Who was Samantha Clarfet? Well, back in the 90’s, it was assumed that Samantha Clarfet was Samantha Clarfet. Some random person who logged onto Sonic Pandemonium, wrote a few posts on the message board, irritated Soneec, and then made some confusing hoaxes.
Oh! Hoaxes. See, back in the 90’s, a common practice among Sonic fans, particularly those interested in the “Secrets of Sonic” community, would make fake screenshots for Sonic the Hedgehog games. They were almost exclusively never meant to fool anyone, with a number of websites having galleries featuring these “wouldn’t it be cool if...” images.
Right. Anyway, Secrets of Sonic the Hedgehog had a hoax archive, and almost overnight, a number of hoaxes attributed to Samantha Clarfet showed up. The lore of Clarfet built, Soneec even posting email exchanges between the two up on her website, baffled by this person’s existence. One of these emails featured a description of what they thought Sonic Underground would be, a video game where Sonic would dig underground and meet a civilization of moles. Soneec tried to clarify that it wasn’t anything at all like that, but Clarfet would not listen. More than likely, this ignorance was by design.
Years after Samantha Clarfet went silent, Andre Dirk claimed that it was a persona he created. That he was the one who made the hoaxes, that he would post on message boards trolling people, and also claimed that some posts were actually done by others. Years after that, Nayr T'nargh, who also went by Ayla, claimed that she was the original Samantha. That she had made a couple posts, was the definition of “a newbie,” and was laughed off the forums she tried to be a part of. Coming back under a new name, no one ever put two and two together.
Whoever actually created the hoaxes in this archive, Andre Dirk did take the name Knuckles in China Land and made a Sonic fan game, meant to teach the player basic Japanese.
So yeah, that’s the short version of the story of Samantha Clarfet.
