Creepypasta

Slender Man

Slender Man is a thin, tall man with no distinguishable facial features that wears a black suit, and is said to stalk, and traumatize people. The character originated in a 2009 SomethingAwful Photoshop competition, and creepypastas were written shortly afterward. According to most stories, he targets children. The legend also caused a controversy with the Slender Man stabbing in 2014.

Jeff the Killer

Jeff the Killer is a story accompanied by an image of the character. The story says that a teenager named Jeff was severely injured in an incident of bullying that caused his face to become bleached. Following the incident and having his bandages removed, Jeff realized he liked to harm people, went insane, and cut a smile into his cheeks and burned off his eyelids after returning home from the hospital. After murdering his parents and brother, he is now a serial killer who sneaks into houses at night and whispers "go to sleep" before murdering his victims. In 2013, posters at the imageboard website 4chan stated that the Jeff the Killer image was an extensively edited picture of a girl who committed suicide in the fall of 2008. A different version exists on the creepypasta wiki.

Ted the Caver

Ted the Caver began as an Angelfire website in early 2001 that documented the adventures of a man and his friends as they explored a local cave. The story is in the format of a series of blog posts. As the explorers move further into the cave, strange hieroglyphs and winds are encountered. In a final blog post, Ted writes that he and his companions would be bringing a gun into the cave after experiencing a series of nightmares and hallucinations. The blog has not been updated since the final post. In 2005, the author of Ted the Caver revealed that it was an original work of fiction partially inspired by true events.

In 2013, an independent film adaptation of the story was released, called Living Dark: the Story of Ted the Caver.

Penpal

Penpal is a six-part creepypasta novel by Dathan Auerbach. The original stories were published on reddit, and were collected as a self-published paperback in 2012. The story's protagonist is targeted by a stalker after releasing a balloon carrying a letter with his address on it, as part of a school penpal project.

_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

"_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9" is the screen name of an anonymous writer of science fiction horror short fiction on the social news website Reddit. The work attracted media attention following its publication beginning in April 2016.

Candle Cove

Candle Cove is a story by Kris Straub written in the format of an online forum thread where people reminisce about a half-remembered children's television series from the 1970s. After sharing memories of the creepy puppets from the series, and discussing nightmares from watching the show (such as a villain called the Skin-Taker and an episode that had no dialogue other than screaming), one poster asks their mother about the series and is told that they just used to tune the TV to static and watch it for thirty minutes. Syfy announced a television drama based on the story in 2015, adapted by Max Landis. The story makes up the first season of Channel Zero which first aired on October 11, 2016.

Squidward's Suicide

Squidward's Suicide is a video posted to YouTube that depicts the SpongeBob Squarepants character Squidward Tentacles shooting himself with a shotgun after being booed mercilessly at a clarinet recital, even by SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star. The episode allegedly depicts scenes of nothing but Squidward sitting on his bed sobbing, as well as single-frame flashes of dead children and other disturbing imagery. A story that provides background for the video states that the episode was created in 2005 and was viewed by a select test screening at Nickelodeon (including the narrator, an editing intern), intended to be the Season 4 premiere "Fear of the Krabby Patty" but was edited over. Show writer Casey Alexander debunked the legend, saying that it was "100% hoax". It is likely based around the departure of show creator Stephen Hillenburg as the show's executive producer.

Ben Drowned

Created by Internet user Alex Hall, or "Jadusable", the story tells of a college student named Matt who bought a used copy of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask from an elderly man at a yard sale, only to find out that the cartridge is haunted by the ghost of a boy named Ben, who drowned. After deleting Ben's save file, Matt has been presented with disturbing glitches and scary messages usually saying "You shouldn't have done that..." or "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" The creepypasta is also accompanied by various machinima videos posted on YouTube, detailing the story's events.

Lavender Town Syndrome

This legend purports that, shortly after the original Japanese release of the video games Pokémon Red and Green in 1996, there was an increase in the death rate amongst children aged 10–15. These children, who played the games, behaved sporadically before reportedly committing suicide through methods such as hanging, jumping from heights, and creatively severe self-mutilation. Showing them either of the video games inserted into the Game Boy handheld console would cause them to scream in terror. The legend connects the cause of their suicides to the eerie background music played in the games when players are in the fictional location of Lavender Town. In the game's canon, Lavender Town is also the site of the haunted Pokémon Tower, where numerous graves of Pokémon can be found.

The theory alleges that children were most susceptible to the Lavender Town music as, aside from being the target audience for the games, the theme supposedly contains a high-pitched tone that adults cannot hear. It has been speculated that the legend was inspired by conclusively true events occurring in Japan in 1997, wherein after the airing of an episode of the Pokémon anime entitled "Dennō Senshi Porygon", hundreds of viewers experienced epileptic seizures from the episode's visuals.

Polybius

This urban legend, often regarded as a creepypasta due to its subsequent popularization online, concerns an alleged 1981 arcade game. The game is said to be similar to Tempest, except that it contains seizure-inducing flashes and subliminal messages that would lead to players' suicide, before men in black collected the data to use it on others. Different versions of the story claim that the game was part of MK Ultra, or simply a glitchy early version of Tempest that was later renamed Polybius.

Sonic.exe

"Sonic.exe" is a creepypasta surrounding a teenager named Tom, who suffers from a series of supernatural delusions after playing a haunted ROM hack of Sonic the Hedgehog. The story describes the details and contents of the hack, which purportedly features gory and disturbing content.

Analysis

Shira Chess, an assistant professor of mass media arts at the University of Georgia, has compared the phenomenon of creepypasta to folklore. However, she notes that instead of being passed down orally over a timespan of generations, creepypasta is created online within hours or days.