People are absolutely shocked after watching this scene from Scooby Doo as an adult

Scooby-Doo fans might have always known that Velma was a lesbian, but what they're just now coming to realise is that her fellow investigator Fred is actually kind of a freak.

After going back to re-watch the cartoon as adults, people are starting to notice some of Fred's questionable behaviour, and they have some questions about it.

One fan had been watching The Scooby-Doo Show when they caught the leader of Mystery Inc. get really weird in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment.

It was taken from the episode 'The Harum-Scarum Sanitarium', when Fred and the gang find themselves scoping out a mental asylum haunted by the ghost of Dr Coffin. When they notice ambulances coming and going with no patients, they decide to do some digging - and it looks like Fred is pretty into what they find:

When the gang discover a morgue filled with dead bodies inside the asylum, Daphne and Velma are horrified. But Fred, ever the detective, decides to go in for a closer look.

As a child, I might have missed that coy grin on Fred's face when he lifts up the cover on one of the corpses, but now it's all I can see.

That's how one Scooby fan also felt when he caught it and shared the clip to TikTok, captioning the video: "Fred down bad."

The video quickly went viral, and people couldn't believe that they had missed Fred's unhinged behaviour when they were younger.

"The way my jaw dropped-" commented one TikToker.

"Wow! that smile as he lifted it up", another pointed out.

And a third wrote: "I was too young when I watched that."

ABC

In Fred's defence, some Scooby-Doo super fans were able to clear up this compromising video and explain what was really going on.

It turns out that Fred snooping under those covers actually helps the Mystery Gang solve the case, since those 'patients' lying in the morgue were actually just piles of gold bars with wigs poking out from under the sheet to make it look like people. The ambulances moving in and out of the asylum were really just smuggling gold in and out. A very elaborate scheme, you have to admit!

Okay fine, so Fred wasn't a creep in this instance - but now my question is: did he really know what he was going to find under those sheets, or was that just a lucky coincidence?

I'm keeping my eye on that guy.