I Bought a Domain and Found a Dark-Web Drug Shop's Ghost

This is a true story, and it's a strange one.

In the spring of 2026 I was building a new website for Silk Road NYC. I wanted a clean domain to build it on. On April 15, 2026, I registered silkroaddispensary.com. New registration, my company, my name. I paid, pointed it at our build, and got to work.

I thought I bought an empty lot. I bought a haunted house.

Google remembered

A couple of weeks in, my team was checking the new site in Google Search Console. That's the dashboard Google gives site owners to see what it knows about their domain.

The numbers didn't make sense.

Google was holding on to pages we never built. It listed six old sitemaps we never made, files that had been dead since early 2023. And when Google inspected our brand-new homepage, it pointed back to a link from an old product page on our own domain. A page that had never existed on any site of mine.

Somebody had been here before us.

So we went to the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive's public record of old websites, and looked up the address.

There it was. In 2022, years before I ever touched this domain, silkroaddispensary.com was a fake online drug shop. A store template, a product catalog, and hard-drug categories, all dressed up to trade on the Silk Road dark-web legend. The archive has snapshots of it from October 2022.

I want to be very clear, because this is the internet and people read fast.

It was not mine. I didn't build it. I didn't run it. I didn't know it existed until Google told on it. Whoever held the domain back then, or someone who broke into their site, put that shop up. Then the domain lapsed, and years later I registered it clean.

I inherited the ghost. I didn't create it.

What a dead website leaves behind

Here's something most people don't know about domains. When a website dies, Google doesn't forget it right away.

The old addresses, the old links, the old sitemaps can sit in the search index for years. Somebody else's history comes with the keys. A domain isn't just a name. It's a name with a past.

Nobody warns you about this when you buy one. The checkout page shows you a price and a renewal date. It doesn't show you what the last owner did with it, what Google still remembers, or which links out there on the web still point at pages that died years ago. You find that out later, the hard way, like we did.

For a licensed cannabis store, that is a nightmare. Every product on my shelf is tested by a state-licensed lab and tracked in Metrc. Every customer shows ID. And the biggest search engine on earth had my new address tied to junk pages from 2022, selling things I would never touch.

My name. My camel. Somebody else's mess.

How we buried it

We didn't panic. We went to work.

1. We mapped it. Using the Wayback Machine's records, we pulled the list of the old shop's addresses: more than thirty category and tag pages from 2022 and 2023, plus the product pages under them.
2. We asked Google to hide them. At the end of April 2026 we filed removal requests in Search Console for three whole URL patterns: everything under /product/, /product-category/ and /product-tag/. Google's removal tool hides a pattern like that from results for about six months.
3. We banned the patterns. We made a hard rule for our own build: no new page will ever live under those three paths. Our menu and our guides run on different addresses.
4. We told Google they're gone for good. Today those old addresses answer with "410 Gone." A 404 says "not found, maybe later." A 410 says "this is gone, and it is not coming back."
5. We pointed the domain home. In July 2026 we moved our new site onto silkroadnyc.com, our main address. Today silkroaddispensary.com redirects there.

The six dead sitemaps from 2022 are still listed in our Search Console. Google doesn't let you delete them by hand. They fade on their own. Ghosts take time.

From the day I registered the domain to the day we filed those removal requests took less than two weeks. I didn't wait for somebody to find it and ask me about it.

Why I'm putting this in public

Some people would bury a story like this and hope nobody ever digs. I get it. It's an ugly thing to find under your own name.

But think about who searches for us. A customer checking out a new store. A reporter. A regulator. A kid from the block who heard the name and wants to know if it's real. If any of them goes digging through old archives, they might find traces of that 2022 shop with our domain on it.

I'd rather they hear it from me first, in plain words, with the dates.

That's how I run the store, too. The license number is posted by the door. The lab results are available on request. The owner's name is on the paperwork and on this page. When you sell something the state used to lock people up for, you don't get to be mysterious. You get to be accountable.

The dark web ran on hiding. I run on the opposite.

Where the domain points now

Type silkroaddispensary.com today and you land on Silk Road NYC's online dispensary at silkroadnyc.com.

Order online from the live menu, pick up at 166-30 Jamaica Ave, or get same-day delivery across Queens. You must be 21 or older, and ID is checked at pickup and at the door on every delivery. Nothing gets shipped and nothing gets mailed. Every order comes out of one licensed store in Jamaica, Queens.

That's the whole point. A domain that somebody once used to fake a dark-web drug shop now points to a licensed online dispensary with a real address, a real license number and a real person who answers for it. Me.

Why this could only happen to Silk Road

Think about the odds. A store named after the most notorious dark-web market in history buys a domain, and the domain turns out to have its own dark-web-style past, left by somebody else, years earlier.

I don't believe in curses. I believe in names. The Silk Road name pulls attention, good and bad. The scammers of 2022 used it to look dangerous. I use it to show the opposite: same name, under a state license, with a receipt.

I'd bet no other licensed dispensary in America has a story like this one. If you want the backstory on the name itself, I wrote that up too: the Dread Pirate Roberts sold on the dark web, and I sell on Jamaica Ave, with a license.

What it taught me about buying legal

This story isn't really about websites. It's the same lesson I preach at the counter every day.

A name can be borrowed. A logo can be copied. A website can look real. The one thing you can check is the license.

In New York, you can look up any store on the state's dispensary location verification list. If a store or a website isn't on that list, it isn't licensed, and you don't know what's in the bag.

Same rule online. A site that offers to mail cannabis to your door, with no license number, no street address and no ID check, is not a dispensary. It might be the next ghost. More on that in why buy licensed.

Who's behind this one

I'm Sohan Bashar. I grew up in Queens, I'm justice-involved with a cannabis conviction from before legalization, and New York gave people like me the first retail licenses through its CAURD program. Silk Road NYC opened at 166-30 Jamaica Ave on February 23, 2024, under license OCM-CAURD-24-000062, held by NYSE3AU-RETAIL INC. DBA Silk Road NYC. The longer story is in my owner letter and on our about page.

I don't run from the past, mine or the internet's. I clean it up and keep building.

Come see the real thing

Browse the live menu, come through for one of our 21+ events, or read why people pick us as their cannabis dispensary in Jamaica, Queens. We take cash, debit, credit card and bitcoin at the counter (more on that on our bitcoin page).

The ghost is gone. The store is real. Come say what's up.

Sohan Bashar, owner, Silk Road NYC. License OCM-CAURD-24-000062.