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

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.