Hunter Schaffner and Holden Goyette Mirror Incident — Censored bathroom photo with mirror and pixelated red content suggesting the Hunter Schaffner mirror

Hunter Schaffner and Holden Goyette Mirror Incident

2022hoaxdeclining

Published October 16, 2026

Hunter Schaffner and Holden Goyette Mirror Incident is a fake gore hoax that spread on TikTok in December 2022, centered on four censored stills claiming a student had been cut to pieces by a shattered school bathroom mirror. The images were fabricated and no video of the supposed event ever existed, though searches for it climbed through early 2023. By January 2023, Reddit's r/RBI was fielding threads from users trying to find out what the trending incident actually was.

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Overview

The hoax works through implication, not footage. @holdne's December 19th slideshow opens with three photos of a student holding a school bathroom mirror, then cuts to a fourth frame covered in heavy censoring and red pixels meant to look like blood pooling around a face with closed eyes1. The caption spells out the premise: a boy named Hunter Schaffner takes the mirror off the wall, drops it into a stall too hard, and the shards cut him into 'little tiny pieces'4. No fifth frame appears, no video link is provided, and no follow-up exists.

The whole payoff is the search. Readers who buy the setup go looking for the supposed gore clip, find nothing, and often post about getting fooled. @vietnamgiit_jay's December 30th FYP scroll video, which shows the Mirror Incident as the first clip on the feed, reached more than 700,000 views as one of the earlier reaction uploads3. That cycle of discover, search, and debunk is what kept the hoax circulating for months.

Origin & Background

Platform
TikTok
Creator
@holdne
Date
2022

TikToker @holdne posted the originating slideshow on December 19th, 2022, with four images and a caption describing them as screenshots from a gore video filmed that year1. The first three photos show a student holding a bathroom mirror. The fourth is heavily censored and features red pixels around what the caption identified as Hunter Schaffner's face. @holdne also named Holden Goyette as the person who filmed the supposed event. The post, which anchored the entire Mirror Incident story, reached over 36.8 million views within four months of upload4.

How It Spread

Searches began climbing the day after @holdne's slideshow went live. On December 20th, 2022, Twitter user @skelopit posted that he had spent what felt like years hunting for the hunter schaffner mirror video before realizing it was a joke and no footage existed, picking up over 180 likes by April 20232. Ten days later, @vietnamgiit_jay uploaded a FYP scroll clip positioning the hoax as the first item in a feed, which reached over 700,000 views3.

Search interest peaked through January 20234. On January 17th, Redditor vsbobclear opened a thread on r/RBI asking what the 'weird mirror incident' trending on Google actually was, drawing more than 150 upvotes within three months5. On February 22nd, @wormonastirng posted a TikTok referencing the Mirror Incident that reached over 280,000 views in roughly two months6. Each new creator discovering, then debunking, the hoax fed the search cycle further into spring 2023.

Timeline

2022-12-19

TikToker @holdne posts the four-image slideshow that originates the hoax, naming Hunter Schaffner and Holden Goyette in the caption.

2022-12-20

Twitter user @skelopit posts about searching for the video before learning it was fake.

2022-12-30

TikToker @vietnamgiit_jay uploads an FYP scroll video showing the Mirror Incident as the opening clip, reaching over 700,000 views.

2023-01-17

Redditor vsbobclear opens an r/RBI thread asking what the trending 'weird mirror incident' is.

2023-02-22

TikToker @wormonastirng posts a video about the hoax that reaches over 280,000 views.

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