People in the stadium

As every TrackMania player might know the stadium stands are eerily empty, even though if the players sound is turned up at the end of the race, one can hear clapping from many individuals, concerning many players, as nobody knew where the source of this applause sound was coming from.

This in turn, made players, more specifically the Brain team start a search for the source of this mysterious but unseen sound.

First sighting
The first sighting of a figure can be found on the old TM-Forum website (which is unfortunately down as of today), being posted by the player PhDTMPro._.

Since the image is from somewhere around 2009, the image quality is in turn very poor, and has led to many players speculating the legitimacy of the photograph.

As the OP of the post stated;

"Today, I was playing TrackMania as per any other day. But this time, it was different. When I looked closer to the East podium, I could see a dark figure standing in the stands, which freaked me out, and prompted me to close the game immediately. Has anyone else experienced a similar phenomenon, or am I going crazy? :D"

Many popular names such as Riolu, Trabadia and many more can be seen in the replies, mostly doubting the truthfulness behind the screenshot.

As Riolu stated:

"Nice one. It's people like you who make up these deliberately fake stories in order to get peoples attention to something which is very obviously fake, and not in the game whatsoever. This type of nonsense is on par with people who actively cheat in the game and try to lie about it afterwards. Disgusting."

The thread was ultimately closed by the moderator Xymph, a few days later.

Second and final sighting
This sighting was in much higher quality, and was posted by the user passex!, around 4 years after the initial screenshot,

In this screenshot, a very clear outline of a dark figure can be seen in the stadiums stands.

This of course, also sparked a lot of controversy within the TM-Forum members as others chimed in with their own theories and suspicions of this post.

However, since this was the second time this incident was being reported, many players started to believe that Nadeo might have purposefully put in some type of code which spawns in this dark figure in order to scare players.

In the posts comments, many players started referring to TrackMania as the "Ultimate Horror Racing Game", stating that it was "much deeper than what it looks to be".

To this day, no other sightings of this figure have been reported. It is unknown if both of these posts were some sort of public stunt to scare players into believing something that wasn't there to begin with.

This post was also the one that sparked the interest of the Brain team.

Theories
There is unfortunately not that many theories that are worth noting, except the ones made by the Brain team themselves.

However, most of their theories and investigations are unknown, which is not something new when it comes to this team, as they keep most things secretive for their own research purposes

One public theory that was posted by the teams leader, Gutman, was that this occurrence would happen every 12 years, claiming that he had found something "rather intriguing" in the games code, using the teams special tool to view the very bits inside of any .exe file. Unfortunately, not much else is known, and if the theory stands correct, this would put the next sighting in the year 2025.