I’m not sure if you think this is true or just one of those made-up stories you find on the internet. Whatever the case may be, I can swear on a million Bibles that this actually happened to me. The proof? Well, none, as I didn’t have recording software at the time.
Now, before you dismiss me as a loony, remember that Tarzan craze? Many of you probably don’t remember because you weren’t a member of the LA Noire Forums. Basically, if you were in the underground railway tunnels of LA during free roam, Tarzan would run up behind you and leave behind a sunken head for Cole to pick up. It had a video accompanying the myth, but the whole thing was a hoax; there was no Tarzan in-game.
Tats Top Videos had a segment about the Tarzan Myth in their Top 55 Hoaxes in Games videos. It’s Number 45 in that video. But moving on.
Here’s something much crazier than Tarzan.
This rumor was older than the Tarzan one, but nobody took it seriously.
It floated around the same dead forums as the others, GameFAQs threads with half the images missing, YouTube comments from accounts that hadn’t uploaded since 2011. The claim was that L.A. Noire had a hidden district that didn’t belong to the game at all. A leftover joke. A licensing nightmare that Team Bondi supposedly buried than deleting it.
“Toontown,” they called it.
The logic was flimsy but tempting: Who Framed Roger Rabbit and L.A. Noire both take place in 1947 Los Angeles. Same city. Same era. Same streets. Someone swore a developer had once joked in an interview that “all of 1947 LA already exists, you just don’t see all of it.”
Most people assumed it meant cut neighborhoods.
A few insisted it meant something else.
The instructions were vague, which is how you know that a myth hunter wrote them. Finish the Vice Desk, but don’t start Arson. Drive at night only. No sirens. No music. Head east of the river, past where the map stops feeling finished.
I didn’t expect anything to happen at first.
That was my mistake.
I was cruising along Alameda Street when the city began to change, not abruptly, not with glitches or pop-in. The textures just… simplified. Brick walls lost their grime. Shadows sharpened too cleanly. Streetlights cast perfect circles, like they were painted on.
Then I heard it.
A sound effect that didn’t belong.
A slide whistle.
I stopped the car.
The radio was off. The street was empty. But somewhere nearby, something went boioioing, followed by distant laughter, high-pitched, layered, echoing like it was bouncing off invisible walls. I checked the map. There was a road there that hadn’t been there before.
It was a thin gray line bending away from the city grid in a way 1940s LA never would. Too round. Too playful. I followed it. The buildings changed first. Storefronts warped subtly, their windows too large and their doors slightly crooked. Neon signs flickered with colors the game never used elsewhere. Reds too red. Yellows that hurt to look at.
Then I saw them.
People.
Sort of.
They moved wrong, arms swinging too far, legs bending like rubber. Their faces were flat, expressions locked in permanent cheer. When I drove past, they waved in perfect unison. One tipped his hat, and it stretched as it came off his head. I tried to turn around. The car wouldn’t reverse. Ahead, a sign loomed into view, hand-painted, wobbling gently like it was alive:
WELCOME TO TOONTOWN
NO HUMANS AFTER DARK
The streetlight next to it bent forward, like it was reading me. The laughter came back, louder now. The city behind me was gone.
And I mean Gone.
Just a painted backdrop of Los Angeles, flat and unmoving, like a stage set someone forgot to load properly. I could see cars frozen mid-motion, NPCs locked in idle poses, all of it separated from me by an invisible line I couldn’t cross.
Toontown, on the other hand, was very much alive.
A fire hydrant grew legs and scurried across the road. A piano fell from nowhere and smashed itself into the pavement, popping back into shape a second later. Somewhere nearby, an argument was happening entirely in sound effects, boings, smacks, and whistles, but no voices. I got out of the car and found out that my partner, Roy, had disappeared. Like he was never there to begin with. I continued exploring, believing that Roy would just reappear sometime later. But he didn’t.
Then one of them noticed me.
It wasn’t exaggerated or silly like the others. It stood in the shade of an alley, proportions closer to human but still wrong. Its eyes were too big, too glossy, reflecting light that didn’t exist.
It stared at Cole for a while.
I tried running away, but it caught up with me very quickly. Cole pulled out his gun in haste and started shooting at the deformed abomination without any prompting from me. The laughter was now hysterical, like Cole’s naivety was a very funny joke. Cole must have unloaded a few rounds into the creature until he realized the inevitable fate that befell him. He turned his weapon on himself and pulled the trigger, then, after a loud bang, Cole fell to the ground in a ragdoll motion shortly before the monster could reach Cole’s body. The Case Failed screen popped up, and Toontown abruptly vanished from the game.
Thank God, I said to myself, but the nightmare wasn’t over yet. After I pressed Continue, the game showed me a cutscene of real 1940s footage of what appeared to be Los Angeles back in the day. When I said “real,” I actually mean it. The footage looked like a film reel of sorts, the kind with no sound, of course. And it was in color, too. The cameraman was walking around, just filming. LA looked deserted, and it seemed to be midday where there should usually be some activity afoot. I could see the cameraman’s shadow as he walked across the empty streets, then he stopped and stood still like something caught his attention. I saw nothing but an empty alley at first.
A deformed human, like those in Toontown, came out running at the cameraman, and it looks like he dropped the camera as the film ended right there.
The game then took me back to the main menu, as if nothing ever happened. I shut off the Xbox 360 afterwards. There are some things that just aren’t meant to be found.
Written by QWTF spy
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