You’re bored at work. You open a browser tab, drop the little yellow Pegman onto a random street in rural France or a coastal road in Japan, and start clicking. Most of the time, it’s just pavement and beige houses. But then you see it. A person with two heads. A car that seems to be melting into the sidewalk. Or maybe something darker—a bird’s-eye view of a lake that looks suspiciously like a crime scene. Google maps odd pictures aren't just a byproduct of a massive data-collection project; they’ve become a modern digital folklore.
They fascinate us.
The internet has spent the better part of two decades hunting for these anomalies. Some are just technical hiccups. Others are genuine "what the heck" moments captured by a 360-degree camera mounted on a Subaru. But if you’ve ever fallen down a rabbit hole of creepy coordinates, you know that the line between a camera glitch and a genuine mystery gets blurry fast.
The Physics of the Glitch: Why the Camera Lies
Most of the "paranormal" stuff you see is basically just math going wrong. Google’s Street View cars use multiple lenses to capture a panoramic view. Later, an algorithm "stitches" these images together. It’s like a digital jigsaw puzzle. If a dog runs across the street while the car is moving, the software might grab the front half of the dog in one frame and the back half in another.
Result? A six-legged ghost dog.
It’s easy to get creeped out by a "half-man" walking down a street in London, but it’s usually just a temporal offset. The camera takes photos at slightly different times. When the stitching software tries to blend them, it creates these jagged, Lynchian nightmares. We call them artifacts. To a software engineer, they’re bugs. To the rest of us, they’re the fuel for a thousand "creepy pasta" threads.
The Infamous "Lake Murder" That Wasn't
Take the case of Almere, Netherlands. Back in 2013, a satellite image went viral. It showed what looked like a person dragging a bleeding body down a wooden pier into a lake. There was a dark red streak trailing behind them. People freaked out. The police were tagged.
It wasn't a murder.
It was a Golden Retriever named Rama. The dog had gone for a swim, climbed back onto the pier, and ran down the wood. The "blood" was just wet wood that had darkened because of the water. Because of the sun’s angle and the satellite’s resolution, a happy dog became a serial killer. This happens a lot. Our brains are wired for Pareidolia—the tendency to see meaningful images (like faces or bodies) in random patterns.
The Creepy, the Weird, and the Sentimental
Not everything is a glitch, though. Sometimes the Google car catches people in the middle of their weirdest moments. There’s the famous shot of people in pigeon masks standing perfectly still on a sidewalk in Musashino, Japan. That wasn't an accident. They knew the car was coming. They waited for it.
Then there are the "Scarecrow People" in Nagoro, Japan. This isn't a glitch either. It’s a village where a local artist, Tsukimi Ayano, replaces deceased residents with life-sized dolls. Seeing them on Street View is jarring. Rows of silent, stuffed figures sitting at bus stops or working in fields. It looks like a horror movie set, but it’s actually a deeply moving tribute to a dying community.
👉 See also: Why Particle Arrangement of Liquids Still Confuses Most Students
Finding the Dead
One of the most emotional ways people interact with these images is finding loved ones who have passed away. There are countless stories on social media of people "visiting" their grandparents' houses on Google Maps and seeing them sitting on the porch, frozen in time from a 2015 drive-by.
It’s a digital ghost.
Google updates its imagery regularly, but you can use the "Time Travel" feature on the desktop version to look at older captures. For many, this is the most valuable part of the platform. It’s a graveyard of memories. You see an old car you used to own, a tree that was cut down years ago, or a parent waving at a car they didn't know was recording them for eternity.
Privacy, Paranoia, and the Blur
Google is pretty aggressive about blurring faces and license plates now. They use AI for it. But the AI isn't perfect. Sometimes it blurs the face of a statue. Sometimes it blurs a cow’s face (which actually happened in Cambridge, UK, and went viral because it was hilarious).
But what about the things Google won't show you?
There are entire sections of the map that are pixelated or blacked out.
- Moruroa Atoll: An island in French Polynesia used for nuclear testing. Large chunks are blurred.
- 2111 North Orleans Street: A house in Chicago that was the site of a kidnapping.
- Patio de los Naranjos, Spain: A government building area that appears as a distorted smudge.
Governments can request these "blackouts" for national security. But the Streisand Effect kicks in—the more you hide something, the more people want to see it. Hobbyists spend hours overlaying old maps with new ones to guess what's being hidden. Is it a secret base? Or just a boring government office with a high-security fence? Usually, it's the latter.
The Art of the Google Maps Hunt
There is a community of "Map Hunters" who treat the globe like a giant hidden-object game. They look for things like the "Giant Pink Bunny" in Italy (a 200-foot knitted toy left by an art collective) or the "Desert Breath" spiral in Egypt.
It’s a weird hobby.
You’re essentially a digital tourist. You can visit the Pyramids of Giza, then jump to a random alley in Detroit, then look at a shipwreck off the coast of North Sentinel Island. You start to see patterns in how the world is built. You notice how suburban sprawl in Arizona looks remarkably similar to suburban sprawl in Australia.
Why do we care about glitches?
Honestly? Because the world feels too mapped out. We live in an era where every square inch of the planet is indexed, tagged, and monetized. Finding a "glitch in the matrix"—even if it’s just a distorted pedestrian in a park—feels like finding a crack in the system. It’s a reminder that the digital representation of our world is imperfect.
It’s messy.
And humans love a mess. We love the idea that there might be something hiding in plain sight that the "officials" missed. Whether it's a guy in a scuba suit chasing the Google car in Norway (another prank) or a weirdly shaped cloud that looks like a UFO over a highway in Italy, these images give us a sense of wonder that a standard map can't.
How to Find Your Own Anomalies
If you want to find your own Google maps odd pictures, you don't just click randomly. You have to be strategic. Look at areas with high "stitching" complexity—places with lots of moving objects, like busy intersections or tourist landmarks.
- Check the history: Use the "clock" icon in the top left of Street View to see how a location has changed.
- Look for "Photo Spheres": These are user-uploaded 360-degree photos. Since they aren't taken by Google’s professional rigs, they are often filled with weird stitching errors and "ghost" limbs.
- Explore remote islands: Satellite imagery in the middle of the ocean often catches weird wave patterns or reefs that look like underwater structures.
Don't expect to find a hidden civilization. You'll mostly find people picking their noses or falling off bikes. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s a raw, unedited look at humanity. No filters, no staged Instagram poses. Just people living their lives, captured by a camera on a stick.
Moving Forward: The Future of Digital Mapping
Google is moving toward "Immersive View," which uses AI to turn flat photos into 3D models. As the technology gets better, the glitches will likely disappear. The "melting cars" and "two-headed dogs" will be smoothed out by more sophisticated neural networks.
We’re losing the weirdness.
In a few years, the uncanny valley of Google Maps might be a thing of the past. If you want to see the strange stuff, now is the time to look. Use the coordinates found on sites like Reddit’s r/googlemapsshenanigans or Geoguessr forums.
📖 Related: Why the iPod nano 6th generation is the coolest gadget you’ve forgotten about
The best way to experience this is to pick a random spot in a country you’ve never visited and just start walking. Don't look for the landmarks. Look for the side streets. Look for the trash cans, the graffiti, and the people waiting for the bus. That's where the real world—and the best glitches—are hiding.
Next Steps for Map Explorers:
- Navigate to "Street View" in a densely populated city and look for reflections in shop windows; often, you can see the camera rig and the driver, breaking the fourth wall of the map.
- Download Google Earth Pro (the desktop version) to access historical satellite imagery dating back decades; it's the best way to see how your own neighborhood has physically evolved since the 90s.
- Join a community like the "Secret Door" or Geoguessr to gamify your exploration; it'll teach you how to identify locations based on soil color, license plate formats, and utility pole designs.
The world is huge. Most of it is boring. But in the margins, between the stitches of the code, there's a whole lot of weirdness waiting to be clicked on.