Luke W. Henderson · Follow
11 min read · Mar 13, 2023
A comprehensive breakdown of the internet’s darkest folklore
I didn’t read creepypastas in my childhood, but I was always aware of their existence. I knew about Slenderman, that they came from the internet, and that these weird, nearly convincing stories had a very specific style.
Imagine my bewilderment when I came across a newer article about creepypastas that described them as “scary stories on the internet”. Even though I only had a vague knowledge of them, I knew that wasn’t correct. They were much more than that.
So, I dove into the archives of creepypastas and familiarized myself with the media that had impacted me as a youth, but I had never read. Through this article, I hope to deeply analyze these stories in a way that celebrates and elevates them beyond that simple definition.
The Medium
The first thing that must be accounted for when discussing creepypastas is where and how they were published. Much like how rules make a sport, the medium influences how art is created and distributed.
Creepypastas were mainly crafted for posting on internet forums that focused on the spooky and occult. Forums were popular in the 90s and 2000s as a way to discuss and share things of common interest among interested internet users. They are largely where the seeds of modern fandom culture germinated.
What made forums unique was that there was light moderation and posts and comments would be packaged together under one page. Users could be largely anonymous and find an entire discussion on a single piece of writing or picture with one click.
Because of the anonymity, users would often copy and paste text to these forums either to share something they found with the larger community, as inside jokes, or convince others that these things actually happened to the original poster. These types of posts eventually came to be called copypasta.
This is where the term creepypasta originated. Using the model of copypasta, users would find or craft their own horror stories which would then be shared by others typically without giving credit to the source.
These features of forums influenced everything that would make a creepypasta which will be discussed more in-depth later.
This mass sharing gave these stories the feeling of urban legends or campfire stories. Like any story retold time and time again, the details would become warped and varied as they spread.
Because of this, authorship can be difficult or impossible to determine. Sites like Creepypasta.com have attempted to track who first shared these stories and when, but many are still anonymous. What a reader experienced depends entirely on where and when they first read a creepypasta and who shared it.
Without these internet forums, creepypastas wouldn’t be as fascinating a phenomenon. The medium where these stories were popularized shaped what was possible and successful in their writing.
Types of Creepypasta
In my reading, I discovered that most creepypastas can be boiled down to two types: those meant to convey a firsthand experience or historical hearsay, and ones that create a lore for a creepy image. While not perfect, these two categories are helpful to explain the “how” of writing a creepypasta.
Examples of the first category can be found in creepypastas like Ben Drowned, 1999, or Sonic.exe. These stories are all written as retellings of spooky events that happened to the authors either in the present day or many years ago.
Some others in this category are not about the authors themselves, but supposed historical events. The most famous of these is likely The Russian Sleep Experiment where the author claims to be disseminating hidden tales of grotesque scientific practices. What links these types is a heavy focus on convincing readers.
The other category focuses less on appearing true and more on developing backstories and explanations for creepy images shared on these forums. Some of the most famous creepypastas, like Slenderman, Jeff the Killer, and Smile Dog originated in this form.
Fandom is more of an influence in these types of stories. Those privy to the original images wanted to participate in a network of shared character development and generate lore as a community. Eventually, someone would craft a story deemed acceptable by the group and the picture and story would be shared together as a creepypasta.
Despite the differing origins of these two types, both have similar writing styles that are the final key to the unique craft of this genre.
Style of a Creepypasta
Point of View
As previously stated, many creepypastas were written to convince readers that the events were factual and experienced by the author. Because of this, the authors tended to rely on first-person writing. Since they are typically the main character of the story, this perspective makes sense.
Third-person can make the reader feel removed from the story and deliver details that would be unknown to the perspective character. First-person feels more intimate and if details are framed as the character’s experience, there is less room to declare something as contradictory.
“The piece of paper had a website address on it, I would rather not say what it was, for reasons you’ll see in a second. I entered the address into my browser, and I came to a site that was completely black, except for a line of yellow text, a download link.”
- From Dead Bart
Altogether, this makes first-person the easiest and preferred point of view for creepypasta authors. However, third-person was used when the story was written like historical reporting or was a part of the second category previously mentioned.
Stories like Gateway of the Mind, Polybius, and The Russian Sleep Experiment were written like a third-person report likely because their events are more extreme than other creepypastas and would prompt more questions if the author claimed firsthand experience.
Changing the perspective in this instance makes them feel more believable. Third-person instantly gives an air of hearsay and directs any potential questions on speculation rather than the author’s experience.
“In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God.”
- From Gateway of the Mind
Outside of this type of story, third-person becomes exceedingly rare with Jeff the Killer and Slenderman being notable exceptions.
Setting
Most creepypastas were set in the present day or during the author’s childhood. While the easiest explanation is that they are drawing influence from their own experience, two other considerations might have made it more common: these stories needed to be convincing, but not verifiable outside of the author’s retelling, and referencing relevant pop culture with preexisting creepy associations helped do this.
Despite the most famous stories being written in the late 2000s-early 2010s, when online gaming and social media were plentiful, they focused on pieces of media and technology from around a decade before. For example, Ben Drowned uses a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and 1999 centers around a local cable television channel.
Both of these stories use media unique to their respective eras that are nearly impossible to duplicate, so the reader has to trust the author’s retelling. Since games stored their memory on the cartridge, only someone with the exact copy from Ben Drowned could verify the story. Likewise, someone would have needed to watch the same local channel at the exact time mentioned in 1999, or somehow had a videotape of the episodes.
These pieces of media also rely on the audience’s memory of quasi-eerie bits from popular media to sell their believability. Ben Drowned uses a statue generated by The Elegy of Emptiness song because it generates a statue of Link, the main character of Legend of Zelda, with a blank stare and painful-looking grin that players likely already thought was unsettling. Similarly, 1999 reminds many of shows like Barney & Friends which was creepy to many, myself included, because of the costumed actor’s mask with glossy, unmoving eyes and their disembodied voice.
Using pop culture references incidentally utilizes a communications theory called the narrative paradigm theory. This theory explains that humans have a sort of narrative logic based on how believable a story appears and how well it fits within previously accepted stories (called narrative probability and narrative fidelity respectively).
Using pop culture helps these stories seem true to the reader because they use media that readers already relate with uncomfortable experiences (narrative fidelity) and toe the line of absurdity enough that they could be plausible (narrative probability).
This combined with irreplicable media makes creepypasta readers more likely to consider them narratively sound. While likely a mix of conscious decisions or accidental creativity, the settings of these stories are an essential part of a creepypasta’s charm and flavor of spooky storytelling.
Writing Techniques
A creepypasta author’s goal of convincing anonymous readers influenced many aspects of their writing and delivery sometimes to the point of creating their unique tropes. Copycats and writers wanting to participate in the community turned what once occurred in a single story into an expected style choice to be considered a true creepypasta.
Timelines
Some writers would organize their stories into a timeline of events starting with when they discovered the occult or supernatural thing and continuing day by day until they either vanquished the thing or escaped from it.
Prominent examples include Psychosis, which begins the story on Sunday and ends with Date Unknown after five days of entries or Ben Drowned which labels its parts by the number of days since the author was given the haunted game.
Part of this organization stems from these stories originating on forums. The writer might have shared a bit each day or over a couple of weeks to convince readers these events were happening in real-time. Others were organized in parts but shared in their entirety like a journal or report after the fact.
This style adds much suspense to these stories and if written in first-person, truly sell that the author is experiencing something terrifying. Disseminating the story a day at a time also makes it more concrete than simply saying “this one time this thing happened to me” and thus, more believable.
Also, sharing the story in pieces gave the audience a chance to participate by asking questions in the comments or using emails supplied by the author. This only added to a story’s believability because the writer could take the comments and integrate them into the next installment of their alleged horror.
Justifying Grammatical Errors & Clunky Syntax
Thanks to famous creepypastas like Sonic.exe, most people assume they are badly written stories riddled with terrible grammar. While most of these aren’t as egregious as that one, misplaced commas and odd sentences became a feature, not a bug, of them.
In some instances, these authors would justify it as a part of the story, their typos, and repetitive sentences as a result of them being scared or losing sleep.
“So now I’m back here writing down the rest of my thoughts and recording what happened, sorry if some of this has grammatical errors and whatnot, I’m running on no sleep here.”
- From Ben Drowned
“In an effort to present this experience in as accurate light as possible I will type my journal as I wrote it: sans grammar check. Please overlook my errors.”
- From Ted the Caver
Other stories like Candle Cove or Smile Dog include supposed emails and copy/pasted forum posts where typos and bad grammar would be more common.
However, many creepypastas do not explain away their writing flaws. Some sort of implies that the author is scared and writing hastily, but others simply have bad grammar with no explanation.
Regardless, this phenomenon happened enough times in enough famous creepypastas to become a stylistic feature of the genre.
Claiming Disbelief
To heighten how crazy or terrible these events were, creepypasta authors often write about how they aren’t “religious” or don’t believe in “spiritual stuff”.
“I have held on to my scepticism and rationality for dear life, I have allowed them to define me, but this morning I was presented with verifiable, physical evidence. Evidence of what I do not know, but it cannot be ignored…”
- From Bedtime
Like the other tropes, this is another tool to convince the reader these events are real. The author shares their disbelief with the audience, admitting that the events are absurd, but that they wouldn’t be sharing these things unless they were true.
In a way, it’s the author claiming to also be a part of the audience while downplaying the unrealistic parts. It’s a desperate plea for their readers to believe these ridiculous terrors and adds to the feeling of dread that permeates creepypastas.
Overly Detailed Explanations
Authors of creepypasta have a habit of providing extremely specific details and justifications for parts of the story. While some of these tropes feel like conscious decisions, this one could go either way, either exemplifying a balancing act of believability or completely crashing the story.
A good example of this can be found in the Disney-inspired story Suicidemouse.avi:
“The cartoon was actually 9 minutes and 4 seconds long. This is what my source emailed to me, in full (he is a personal assistant of one of the higher executives at Disney, and acquaintance of Mr. Maltin himself)”
This story takes the reader through a disturbing Mickey Mouse video in a detailed minute-by-minute breakdown, but it doesn’t take the reader out of the story because of how it’s paced and how it’s written. The author gives an exact length of the video once and details each bit as “the 6th minute”, “the 7th minute” etc. It’s specific, but not so much that it feels rehearsed.
On the opposite end, sometimes this specificity pulls the reader out of the horror. Most infamous and extreme for this is Sonic.exe which excessively explains the precise number of seconds for each event. The volume and specificity of time feel forced and makes this story less convincing.
Now, most creepypastas aren’t nearly as bad as this, but quirky explanations continue to pop up. Some add to the murkiness of the story and others chip away at the illusion.
Conclusion
While I can’t control how a term is used colloquially, I would argue that creepypasta deserves better use than just internet horror stories. Those famous stories created a genre that could only have emerged under the circ*mstances of early internet culture.
These stories are reflective of their time like young adult vampire romances and post-apocalyptic novels and should be cherished as such. While those novels demonstrate the values of a post-9/11 US seeking escapist literature, creepypastas show the values of a world just beginning to see the possibilities of an online presence.
So, because I had my own qualms with that vague definition, I’ll end this by proposing my own:
Creepypastas are a genre of horror developed in early internet forums intended to convince readers of their veracity and be shared widely via copying and pasting to other avenues of the web.
