The Surprising History of Anonymous Letters and Confession Culture

Published: December 17, 2025

In 79 AD, a man named Gaius scratched something into a wall in Pompeii. Two thousand years later, we can still read it. In 1769, an unknown writer sent letters to a London newspaper that would bring down a prime minister. In 2004, a guy in Maryland handed out blank postcards asking strangers to mail him their secrets. He's received over a million.

The urge to say things anonymously isn't new. It's one of the oldest forms of human expression. And the history of how we've done it tells us something important about why we need it.

The Walls of Pompeii: History's First Social Media

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it buried the city of Pompeii under volcanic ash. It also preserved something unexpected: over 11,000 pieces of graffiti scratched into walls by ordinary Romans.

These weren't just names and dates. The walls of Pompeii contain love declarations, political endorsements, jokes, insults, poetry, and philosophical musings. One reads: "I wonder, wall, that you haven't collapsed from having to carry the tedious scribblings of so many writers." Sound familiar?

According to researchers at Antigone Journal, these walls functioned like ancient message boards. People read what others wrote and added responses. They started arguments. They left encouragement. They wrote things they probably wouldn't say to someone's face.

Here's what's interesting: unlike modern graffiti, Roman graffiti often included real names. The culture didn't treat it as vandalism. But the impulse was the same one we recognize today: the need to put thoughts somewhere outside your own head, to make them real, to know that someone else might read them.

The Confessional: Anonymity Gets Architecture

For most of Christian history, confession was a public affair. If you sinned, you confessed in front of the congregation. The penance could last years. It was, by design, humiliating.

That changed gradually. By the Middle Ages, confession had become private, face-to-face with a priest. But there was still a problem: sitting across from someone you know, looking them in the eye while admitting your worst moments, isn't easy. Some people avoided confession entirely. Others held back.

In 1576, Cardinal Charles Borromeo introduced the confessional booth: a wooden box with a screen separating priest from penitent. For the first time, you could confess without being seen. You could speak into the darkness and hear a voice respond without judgment attached to a face.

The design spread across the Catholic world and persists today. The architecture itself tells us something: humans confess more honestly when they can't see who's listening. The screen isn't just physical separation. It's psychological permission.

The Mystery Writer Who Toppled a Government

In January 1769, a letter appeared in London's Public Advertiser signed simply "Junius." Nobody knew who wrote it. That was the point.

Over the next three years, Junius published 69 letters attacking the British government with surgical precision. The writing was sharp, the accusations specific, the sources clearly inside government. When Junius went after King George III directly, the government tried to prosecute the newspaper for seditious libel. They failed.

The prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, resigned in January 1770. Contemporary politician Archibald Macdonald stated that "Junius unquestionably wrote the Duke of Grafton's administration out of office. No anonymous letters ever have produced, or ever will produce, an equally striking result."

To this day, nobody knows for certain who Junius was. Over 45 candidates have been proposed. The leading theory points to Sir Philip Francis, a War Office clerk. But we'll probably never know for sure. Junius took his secret to the grave.

The Federalist Papers: Anonymity Builds a Nation

Eighteen years after Junius, three men sat down to convince Americans to ratify a new Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote 85 essays arguing for the document. They published every one of them under a fake name: Publius.

Why hide? Hamilton and Madison had attended the Constitutional Convention. Their arguments might be dismissed as self-interested. By writing as "Publius," they shifted focus from who was speaking to what was being said.

The pen name itself was strategic. "Publius" referred to Publius Valerius Publicola, a founder of the Roman Republic whose name meant "friend of the people." The Federalist Papers became one of the most important documents in American history. Their authors weren't publicly confirmed until after Hamilton's death in 1804.

The Victorian Poison Pen: When Anonymity Turned Dark

Not all anonymous letters changed nations for the better. In Victorian England, a different kind of anonymous writing became an epidemic.

Two things happened in the mid-1800s that transformed anonymous communication. First, the penny post arrived in 1840, making it cheap to mail letters without leaving a trace. Second, the Education Act of 1870 dramatically increased literacy rates. Suddenly, almost anyone could write an anonymous letter and send it anywhere for almost nothing.

The result was what came to be called "poison pen" letters. Dr. Emily Cockayne's research, documented in her book Penning Poison, traces hundreds of cases from 1760 to 1939. Small communities would be terrorized by anonymous accusations. Relationships were destroyed. In some cases, people took their own lives.

The poison pen era is a reminder that anonymity is a tool. Like any tool, it can build or destroy. The same mechanism that let Junius challenge a corrupt government let neighbors terrorize each other with accusations. The technology doesn't determine the outcome. The person using it does.

PostSecret: One Million Confessions and Counting

In 2004, a man named Frank Warren had an idea. He printed 3,000 blank postcards and handed them to strangers around Washington, D.C. The instructions were simple: write a secret you've never told anyone, decorate the postcard however you want, and mail it to this address.

The response was overwhelming. PostSecret has now received over one million postcards. Warren posts selections every Sunday on his website, which has had nearly 700 million visits and won three Webby Awards for Best Blog.

The postcards have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and galleries in Rio de Janeiro. Warren has been called "the most trusted stranger in America."

What makes PostSecret work? Warren believes it's the combination of anonymity and physical creation. Making a postcard takes time. You have to find images, write your secret by hand, walk to a mailbox. The act itself becomes meaningful. "Pure anonymity is potent and powerful," Warren has said. It lets people talk about things they've never told their partner, their priest, or their family.

The App Era: A Cautionary Tale

When smartphones became ubiquitous, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. If people loved sharing secrets on postcards, imagine what they'd share through an app.

Between 2012 and 2014, a wave of anonymous apps launched. Whisper, Secret, and Yik Yak attracted millions of users and hundreds of millions in venture capital. Yik Yak was valued at $400 million at its peak.

Then most of them collapsed.

The Washington Post analyzed what went wrong. Secret connected to your phone contacts, which meant your "anonymous" posts could be traced to your social circle. Yik Yak's college-campus focus concentrated drama in small communities. Both became vectors for bullying, harassment, and worse. Secret's founder David Byttow acknowledged that anonymity had been "the ultimate double-edged sword."

Whisper survived by making deliberate design choices: no connection to your contacts, aggressive moderation, and a focus on emotional expression rather than local gossip. The lesson was clear: anonymity works when it serves genuine human needs. It fails when it becomes a weapon.

Why We Still Need to Confess

From Pompeii to PostSecret, one thing stays constant: humans need places to put the things they can't say out loud.

Psychological research suggests confession serves several deep functions. It relieves the cognitive burden of keeping secrets. It helps us separate our past selves from who we are now. It transforms private shame into something external, where it has less power over us.

There's also something powerful about being heard by someone who has no stake in your life. A stranger on a plane. A priest behind a screen. An anonymous reader on the internet. They can receive what you're saying without the baggage of knowing your whole story.

The Tradition Continues

Every generation finds new ways to share anonymously. Romans had walls. Victorians had the penny post. We have the internet.

At ReadAndGone, we built something intentionally simple: a place to share a confession, a midnight thought, a piece of hard-earned wisdom, or an encouraging word. No accounts required. No connection to your identity. Your free message enters a pool, a stranger reads it, and then it's gone forever.

We're not the first platform to offer anonymous expression, and we won't be the last. But we're part of a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. The tools change. The need doesn't.

People will always have things they need to say that they can't tell the people in their lives. They'll always need places to put those things. The question isn't whether anonymous expression should exist. It's whether we build tools that serve genuine human needs or ones that make things worse.

The writers of Pompeii, the mystery of Junius, the confessional booth, PostSecret, and yes, ReadAndGone are all answers to the same question: Where do I put the things I can't say out loud?

Turns out, humans have been asking that question for a very long time.