The Gravity Falls Cipher Hunt 2016: the real-world ARG, clue by clue

The Cipher Hunt was an international alternate reality game and scavenger hunt created and organised by Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch between July 20 and August 2, 2016. It is the most substantial piece of the franchise that exists outside the screen, and it is fully documented. Here is how it actually ran.

Where it came from

The trigger was the series finale. "Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back the Falls," which aired on Disney XD on February 15, 2016, ends with a few seconds of real-world footage of a stone statue in a forest. Fans read the shot as confirmation, and the finale also carried an encoded riddle about treasure "deep within the woods" and a statue "beyond the rusty gates."

Hirsch explains the origin in One Crazy Summer, the behind-the-scenes documentary included with the complete-series box set. He wanted to give fans one final mystery they would not be expecting, consistent with the show's theme. He recruited art director Ian Worrel to help plan the locations, and movie prop master Fon Davis, a friend, to build the statue out of plexiglass so it would survive weather. They mixed glue with seeds inside it so moss would grow on the surface and it would look aged. Hirsch then found a Reedsport, Oregon resident willing to let him install it on her property, filmed it for the finale, and began leaving clues at every place he visited afterwards.

The independence statement

This is the part most retellings leave out. After the hunt was announced, Hirsch stated publicly on Twitter that it was being done out of his own volition and funding and without any affiliation to The Walt Disney Company, which owns Gravity Falls. He also asked fans to be careful and not to trespass or vandalise the public areas the clues were in. Any account that describes the Cipher Hunt as a Disney marketing campaign has this backwards.

The clue chain

Each clue was decoded with a different classical method, which is why the hunt is still the best available teaching material for the techniques in our ciphers and codes guide.

1. Saint Petersburg, Russia (July 20, 2016). The hunt opened here. A run of red letters in the announcement image decoded to the country name only after a minus-3 Caesar shift combined with Atbash. Fans then identified an architectural plan of the Kazan Cathedral in the image, and used a second diagram showing the interior location to find the first clue.
2. Tokyo, Japan. The decoded text named a shrine, mentioned yen, and referenced a sword and crescent. The clue was written on the back of an ema at the Kanda Shrine in Chiyoda, a place Hirsch had visited with Dana Terrace in February 2016.
3. Atlanta, Georgia. The text pointed to 400 Ponce de Leon Avenue NE, which led to a Shriners temple. Community streamers found a water-damaged missing-poster for Waddles, Mabel's pet pig, bearing a cryptogram and a phone number. Calling the number played a message recorded in Grunkle Stan's voice, played backwards, with The X-Files theme music underneath.
4. Griffith Park, Los Angeles (July 21, 12:30pm PST). Hirsch tweeted the same phone number, and the new message pointed to the statue of Griffith J. Griffith in Los Feliz. A golden head of Grunkle Stan turned up with an invisible-ink message and a pen to read it.
5. Century City, Los Angeles. A black pouch held a USB stick with a Bill Cipher drawing, containing an audio file of Grunkle Stan taunted by the ghost of a university president, with music and sound effects from the 1990 Super Mario World game. Jason Ritter and Ariel Hirsch joined the hunt in person.
6. Santa Clarita, California. A clue at the California State Summer School for the Arts, inside Hirsch's alma mater CalArts, accidentally discovered a week early as wall graffiti: a crude Bill Cipher beside hexadecimal values that converted to decimal coordinates.
7. Piedmont, California. Those coordinates led to Piedmont, the hometown of both the Pines twins and the Hirsch twins. A pink key on a tree stump in Piedmont Park, plus a chest with a cryptex opened by the five-letter keyword PINES, which was visible on a banner in the original announcement image.
8. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles. A key opened a USPS PO box containing a plastic bag with 2,000 jigsaw pieces, a note decoding to "I HOPE YOU LIKE PUZZLES!", and 37 fake "Stan Bucks" with FILBRICK written on the back in invisible ink.
9. Portland, Oregon. Found by accident: a fan picked up a lawn gnome on Rodney Avenue and Tillamook Street and found a View-Master and a clue underneath.
10. Confusion Hill, Piercy, California. The View-Master showed the area around Confusion Hill, including Snoqualmie Falls, which appears in Twin Peaks, one of Hirsch's stated inspirations. A jar of fake eyeballs in the gift shop needed the password FILBRICK, and the tenth clue was written on its base.
11. Amity, Oregon. A geocache bolt unscrewed on Stanley Street, holding the eleventh clue on a narrow strip of paper.
12. Turner, Oregon. At the Enchanted Forest amusement park, near a sign reading "Here lies the bones of a man named Bill." A family dug at its base and found nothing, because another fan had already taken the clue and posted it online. The riddle said to "return to where it all began" and that "the answers written in the trees."
13. Reedsport, Oregon (August 2, 2016, 7:53pm PDT). The final message decoded to "REEDSPORTOR." The technique was a Polybius square applied to the branches and knots in the background of the announcement image, with the search narrowed by assuming the answer ended in OR, the abbreviation for Oregon. The statue was found at the end of S 22nd Street, south of Reedsport Community Charter School, by Twitter user @shadow_wolfwind, who later renamed herself @OfficialGFMayor.

The treasure chest and the real twist

A chest buried in front of the statue held plastic coins and gems, Russian and Japanese currency, a signed copy of Journal 3 with an original drawing, a black-light flashlight, a plastic crown, a "Mayor of Gravity Falls" sash, a music box playing the show's theme, a miniature statue, a USB drive, and Stan Bucks. The USB contained a text file leading to a Twitter account, a recording of Grunkle Stan singing "We'll Meet Again," and a file named "MyExWifeStillMissesMe.ButHerAimIsGettinBetter." Opening that in Notepad revealed "RETURNBACKWARDSTOTHEPASTAGAINTHREE", which as the username and password RETURNBACKWARDS / TOTHEPASTAGAINTHREE on a pilot URL unlocked the unaired 2010 pilot episode, a prototype of "Tourist Trapped" with different art and altered scenes.

The genuine surprise was the name Bradley. Stan Bucks in the chest had been signed by a Bradley Pic, and Hirsch did not explain why until a 2022 appearance on the Mystery Shack Lookback podcast. Bradley was a Reedsport resident who had found the statue on July 12, 2016, eight days before the hunt began, purely by accident while out walking, and had posted a photo of it to an unsolved-mysteries subreddit where it gained little attention. Hirsch paid him $100 and a prize, asked him to take the post down and stay silent, and let him take the credit for finding the statue after the hunt ended. Bradley later replaced the USB drive and left a text file linking his account. The two thousand-piece puzzle was completed on August 1, 2016, and Hirsch appeared in person, signed it, and released the pilot.

Aftermath

On August 3, the day after the find, local authorities removed the statue over a property dispute between the woman who had authorised its placement and another person claiming to own the land. Its hat was damaged and then, as Hirsch later learned, turned out to be infested with fire ants and discarded; he had publicly asked for its return, assuming it had been stolen. By August 5 the statue was bolted to a tree in Reedsport's Bicentennial Park. On August 18 it was gone, replaced by a sign reading "BILL WAS HERE" that decoded to the name of the man who moved it. By August 20 fans had traced it to Confusion Hill in Piercy, California.

The statue and the completed puzzle are now permanently housed at Confusion Hill, at approximately 39.919002N 123.764908W, and a new treasure box sits behind the gift shop counter with a log book where visitors record their name, the date they "found Bill," and where they travelled from. Deleted scenes promised during the hunt were released on the complete-series box set.

What is verified and what is not

The timeline, locations, ciphers, and outcomes above are drawn from contemporaneous 2016 reporting and from the Wikipedia Cipher Hunt article, which follows its own sourcing. Two honest caveats: that article carries maintenance flags for relying heavily on primary sources, so treat fine details of the clue order as slightly soft; and the Bradley Pic account is a 2022 recollection rather than a 2016 record, which is why we present it separately. The companion site covers the later, distinct puzzle artefact in the Book of Bill terminal, which is not part of the Cipher Hunt.