Who is the anonymous Minnesota tagger Ratboy?

Ratboy’s name is everywhere — even on a sticker inside a toilet bowl at Minneapolis’ unabashedly grungy Caffetto Coffee Shop.

For nearly two years, Twin Cities residents have watched tagger/graffiti artist Ratboy’s stickers and tags appear on street signs, fire hydrants, utility boxes, dumpsters, benches and highway underpasses. There has even been a second toilet bowl sighting — at Como Tap in Minneapolis.

Ratboy fans make TikToks of his tags, stickers and a caricature face with wide-set buggy eyes and a long chin.

Dakota Sutton started the TikTok account @Urbex.Mn_, posting collections of abandoned and derelict places around the Twin Cities and elsewhere.

“I just thought it was cool what he would leave, a kinda like easter egg everywhere he went ... sorta like a game,” said Sutton, 18, of Pine County, Minn.

In some 300 comments on a popular TikTok post on @Urbex.Mn_, TikTokkers debated the viral sensation about Ratboy. Some claimed to know him. Others gushed about Ratboy sightings in Duluth, Circle Pine, Rochester and Twin Cities tunnels and caves.

Some called him mean, others said he was nice. Some even compared him to Banksy. Most of all, they wondered who he is.

Rose Allgood, 18, of New Richmond, Wis., liked how Ratboy wrote his tag in hard-to-reach places, like on top of a tower at the old Ford plant in St. Paul. A lot of the metal bars on the tower are broken, “so it’s basically impossible to get up there, not sure how he did it,” she said.

In the Twin Cities, Ratboy’s tag inspires wonder.

“Ratboy’s rogue and does whatever Ratboy wants to do, and I kinda like that,” Minneapolis resident Danny Klecko said.

He first spotted Ratboy’s tag about a year ago as he was exiting Interstate 94/35-W at Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. He and his wife Erica Christ snap photos of Ratboy’s stickers and tags, sending them to each other or posting to Facebook groups like Parking Lots in America.

“He’s kind of a hero,” said Klecko, 62, a master baker and poet.

“No,” he said. “I mean, do you want to find out who Batman is? I don’t think so.”

The origin of Ratboy’s name also remains a mystery, but the internet provided some clues.

It could reference “The Simpsons” episode “Homer vs. Patty and Selma” (Season 6, Episode 17) where Homer imagines Bart as a rat boy, or it might reference the British band Rat Boy.

But it could be referencing “Rat Boy Summer,” a Gen Z internet trend that celebrates unconventionally attractive men with rodent-like features, such as lanky angular bodies, messy hair, pale skin and shifty eyes. Think Timothée Chalamet, Ryan Gosling, Barry Keoghan or Mike Faist.

That trend blew up in summer 2024, around the same time people started seeing Ratboy’s tags around the metro area.

Christ has spotted half a dozen stickers within a block and a half of Washburn Fair Oaks Park in Minneapolis.

“It’s almost like performance art more than tagging things, and they stand out different than a tag because [the stickers], they’re so black and white,” she said.

Minnesota podcasters “Praise Be To Pod” called Ratboy a hometown hero.

“I love it, there’s a really lovely Ratboy tag that’s on a pipe that is on my walk from my house to Aldi, in the alley, and I always think, ‘Oh Ratboy’s here,’” said co-host Ashley La Marr. “Ratboy is a vandal and we all love Ratboy.”

But not all love Ratboy’s written tags and stickers.

“If I gotta look at his stupid made-up name plastered all over the city, just do it with a bit of artistry,” Fedie said. “[Tagger] Bosque is all over the cities, too, and he’s not great either but at least he ends up in some wild spaces that I don’t know how he gets to.”

In late November, Fedie drove onto Interstate 394 and was delighted when he noticed that someone had painted over a Ratboy tag.

Fedie doesn’t hate Ratboy, but he does hope the tagger will improve.

When he heard that there was a Ratboy sticker inside a toilet bowl at Caffetto, he said “Well that makes me happy, because at least he might have gotten some [expletive] on his fingers.”

Instagram offered another clue. Did Ratboy orders his stickers from the China-based vendor @eggshellstickers.emily?

St. Paul-based fiction writer Josh Cook, 40, obtained a post on Reddit, where Ratboy appears to have deleted his name. When he discovered Ratboy’s tag in a secret staircase by Hidden Falls in St. Paul, he started paying attention to him.

Cook also spotted Ratboy’s tag in Stillwater, St. Louis Park and Wayzata while he was training for a long bike trip. Seeing the tag over and over again started to feel like trying to solve a puzzle.