Have you ever heard of the show Miss Mosaic from Nickelodeon in 2002? The chances that you have are slim because the show was canceled after airing just six 20-minute episodes. If you have no idea what I’m talking about let me explain: Miss Mosaic is an "Educational Children’s Show". Please keep in mind that this isn’t one of those cliché lost episode crap stories that has the static and blood and gore and blah, blah, blah.
Miss Mosaic isn’t even close to those cheesy horror stories you find scattered across the internet, and I'm certainly not begging for you to believe me and all of that crap. If you want, look it up. Miss Mosaic is a woman (obviously) who is made out of small colored square stones.
It wasn’t animated mind you; it was stop motion. Miss Mosaic would elegantly move and dance and her voice was quite literally an angel chorus. She wore sky blue belly dancer-like clothes and had golden jewels decorating her graceful body. Her caramel skin seemed to shine more than all of the other small stones, her eyes were a deep dark sea blue, and her voice sequence followed each word that poured out of her lips perfectly. Even if you hate educational shows you’d been in awe of how the show was done with the utmost care! It seemed to be cherished by the employees who worked on it.
Nonetheless, the show seemed extremely entertaining for the ages between 3-12. In fact, parents reported that their children were ADDICTED to the show. Parents would claim that their child would gain great knowledge and immediately that made the show skyrocket to the top of the list! So, why? Why would they cancel the show? It was perfectly produced. The artwork of Miss Mosaic was stunning, and the music was absolutely great. Miss Mosaic would teach children fun math problems, and had them sing with her while dancing and jumping!
Like I said before, there isn’t any violent graphic scenes or static that appears in this show. In fact, none of the stones even had the color red on them.
Around episode four, the popularity for Miss Mosaic was booming and still growing. All the reviews were five stars, always holding similar descriptions; "Wow, My daughter loves this!", or "My kids don’t even watch cartoons anymore and they read books all the time!", and so forth. After Episode Four, parents were starting to show… concern.
Families were calling Nickelodeon complaining that their child only spoke about topics such as science. Now you might ask: How is that a bad thing? Well, the parents of the children continued saying that their child would gaze at their food and not even take a small bite of it, and began murmuring numbers and words. The child's voice would grow louder and louder until the parents could hear it clearly. The child would be rambling about gravity and human anatomy, and even saying things about how many heartbeats we might have left til we-disturbingly enough-die. The child would tell his or her parents how many breaths we take when we sleep, and the list goes on. The child would speak gibberish that even the most intellectual parents didn’t understand.
The child would continue this for about a minute, before shutting their mouth completely. Just like that. Not what you expected right? You probably thought the child was going to start screaming at the top of their lungs and their eyes would be crying blood or something like that. No, they just stopped and went back to normal. Yes, the child went back to his or her average self! When their parents asked about what their outburst was, they would only reply with a soft smile, nod and would only say these few words:
“Miss Mosaic taught me!”
Whenever the parents would ask again, the child would ignore the topic entirely.
A majority at Nickelodeon already thought about canceling the show, but of course you have the assholes that work for Nickelodeon. Unfortunately, these good-for-nothing jerks will rant about and bash on the creator until they drive him or her to insanity, and it seemed that the other employees went along with it. I’ll admit Nickelodeon did pull a douchey move, and they also pulled another one!
They complained on their website that the calls never occurred. Yes, they completely put the incidents in the back of their minds. There were only around twenty unusual calls about the children's outbursts, so of course dull-minded fans believed Nickelodeon’s lies.
There weren’t any calls like that ever again, and the show continued like nothing had ever happened. Even the employees seemed to believe that the incident never happened, due to the lack of conversation about it. Miss Mosaic would be aired on national television every Wednesday, and barely cost any money because Miss Mosaic’s set was medium-budget, due to the fact that there was only one camera pointing towards Miss Mosaic and the mosaic sky behind her, and that was it.
Of course there would have to be hundreds and hundreds of frames to put together and such, but nonetheless the animators enjoyed it. The voice actor for Miss Mosaic was happy with her job and everything seemed to be perfect. Episode Five was like any other episode, where Miss Mosaic taught the young viewers how to twirl and sing the ABCs. Mind you that, of course, adults could sit in the room and watch the show with their child.
Adults claimed that Miss Mosaic said these words: “Let’s play, hide-n’-seek!”, she would gleefully yell. The children would then hide somewhere in the room, usually in a nook or cranny. A big smile plastered on their faces as they peered out from their hiding spots to see Miss Mosaic looking around the screen, searching for the hider. She would be completely oblivious to the adult or teenager present in the room. In fact, it seemed that she tried her very best not to even look at the people from ages 13 and above. Then, after a few minutes she would open her mouth to say: “Gotcha.” She would say it in a victorious tone as she pointed towards the hiding spot of the child. The child would proceed to come out of their hiding spot, and the show would go on like normal.
If you didn't analyze what I just said, let's overview it quickly: How did Miss Mosaic know where the child was hiding? Miss Mosaic began gathering horror gurus everywhere after that, and the rumors and stories were spreading like a plague. These occurrences in the show were just too… strange and out of this world. Those are the only words that can describe this show.
There were also countless stories about Miss Mosaic would come out of the TV and brutally murder the children. No one believed the hide-and-seek scene, except for the people who actually saw the episode, which was surprisingly very little. Miss Mosaic played very early mind you, and the adults were probably getting ready for another day of work. I even noticed that Miss Mosaic played on days where children didn't have to go school, or when families were busy working.
Miss Mosaic was quickly becoming famous in the horror community.
Again. Everything went back to normal
The episodes only aired once, for some reason. I never knew why they only played one episode every Wednesday. Then, episode six finally came out after a long wait, and the curious minds that wanted to "investigate" didn't miss the opportunity to see an episode of Miss Mosaic, because they fully knew that they only had one chance of viewing the episode.
Midway through the episode, Miss Mosaic halted her tracks, and so did the children. She just stood there and stared at the camera.
She wasn’t completely motionless, just like in real life when someone is staring at someone else, their face twitches, their eyes drift around, and their eyebrows move slightly. That’s what Miss Mosaic was doing, and at this point the elder people in the room became concerned by the fact that their child was just standing there, eyes fixed on the screen. There have been cases where the child was originally sitting down watching the show, but when Miss Mosaic mysteriously stopped, the child's expression would drop and they'd stand up. Miss Mosaic's eyes darted around as if she were trying to stare at the thousands of viewers all at the same time. She would purse her lips and clamp her jaw shut. Slowly, her neutral expression would turn into a frown, and her mouth would slowly open, revealing rotten, sickly yellow teeth which she did not have before. She would then try to crack her neck. Not in an inhuman way, she did the same motions we do when we wake up in the morning, moving our heads and shoulders around in an attempt to crack our cramped necks. After she did, there was a loud, sickening crack.
She gritted her teeth, scraping them against each other as she began stretching her body in the most crooked way possible, yet she kept that elegance and her movements were those of a snake. She trembled and slowly the small mosaic stones' paint chipped off and become dull, revealing thin cracked stones beneath those once colorful patterns. By now she had a look of pure anger formed on her now pale face. Her cheeks were sunken and her eyes were slightly swollen and bloodshot.
The children were still locked in place, the soundtrack for the show was barely audible, and there was pain in her eyes. Finally, with a snap of her neck she smiled. Or, at least tried to. Her broken, parched lips made smiling look painful. She tilted her head and said in her normal soft voice:
“Miss Mosaic’s daily lesson! How to heal sick people!”, she joyfully announced. The children who were once frozen would suddenly start laughing and jumping.
Miss Mosaic would instruct the child to poke her on the forehead. She still kept her decayed appearance along the way, you could imagine that the older person who was present was absolutely terrified to the brim. However, witnesses claim that an unknown force made their muscles clench and a knot formed in their stomachs and squeezed. If they tried to stand up or run towards the child to get them the hell out of there, they couldn’t. If they tried, their bodies would feel strained.
Finally, when the children poked Miss Mosaic's head, in a split second she reverted back to her normal appearance, the children didn't get sucked in or anything like that. Miss Mosaic was indeed healed.
After that, the people from age 13 to above would be fully back in control, and this time, Nickelodeon couldn't even TRY to ignore the incident or cover it up. Like before, phone calls flooded the Nickelodeon studios. They officially knew Miss Mosaic was screwed. However, they admitted that no one made Miss Mosaic do those things. The "Healing Scene" was at 11 minutes and 36 seconds in length. When Nickelodeon staff went to that period of time in the episode to check, nothing odd showed up. Even though they proved that scene never happened, they still had no choice but to shut down Miss Mosaic due to the lack of viewership and demanding parents.
And just like that, the show went off air. Sure, people still talked about it. But it seemed that Miss Mosaic went in the back of our minds and, of course, horror stories covered Miss Mosaic so completely that everyone thought it was a hoax. Nickelodeon had countless arrays of new shows to air anyway, so they had no problem with losing one show.
One of my friends, who was victim to Miss Mosaic, had to watch her daughter stand and poke the forehead of what seemed to be a monster. But she told me that her child never spoke of Miss Mosaic again, but she told me one thing I can never forget. At first I thought she was joking, but the look of sincerity on her face told me otherwise; she said that one night, when she was going back home from another day of work, she fell down a small, bumpy, sharp hill and got injured in the process. Once she was home, her husband immediately put her in bed, and she was bedridden. When she fell asleep, she told me she woke up in the middle of night. She told me that in the dimly lit room illuminated by the moonlight, she could see the figure of her daughter holding up one finger, her other hand hanging loosely, and she could even vaguely make out the shape of a bottle of pills in her hand.