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Extra Credit 028 - Creepypasta (Patreon)

Published:
2024-10-31 13:00:05
Imported:
2024-10
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Happy Halloween! Let's switch up the candy for some delicious creepypasta!

You likely know the purveyors: 4chan's Paranormal board, the Creepypasta wiki, and Creepypasta.com...

Share your personal favorite creepypastas in the comments and we'll chat about them in next month's feedback episode!

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Comments

Ann Knight

Happy Halloween everyone!

Corey Wittig

I am running my own bookshop now (7 months in and my book club just read Carmilla!) but when I was teaching before, I heard about “creepy pasta” from weird middle schoolers. Never understood though so thanks! Your observation that a lot of these stories reference nostalgia and kids shows made me think of the recent film “I Saw the TV Glow” which I’m in love with and does a LOT of this kind of thing. It’s a PG-13 “horror” film that’s more weird than anything—a deep exploration of coming to terms with one’s true self (filmmaker is a trans woman). I was picking up on references of shows like Pete and Pete, Power Rangers, Buffy etc. really cool and highly recommended to the Strange Studies community!

Ross Clark

Great ep! I've long been a big fan of the creepypasta form, even though the execution usually leaves something to be desired. I think Chris hit the nail on the head at 90% - 10% in terms of interesting stories. It's clear that creepypastas are often the first attempt at creative writing for a lot of people, which while not always engaging to read is exciting to see! Two of the best creepypasta tales I've ever come across (linked below) are The Dionaea House and The Interface Series. Both utilize the familiar creepypasta epistolary form, but the writing comes across as a lot more literary and polished than the popular entries into the genre. Both would be well worth covering at some point! Dionaea House (in original format thanks to The Wayback Machine!) https://web.archive.org/web/20041030020221/http://www.dionaea-house.com/default.htm The Interface Series (WARNING: Addictive! Originally posted in comments on reddit across many subreddits over the course of several months, but helpfully collected in one place for ease of reading.) https://www.reddit.com/r/9M9H9E9/wiki/narrative/

Pete Williams

One aspect that has long annoyed me about creepypasta is the tendency to over explain, especially the "twist" at the end of a lot of them in which whatever ghoul creatures say "we are the darkness that lives inside all of you blah blah". I blame the popularity of the Russian Sleep Experiment on that one. I do appreciate that these are amateur writers doing in for the fun of it, though, and that should be encouraged.

Rick Hound

Have to say I like they mentioned SCP; for me the side that peaked me the most was the Kaktus continuity (based on the writer’s username), which results in revealing the Biblical Noah was a mage and the Flood was made to kill off the Big Foots. There’s even ancient tombs underground that are powered by magical machines that are powered by blood magic. So much potential for a simple thing like an internet writer community.

Bugberry

Being reminded how Creepypastas came about around the time yall started reminded me where I was when I first started listening to yall back in 2009, at 18 right as I was starting college. Had only really began using the internet a lot in the past year so lots of these stories I was well aware of. You didn't really touch on it here, but you have talked about SCP which is basically the most unified example of this concept, which also began in 2007. On the topic of people confusing fiction with reality, I'm reminded of both the Blair Witch Project and Cannibal Holocaust were notorious for their marketing leading people to think what happened was real, with Cannibal Holocaust director even being arrested. There's kind of a whole genre of Creepypastas on video games. Video games often have secrets and glitches that can cause one person's experience to differ wildly from others, and it's not uncommon for freaky things to actual happen like characters faces not loading in correctly or music becoming distorted. Undertale the game has some elements that seem be directly inspired by these kinds of creepypastas, through having the normal experience being a cheery RPG that hides an unsettling 4th wall breaking alternate storyline if you know where to look and what to do.

Brian Pitt

I’m glad you mentioned Ted the Caver! I found that when I was a university student when it was first coming out and I’ve loved it ever since. Someone else wrote another version with an ending where you learn what’s actually in the cave, and of course, it’s much worse than the version that leaves you in suspense. I have to give a shoutout to Dionaea House, another very early creepypasta (2004-2006) in epistolary style about someone investigating a friend’s descent into madness and the horrible secrets they discover. My favorite story in the “haunted video game” category is usually just called “NES Godzilla Creepypasta.” The story is fine, relatively pedestrian, but the really cool part is all of the custom pixel art the author made about the game’s levels and monsters. Here’s one example: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/creepypasta/images/0/02/Moon4.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/340?cb=20130412061035 Other people have come up with with 8-bit OSTs for it too. The Backrooms are a great concept, but the nerd tendency to over-explain has resulted in wikis filled with dozens of other Backrooms “levels”, including one filled with Japanese onsen. I wouldn’t mind being trapped forever in that one.

Allison Albright

Similar to Candle Cove, there's a "lost TV show" intro on YouTube called Shadowbox and I wish someone would actually make the show. The comments are full of people expanding on the lore of it. Really fun stuff. https://youtu.be/_G7Hh8nhM00?si=7YnAR1fKJ2Ic1ssB I love the backrooms and all that liminal space stuff. I went through a photography phase in my early 20s where I took all kinds of pictures of empty and abandoned places and I still connect with that kind of stuff. There's some YouTube backrooms videos that are surprisingly well done. And for other people into that sort of thing, you should also check out the video game Control, which might be one of the best games I've played. The gameplay is super fun and it really captures that backrooms/liminal vibe.

Karl Haikara

I did like the first season of Channel Zero but I haven't watched the other seasons yet. I remember finding out about Creepypastas around 2010 or 2011 or so, my ex at the time was into watching YouTube stuff and there was videos then talking about the slender man and the rake and all that, and I will admit when I first saw the stuff about slender man I didn't really understand if it was supposed to be a real supernatural thing or a story or what as I also did not really grasp what creepy pasta was at first lol. Anyways they're fun for sure some of them are very creepy and I also feel like many newer horror movies are really starting to feel like they're inspired by creepypasta. Even Longlegs this year I felt could have been a creepy pasta

Alex Beal

Loved to hear you guys chat about these! I think I was at just the right age around 2010 to really dive into some of the creepypasta stuff, especially the SCP and NoSleep forums. I was in my early 20s and running the computer section of a college bookstore so had plenty of time to browse the internet. A lot of it I haven't revisited and I doubt all of it holds up, but I have very fond memories of discovering Slenderman and getting super creeped out by the Marble Hornets video series based on it. I don't check the NoSleep subreddit as much these days and really should get back to it, but as it got more and more popular it lost a bit of the magic that it had when it first got started. It had a fun little community feeling where people would engage and theorize in the comments, depending on the story the original poster would follow up. That all still happens but the kayfabe is a little harder to maintain when there are links to the author's facebook page or the title of the first post contains the "Series" tag. That being said I'm definitely not knocking the writers for trying to get something out of the stories they write and post. I've bought several books that started off as NoSleep posts and I've really enjoyed some of the subsequent published work from people who started posting there (shout out to Gas Station Jack). Fun fact (well, fun to me at least): I myself read on a few of the early episodes of the NoSleep podcast. If I recall correctly I had the honor of being the only person other than the host to actually record and submit something almost-listenable for the first episode, and did a a few more stories after that.

Alan Ricks

I’m 10 years younger than you guys and the whole 4chan/Something Awful/Creepypasta thing passed me by at the time as well so it was nice to actually learn where the term comes from. That Russian Sleep one is familiar to me because of short story readings I’ve listened to on youtube and its a fun premise. I likewise came across a creepypasta that I enjoyed on reddit years ago, in the /nosleep subreddit. Its about a search and rescue officer’s experiences in the woods. He relates various things but its the mysterious staircases to nowhere that “litter national parks” that hooked me. I have seen these in real life, they are from old demolished houses but for whatever reason were left behind. So this story had that piece of reality that pulled me in. I remember reading 4 or 5 parts but looking it up now looks like there are atleast 8. Talking about building interactive mixtures of fantasy and reality got me thinking about the genre of Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs. They are games that use real-word media mixed with player involvement, sort of like a live-action roleplaying game with props where people build an immersive story that blends fact and fiction. I remember ARG games from the 90s and early 2000s that would be like a mystery or puzzle that had to be deciphered through text msg’s, phone calls, mail, general internet sleuthing etc. I watch alot of “retro” game reviews on youtube and a video for a lost N64 game named Crow 64 came up. I excitedly watched the little documentary about a lost game that had footage of gameplay and it was presented as real and was very convincing. People thought it was real. The developers story was crazy and there were lots of mysteries involving death and general weirdness. People tracked down every little piece that they thought was part of he puzzle like the Crow language that the Catastrophe Crow character speaks in. It was fun for several months watching people crack different things and unlocking background story.

Mark Simmons

Well, that was good fun! I'm checking out some of the "Backrooms" videos now, and I'd have to say they have a very "House of Leaves" vibe. Speaking of which, my copy of "House of Leaves" is a weirdly hacked-up one with irregularly trimmed pages, which I found in a box on the street. All of which definitely upped the creepy factor, so I recommend that as a book-discovery format.

Jamie Brittain

Season 2 of Channel Zero, which is an adaptation of an excellent Creepypasta called 'The No-End House', is much better than the first. It features a characteristically extraordinary performance from veteran character actor John Carroll Lynch - worth the price of admission alone.

Scott Butler

The Back Rooms sounds a lot like “Hotel Dimension “ from the Laundry Novels by Charles Stross. I don’t think it anything that is ever expanded but just an off hand reference by the main character commenting on the bland uniformity of modern hotels (especially those with conference centres). He supposes that if you wander long enough there is probably a hallway connecting to a hall to a door, etc that would let you seemlessly move from one hotel to another somewhere else in the world. Almost as if all hotels share the same service corridors and back rooms in a Twilight Zone like setting.

The Chet

Loved it, guys. But now that it's over, the time has come for my annual relisten of the Call of Cthulhu episodes while I hand out candy. Of note, Autocorrect had a lot of trouble with "relisten" but didn't blink at the Big C.

Tyler young

As someone who grew up on Creepypastas and was absolutely terrified by many of them, it's been really interesting re visiting some of them now that I'm an adult. Sadly, most of them are pretty much hot garbage that rely on wierd tropes like cartoon characters violently ending their own life, or a monster stealing your kidney (this happens in more stories than you'd expect). However, some stories like No End House, Russian Sleep Expiriment or Penpal really hold up. There's a fantastic podcast on YouTube called Creep Cast that covers a lot of classic internet horror from No Sleep and the Creepy Pasta Wiki that'd I'd recommend to anyone interested in learning more

Steve

Dr Andrea Kitta is a folklorist who looked at Creepypasta and Slender Man in particular. I saw her do a great talk in London on this but she has also got some of this material online here, with others: https://research.library.mun.ca/8417/ She has also moved onto other interactions between Folklore and real life such as vaccination myths and immigrants eating pets which you can find on her YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@DrAndreaKitta/videos and at a recent talk she did for the Library on Congress on Folklore, Conspiracy Theories and Belief: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfVjtAXg4e8.

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

I've always kind of hoped y'all would eventually make contact with SCP. If anyone wants to consume some good SCP entries in a well-made audio format, I highly recommend a YouTube channel named The Volgun.

Jeremy Impson

Wait until Chad and Chris learn about Analog Horror!!

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

Really enjoyed this overview of Creepypasta. I especially appreciated how you drew out the parallels between Creepypasta and what the Lovecraft Circle was doing in the 1920s/30s. I have to say that I feel an even stronger case could be made for their similarities. Chad commented on how doom-scrolling is a "lonely" activity. Well so is reading Weird Tales. You're by yourself, it's just you and the magazine. Or if you're in public - on the bus or train - then your face is buried in the pages, just like how people's faces are buried in their screens. You're not interacting with the people around you, instead its just you and the magazine. If you write into the Eyrie then you get to interact vicariously with other readers but not face-to-face. Pulp magazines like Weird Tales were really the first virtual communities - as literary historian Michael Saler has argued. And while Chris is right that Lovecraft never claimed his stories were true (when asked), he did intentionally present them that way... “No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” - HPL to Clark Ashton Smith, Oct. 17, 1930 And Lovecraft's surviving correspondence testifies to how many people wrote him asking about the reality of Cthulhu, Arkham, and especially the Necronomicon... "I don't wonder that you receive letters inquiring about the Necronomicon. You invest it with so much realism, that it fooled me among others. Until you enlightened me, I thought perhaps there was some such book or manuscript sufficiently fantastic to form the basis of fictionized allusions." - Robert E. Howard to HPL, Apr 1932 And of course there were later writers who did claim their stories were real, like Richard Shaver and Robert Anton Wilson - neither of who I believe you've covered on the show before. The way that fictional Creepypastas like Slenderman have become "real" is fascinating but Lovecraft did it first with the Necronomicon. And of course you didn't mention what is undoubtedly the most successful Creepypasta to make the jump from online into real life: QAnon.

Oleh R

I particularly like when Chad said he “had to learn”something because of this show. I like to think his motivation in creating this podcast was to get away from all that pesky learning (and coast through life on big podcast revenue).

Jim Cannon

This was informative and helpful Hallowe'en content. The only creepypasta I have interacted with directly was "Ted the Caver" and it was really well done, I thought. A great slow build to the conclusion.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Students in my Monster Lit for Art Students course read "Pickman's Model" for class today, and one student appreciated the verisimilitude and straightforward narration: "It reminded me of Six-years-ago Me getting pulled into creepypasta stories online!"

Rickard Åström

Chad, I share your fear of board rooms. At my first job I was taught that meetings are taking time away from actual work and should be limited to the topics and people necessary. EVERY job I worked at since has had this insane affinity to call endless meetings with everyone for droning exposition. For each minute passing you start looking around and wonder how come no one else sees the madness. All these people staring emptily at a person flipping slides and droning monotone facts that could have been an email. Wait.....am I in a cult?!

Michael Cunliffe

I don’t know if your kids were the wrong age Chris, or if your schools had better practices but back in 2019, we had an online safety alert for kids that grew out of Creepypasta. ‘The Momo Challenge’ was supposedly an internet phenomenon where children would receive WhatsApps or texts from Momo, a creepy looking creature that would encourage them to perform increasingly dangerous acts, harming themselves and others. There were also warnings that Momo would appear in seemingly innocent YouTube Videos to scare and tempt children. This got big enough that schools were sending emails to parents and eventually the Children’s Commissioner had to step in and ask people to stop spreading the hoax. Although it had all the hallmarks of an urban legend, including a scary visual that was easily traced to a piece Japanese sculpture I had previously seen, the fact that schools were reporting this risk (coming hot on the heels of the Blue Whale challenge) gave a genuine edge of concern.

Robert Curtin

Backrooms without monsters is so scary to me. I don't mind solitude for extended periods of time, but to know that there's not even an antagonist there, that you will always be alone, not even hate or fear will stir you, that gets me. The Russian Sleep Experiment is my favorite CreepyPasta by far, and was even loosely adapted to the film The Killing Room. I haven't read Ted the Caver, that one sounds fascinating. Last one I'll mention was the Stairs to Nowhere (or whatever it was called) Reddit story that was also good. Not scary per se, but eerie and such a good mood piece. I got to read that one live as it was being updated and it's one of my favorite online experiences. Great episode, glad you guys dived into the pasta!

Derek Scott

Very late to this comment stream but I just re-listened to the Creepypasta show when I was blowing leaves. I missed the onset of Creepypasta as I was a bit older when the major ones first hit and on a hiatus from reading horror. I was aware of them in the abstract though and Candle Cove has proved to be my favorite. Since I was born in ‘85, I still remember watching puppet type shows and how naturally strange some of them were so that story hits for me. Kris Straub later compiled Candle Cove and other stories into “A Visitors Guide to Ichor Falls” which has that famous story and many other genuinely creepy ones loosely set in the area in and around the fictional West Virginia town. A combination of fictionally history and creepy stories, it’s a personal favorite.

Mooncubus

Man I used to love creepypastas. I actually dressed up as Jeff the Killer for Halloween in highschool. I recommend checking out Marble Hornets on YouTube. It's a found footage ARG that involves Slender Man among other things. It's very amateur but it's an interesting ride. It sadly didn't really have a real ending, it just kinda died off. But it's still worth a watch if you're bored one night. ARGs and Analog Horror are a whole other can of worms that wouldn't exist without the Internet, and I definitely recommend delving into some.

Jerrod Brown

The SCP about Cthulhu is amazing. For those who may not know. The SCP foundation has Cthulhu in a containment site. But people will see visions of him in their dreams and create these elaborate ways to break him out. It’s a wild story but it turns out that Cthulhu has no way to stop this power he seems to have over people and just wants to be left alone to chill and play video games. All the while people keep breaking in and committing atrocities and sacrificing in his name and it just grosses him out.

Jimmy Mac

I think you figure out the riddle. It is about loneliness. Isolated figures. Friendless. The folks who get preyed upon, because no one looks in on them. On a less depressing note... I think there is something deliriously fun about scaring the sh*t out of yourself when you are by yourself.