As requested on my last write-up, allow me to tell you the story of Clock Man, a mysterious unidentified animation remembered only through broken memories of childhood fear. The search for it was long and complicated with many dead ends, sowing a lot of doubt about its existence. And in the end, it was not only real, but right under everyone's noses the whole time.

Initial Report

On January 12th 2012, on bungie.net's off-topic forum titled The Flood, a user named Commander Santa recounted a dreadful childhood memory of an animation he had watched. The post begins with the following introduction:

I am looking for a particular animated short that terrified me as a child. I've been looking on and off for it for nearly 4 years. Maybe it doesn't exsist. Maybe...nobody should ever find it. But if someone can - it's The Flood.

He goes on to describe his memory of the short:

This short animation was terrifying as a child. The scene is still burned into my mind (28 years later). It's of a young boy sleeping in his bed. Above his bed is a ticking clock. All the lights in the room are off and it is very dark. Suddenly the clock begins to slow down it's ticking and eventually it stops...on midnight. When the clock stops a Greenish/Bluish man climbs out of the clock. The boy wakes up just in time to see this man dressed in black grab him out of bed and kidnap him by carrying him through a window. The "Clock Man" takes the boy on some kind of terrifying adventure and brings him back to his bed before sunrise.

And if the post so far comes across to you as a tad dramatic, it only intensifies in his closing statement:

It's been a very long time since I've seen that short animation and it has haunted me for almost 30 years. I can't begin to tell you how happy I'd be to see it one more time before I pass away.

He was so determined to find this piece of media, in fact, that he promised a reward for anyone who could find it for him.

If by chance...someone was able to locate this terrifying child's animation and post it in this thread - there is a very good possibility that you will be handsomely rewarded in a PM from me.

This post intrigued quite a bit of people, wondering what the short could have contained that affected him so deeply, and what they could do to help. In particular, the comment about seeing the short before he passed away raised some alarm bells, with one user asking if that implied he was currently dying. But Commander Santa assured them:

No, but I'm strangely nostolgic tonight. I'd think about Clock Man sometimes at random. In junior high, high school, college...even sometimes now as a father. I just want to see Clock Man one more time. You never know when you are going to check out.

When asked if he thinks the animation is genuinely scary or if it just felt that way since he was a kid, he replied:

I'm not exactly sure. I remember feeling great terror whilst watching it. [...] I rember being scared for the boy and just wishing that Clock Man would take him home.

Santa would continue responding to questions, and periodically reminded people of his promise of a reward for finding the short to keep up morale. The overall story he recalled was that of a little boy being swept up by a man who jumped out of a clock, and taken to a series of scary places as the boy begged to go home. When Clock Man finally did take him home, he hopped back into the clock, and the boy's father came to check on him in the morning. The boy wanted to tell his father what happened, but he didn't or couldn't.

He mentioned other details such as the Clock Man having "a pointy(ish) hat" and "a rather bushy beard," as well as dark clothing and a cape. He also described the animation as "felt-like" stop motion, and - most crucially - he said that he saw it on Pinwheel, a show similar to Sesame Street that aired on Nickelodeon from 1977-1990. He further narrowed down the timeframe to somewhere between 1984 and 1987 during the morning hours, as he was sure he had watched it while home sick from kindergarten.

Despite the additional details, no one in the thread could find what he was looking for. Even after visualizing what he remembered, the scene wasn't ringing any bells with people. A few comments accused Commander Santa of being a troll, or compared his writing and descriptions to that of a creepypasta.

>I don't think it exists.

I'm sorry OP, I have to agree with this.

This seems like a scary story or a Slender Man in the making. Are you sure that show? I'm sure that if the show was real their should have at least SOMETHING, ANYTHING. If it was ever aired on TV it would've been noted.

It likely didn't help that Santa's descriptions of the feelings Clock Man filled him with sounded almost like a psychological horror, referring to the short as a dark secret he had been harboring and thinking about for decades, as well as a mention that the short had given him a phobia of being kidnapped.

I know I am not insane. This cartoon made me afraid of kidnappers until I was 16 years old. I want to see Clock Man and face him as an adult. We are so close...I know he's out there - he doesn't want to face me now that I've grown. He preys on children.

What likely helped even less was this rather Candle-Cove-esque description of Pinwheel:

Strangely, many people old enough to watch the show Pinwheel have commented that the show would put them in a dreamlike state when watching - some go as far to say they were "hypnotized" while watching and had hallucenations. Whether this is only a result of the memories being so old or something more sinister I cannot say. Although many have shared my fuzzy memory of Clock Man, others suggest that Clock Man is a result of being hypnotized by Pinwheel's allure.

But overall, Commander Santa was a well-established member of The Flood with a good reputation, so the comments distrusting him at this point were in the minority. Still, many speculated that Clock Man might have been a bad dream he'd had and was mistaking for reality, especially considering he watched it while sick. Or that he might be conflating multiple shows together in his memory.

Santa remained steadfast in his conviction that the short was real, even if he was misremembering details, as well as Pinwheel as the short's origin. A Pinwheel-based short that was ruled out early on was an episode of the Swedish cartoon Alfie Atkins, and non-Pinwheel cartoons that were ruled out included The Sandman, The Clock Store, Nutcracker Fantasy and the Davey and Goliath episode The Stopped Clock.

Investigation: The Flood

When The Flood struggled to find the short Commander Santa was looking for, many users recommended he try 4chan, due to their reputation for correctly identifying a wide variety of things with little information. After taking all of the information he had laid out to the /x/ board, he received one noteworthy reply:

Holy shit! I remember this fucking short!

It was like claymation with poorly made dolls and the animation was real stuttery and shit. It started with the kid's mom telling him goodnight and closing the door behind her after shutting off the light. Then the door slowly creeks open while a generic eerie wind sound blows and the camera cuts into the kids room at the foot of his bed. He struggles to open his eyes as they slowly droop and he eventually gives in and goes to sleep. Then it cuts up to the clock while the second hand slowly ticks to 12:00. When it hits it there's like a low bell ringing sound and the camera goes back to the foot of the kid's bed. The "Clock Man's" head peeks into the room like the clock were a window. Unlike what the OP's image shows, the Clock Man's head then recedes back and his arms comes out and pushes the clock open like a door, revealing a big dark hole behind the clock. Then Clock Man hops out of the hole and the kid wakes up and stares beady eyed at the Clock Man. Then the Clock Man starts doing like a weird Irish river-dance. Oh, and the Clock Man looks a little different from the picture. He was wearing like an all black turtleneck sweater and a black bowler hat. His skin was green and I don't really remember him having a beard but he did have a big toothy smile and two real big eyes with very tiny pupils.

I don't think I actually watched much after that. But I distinctly remember the Clock Man saying his name was "Benjamin" and he rung an elevator up to the kid's window.

Commander Santa was certain this user was thinking of the same short he was. Although he didn't remember the Clock Man being named Benjamin, and he was sure Clock Man had a beard, he claimed that everything else matched.

However, the biggest break in the case came on January 18th. A user by the name o0MrCheesy0o found a comment from March 6th 2004, in the Horror forum on a website called AnimationNation. Users were discussing cases of psychological horror in cartoons, and one particular comment on the thread, written by one Michael W. Howe, stood out.

There were a few segments on Nickelodeon's Pinwheel when I was younger that had some scary moments: [...]

[T]here was one based on this story of a little girl who lost her red shoes. so she asked a local wizard for hel (who could appear and disappear anywhere). He helped her, but told her she had to tell her mom. The little girl goes home and doesn't hoping the wizard would forget. But then the musicgets eerie as the narrator says 'But the Wizard...did not, forget.' And we see him appearing and disappearing along the house floors, till he suddenly pops out of her clock and steals her away, demanding to know why she didn't tell her mom. She makes up for it by sewing stars to put in the night sky, and the next day is returned home, and tells her mom the truth.

This description gave Santa a much stronger reaction than the 4chan post:

HOLY -blam!- -blam!-!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS IS CLOCK MAN!!!!!!!!!! [...]

It wasn't a little boy (I probably imagined a boy as I was a young boy at the time) - but I can almost remember the story leading up to the bedroom scene now.

I'm tearing up - SERIOUSLY!...I'm shaking.

We are going to find Clock Man - TONIGHT

This discovery brought a wave of optimism across the thread. Many comments celebrated how it had brought members of The Flood together to help one man search for closure. Many were confident the short would soon be found. Those who were actively investigating the mystery moved away from clock-based keywords and instead searched for anything related to wizards and red shoes. The first, most obvious rule-out was The Wizard of Oz.

After that, users found that Hans Christian Andersen had written a story called The Red Shoes. The fairytale is centered around a vain and spoiled girl who wears a fancy pair of red shoes everywhere, even to church, until she is confronted by a bearded guard who curses the shoes to cause the girl to dance uncontrollably until it takes over her life, leading to the amputation of her legs and then her death. Some posited the idea that the Clock Man short might have been an adaptation of this tale. In particular, a company called Mel-O-Toons had made an animated adaptation of the story in 1960 - one with a less bleak ending, where instead of dying due to the dancing red shoes, the girl was rescued from them and came clean to her adopted mother, after which all was well.

Commander Santa had initially been confident that this was the short he had been looking for. It had almost everything. A little girl main character with red shoes, telling her mother a lie related to the shoes, finding herself in a scary situation that taught her a lesson, and ending with the girl telling her mother the truth. It was an animated short, and while it wasn't stop motion, the animation was cheap and choppy enough to believably be mistaken for stop motion in a hazy childhood memory.

But...I said it had almost everything. And the one thing it didn't have was pretty important.

It didn't have Clock Man.

Even though Christen Anderson's original tale features a bearded soldier as the catalyst for the conflict, no such character exists in the animation. The Red Shoes was soon after ruled out.

The next blow to morale came after Commander Santa purchased a large collection of bootleg Pinwheel episodes that had been compiled and put up for sale, and didn't find Clock Man on any of the episodes in the collection. Since Pinwheel is a rare show and largely lost media itself, having aired so long ago with no official home media release, this unofficial collection would have been the best chance Commander Santa had, and still he turned up empty-handed. He had also contacted former Nickelodeon staff asking for information, and was told that the shorts featured in Pinwheel were collected from a wide variety of international sources, with little to no documentation and no archive of the shorts to speak of. It was starting to set in that the short would be a tiny needle in a massive haystack.

It didn't help that the Clock Man thread on The Flood had grown immensely as the search dragged on, with a large amount of new users flooding (hah) into the conversation as the topic went more and more viral. This mass of newer users, who had little to no prior knowledge of Commander Santa and his reputation, expressed increasing amounts of skepticism toward him, and comments accusing him of being a troll and writing creepypasta became more common. Many pointed to the many dead ends the search had endured, as well as the melodramatic writing style Santa had a habit of using. From the perspective of these users, his somewhat flowery writing style and the way he seemed to portray the short as if it had deeply impacted his life, as well as the offhand comment describing Pinwheel as if it was some mind-altering experiment that put children in a hallucinogenic hypnosis state, had all the markings of a troll that was trying way too hard to scare others and create a spooky internet hoax.

There were a few curt accusations throughout the thread, but one particularly presumptive comment from Epicly Uber seemed to catch Santa's attention:

I think OP is trolling, I was cool at first but now I think the nutcracker fantasy opening is as close as we're ever going to get, I think the nutcracker fantasy is it and OP figured out the popularity of this thread and is now abusing it, basically making everybody search for something that has already been found. OP I'm calling you out for taking everybody for fools, I want proof that you actually ordered DVD's.

And Santa responded:

Unfortunately, many people have been calling me a troll. I cannot offer any 'proof' I am not. [...] If people don't want to help anymore, I can't blame them. This has been insanely frustrating. [...]

Before, I wanted to find Clock Man to put my childhood demon to rest

Now, if I don't find Clock Man I will forever be remembered as a troll. I've been on B.net since 2004 "Legendary Santa" no longer exsists. I don't want people to think of me as some piece of trash that would do all of this for attention. But if I don't find Clock Man - not only will he still haunt me... but he'll have made me feel like a fool.

All of this attention seemed to become too much for Commander Santa. As January turned over into February, his responses and contributions to the thread slowed, before he stopped commenting completely. After a few days of worry and speculation as to what happened to him, user Epic Is Uber claimed to have messaged him on Xbox Live, and that Commander Santa explained he had decided to leave the thread until he found Clock Man.

A now deleted Flood thread appears to confirm this. In addition to updating and tying up loose leads, Commander Santa makes his proclamation:

I have exiled myself from you all as I have not been able to find the elusive Clockman as of yet. Many, MANY people have helped in the search.As of yet, I have nothing to bring you. [...]

A few Floodians have sent me messages on XBox Live - asking me if I was still alive. I have been stripped of my Mythic Status, disgraced among my fellow Floodians, and too ashamed to return.

In my mind, i'll return someday - on a figurative white horse, carrying Clock man's head on a stick, but in reality, the search is at a standstill. It's taken a few drinks to get up the courage to come back and speak my peace, but I respect this site too much to return without proof of my childhood nemisis. I'm logging off now, hopefully not for the final time from b.net - but if it turns out to be...

THank you to everyone who has ever been on this site. For better or for worse, it has had an impact on my life.

This post brought a wave of devastation to the thread. Some were upset that Commander Santa was made to feel like he couldn't show his face around the search team, and pleaded with him to come back. Others were angry at his absence - activity in the thread had a tendency to slow down when he wasn't online and responding to comments, so his decision to stay off the thread was predicted to kill discussion and, consequently, the search. Those who doubted Commander Santa's authenticity were claiming victory, asserting that he had been a fraud all along and that Clock Man didn't exist, and he left because he realized he couldn't keep up the lie anymore. The dying thread, with its dwindling activity and lack of new leads, turned to infighting between users and memes about how Commander Santa finally fell victim to Clock Man.

Despite frequent thread bumps and a continuous string of comments throughout the years, nothing of note was suggested, and no new information was dug up. The search had grown stagnant, and without Commander Santa's help, interest in finding the short, and faith in its existence, seemed to fade away.

Investigation: Lost Media Wiki Forums

In 2016, a new wave of interest in finding Clock Man swept the internet when the helm was taken up by the lost media community. The Lost Media Wiki founder, known as Dycaite, created a new thread on the Lost Media Wiki forums (this thread had been accidentally deleted in 2020 and today exists only as archived cache files). He expressed a personal interest in finding the short, as the search and descriptions of it reminded him of Cracks (aka "Crack Master"), a similar child-scaring short from Sesame Street that had been a popular lost media case years prior. He created a page dedicated to Clock Man on the wiki to compile known information from Commander Santa's posts, and then a thread on the forums to boost the search and document his personal search efforts. He had managed to contact multiple people who had either watched the short or worked on Pinwheel, and shared his findings in the thread.

His first contact was Michael W. Howe, and he asked if he could provide a thorough recount of his memories of the short. He also sent along Commander Santa's comic rendition of the Clock Man abduction scene and asked if it rang any bells. Howe responded, stating that the comic was similar to what happened in the cartoon, and gave a more detailed rundown of what he remembered. He described the short starting out with a little girl being given red shoes by her mother, and warned not to lose them. But after playing outside, she ends up losing them, and when she can't find them, she asks a local wizard for help. The wizard gives her a new pair, but instructs her to tell her mother. The girl decides not to tell, hoping the wizard would forget about the deal. That night, as the girl is in bed with a pendulum clock above her, the wizard is seen entering her house and phasing in and out as he ascends the stairs, while an eerie-sounding narrator states, "But the wizard did not forget." Back in the bedroom, the girl watches in horror as the pendulum clock stops and turns into a window, which the wizard flies out of and carries her back to his house. As penance for not coming clean to her mother, the girl is instructed to knit stars for the night sky, after which she is returned home. In the morning, she admits to her mother what happened, and her mother forgives her as the wizard watches them, smiling.

He went on to describe the animation as "stop-motion paper animation, like they laid the characters on the backgrounds and moved them around."

This summary had intrigued Dycaite, and it inspired him to try and get in contact with former crew members who had worked on Pinwheel. His first successful contact was Michael Karp, a former writer. Karp expressed vague familiarity with the short, and speculated it aired during season 1 of Pinwheel while he was brought on during season 2. He also gave Dycaite the email of his colleague, Tippi Fortune, thinking she might have more information to share.

This correspondence thoroughly convinced Dycaite that Clock Man was a real thing that existed and not just a creepypasta, as had been a fairly popular opinion by that time. And when he managed to get in touch with Tippi Fortune, she gave him more information to work with. While she admitted to having no memory of the short, she mentioned that all animated shorts for Pinwheel were acquired from Coe Films, a company that collected shorts from the UK, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to sell to cable companies as interstitial programming. However since then, most major networks had started producing their own material, and the market for such shorts died. As such, Coe Films went defunct and she couldn't find the contact information for anyone who worked there. But she forwarded Dycaite's email to everyone she knew who might have something to share. But despite Fortune's help and enthusiasm, none of her contacts got back to Dycaite.

Dycaite then managed to reach out to Commander Santa with everything he had found, including Howe's detailed summary. Commander Santa confirmed that Howe's account matches his own memories, so finding Howe's wizard short would hopefully also mean finding Clock Man.

Dycaite hit a dead end around this point, so he opened the floor to the wider community to help with the search. In addition to the thread and wiki page, a friend of Dycaite's, Bedhead Bernie, made an infographic summarizing known information and spread it around online. The two also posted their own summations to YouTube of the search so far - Dycaite posted a video recounting his investigations, and Bedhead Bernie posted a similar video summary as well as an interview he did with Commander Santa.

These efforts attracted the wider lost media community, who was enticed by descriptions of the short. Some users decided to chase the Coe Films lead, contacting anyone who was associated with the company and searching for an archive of the shorts they acquired. Though this would be a daunting task, as Coe Films was thought to have upwards of 2,500 shorts. Others tried to look for as many episodes of Pinwheel as they could to see if Clock Man was featured in any of them, and others still compiled as many alleged accounts of people who had watched the short as they could. Many discussions attempting to narrow down leads focused on speculations around Clock Man's country of origin, and if it was an adaptation of a preexisting story or European fairytale - everything from a Danish adaptation of The Red Shoes to a German adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin to an Irish short in which the wizard was actually a leprechaun were all pitched as possible leads.

While the brute-force nature of the search wasn't ideal, the sentiment that Clock Man was real was pretty unanimous within the thread, and so the search efforts kept up throughout 2016 and into 2017. While users on The Flood had been more or less beholden to Commander Santa's word as well as his activity within the thread, the lost media community was more decentralized and independent, determined to solve the mystery with or without further help from Commander Santa or Dycaite. This plus the community being entirely centered around looking for mysterious media, and having intuition around obscure internet searches and contacting relevant people, likely gave users the confidence that they would eventually find Clock Man once and for all.

The Discovery

The date is December 11, 2017. It has been a year and a half since Dycaite started the thread on the Lost Media Wiki Forums, and nearly 6 years since Commander Santa's post on The Flood.

While most of the thread spent months attempting to find Clock Man by searching for rare Pinwheel episodes or brainstorming the precise story the short was based on, some were more focused in searching through online databases and library catalogues using a series of keywords. One user by the name of Nitratenerd took this approach, and at one point searched for the term "the wizard" on WorldCat. After sifting through 3-4 pages of results, he found a YouTube link, and the accompanying description caught his attention. When he clicked on the link and watched the video, he was struck with excitement, and confidence that he had found the Clock Man short. He was quick to share his find in the forums:

Guys. GUYS

I think I found it. Holy crap.

Can everyone else take a look at this: m.youtube.com/watch?v=74FNByoRYFk

It has everything that was described. The clock and all. Although its in Russian, the worldcat listing says: The story of a little girl who is taught the importance of telling the truth by the local wizard. For primary grades.

RIGHT?!?!

This is clearly the original, the english dub might be available at the Brooklyn Public Library, near me. Can someone send this to Commander Santa and Micheal Howe?!?! Dycaite are you seeing this?!!’

My heart is beating at a thousand beats a minute. Please check it out.

While the short was not in English, it matched up with Commander Santa's and especially Michael W. Howe's recollections almost perfectly. There was the stop motion paper animation. The girl. The missing clothing. The wizard with a black beard, dark clothing and a pointy hat. The creation of stars for the night sky.

And most importantly, there was the wizard jumping out of a clock to sweep the girl away.

The reaction on the forums was pretty unanimous - this was the short Commander Santa had been haunted by since he was a sick child in 1984. Clock Man had been found.

Upon further research, it was found that the short was called O parádivé Sally (roughly translated to "About Dressy Sally") and was created in 1976 by Art and Animation (AAA) Studio in Czechoslovakia. It was an adaptation of a story of the same name by Jan Vladislav.

It was also found that the short was first posted to the Czech video site uloz.to in 2014, and went completely unnoticed by Commander Santa or any searchers on The Flood. 3 years later on September 22nd 2017, it was posted to YouTube and went unnoticed by the lost media community for a few months, until someone happened to find the right keywords on the right archive to find it. This turn of events would later lead to Clock Man being commonly used as the de facto example of long lost media searches ending with the media being discovered on YouTube.

While most were confident the search was more or less finished, there was still more closure to be had. Many were awaiting Commander Santa's reaction to the short and, most crucially, the discovery of an English dub. The Russian version Nitratenerd found would more than likely not be the version Commander Santa and Michael W. Howe would have seen on Pinwheel. Only when an English version was found would the search be considered officially over.

The former would come about 10 days later, when Dycaite gave the update everyone had been anticipating - Commander Santa confirmed that O parádivé Sally was the Clock Man short he had been searching for. In addition, he seemed to make good on his promise of a reward for the find.

Well guys, something truly incredible has just happened.

Santa got back to me about the short and HAS CONFIRMED that O Paradive Sally IS INDEED CLOCK MAN!

But here is where things get truly incredible... Santa has pledged to donate *$1,000* to the LMW!!! [...]

Santa, if you happen to come across this post, thank you. Thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart. I have never been graced with such generosity and it is truly an incredible feeling.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL

This was incredible news, and motivated people to find the English dub of the short - the true version Commander Santa had seen. The first lead came from AAA Studio themselves, who stated that the short was sold to The Learning Corporation of America in 1978 - this almost certainly would have been the company who dubbed the short into English. However, AAA Studio was not aware of much beyond that. Because O parádivé Sally was made in a Soviet-occupied, communist Czechoslovakia, the original creators had no knowledge of what became of the short once it was exported overseas.

Upon further digging, some listings were found on old archives that indicated an English dub did exist under the title Sally. But from here, the investigation ran in circles for a few weeks - there was a lot of confusion over who exactly owned the short, or Pinwheel for that matter, and which libraries were likely to own copies. The investigation also appeared to split between the forum thread and a Google doc, which attempted to make information easier to search through, but also spread the already dwindling search team thinner.

But then, on January 11th 2018 - exactly one month after the short was first found - Dycaite announced that the English version had been found. He provided a link to an upload both on uloz.to and Vimeo (both of which no longer work, but has since been uploaded to YouTube by AAA Studio). He credited a user named Tomysshadow and an entity called A/V Geeks for the find.

Users on the thread were ecstatic over the find, having finally gotten to see what scared Commander Santa so badly as a child. In particular, one user marveled over the line "But the wizard did not forget," recollected exactly by Michael W. Howe.

Amid this excitement, Tomysshadow explained how he had found the footage, courtesy of A/V Geeks.

Not having any luck with the library listings on Worldcat, I knew it was unlikely that the film was going to be found via a library listing. The problem is, I didn't really know where else you'd go about finding a 16mm film reel anywhere. I decided I wanted to ask an expert. Perhaps someone who had collected many films before would know where to find these kinds of things.

I had been searching Google for the terms "Learning Corporation of America" and "Kratky Film" together in the hopes of finding more resources. I noticed that LCA had licensed more films from Kratky than just Sally. They also had a series of animated films featuring a character only known as Mole. Mole and the Bulldozer, Mole and the Painter, Mole and the Rocket, etc. I was able to find the LCA versions of these films online, uploaded to the Internet Archive by an uploader known as A/V Geeks.

I found out that A/V Geeks has a website. There is also an organization they work with called AFANA, which preserves educational films. I figured these would be perfect candidates to ask where these films are. I didn't tell anyone about this because I didn't think it'd be anything eventful. I was thinking long-term: I was only emailing them because I wanted to learn where such films may be found and how they managed to collect so many films over the years. A/V Geeks has over 25 000 films preserved, and they've uploaded many of them to the Internet Archive for public viewing.

So when I explained my case I was surprised to hear back from them saying they had a film called Sally by LCA. Two days later and without any prompting, they just went ahead and recorded and uploaded it and sent it to me in an email. They were a pleasure to work with.

With the short and its English version now found, the story was now clear through the haze of foggy childhood memories. The story follows a girl named Sally, who is given a pair of yellow gloves by her mother, and cautioned not to lose them. But she loses one of the gloves while playing outside, and when she can't find it anywhere, she hesitantly asks for help from the wizard (who in the English version is called Mr. Kadabra). The wizard gives her the missing glove, but instructs her to tell her mother what happened. Sally returns home and doesn't tell her mother, breaking her promise with the wizard. And so the wizard visits her at night, jumping out of the clock above her bed and whisking her away to his house. As punishment for disobeying him, he instructs her to crochet stars for the night sky. Once the sky is illuminated with the stars, the wizard takes Sally home, hopping back into her clock after putting her to bed. In the morning, she admits to her mother what had happened, making the wizard proud.

Some in the thread believed the search hadn't been fully completed, as there was still the mystery of which episode of Pinwheel the Sally short had aired on. To this day, it hasn't been found, and some wonder if the short even aired on Pinwheel in the first place. Sure, many users remember having watched it on Pinwheel, but since the companies that owned it were known to sell shorts as interstitials, some floated the idea that the short may have played during commercial breaks in Pinwheel time slots, leading to the false memory of them featuring in an episode of the show. But until more Pinwheel episodes are found, this is only speculation. And for most people, finding Clock Man itself was enough to end the search.

Case Closed

The story of Clock Man would go on to be known as one of the most famous in lost media history. The fact that it took years to find gave plenty of time for it to build intrigue. Its early descriptions resembling those of a lost episode creepypasta made the short all the more compelling once evidence of its existence began to build up. This search also became the de facto example of lost media being found on YouTube, hidden in plain sight.

Clock Man also sits alongside other popular lost media cases such as Cracks and Episode 847 of Sesame Street - media that people remember having frightened them as kids, and the discovery of which helped not only to preserve media, but to bring people closure and put their unsettling childhood memories to rest.