🪰 ‘Bob Ross Was a Serial Killer and His Paintings Show Where He Buried the Bodies’ – The Internet

We need to talk about Bob Ross…

Yes, that Bob Ross. The soft-spoken PBS painter with the legendary perm who spent decades convincing nervous beginners that a crooked tree wasn’t a disaster, it just needed a friend.

According to one of the internet’s more spectacularly unhinged theories, however, America’s favorite painter had another hobby…

Serial killing.

The theory claims Ross’s peaceful landscapes weren’t actually landscapes at all. They were maps. Mountains, lakes, isolated cabins, and, naturally, all those happy little trees supposedly marked places where Ross had killed people and hidden their bodies.

Of course, there’s no credible evidence Bob Ross murdered anybody.

We want to get that out of the way before someone starts excavating beneath every pine tree in Alaska.

But the rumor has been floating around the internet for over a decade, and instead of dying down, it’s become more elaborate, including mythology that includes crime-scene matches, sinister interpretations of Ross’s famous sayings, his military history, and even that missing finger.

And good Lord, once you actually hear this story, you start to understand how the internet got to this weird place.

Suddenly, the happy little trees look different 🌲

For anyone just discovering good ol’ “Murder Bob” for the first time, this short clip gives you the basic nightmare fuel.

Here’s the deal: the internet says the paintings resemble locations where bodies were found. Ross’s missing finger is their evidence of a struggle. His nearly two decades in the Air Force become part of his shadowy backstory, as well.

Then comes an actual Bob Ross quote that conspiracy theorists couldn’t have written better themselves…

“Trees cover up a multitude of sins.”

You can probably see where this is headed, right?

Rotten Cherry:

And there you have it. Bob Ross was secretly killing people, painting the places where he disposed of the bodies, and then displaying the evidence on PBS while America relaxed on the couch.

That would certainly be… bold.

The problem is that the juicy pieces tying Ross to actual murders don’t come with credible evidence. First off, there’s no documented trail connecting him to the supposed victims, burial sites, or crime scenes that get passed around in viral videos.

But that quote about the trees?

Oh, that part’s very real.

During The Joy of Painting, Ross really did say that trees “cover a multitude of sins.” Unfortunately for the budding online homicide investigation, PBS has the rest of the exchange, and Bob immediately explained what he meant: if there’s an ugly spot in your painting, put a tree over it.

He was covering crappy brushwork, not burying dead bodies.

Eventually, Snopes wandered into the happy little woods

The rumor became big enough that in December 2024, Snopes actually took a look.

Which is funny in its own right.

Of course Snopes couldn’t establish that Bob Ross was a serial killer. They’re cat owners and fact-checkers, not homicide detectives crawling through the woods with cadaver dogs.

But their dive into the rumor uncovered something even more interesting: where this whole story started.

Snopes:

The rumor circulated heavily on TikTok, with one user posting a video alleging to show Ross’ paintings corresponding with crime scenes. One user responded, “He draws nature so yes out of thousands of murder cases some are bound too [sic] look a little like his paintings.” Somebody else replied, “Just bc he painted those mean he’s a killer, [sic] he could’ve just did it to honor the lives that were lost.”

Some users also posted to X about the rumor, with one saying, “I love the internet. Today it’s told me: Bob Ross was a serial killer and his paintings where [sic] locations where he’d buried bodies.” Another X user echoed this statement, posting, “Bob Ross was a serial killer and his paintings are where he hid the bodies.” In October 2023, the YouTube channel Conspiracy Central posted a lengthy video about the claim.

The rumor was also popular on Reddit, with one user posting the same video from the TikTok shared above, saying, “Something to think about.” Another Reddit post featured an image spreading the rumor with a user adding, “Thanks I hate that knowing Bob Ross could have been a serial killer.”

However, Snopes found the claim to be unfounded. Among other evidence, no credible news outlet has ever reported on this rumor, an infinitely newsy topic if it were true.

And this is where our happy little murder mystery gets way more interesting.

Snopes traced the rumor back to a 2014 Reddit post proposing the hypothetical idea that Ross might’ve been a serial killer who painted the locations where he hid bodies. The story then made its way into Reddit’s creative writing community, where people did exactly what people in a creative-writing forum are supposed to do: they made shit up…

By the time the story reached TikTok, Bob Ross had a body count. And that’s when the internet built the Bob Ross murder board.

This next clip will give you the deluxe edition of the conspiracy.

The theory takes all the usual Bob Ross scenery and starts assigning sinister things to it. Those lonely cabins supposedly mark disappearances, familiar-looking mountains become places he kept returning to, and even his soft voice gets recast as something creepy. At one point, the mythology gets so carried away that a missing palette knife somehow winds up in the evidence pile.

There are even claims surrounding a mysterious cabin painting with a suspicious red mark in the snow.

Right about now, Charlie Day needs to enter the chat with a corkboard and a thousand feet of red string.

Hang on, here comes the full Bob Ross Cinematic Murder Universe.

Okay…

That is a pretty darn detailed criminal case against a man whose primary weapon was a two-inch paintbrush.

And the conspiracy works because it feeds on little pieces of reality.

Ross’s real-life habits give the rumor plenty to play with. His landscapes are full of isolated cabins, mountains, and forests, and he liked inventing little stories about whoever might live there. Once the internet decided to make him creepy, even harmless studio jokes like “beat the devil out of it” and his comment about trees covering sins suddenly sounded suspicious.

If you read the PBS transcripts, they show how naturally he invented little imaginary histories and stories while painting, sometimes wondering aloud who might have lived in a cabin or what had happened in the landscape he was creating.

That was just Bob Ross teaching people to use their imagination.

But once somebody plants the idea that Bob Ross was a serial killer, ordinary Bob Ross quickly becomes the evidence against him.

Unfortunately for Murder Bob, reality keeps showing up 🎨

Now for the other side of this magnificently stupid rabbit hole…

The next video traces how the theory grew and takes apart many of the biggest “clues” that’ve been attached to it for over a decade.

If you skip the video, here’s the important part: there’s no known police investigation, credible reporting or historical evidence connecting Ross to serial murder. The supposedly incriminating details from his real life tend to become considerably less incriminating once somebody finishes his sentence.

Take the missing finger.

Yes, Ross was missing part of his left index finger, but he didn’t lose it wrestling a terrified victim in some remote mountain cabin.

According to Bob Ross Inc.’s own biography, he injured the finger during a childhood woodworking accident while working around the carpentry trade with his father, Jack.

His military career is real too, and this part of Bob’s biography is really fascinating.

Ross spent about 20 years in the US Air Force and rose to master sergeant. He later described himself during those years as the guy responsible for ordering people around, making them scrub the toilets and yelling when they were late. He disliked becoming that person and decided after leaving the service that he wasn’t going to scream at people anymore.

So that famous whisper wasn’t evidence that Bob Ross had mastered the creepy vocice of a woodland predator… he just didn’t want to yell anymore.

And then there are the paintings themselves.

The Joy of Painting ran for 403 episodes, and Ross painted in 381 of them. His production process involved making three versions of the same work: one beforehand as a reference, the one viewers watched him paint, and a more detailed version for instructional material.

That works out to about 1,143 Bob Ross paintings connected to the show.

Ross also once casually estimated on camera that he had painted somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 to 30,000 paintings, maybe more, over his life. So, if every Bob Ross landscape marks a murder site, we’re not just looking for a serial killer… we’re trying to explain the disappearance of a small city.

The internet picked Bob Ross for a reason

There’s a reason this rumor sticks better to Bob Ross than some other random landscape painter.

The rumor works because Bob Ross is the funniest person the internet could have chosen for it, aside from Mr. Rogers. He spent years calmly teaching people not to panic when a painting went sideways, because most mistakes could simply be worked into the picture and turned into something better. That gentle, endlessly patient guy becoming a secret serial killer is so absurd that it practically writes its own jokes.

Bob discovered painting while serving in Alaska. He sold small landscapes on gold-mining pans to tourists and eventually turned a wet-on-wet painting technique into one of public television’s biggest success stories.

Decades after The Joy of Painting ended, people are still watching him.

Which is why taking Bob Ross, of all people, and turning him into a secret monster is so fascinating to people.

Apparently, a nice man on television is simply too suspicious to ignore.

Okay, Bob, you’ve been cleared

After spending all this time wondering what Bob Ross had buried behind those happy little trees, the man deserves a palate cleanser.

So we’ll finish with the guy people actually knew and loved.

Not Murder Bob. Just regular Bob… the painter who loved nature, made room on television for squirrels and other animals, taught millions of people that artistic disaster could easily be fixed, and somehow turned watching oil paint dry into really comforting television.

Bob Ross didn’t leave behind a trail of bodies. He left behind thousands of paintings and enough wonderfully strange little quotes for the internet to build one hell of a story around him.

Somewhere along the way, the joke got out of hand and picked up a bunch of “evidence” and started coming back around as something people were actually willing to believe.

And that’s how the guy who spent his career painting happy little trees somehow ended up with an imaginary body count.