Shiloh Hill’s “Shoeman” series got so out of control that the Orlando Police Department eventually called WWE to make sure he was actually okay. What started as a bizarre TikTok project about bloody shoes from the dark web turned into hundreds of police calls, a confused WWE employee and Hill eventually moving out of his home after his address was leaked.
Speaking on Busted Open After Dark, the NXT talent explained that many viewers thought the series was connected to WWE. It wasn’t, and apparently that came as news to the company when police reached out.
“At the time, a lot of people thought that that was a thing I was doing for WWE and funny enough the police contacted WWE. They were like, ‘Hey, we know you’re probably aware of this and it’s probably something for wrestling. We just wanted to make sure that you’re aware,’ and the person who was on the phone with the police at the time was like, ‘What?’ They had no idea what they were talking about, and they were like, ‘No, this is not for WWE’ because it wasn’t for WWE at all.”
Hill’s “Shoeman” videos featured him claiming to order shoes from the dark web that had blood on them before testing the stains to see whether they were actually blood. The series exploded online, and Hill said it pulled roughly 500 million views within its first three months.
That kind of attention came with a downside. Hill said concerned viewers were hammering the Orlando Police Department with calls about his safety, which is what eventually led authorities to WWE.
“Then they had to reach out to me and make sure I was OK and it’s something that apparently they were getting hundreds of calls a day because that Shoeman series, within the first three months, I believe it did 500 million views, so it had a tremendous amount of viewership throughout the entire world.”
The mess didn’t end with police checking in. Hill said the attention eventually got personal when his address was leaked online, forcing him to get out of his apartment.
“That was also part of the reason why I had to move houses was because in the process of that, I got doxxed. My ‘real address’ got leaked onto the dark web and I had to move because I was like, ‘Well, this is really not good.’”
That’s a pretty wild escalation for a TikTok series. Hill went from posting creepy shoe videos to having police call WWE, fans flooding authorities with concern and his home address winding up online. The “Shoeman” series may have been built for shock value, but once police and WWE were getting dragged into it, the joke had clearly gone way beyond social media.
What do you think about Shiloh Hill’s “Shoeman” series getting so big that police contacted WWE over it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
