👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird little wiggle of a word! Now, there isn’t a universally agreed upon, stately-council kind of definition for, frankly…
'jackjack.’
You won't find that in the Oxford English Collegiate. Instead, "jackjack," as far as I can ascertain through some rather frantic trawling through old online urban legends and rambling Tumblr posts, is essentially... nothing.
Seriously! It’s a semi-serious kind of hoax. Around 2013, there was this pervasive, completely baseless rumour circulating on the internet that a young boy named, yep, you guessed it—"Jackjack"—had vanished from his supposedly very carefully guarded home in the American South. There were blurry eyewitness accounts (almost entirely of people mistaking squirrels for small boys), grainy photographs purporting to show the house with a disturbing number of caution tape and a handwritten sign saying "DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMstances… look here!,” along with increasingly outlandish theories about interdimensional cult activity, government conspiracies, and even that Jackjack himself was now an eldritch being residing somewhere beyond our reality. Nobody actually knew what happened to this kid, nobody ever did, which is the point. The entire thing became a sustained, elaborate prank. It’s a wonderfully bizarre collective delusion. We basically collectively decided a boy named Jackjack, who we never saw and never likely existed, was a terrifying, unsolved mystery that had
