File UN-R05 · Urban legends · Fact recordFiled 2026-09-18

The Pan Bowen incident: the classmate who never existed

The Pan Bowen incident is a first-person story a user posted on the Chinese platform Zhihu about a classmate, Pan Bowen (潘博文), who supposedly vanished in a dormitory basement and whom no one else remembered. The story went viral as apparent evidence of a parallel universe, but the original poster later said Pan Bowen was a character he had imagined, not a real person.

What the story says

Is the Pan Bowen incident real? No, according to the person who posted it. The Pan Bowen incident is a first-person account published on the Chinese question-and-answer platform Zhihu, describing a classmate, Pan Bowen (潘博文), who went with the narrator and another student into the basement of an abandoned dormitory building to retrieve a badminton shuttlecock. Pan Bowen went in and never came back out.

What happened next is the part that made the post spread. Afterward, according to the retellings carried by the technology site Guokr and a video report republished by The Paper, nobody else, not classmates, not the school's own roster, had any record that Pan Bowen had ever existed. Only the narrator, and in some versions one other classmate, remembered him at all.

Where it started

The post appeared as an answer on Zhihu, the Chinese site where users write long personal essays in response to open questions. Accounts differ on exactly when it first went up and on the poster's username, and this file was not able to confirm either detail against a source that could be opened and checked, so neither is repeated here.

What is confirmed is that the story had already spread widely by January 2021, when it was substantial enough to draw a write-up from Guokr, published 20 January 2021, and a video segment from Pear Video that The Paper's contributor platform carried the next day. Both describe the same basic sequence: the basement, the missing shuttlecock, and a classmate whose existence nobody else could verify.

How it grew

The disappearance detail is what pushed the story into internet legend, and toward the parallel-universe theory now attached to his name. Readers reasoned that if a person could vanish from every record and every memory but one, either the world had a bug in it or the narrator had crossed into a timeline where Pan Bowen was never born. Comment sections filled with people describing their own half-remembered classmates, extending the story well past its original post.

The framing changed once the poster spoke again. Guokr's account says he explained that Pan Bowen was a "幻想中的伙伴," an imagined companion invented to cope with loneliness, a phenomenon sometimes called a tulpa. ifanr's coverage adds that he described the character as invented under study pressure, and that people around him later raised the possibility of bipolar affective disorder, without saying that diagnosis was ever confirmed.

The parallel-universe theory, and what explains it

Is the Pan Bowen incident evidence of a parallel universe? Nothing in the sources checked for this file supports that. What it resembles, more than a Mandela effect, is confabulation: one person's confident, detailed memory of something that did not happen. Research on imaginary companions, cited in Guokr's coverage, finds this kind of invented figure in a large share of children, roughly half of those studied in Western samples and about 40 percent of Chinese five- and six-year-olds.

The Mandela effect itself is a related but different pattern: many separate people, who have never spoken to each other, sharing the same wrong memory of something public. A University of Chicago study of 40 well-known images, led by psychologist Wilma Bainbridge, found people confidently picking the same incorrect version again and again, such as the Monopoly mascot with a monocle he has never worn, and concluded that some images simply invite the same memory error in different minds independently.

That is not what Pan Bowen was. Only one person ever claimed to remember him, and that person is also the one who wrote him into existence. A Chinese-language explainer on the Mandela effect carried by The Paper, quoting physicians Gu Nannan and Qiao Ying of the Shanghai Mental Health Center, describes ordinary memory as reconstructed from fragments each time it is recalled, which leaves room for confident errors, but reconstruction is not the same claim as invention.

Which details hold up

The setting is ordinary and unverifiable in the way most personal essays are: a school, a dormitory, a basement, a badminton shuttlecock. None of the coverage checked for this file names the school or independently confirms any part of the account beyond the fact that a matching post existed and was widely discussed. That is consistent with a personal essay, not with a documented incident.

What does hold up is the resolution. Every source opened for this file agrees on the outcome: the poster said Pan Bowen was invented, not that Pan Bowen was a real classmate whose records had mysteriously vanished. Guokr frames that outcome as an imaginary companion; ifanr frames it as a possible symptom of bipolar affective disorder. Both describe an invented character, not a verified disappearance.

Verdict

The Pan Bowen incident is a personal essay posted on Zhihu about a classmate who, by the writer's own later account, only ever existed in his imagination. It is not a true story about a parallel universe, and the sources checked for this file found no independent confirmation that Pan Bowen was ever a real student. Real or Legend files it as debunked, on the strength of the poster's own admission, while leaving the exact posting date and the poster's identity unconfirmed.