Of course the app responded.
Of course the universe answered. It’s a clean arc. Set up. Manifestation. Pay off.
But here’s the thing. There is no verified reporting that confirms what their intention
actually was on that beach in Seattle. Major outlets that covered the case focused on the facts.
The discovery, the investigation, the identification of the victims, the intention itself,
the supposed trigger for the coordinates is either absent or vague in any credible reporting.
And that absence created a vacuum. And the internet hates a vacuum. The internet absolutely
hates a vacuum. It wants a good story. It wants a reason. It wants a why.
So you know what happened? The people came in and they filled it. They gave people a reason.
They gave people a why. Almost immediately retellings began customizing this same story.
The intention became darker with each repost. More cinematic. More aligned with the outcome.
It shifted from coincidence to causation. Because they set their intention to death
and found a body is a myth. But it’s a powerful one. And it’s very effective,
especially in this world where we live in an internet world filled with clickbait and rage
bait, everything like that. People who find Randonautica stories, they want to hear this.
They want to hear that the intention was death and a body was found. They want to hear the
intention was set to creepy and they end up in the middle of a forest and there’s a rickety old
building and there’s a shadowy figure inside of the building holding something metal.
People who seek out Randonautica stories, that’s what they want to hear.
But it transforms randomness into prophecy. It suggests that the app doesn’t just generate
coordinates, but it somehow responds to the intention that you put in. And that subtle shift
changes everything. The original event was tragic and coincidental. The internet version
is supernatural inevitability. That transformation happened fast within days. TikTok captions were
framing the discovery as proof that the app could manifest outcomes. Commentary videos leaned into
the idea of dark intentions being answered. Reaction channels amplified the eeriness of it all.
The story wasn’t just shared, it was heavily edited. What fascinates me is how instinctive
that edit was. We as humans are uncomfortable with randomness colliding with horror. It feels
chaotic, meaningless, and unstable. But if you insert intention, especially a dark intention,
the chaos suddenly becomes structure. Now the event has logic behind it. Now
it has a narrative spine. Now the story has teeth. Now it all makes sense. Even if that sense
is completely fictional. And maybe that says more about us than it does about the app.
Because what happened in Seattle wasn’t the algorithm predicting tragedy. No. It was human
storytelling reshaping coincidence into destiny. And that rewrite happened in real time.
You’re listening to the Midnight Drive.
We’re back on the Midnight Drive, wherever you may be tuning in. I’ve got a video feed on YouTube,
but we are playing anywhere that you enjoy listening to your podcasts as well. Now we’re
talking randonautica tonight. The weirdest part about randonautica is all of the lore that’s been
there as to it. We just talked about a group of teenagers in Seattle that found not one body,
two bodies, in a black suitcase. The smell gave it away. But the lore of what the internet turned
that into. An app that operates off of coordinates and intention.
How can an app know intention? That’s the question that everybody who jumps down this
randonautica rabbit hole is asking. Now if you’ve used randonautica, I encourage you,
please send me a text. 402-610-2836 is our text line here for the Midnight Drive. I would love
to hear your randonautica stories. And maybe you don’t have a randonautica story, but you’ve got
a weird story. Share your weird stories with us. We’re only getting started here on the Midnight
Drive and we’ve got a lot of road in front of us. Let’s put it that way. When it comes to randonautica
though, everybody always wants the whole story. And unfortunately, there’s not always a whole
story to any or all of this. So when it comes down to setting an intention within the app,
just straight from the get-go, your subconscious, your subconscious is setting you up to see things.
If you set your intention to creepy, you’re going to have your eyes open
for creepy stuff that’s happening all over the place. You have it set to scary. You’ve got it set
to death. I know that I’ve seen a lot of randonautica stories where people will set the intention
to death. And they are absolutely creeped out by the stuff that they encounter because if they end
up near a cemetery, death, oh my gosh, what does that mean? So ultimately, the meaning behind
randonautica is totally given to it when the user sets an intention and then starts crafting a
narrative with all of that in mind. Now granted, coming upon a murder scene, in and of itself,
just hard stop, murder scene, body in a suitcase, smells terrible. Like, yeah,
that’s straight up traumatizing right there. You’re going to remember that.
You didn’t set the intention to whatever it is that you want. I mean, that’s crazy. Even if it
was like, we want something happy, love, sweet, any of those things. You can spin it into a really,
really twisted, twisted story. When it comes down to internet lore, that’s all there is to it.
That’s all there is to it. Personally, I’ve never used randonautica. I just love reading the stories
because they are absolutely off the wall. Absolutely off the wall. I’ve heard several
where they set the intention to creepy and then they’ll be led down a random dirt road and then
all of a sudden, headlights will come up in the middle of a frontage road and then
a car will start driving towards them. And of course, they’re freaked out. I mean,
age demographic for this stuff. We’re talking high schoolers, man. So, I mean, like,
me, I’m too old for this stuff. I think the stories are fascinating, but I’m not the demographic
for the app in and of itself. Now, we’ve got a lot of adventure seekers that are out there
that still might enjoy randonautica. Like I said, that’s why I want to hear your experiences
or just hear your take on this. I would absolutely love to hear what you guys have to say about
randonautica in and of itself, like the world that we’re living in. You know what? Let’s just say,
let’s just say that there is something happening within this app to where
the spiritual and technological are intersecting. Let’s say that’s a thing. Would that be exhilarating
to you? Or would that be terrifying? Or would it just be like, eh, business as usual? It just
is what it is. Because that’s such a strange world when you start tweaking intention into the mix,
because I know inside of spirituality, a lot of different world religions really rely heavily
on intention. And what happens if your intention is not good? What happens if your intention is
somewhat dark? Or even if there’s like some kind of perversion twisted into all of it?
What does that mean on a bigger level? What does that mean for technology? What does that mean
for spirituality? What does it mean for anything? If those two things are intersecting with each
other, not only have you got a ridiculously powerful and pretty dang terrifying app,
you’ve got endless possibilities, absolutely endless possibilities of what could be done
with an app like that. Can you imagine? That’s funny to think for a moment.
Let’s say, let’s say we’re just going to do something wild. We’re going to download randonautica.
We’re going to set the intention. Is it going to be smiley faces and blue skies?
It’s going to be a sunny day, a lot of green on the trees? Or is it going to be scary? Is it going
to be creepy? Is it going to be dark? Is there something inside all of us that leans towards
that darkness? If we had the possibility to really scare ourselves or to scare our friends,
is that something that we would like to do? We’ll discover it more here on The Midnight Drive.
There’s a garbage truck parked on top of the meaning of life.
That’s what I’m thinking as I stand at a set of coordinates randomly generated by randonautica.
You know, a self-described tool to enhance the human experience. The premise is very simple.
You set an intention and the app sends you somewhere in the real world that’s supposed
to connect with that intention. In 2020, journalist Amelia Tate of Wired wrote about
the strange rise of this app called randonautica and the gap between its viral hype and its
everyday reality. What follows is an adaptation of that reporting coming up next on The Midnight Drive.
I’m standing in a set of coordinates randomly generated by randonautica,
a self-described tool to enhance the human experience. Again, the premise is simple. We’ve
been through this. You set an intention and it’ll send you to a location, a real-world location
that’s supposed to connect with your intention. Intentions can be anything. A dog, the divine,
something unexplainable. Mine was meaning. As the garbage truck flashes its lights and pulls away,
I notice something glimmering on the ground. It’s small, shiny, just enough to make me quicken
my pace. It’s the discarded wrapping of a microwavable tuna lunch. Not exactly the profound
revelation I was hoping for. You probably first heard of randonautica in the summer of 2020
during lockdown. When routines felt suffocating and the world seemed smaller than ever,
the app exploded in popularity. It was even called the app of the summer by the Atlantic.
But its rise wasn’t just about curiosity or cabin fever. It was also about the suitcase.
Now, rehashed what we talked about. In Seattle, a group of teenagers followed coordinates
generated by the app to a beach and discovered human remains inside of a black suitcase.
They documented it on TikTok and the video went viral. Suddenly randonautica wasn’t just quirky.
It was straight up eerie, mysterious, and even dangerous.
The hashtag randonautica racked up more than a billion views. The most popular videos featured
panicked narrators, shadowy figures, ominous music. On Reddit, thousands of self-described
randonauts shared their journeys. Someone who found gold coins scattered on the ground.
Someone who discovered a lone armchair in the middle of a field
after setting their intention to something unexplainable.
Someone who claimed they’d stumbled upon the end of a rainbow. The stories that travel farthest
are the extraordinary ones. They promise a wow factor. The sense that randomness has been bent
into meaning. But for every viral video, there are dozens of quieter experiences.
One Reddit user described using the app more than 20 times and finding absolutely nothing
meaningful at all. No synchronicities, no white rabbits, just private property,
a pond, a sandpit. When they set their intention to randonautica itself,
the app led them to a boarded up shack with recycling dumpsters outside.
Seriously, they wrote,
standing over my tuna wrapper, I understand the feeling. For a moment, I try to retrofit meaning
into it. The truck drove away. Fish.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
The meaning of life was 42. It’s tempting to force a connection, isn’t it? But eventually,
I close the app, a little disappointed. The founders of randonautica say that the goal
isn’t magic. It’s novelty. Randomness, they argue, pulls you out of a routine.
It makes you notice your surroundings. It gives you a reason to explore. And maybe that’s the real
phenomenon. Once you set an intention, football, gray cars, something calming, you begin scanning
the world for it. You notice things you might have ignored before. Patterns appear, not because the
universe rearranged itself just for you, but because your attention did. There may be no way
to find nothing as one of the apps created by the app.
There is something in everything, though, if you’re willing to look hard enough.
But that doesn’t mean the app is bending reality. It might just be bending perception.
So what is the reality of randonauting? Sometimes, it’s gold coins in the dirt.
Sometimes, it’s a lonely string of Christmas lights glowing in an empty house.
Sometimes, you may come across a fairy circle. Sometimes, you might come across a black suitcase
on the rocks next to the beach. And sometimes, it’s a stinky discarded tub of tuna.
Whether that feels meaningful says less about the coordinates
and more about what you were hoping to find when you set out.
There’s so much to be said for that word that you put into the intention box.
So much to be said for that, because you will find it. You will find it.
I really love what Amelia Tate was talking about with this particular section. This particular
article that she wrote up, because she was willfully going against the sensational aspects
of randonautica. People want to find the weird, people want to find the mysterious,
people want to find the dangerous. Sometimes, sometimes,
you just find trash bins. You just find discarded tuna cans.
What does that mean? I don’t think it means anything, personally. But I would love to hear
what you think that it means. Go ahead, send me a text or leave me a message
on the Midnight Drives line 402-610-2836. I absolutely love to hear from you.
And feel free to leave the comments below.
Whether you’re watching us on YouTube or you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform,
if you’re on YouTube, jump into the comments. I’ll be reading them. I’ll be reading them.
But if you really, really want to get into the conversation, send me a message
or leave me a message on the Google voice number for the Midnight Drive 402-610-2836.
As we wrap up our show today, we’re going to be talking a little bit more about where randonautica
came from, the people who created it, if it’s still available, and what people are doing with
it now. These stories are all from 2020. It’s now 2026. So what happened to it? Are people still doing
it? Believe it or not, they are. Right here on the Midnight Drive.
And we’re back. And we’re talking randonautica. Randomness, intention, and the internet.
Randonautica. The app itself launched at a very specific moment in history.
I want to keep these segments evergreen, but it is significant because the day that I’m recording
this is February 22nd, 2026. And the day that randonautica’s app first launched was February 22nd,
- So exactly six years ago. And I want you to go back to 2020 with me. Late February,
- Just weeks before the world shut down. Before lockdowns, before the endless scrolling,
before boredom became a global connection. Think about that. Boredom being a global connection.
We were all bored together. How crazy is that? So wild. On the surface, the randonautica app is
simple. It generates random geographic coordinates near your location. And it invites you to go
there just like we’ve been talking about for the whole show. That’s it. It’s really straightforward.
It’s a digital prompt for a physical detour. Think about Pokemon Go when that first came out.
This is like a darker. It’s been turned into a darker version of Pokemon Go. The whole spirit
of Pokemon Go was to get kids outside chasing Pokemon in their real surroundings. Randonautica,
Pokemon Go, for people who are looking for adventure. On the surface, the app is simple.
It generates random geographic coordinates near your location. And it invites you to go there.
That’s it. Again, a digital prompt for a physical detour. Randonautica doesn’t just
send you somewhere random though. It asks you to set an intention first. Something calming,
something meaningful, something unexplainable. Then it generates the coordinates. And you go
and see what’s there. The name itself is a mashup, random and not, like astronaut or
argonaut, a traveler through randomness. The app was created by Joshua Langfelder,
who’d been experimenting with random coordinate generation through a telegram bot project,
sometimes referred to as the Fatem Project. The early community was small. Internet explorers
interested in chaos theory, probability, and the idea that randomness could disrupt routine.
Soon after, Auburn Solcito joined the effort, helping turn the concept into a fully
developed mobile app. Together, they formed Randonauts LLC and launched the product publicly
in early 2020. The philosophy behind it was not horror. It was novelty. The creators talked about
breaking out of probability tunnels, the predictability routes that we take every day.
You know the ones, going home from school, going home from work, going to the grocery store,
going to the drug store, and back again. By introducing randomness, they believed that
you could step outside of your routine, notice more, and maybe even feel more alive.
There were even references to psychogéography, the idea of wandering through urban environments
guided not by purpose, but by curiosity, and then the pandemic hit. Suddenly,
millions of people were stuck at home looking for something, anything. That felt different.
By the summer of 2020, Randonautica had exploded. TikTok videos tagged the app’s name.
It began flooding feeds. People filmed their journeys in real time, laughing nervously, walking
down empty roads, reacting to whatever they found at their coordinates. Sometimes it was nothing.
I’d say most of the time it was nothing. Sometimes it was oddly poetic, a mural, a hidden park,
an object that felt symbolically aligned with their intention. And sometimes it was something darker.
As we talked about, the darkest instance in Randonautica’s history
was that shoreline in Seattle, Washington, near Alki Beach.
That incident was widely reported by major news outlets.
Authorities were really clear that the app did not cause the crime. It had simply generated
coordinates within a geographic radius. And by coincidence, these coordinates happened to lead
to a crime scene. But the nuance was quickly swallowed up by the internet. Suddenly, Randonautica
wasn’t just quirky, it was ominous. The suitcase story became a defining myth of the app. Download
surged, hashtags accumulated, millions, eventually billions of views. TikTok creators began framing
their adventures with words like terrifying, warning, and don’t try this at 3am.
Here’s where things get complicated. Randonautica relies on randomness. Sometimes even describing
its system is using quantum random number generation. But users are also encouraged to set intentions.
That combination, randomness plus intention, creates a psychological sweet spot. Because once
you decide you’re looking for something specific, you start noticing it. You set your intention to
red while you’re going to see red everywhere. If you set it to peace, the quiet park bench is going
to feel weirdly profound. If you set it to something creepy, an ordinary abandoned building suddenly
takes on an incredibly ominous tone. The app itself doesn’t interrupt your life. It doesn’t interrupt
your world and it doesn’t force the universe to shift. It’s not responsible for interpreting
what you find. You do. You find the meaning. And social media amplifies all of that interpretation.
During the height of its popularity, Randonautica also became entangled in controversy. Some users
trespassed onto private property. Others wandered into unsafe areas. There were even online rumors
accusing the app of far darker conspiracies. Claims that the company representatives denied
and that lacked credible evidence. The founders pushed back on the horror narrative. They emphasized
that the app was about exploration, not the supernatural. They encouraged safety and critical
thinking. They even built features that allowed users to share verified locations to reduce
misinformation. But once the app becomes a viral phenomenon, control shifts, stories morph and
details get embellished. Intentions get retroactively rewritten to fit outcomes. The Seattle suitcase
is the clearest example. Over time, online retellings began insisting that teenagers had set the
intention to death or even murder. There’s no verified reporting confirming on that.
But it just makes the story neater. It makes the narrative more effective. And it makes you want
to listen in more. It makes you want to pay attention. It gets your imagination racing, doesn’t it?
What if an app could bring me somewhere? Just if I put a word of intention into it? What would that
be like? We’ll explore more of this on the midnight drive. Feel free to text or call our line 4026102836.
And we’ll talk about all things weird and wonderful. Right here on the midnight drive.
Have a wonderful rest of your night.