‘The Crack Monster’: A 30-Year Quest to Uncover the Most Disturbing Animated Sequence on ‘Sesame Street’

Jon Armond was at a radio station in rural Iowa when an unexpected fax arrived. It had no signature but contained a message that made his heart skip a beat.

We have it.

For more than three decades, Armond had been on the hunt for a disturbing animated clip from PBS’s ‘Sesame Street,’ one he had first seen back in 1975 when he was around 5. He remembered sitting on the shag carpet in his Los Angeles home, watching a 25-inch console TV as a girl with a sweet voice was gently pulled from her bed by friendly animals emerging from cracks in her wall, accompanied by a jazzy tune. She was having fun—until a dark, sinister shape appeared: A plaster monster with a twisted grin that seemed to get worse until his own bitterness caused him to fall apart.

Like most Sesame Street animations, it only lasted a few minutes. But it left a lasting impression on Armond, with the ‘crack monster’ seeping into his young mind and haunting his dreams.

As Armond grew older, the crack monster faded into obscurity. No one he spoke to seemed to recall the cartoon, not even those working at Sesame Workshop, who insisted there was no record of such a segment. Though Armond eventually found others who remembered the creature, it began to feel like an example of the Mandela Effect, a shared but false memory.

“For years I thought it was just a dream,” Armond tells Mytour. “I’d ask people, and no one had ever heard of it.”

But then came an anonymous fax, sent to the radio station where Armond hosted a morning show, seemingly offering a path to answers. The note promised closure—if Armond agreed to never upload the segment online.

With little to lose, Armond signed the agreement and sent the fax back.

For six months, nothing happened. Then one morning, Armond stepped onto his front porch and spotted a manila envelope jutting out from his mailbox. There was no return address, no postage, and it was Sunday—no mail was ever delivered on Sundays.

Inside the envelope was a DVD, marked with a single word: Cracks.

Armond rushed inside and popped the disc into his DVD player. On the screen, Bert and Ernie were chatting. Then, he heard a voice that felt strangely familiar begin to sing.

While layin’ in her bed … the cracks overhead …

Drawn to It

Since its debut in 1969, Sesame Street has taken a multimedia approach to educational programming. Created by producer Joan Ganz Cooney and educator Lloyd Morrisett, the show blended Jim Henson’s Muppets, catchy songs, and familiar adults like Mr. Hooper to support an evidence-driven curriculum. Every detail, from Big Bird’s vibrant yellow feathers to Elmo’s toddler-like speech patterns, was (and continues to be) designed to captivate children.

From the very beginning, the show incorporated animation. Filmation, one of the first contributors, created animated DC characters like Batman and Superman for the series. Independent animation studios were also enlisted, tasked with crafting content that aligned with the show’s pre-established themes and messages. Some animations were abstract or subtly surreal, and others, like “Cracks,” left a lasting impact.

“It was a combination of things,” Armond recalls about his discomfort with the segment. “Most people will point to the ending, where the crack monster appears on the wall. He’s definitely the antagonist. But it’s really the entire sequence leading up to that. It was deeply unsettling. The dissonant music, almost like freeform jazz that doesn’t seem to sync with anything. The woman’s voice is strangely eerie. And the way the girl is pulled into another world.”

The latter, Armond explains, had a particular impact on him, partly due to another show. “My dad was a huge Twilight Zone fan. We’d have marathons. So I watched a lot of The Twilight Zone—or at least watched my dad watching it. I remember one episode where a girl was trapped in another dimension. She was crying out for her parents, but they couldn’t hear her. She was stuck in the walls. That was really traumatic for me,” he recalls.

“Then, when I was watching Sesame Street, it was the last place I expected to feel scared. It reminded me of that feeling—being in a room, minding your own business, and suddenly being swept away.”

While some animated shorts aired regularly, this one appeared only sporadically. As later internet researchers would uncover, “Cracks” aired about a dozen times between its debut on December 31, 1975, and May 2, 1980. Each appearance allowed Armond to relax, temporarily forget, and then be jolted once more. “They’d go months without showing it. Then I’d hear the first few notes … I’d freeze,” he recalls. “I didn’t look away. I endured it. I’d be scared, have nightmares, then forget again.”

The fact that “Cracks” stopped airing in 1980 caused Armond to begin viewing it as a fading, unreliable memory—one that seemed just beyond his grasp. He bought Sesame Street compilation tapes, hoping the segment would be included. He brought it up in conversations with others, most of whom had no recollection of it. It seemed as though there was little hope left to uncover “Cracks.”

Then, in the 2000s, Armond started visiting online forums dedicated to Sesame Street, television, and animation, hoping someone would recall it. They did. “With the rise of the internet, I shared my experience, and people started saying, ‘Yes, that traumatized me too,’” he says. “So, OK, I didn’t just dream it.”

People resonated with Armond’s experience. The “crack monster” had disturbed their minds too, sending them scurrying under their beds. However, despite the growing collection of obscure content on YouTube, the actual clip remained elusive. Armond reached out to Sesame Workshop—formerly known as Children’s Television Workshop—hoping to track it down. But each attempt led to a dead end.

When posting about the short, Armond—an Emmy-nominated voiceover artist—often signed off with his full name. “If you Googled my name, the first result was always ‘morning host at the radio station,’” he says. “The fax number was listed on the station’s website.”

In other words, he wasn’t exactly hard to find. After years of searching for the elusive segment, Armond received the fax in 2008. He didn’t keep it and can’t recall its exact wording, but remembers interpreting it as a request to stop his inquiry. “Essentially, the fax said, ‘We have it.’ It didn’t say ‘cease and desist,’ but it implied, ‘We want you to drop it, and we’ll send it to you if you agree to never share it.’”

Armond agreed. In 2009, a DVD appeared in his mailbox, accompanied by another cryptic note: We trust this completes your search. Without postage, it seemed likely someone had physically delivered it to his house.

After nearly 30 years, Armond finally watched the clip. The girl was gently awakened by animals emerging from the cracks in her wall. A camel appeared. “Today’s a rainy day,” she said. “I can’t go out and play. Would you take me for a ride, camel?”

They’re soon joined by a monkey and a hen, but that’s not the full group. “At night behind the door, I think I’ve heard one more,” the monkey says. The group then comes across a large face in the wall that sneers before crumbling into pieces.

“Camel, thank you for the ride,” the girl says. “The rain has stopped outside. We’ll go back and see the cracks again someday.”

Just a little over 1 minute and 40 seconds long, the hypnotic clip was nearly identical to what he remembered. “The year before I got my copy, the people I spoke to who remembered it, we pieced it together. All the characters. It was like a storyboard. We managed to recall it all pretty much perfectly.”

There were a few small details his mind had misremembered. The snarling crack creature at the end was called “crack master,” not “crack monster.” The bird was referred to as a hen, not a chicken.

But Armond faced a bigger issue. He couldn’t share the video online.

The Crack Master

Armond wasn’t sure if the waiver he had signed was legally enforceable, but he wasn’t keen on testing it. He stuck to his promise and didn’t release “Cracks” online, despite requests from others who recalled it and wanted to experience it once more.

His first clever workaround was recording an audio-only version of the short for YouTube, where he reenacted it word-for-word without any visuals. “It’s a verbatim recreation of me doing the clip,” he says. “It was a way to give people something, to show that I really did have it.”

Then, Armond discovered another loophole. The agreement prohibited him from distributing the short, but it never mentioned showing it to someone. While in Los Angeles for his grandmother’s funeral, Armond reached out to Jennifer Bourne, a cartoonist and fellow “Cracks” enthusiast who lived nearby. Bourne had frequently written about “Cracks” on her blog, but she doubted she’d ever see it again after it left a lasting impact on her when she was six.

“I wanted to believe him, but since I only knew him online, I was a little cautious,” Bourne tells Mytour. “Not long after, he called me and played the cartoon over the phone.” Since she was using a landline, she could only hear the audio, but it was enough for her to conclude, “By then, I was 95 percent sure he was playing the real clip, not just something he made up.”

The two arranged to meet at a coffee shop. Armond brought along a portable DVD player, hit play, and got to witness Bourne watching 'Cracks.' (Bourne, on the other hand, remembers watching it on her laptop.)

“I recognized it right away,” Bourne recalls. “It was so strange to finally see it again after years of searching for it... The only shock was that ‘Crack Master’ turned out to be pretty terrifying. Before I saw it again, I thought my childhood mind had made it seem worse than it really was.”

For Armond, it was also a way to prove to people online that he had the real thing. “People still wanted me to post it, but I refused,” he says. “But it was nice to have someone confirm it for me.”

Armond stuck to his word. Yet, in 2013, ‘Cracks’ ended up online, four years after Armond had been secretly given his copy. This time, an anonymous person reached out to Daniel Wilson, the webmaster of the Lost Media Wiki, a site dedicated to obscure, lost, or hard-to-find media. Wilson received an email attachment from an unknown address. The attachment contained ‘Cracks,’ with no instructions on how it could be shared. Naturally, Wilson made it available for everyone to see.

What was supposed to be the end of the story turned out to be more puzzling. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, Jon sent it to him,’” Armond says. “But our versions are different. My copy was from the airing of the show. It included the last two seconds of a Bert and Ernie segment before transitioning into ‘Cracks,’ and then it cut to something else, like a zoo. Mine was taken from an actual episode. The one he received had production notes. It clearly didn’t come from the same source, which just makes the whole situation even stranger.”

Although ‘Cracks’ was no longer just a fleeting memory, the question remained: who had shared it with Armond and Wilson, and why had it been hidden in such secrecy? In 2019, the Studio 360 podcast, along with producer Sam Kim, took a deeper dive into the mystery. They uncovered that Sesame Workshop had failed to locate ‘Cracks’ for Armond because he didn’t know its true title until the DVD was delivered. A search for ‘Crack Monster’ had turned up nothing, but searching for ‘Cracks’ brought it to light in their digital archives. Anyone at Sesame Workshop or their Long Island City archive could have found it, burned it to a DVD, or attached it to an email and sent it to Armond—though his copy appeared to be from a full episode.

It’s unlikely that the person or people responsible for this will ever come forward. However, the Studio 360 podcast brought up another question: who created the Crack Master?

A Sketchy Background

There are no production credits on either version of ‘Cracks.’ Furthermore, Sesame Street didn’t usually credit animators during the closing credits in 1975. By 2019, Sesame Workshop could only tell Studio 360 that a company called ‘P Imagination’ was behind it, with Mel Martin providing the music and Dorothy Moskowitz offering the narration. The podcast tracked down Moskowitz, who remembered recording the session in San Francisco, but couldn’t recall who created the segment.

The name and location matched Imagination, Inc., an animation company based in the Bay Area, led by Jeff Hale, his wife Margaret Hale, and partners John Magnuson and Walt Kraemer. Among their works were several shorts for Sesame Street, including the famous ‘Pinball Number Count’ series. Mel Martin played the saxophone for the segment.

Hale passed away in 2015, making it difficult to confirm his authorship of ‘Cracks.’ When contacted by Mytour, his daughter, Margot Hale, stated that ‘Cracks’ was likely the work of Imagination, Inc., but she wasn’t certain her father was involved. ‘It really doesn’t look like my father’s work, especially the timing,’ she said, referring to the movements of the characters’ mouths and bodies. ‘My father directed many episodes and had junior artists handle the animation, so it’s possible this was one of those cases. Although the art direction doesn’t resemble his work either.’

Another Bay Area animator, Sally Cruikshank, believes Hale may have overseen someone else’s animation for the short. ‘It has a New York vibe to it, with animation that feels a bit hesitant, like they gave someone a first shot at a job,’ she told Mytour. ‘I don’t think it was animated by Jeff Hale because his style was more polished. But he could have passed it along to a woman just starting out—that’s my guess. He tried to get me work on Sesame Street around 1972, but it didn’t work out.’ (Cruikshank would eventually contribute to the show in 1989.)

When Mytour reached out, Fred Calvert and R.O. Blechman—both seasoned animators who worked on Sesame Street in the 1970s—said they didn’t recognize ‘Cracks’ and had no idea who could have created it. Unless there’s a thorough investigation into Jeff Hale’s archives, its origin may remain a mystery. However, circumstantial evidence points to Imagination, Inc. as the primary candidate.

If the animator behind ‘Cracks’ is ever found, the children of that generation who were terrified by it would surely want to know: Why was this segment so disturbing?

Child’s Play

Many adults have vivid memories of something they saw on television or in the movies as children that deeply unsettled them. Some moments, like the death of Bambi’s mother, are easy to understand. Others, such as a random episode of Rugrats or a clown from The Brave Little Toaster, are much harder to explain. What makes some children’s content entertaining for one person and terrifying for another?

In the case of ‘Cracks,’ the fear might have come from a simple case of misdirection. ‘I can see how this cartoon could have scared many young children and toddlers,’ says Mona Delahooke, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and author of Brain-Body Parenting, in an interview with Mytour. ‘It starts with this delightful, safe scene where the cracks on the wall transform into a camel, taking kids on an adventure and introducing them to new friends. It sets up the brain to expect safety, which is something we naturally associate with pleasure.’

Then, the tone shifts dramatically. ‘The crack master emerges as a monster, and the narrator’s tone changes. This breaks the viewer’s expectation that the story will remain safe, turning the crack in the wall into something threatening. Essentially, it takes the safety the viewer anticipates and unexpectedly flips it into danger. The brain does not appreciate that! It can be terrifying for young children who may not have the cognitive tools to interpret it symbolically and understand it’s just fiction.’

‘That’s why it makes sense that this short traumatized so many toddlers. They lacked the developmental skills to reassure themselves, ‘It’s just a cartoon, monsters aren’t real,’ or otherwise make sense of it. For them, it wasn’t just a cartoon; it was real drama that they couldn’t process in the same way an adult might.’

That sensory experience likely stuck with Armond and others because it was so raw and impactful. ‘Young children’s brains remember sensory experiences—things they see or hear—that they associate with fear or danger,’ Delahooke explains. ‘Those images can stick with them for a long time.’

For Bourne, the impact of ‘Cracks’ was clear. ‘When it fell apart, it felt like the child-friendly version of the melting faces from Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ she explains. ‘I was old enough to realize that cracks didn’t come to life, but the thought of a cracked wall turning into a monster was still creepy.’

These kinds of experiences are often shaped by generational influences and cultural context. When Armond discovered ‘Cracks,’ his children were aged between 8 and 12. He showed it to them, unsure of their reaction. ‘I showed it to them, and they said, “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal? There’s nothing scary about it.”’ Armond recalls. ‘Kids today, raised in the era of YouTube and streaming, wouldn’t have the same reaction. It only impacted kids who hadn’t seen much. No child today would find it scary—they’ve seen worse. But for a kid in the 1970s, who wasn’t exposed to much, it was a different story.’

‘Cracks’ clearly followed an unusual path. Instead of being aired continuously, it disappeared in 1980. With his questions about its existence answered, Armond then wondered why it had been seemingly discarded. A clear answer is unlikely. A Sesame Workshop spokesperson pointed Mytour to the Studio 360 podcast and said there was little else they could share.

‘It just vanished, and no one could locate it,’ Armond recalls. ‘I honestly don’t know why. But it was definitely intentional.’

A potential explanation might be hidden right in the title itself.

Fixing the Crack

Two significant events occurred in the first week of May 1980. Sesame Street aired ‘Cracks’ for the final time, and Rolling Stone published a shocking report about the rising crack cocaine epidemic.

The term ‘crack’ swiftly became synonymous with the cheap, smokable form of cocaine that wreaked havoc on urban communities, especially in New York. It dominated the headlines throughout the 1980s and became a major political issue. Suddenly, a cartoon featuring a ‘crack master’ in a home with deteriorating walls gained an entirely new, unintended interpretation.

Sesame Workshop was highly sensitive to criticism. Parents could—and frequently did—send letters to voice their concerns over content they deemed inappropriate. In 1976, when Margaret Hamilton reprised her role as the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz (1939) on the show, some adults found it too disturbing for children. (In a situation similar to 'Cracks,' an anonymous source uploaded the segment in 2022, prompting a strong rebuke from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, where the entire series is kept. The AAPB referred to the footage as 'improperly downloaded.')

While it’s possible that letters of concern about 'Cracks' are tucked away in the Children’s Television Workshop archives at the University of Maryland, it's unlikely that producers required any encouragement. In the aftermath of the crack epidemic, 'Cracks' and its terminology could easily have been viewed as insensitive. Ben Lehmann, who served as the executive producer of Sesame Street through 2022, mentioned in a 2019 interview with the Studio 360 podcast that the short 'felt dated' and that 'producers at the time probably thought it was inappropriate.'

However, 'Cracks' was pulled from the air in 1980, several years before the crack epidemic regularly made headlines. (In 1986, The New York Times described it as a 'so new a phenomenon that police have no accurate statistics' on its usage.) Would Sesame Street have really removed it over a single Rolling Stone article?

Another explanation: 'Cracks' conveyed a somewhat muddled message. While the 'crack master' is scolded for his meanness, the sequence happens so rapidly that viewers are left feeling a bit confused.

'The theory that makes the most sense to me is that Sesame Street didn’t think the message it was trying to convey was getting through,' says Armond. 'Even if you ask people what it was about, what the lesson was, you get different answers. It wasn’t necessarily teaching the lessons they wanted it to teach. I don’t think the message was clear enough to keep it over the other shorts.'

The true reasons behind 'Cracks' disappearing or the identity of the creator who crafted its surreal and unsettling world may remain a mystery. However, Armond suggests that focusing on those details might be missing the larger point: 'I believe the person who made it had good intentions. It was made for a children's show, aimed at kids who might be living in tough conditions. The message was simple: be kind to others. Don’t be as mean as the crack master.'

The continued mystery surrounding 'Cracks' seems almost fitting. After all, it's a brief Sesame Street segment, barely two minutes long, that was unexpectedly dropped at Armond’s door by a stranger. The reasons behind its existence aren’t as intriguing to Armond as the end result itself. After more than three decades of wondering if he'd ever experience the haunting tune and the plaster creature again, he finally did—and it was as if he were five years old once more.