An Entire Online Community of Clubbers Just Got Catfished en Masse

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In late 2005 I joined what was known as the Godskitchen Forum, named after the popular club and club night. I wasn't a big clubber. I preferred house more than anything else, and wearing cyber gear and dancing to trance music was not really high on my list of priorities. But I joined because I had opened a small hookah café in the vicinity of the club and hoped that my poor attempt at spamming the board would result in a windfall of hookah profits and make me a millionaire. I'm still driving a Volvo, so you can figure out how well that plan worked out.

It was a forum, so obviously there were some trolls who gave me a hard time immediately, but I stood my ground, buried in like a tick, and became an actual, non-hookah-mentioning member of the community—I'm still friends with many of them, or at least familiar with their names.

There used to be a very attractive girl on the forum called "Katelin McMillian." Aside from looks, she also had a great job as an interior designer and apparently was pretty well off, too. A full package, some would say, and as a result she was a popular member of the community.

Over the years, she came across as someone who loved the soulful side of house as much good jazz. She was also a big support of Manchester City and Motherwell. Many men on the forum would salivate over her every post, giving her a lot of attention—even female members would comment politely on her looks. She was a frequent poster, speaking at length about her music, her business, and, on one occasion, a major job she had going at RBS. She had sisters, too: Aaltje (pronounced Al-cha), Marieke, and another, whose name I can't remember (she wasn't on the forum, so she might as well have not existed). All were good-looking. She said her mother was Dutch and her late father was Scottish, so clearly that combination works.

The forum came and went, and as we got older our posts turned from music and drugs to footwear and documentaries. The community grew quite guarded—newbie members were quickly slapped down by veteran members, just like I was back in my spamming days—until it all got too much and the forum administrators all banned us and shut the whole thing down. We all—including Katelin, and her Dutch-Scottish hybrid sisters—migrated over to a new forum started by another member, until that sort of dissolved and we all moved over to Facebook.

Katelin has been my friend on there since 2008, along with other former members. During that time, she has posted various holiday photographs but kept personal pictures to a minimum. She eventually moved to New York. There, she set up a night called Sundays Are Lazy and would DJ regularly; then she went ahead and turned her club mixes into a radio show. She got plenty of DJs on the hook: Non-forummer but Southport Weekender DJ Sean McCabe contributed a guest mix; until recently she was asking DJ Andy Ward of Soul Central fame about uploading mixes. This was all backed up by a trail of Mixcloud and SoundCloud links, and endorsed by her boyfriend, Harry, and a female friend of hers named Erin.

Then suddenly, in 2011, while in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, she had a massive car accident. Her sister, Aaltje, made herself available on Facebook to provide updates on her progress—she'd recover, but there was going to be a lot of physical therapy and even more pain. More people prayed for Katelin than for fucking Malala Yousafzai, and the majority of these bastards are godless heathens. We all loved Kate. When we thought she couldn't get any sweeter, her sister logged on to tell us the taxi driver she collided with was working day and night to put his daughter through university, but couldn't work post-crash—so—Katelin just straight-up paid her fees. Praise be to the DJ.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

When you write it down and compact it like this, it's probably obvious that Katlein was a catfish. All the hallmarks are there: the fantastical, jetset lifestyle; the sprawling web of neatly named friends and family; the catastrophic, outpouring-of-pity events; the unfeasibly hot woman spending her precious hot-woman time on a forum with a bunch of us. But spread out over ten years, you don't notice it in the same way. Plenty of people have lived their lives through this community—why not Katelin?

Well, because she didn't exist. On Monday morning, we all woke up to a (since deleted) post explaining that Katelin was a phantom, operating behind someone else's face. She wasn't real, or if she was, she wasn't who she said. Katelin McMillian, my friend for ten years, didn't exist.

When I first heard the news, I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach. This was a person in the community we'd accepted as one of our own—with whom people had shared their concerns, with whom some had discussed the loss of loved ones when she mentioned her mother was sick. People have given her a part of themselves, a part of their youth, a part of their lives. I look back now and try to put the pieces together, but it's a real struggle—the truth is, we were all too busy making sure our inner circle wasn't accessible to anyone and then we got fucked by one of our own. It has certainly left people feeling vulnerable and wanting answers, but the bottom line is, I guess, that we'll miss her.

Comment followed comment—everyone had some kind of link to her. Whether it was sending mixes, asking for suggestions on club nights in NYC, sending well-wishes to her post-accident—everyone had a connection. This wasn't just Facebook, or the Godskitchen forum: She was on Twitter too, as were her friends, and sprawling across every music-sharing site you could imagine. And then boom: nothing. All taken down.

It all unraveled when a guy from our group decided to google images of female DJs, for reasons that remain unclear. He came across a DJ called Miss Nine who looked an awful lot like Kate. Slowly, the dots joined together into one gigantic "WTF?" moment, and the spell was broken.

He messaged "Kate," and she started talking about how she was sorry and that she only did it because she was being stalked—that everything and everyone and every car accident was real, apart from the looks. At this point, a gobsmacked Facebook blew up—I was getting notifications left, right, and center. I couldn't even concentrate at work—I needed to take the day off. We'd been catfished to fuck. Men, women, all of us.

I don't know what to think anymore. Over the course of the last couple of days, Kate's made a few communications (through others) to explain her actions, but the waters are just getting muddier. Nothing makes sense: I have to eat two Lion Bars just to feel human again. People are in a state of shock—someone they thought they knew, for ten years, is a figment of someone else's imagination. People shared things with her, passed messages of support on to her, flirted shamelessly with her. Now we don't know who she is, where she is, or whether she's even a she. All of those connections: cut.

The reaction is primarily one of confusion rising to banter, but through it is a thread of concern: Many people are now saying it could be a mental health issue, because, whatever way you spin it, doing this and keeping it up for a decade—across multiple accounts, through multiple cities—veers quite far away from being normal. It's a full-time job. That said: There's also talk about calling MTV's Catfish, and someone is making serious steps towards printing a batch of "Je Suis Katelin" T-shirts. A Kickstarter to hire a private detective to figure out who Katelin is looks increasingly likely, but I'm not sure how much they'll be able to dig up now that her entire social media presence has been deleted.

Before this happened, I had only three questions in life:

1. Does God exist?

2. What happens after we die?

3. Why the fuck did Cheryl Cole get a rose tattooed on her ass?

And now I am having to add a fourth one: Who the fuck was Katelin McMillian?

Follow Tan on Twitter.