In July 2023, a Redditor would post to the Internet Mysteries subreddit to ask if anyone remembered a video from the early days of YouTube.

In 2009, OP was left with their dad’s open laptop and curiosity got the better of them as they began to search the video site.

Soon enough, they found a video called ‘Sunny.avi’ and they clicked on it.

The video had no music and all you could hear was a quiet conversation between two people. The video took place in an empty room, with a dark blue carpet, and lighter walls. There were two people in view of the camera. A young boy, and a man who appeared to be his dad. The boy was sitting on a windowsill and both of them were looking out of the window into the darkness outside.

Suddenly, the camera would change angle and it would now be looking at the ceiling. From the ceiling, the head of a baby doll would be hanging down with spikes sticking through it. The eyes were protruding from the doll and apparently it looked very realistic.

OP says that this gave them nightmares and that it stuck with them for years to come. In 2019, it got so bad that they were having extreme insomnia because of the video. Now, being an adult, they want to find the video that tormented them as a child, but it’s like it has vanished off the face of the earth. 

So, where is sunny.avi?

It goes without saying that finding this video is going to be a difficult task as it dates back to 2009 and it’s not an uncommon title.

Carrying out a search for the term ‘Sunny.avi’ will return over 10 thousand results, but adding YouTube to the search will cut it down to around 3,000.

If we look over the videos that appear, none of them match the thumbnail that OP describes. But then again, after so long, there is a chance that it has changed.

Still though, I looked over all of the videos that it returned.

Yes, all of them.

Now before you think I’m insane for doing this tedious task, not all of the results are YouTube videos and some just have mentions of Sunny.avi and YouTube in the same sentence from different sites.

So, thankfully, I didn’t have to look through 3,000 videos.

Therefore, I can confirm that all of the videos that show up under the search term of Sunny.avi on Google are not the video.

From a brief search, I unsurprisingly can’t find the video, but how are the investigators on Reddit doing?

Well, they’ve opened up a whole new can of worms. 

User ‘NoThing1941’ was looking for the video when they stumbled upon a strange website.

This is the website they found.

On the surface, it seems to just be a site that documents live video feeds from home security cameras, but as we go deeper, we find out that it may actually be a site for the owner to store their files.

There are three pictures on the site that update every minute, and they show a green patch of grass, a similar view from behind a window, and what appears to be a thermostat.

These feeds have been updating since 2010, but we can still dive deeper into the site.

If we add ‘Harvest.html’ to the URL, it takes us to a blank page with a list of email addresses. The emails seem to have nothing in common other than being associated with spam, but it begs the question of why the site owner was storing these emails.

It gets stranger though, as if we add ‘Alizée’ to the URL, we get taken to a page that starts by saying: “Nothing to see here, please move along.”

The page contains 23 photos of French singer Alizée Jacotey for seemingly no reason, but the owner implies that he knows other people may stumble upon his site by the text that he puts at the top and bottom of the page.

Unsurprisingly, we’re not done yet.

We can add A, B, C, and 1 to the URL to take us to other pages, and this is where files have been stored. 1 contains memes and that’s about it. A is photos of pipes, snow outside of a house, and PDFs for mechanics. B contains a ZIP file for Mario Kart 64, and also this creepy image that returns nothing when put through a reverse image search.

Finally, C has only two photos that both seem to be of their personal property so I won’t be including them in this post. 

There’s one more URL to take a look at – videos.

If we add ‘videos.txt’ to the URL, it takes us to a long list of music videos that the site owner had stored on their PC. If we try and find the term ‘sunny.avi’ in here, it returns one result.

That is why this site showed up during the search.

The owner of this site did not have the video that OP was looking for, but rather downloaded the song ‘Sunny’ by Boogie Pimps in the avi format.

So, I’m inclined to say that this site is simply a website that OP is using to host their files, however it is a bit strange as to why they would be constantly uploading home surveillance footage to a website for 13 years. Another question is, what in the world was that creepy image stored in the B URL? 

Despite the creepiness of the site, it seems that this guy is just a regular man, who is likely a mechanic or someone who takes an interest in aeroplanes. I wouldn’t say there is much to this part of the mystery, but maybe I’m wrong. Time will tell, I suppose.

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Back to the topic at hand though, we don’t really have any more leads.

So this is the part where I request the help from anyone reading this who even vaguely remembers something similar.

There is a chance that this video has been deleted from YouTube, but if someone else remembers it, then we’ll be on the right track to getting an answer.

If you do think you can help with this search, please leave a comment and join the Internet Mysteries subreddit.

If we all come together, maybe we can crack this mystery once and for all, and finally find out the origin of Sunny.avi.