Possible GTA 6 Easter egg discovered in Red Dead Redemption 2

Seven years after launch, Red Dead Redemption 2‘s sprawling open world is still hiding secrets, including a recently discovered mystery involving a telegraph pole and a series of strange spider webs that only spawn at certain times.

Players have spent the few weeks untangling this web of secrets, and now it’s looking like the mystery may be related to the spider webs mentioned by coin-operated psychic Madam Nazar in Grand Theft Auto 5, leading players to suspect that Red Dead Redemption 2‘s spider-based Easter egg may lead to a Grand Theft Auto 6 teaser of some sort.

It started near the end of December, when Reddit user /u/FL4VA-01 shared their discovery: A strange telegraph pole located south of Cumberland Forest and north of Twin Stack Pass. The telegraph pole features a strange carving of a spider surrounded by what appear to be feathers. Between the hours of 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., in-game time, a spider web with some feathers will spawn above the telegraph pole. As shared by YouTuber The Strange Man, applying the spider-shaped symbol to the in-game map will lead to eight new web locations — one at the end of each of the original spider’s legs. Each spider web spawns during a different one-hour window between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., with different appearances — some have black feathers, while others have red ones. The game’s files treat the webs like the shootable dreamcatchers players can stumble across in “The Wisdom of the Elders III” mission.

Around Christmas, Redditor /u/fthen2k02 shared the discovery of a new spider web located right in the middle of the others. This web is only visible from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m., just like spider webs that appear in GTA 5. It’s also much bigger than the other webs, and hangs from the top of a tree rather than a telegraph pole. Eagle-eyed players noticed that when looking at it from the correct angle, the big web appears to be hiding the letter F, along with a symbol for a telegraph pole, pointing players in the direction of yet another telegraph pole. This one, however, is different from the rest: Rather than shooting at a spider web, players must instead shoot at the base of the pole itself, which will reveal a secret carving of the letter W with five more telegraph poles beneath it. Walking five poles to the west and shooting that pole reveals a carving with the letters “NW” along with a small symbol of a guitar. The nearest guitar is located to the northwest, in Fort Wallace, which is where the trail ran cold.

The Strange Man mapped out the locations of all the guitars in the game, two of which are in Fort Wallace. One points west, while the other points upward toward Fort Wallace’s rooftops. Once on the roof, the YouTuber noticed that Fort Wallace itself takes the shape of a guitar, and following the neck of the instrument — in this case, a river — leads to Dodd’s Bluff, a small cabin with two NPC corpses inside. Once again, the trail runs cold here, but The Strange Man posits that the feathers on the spider webs (three red feathers, five black feathers) could be references to Eagle Flies’ mission appearances. This Native American NPC appears in eight missions total. In five of these missions, Eagle Flies escapes unscathed. But in the final three missions, he’s kidnapped, held hostage, and eventually killed — which may be what the trio of red feathers is alluding to.

So far, that’s the end of the trail of clues, but the sleuths on /r/RedDeadMysteries are still hard at work hoping to unravel the truth behind this massive Easter egg, which may give players a hint of what to expect from Rockstar’s next title: the long-awaited GTA 6.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking…