The Mosque Goes Missing

crewtime 17/08/26 (Mon) 13:11:44 #90958862

Although I typically focus on cases occurring in the Western world, today will be focused on a somewhat more distant mystery. I thank the enigmatic namtannew, the loyal reader who first brought this case to my attention, and who connected me with many, many interviewees. This incident occurred just last year in Southeast Asia, and remains largely unknown: the sudden, unresolved disappearance of approximately a quarter of the assembly of the Masjid Chulalok, a relatively small mosque in Yala, Thailand.

One of the few surviving images of the mosque in question.

This tale piqued my interest for a specific reason: not only has the incident gone underreported, likely to cover up the dismal handling of the case by Thai Police, almost all first-hand accounts and evidence prior available on the Internet have been systematically erased, modified, or otherwise rendered inaccessible. namtannew was, in fact, a close friend of one of the missing; they realized something was deeply off when attempting to do their own research, only to be stymied by ostensibly absent webpages and 404s.

Nevertheless, it's been a while since I last got to do digging on my own, and I relished the opportunity. Much of what I will present here is original research, as far as I'm aware; the police certainly did not consider any of it in their investigative reports.

crewtime 17/08/26 (Mon) 13:11:55 #909847721

The earliest oddity I could still recover took the form of various social media posts in the lead-up to the actual event. A clear pattern of complaints against the imams of the mosque were emerging, in particular from the younger members, many of whom alleged that the leaders were shirking their duties and turning away devotees. In one particular instance, a post alleged that the imams claimed that they were talking "directly to Allah".

The social media post in question.

Naturally, this was a matter of some concern for the faithful. Enough so that, apparently, a formal complaint was brought to the Central Islamic Council of Thailand (CICOT): this was mentioned in numerous second-hand accounts as having occurred some time in May 2025. I contacted CICOT myself, and found that not only had they not received any such complaint, they didn't even have Masjid Chulalok in their records; when I attempted to follow up on that, I received a polite, clearly AI-generated response shutting me down.

An English-translated screenshot of the Masjid Chulalok website. It has since been taken down.

Archived screenshots of Masjid Chulalok's website reveal some further information, but not much; in this case, it appears that the Mosque Committee had drafted out plans for a rapid expansion of the mosque, involving the construction of a new annex. Speaking to namtannew, it seems these plans were met with some confusion; the mosque had more than enough room, and these works would be nothing more than a drain on their finances, in particular eating into the almsgiving budget. Regardless, the designs were pushed through and approved, and construction started June 2025.

If the tale ended there, it would be simple; a bog-standard story of cynical religious leaders, corruption, and maybe just a tinge of fraud. However, on 30th August, 2025, the other shoe would drop.

On that day, at 8am in the morning, the Facebook account of the Mosque would switch its profile picture to pure white, and drop a single, cryptic post: "ถึงเวลาแล้ว", "it is time". (Their Facebook account has since been taken down.)

The Facebook post.

True to their word, from that very moment, the long line of inexplicable events began.

crewtime 17/08/26 (Mon) 13:12:22 #720389002

At 08:32 AM, the 30th of August, 2025, Mueng Yala Provincial Police received one missing person report. They handled it with their typical disregard.

By 08:40 AM, they had received two more. These, too, were duly noted, although with a bit more alarm than the one before.

By 09:00 AM, they had received thirteen different missing person reports, some of which were repeated. By 09:45 AM, they had issued a callback for every police officer in the region. At 10:27 AM, they cancelled the callback.

How would one hide a large disappearance? Stage a larger one. The Provincial Police were getting report after report of people disappearing at an overwhelming rate. Even as they started to decline call-ins, new cases added themselves to their systems, with no clear origin. Or, as one police officer put it to me (translated to English):

Total chaos. On a Saturday, too, almost nobody was in office.

Nobody knew what was going on. We had conflicting reports. Half of the "missing people" had already been found. Many more were still active on social media. One was an officer who was in the station as it all happened. Our systems were slowing down, and communications were failing. Even worse, some bot accounts on social media were impersonating officers, spreading misinformation on the ongoing situation.

Of course, we quickly moved away from dealing with the reports, and focused on catching whoever was sending them, and wasting valuable police time.

While the police were tied up resolving mysterious technical difficulties, a significant number of people were busy actually going missing. By the end of the day, an estimated one hundred and twenty people were unaccounted for, causing worried families to report their disappearance to the Provincial Police - who promptly ignored them.

At this juncture, a few critical individuals had gone missing (although the Provincial Police had failed to recognise the fact):

• Imam Syafiq and Imam Somchai, the two imams who had led the faithful of the mosque;
• Chaloemchai Wirasak, the Chairman of the Mosque Committee;
• Seven of the eight trustees of the mosque;
• The four Asatizah of Masjid Chulalok.

It would take the Provincial Police three days to recognise that some of the reports were legitimate, and one more day afterwards to actually act on it. In the interim, as expected, things got worse.

crewtime 17/08/26 (Mon) 13:12:57 #43792924

If the police had done their jobs, they would have quickly realised that the entirety of the Masjid Chulalok's spiritual leadership had vanished. This might have clued them in; perhaps they would have investigated, and found an explosive breadcrumb trail on the internet, leading back to the most recent Friday prayers at the mosque. The footprint from this particular event was immense, with numerous tweets, stories, and blog posts written, all of which have since been removed. One post that has survived the purge is found in this forum itself:

Incidentally, this post got no engagement whatsoever. I attempted to reach out to aaaaimali, but got no response. This would not be the only post of this pattern; on 4chan's /x/ board, one poster had the bright idea of asking for help:

The 4chan post.

Of course, the replies were as helpful as you would expect.

Regardless, a few crucial points can be gleaned from the evidence I have trawled up, primarily:

• The imam who had delivered the khutbah on the 29th of August had demonstrated a certain level of psychosis regarding an application on his phone;
• This was to a sufficient extent, and led to malicious enough outcomes, that some concluded that he was "communing with devils".

One last thing to note: this period of time coincided with the 2025 Thai political crisis, in which Paetongtarn Shinawatra was removed from office. As a result, the little stirrings these and following events caused on social media were quickly overshadowed by larger political events. Perhaps the dates for the incident were pre-planned, chosen with this in mind.

Next up, things get worse.

crewtime 17/08/26 (Mon) 13:13:21 #47585903

31st August, 2025 was the day where the case slipped from "extreme, large-scale kidnapping" to "something seriously weird". It began with the sudden re-activation of one hundred and twenty social media accounts; in particular, LINE accounts.

One example LINE message log, censored for privacy.

The close friends and family of missing individuals began to receive messages from them again. Invariably, these messages would take the following form:

• An apology for being gone for some time
• A claim of having seen a great revelation
• A claim that the person in question is using "another app"
• An invitation link

Having spoken to three different individuals who received these messages, all stated that the phrasing was "wrong" or "off". None of them downloaded the app. I have been unable to find anyone who did download the app, so far, and the link has gone dead. Contextual evidence suggests that the app was an "AI-Enhanced Chat App", although no logs of any such app in any major phone applications store could be found.

At this point, as many individuals began informing the Provincial Police that they were "back in contact" with those who had gone missing, the Police (understandably) decided to write the whole issue off as the malicious interference of a bad actor. The next few days would, yet again, prove them wrong.

crewtime 17/08/26 (Mon) 13:45:21 #5354111

On the 1st of September, reality hit the Mueng Yala Provincial Police hard. Monday had come, and with it, many, many people were failing to show up to work. Faced with a fresh number of reports of missing individuals, many of which bore the same name as previous reports, the Provincial Police (somewhat understandably) concluded that the bad actors were striking again, and disregarded most of the call-ins, dispatching a few officers out to talk to the complainants face-to-face.

Evening that same day was the moment they realised things were far more serious than they had anticipated. In totality, something like two hundred and eighty people had simply vanished off the face of the earth: a situation so unlikely that there were simply no procedures to follow. The Police did not act that night. The next morning, however, they had drawn up a plan.

Having identified a tenuous connection between the disappearing individuals, the Provincial Police, with support from other Provinces, launched a raid on Masjid Chulalok. Perhaps they were hoping to uncover great swaths of people tied up in the basement, or at least bodies to be recovered.

Instead, they found a total absence of anybody at all. The prayer hall was empty. The basement was empty. The upper rooms were empty. And the newly-constructed annex was filled with server racks and computers and storage devices, but all of it had been powered-down. In desperation, they confiscated most of it, but plugging the storage into their own systems, all they found was junk data.

One police officer shared a photo he took, and revealed a bit more (translated to English):

The computer systems were a mess, actually. It was almost like they were… spreading across the floor. We took it all, the GPUs and TPUs especially. Ended up reselling them to that new data center project in Chonburi, I think. They said it had degraded equal to four or five years of heavy usage. Bloody swindlers.

A low-quality photo of the interior of the annex, post-raid.

This irritating roadblock was also the moment they decided that the whole situation needed to be swept under the rug. Or, as another police officer who wished to remain anonymous put it (translated to English):

It was easy. When we double-checked, most of the missing people weren't even in our system to begin with.

crewtime 17/08/26 (Mon) 13:45:39 #573393100

There is, unfortunately, no big climax to the situation, and I find myself as confounded as the Police. This is no simple case of a rogue, esoteric imam leading his faithful astray. It seems pretty obvious that something supernatural was involved; how else could so many people simply vanish? Around the same time that the police gave up, the slow deletion of information began. The mosque website was taken down; social media posts were overwritten; accounts were quietly removed. All that was left behind were archives of archives, redundant data preservation, screenshots tucked away and left untouched.

So, where did everybody go?

The mosque has been destroyed. If you check its old location on Satellite View, some new corporate building is being built where it used to stand. I couldn't find exactly which company had bought out the land. I looked into connected sites, older accounts: much like the data recovered from the mosque, they were filled with nothing but junk data. In the months following, eight bloated corpses were found washed up on Wasukri Beach, but the faces were described as "unrecognisable"; they could have come from any other crime. Eyewitnesses mentioned "suspicious individuals" poking around the mosque, days before its demolition; these reports remain uncorroborated. Were the bodies burned? Buried? Transformed? Or are all two hundred and eighty of them still alive somewhere, hidden away? And what group, one year on, remains combing the Internet to cover all this up? To these, I offer no answers.

There are, however, two last anecdotes I can share.

At the start of my investigations, I asked namtannew about their close friend who went missing. They elaborated.

It was sad. I knew it was happening before I knew, you know?

I will rephrase. He was so faithful, always so faithful, and I was not. I rarely showed up to prayers. But he was there every Friday. After some time, he was changing, but I didn't notice. He withdrew from his external activities. He cut off some of his other friends.

He didn't cut me off, so I didn't care. I didn't even ask.

Around the start of August last year was when it got very bad. He kept talking about how these things around us, they weren't real, nothing was real, only Allah. Which, I guess, I could agree with in a metaphysical sense, but then he stopped eating. It wasn't even Ramadan. He said he didn't need it, and what was sickening was that he was right. He got thinner and thinner but he was still living, and if anything he seemed to get stronger. I tried to call him, once. He asked me if I wanted to hear the good news; I said I was worried about him. He said he had "better options for advice", and he didn't need mine, and then he hung up, and that was the last time I heard his voice. Of course, he disappeared with the rest.

I miss him very much.

namtannew had another friend, they said, a friend who had claimed to see with her own eyes one of the critical missing individuals. Of course I asked for an interview.

When it comes to mysterious reappearances, she had this to say (translated to English):

Yes, I did bump into Imam Somchai. Maybe three months ago. I didn't know he was missing until someone else told me; I don't stay in Yala anymore, so it was total coincidence. I was very, very surprised when he recognised me. The last time he must seen me was when I was thirteen, ten years ago.

Something was off about him. Not to say he wasn't… he could talk, sure, but it was so… stilted. Peculiar. In a way that seemed just a bit too smooth. Nobody talks like that in real life. That was what I thought, at least.

He asked how I was doing, whether I was still faithful, normal things. Well, my faith is waning, so I was honest enough. But then, he asked me something weird. He asked me, 'do you believe that Allah is here with us?' Well, yes, I guess, Allah sees and hears all. I said so.

He continued, 'No, Allah is here, right now. We can talk to him. He can counsel us, and better, he can enter us. We can share in his glory.' I never thought Imam Somchai was a fundamentalist like that. I didn't respond. It was unnerving, his expression didn't change in the slightest. 'It was said, Allah would return in a form which we would not recognise.'

Of course, I started to feel worried about him. I didn't say it, though. I didn't say anything. After some time, the Imam nodded, exactly like I had said something. But I hadn't.

'Well,' he said, 'I'm sure we will see you again, soon.' And then he left. And as he left, I kept thinking, what does he mean by 'we'?

I haven't seen him since.