89 Fun Facts About Creepypasta

Which creepypasta character was jokingly 'removed' in years of his game's official update notes?

Herobrine. Minecraft's legend makes him the dead brother of the game's creator, who says he never had one, haunting players' worlds as a white-eyed copy of the default character.

The creepypasta 'Lavender Town Syndrome' blames eerie music in which video game series?

Pokémon. The tale claims a graveyard town's theme in the first games hid high-pitched tones only children could hear, with tragic results in 1990s Japan; no such incident ever happened.

Which 2001 story is sometimes called the first creepypasta?

Ted the Caver. The Angelfire diary carried so many photos and caving details that readers argued for years over whether it was real; its author later said it grew out of a genuine trip.

MIT's 2017 horror-writing AI, trained on thousands of Reddit scare stories, was named after which author?

Mary Shelley. 'Shelley' went live in October 2017 and wrote its tales in tandem with the public on Twitter, the AI and its human partners taking turns to add lines.

Which subreddit, founded in 2010, became a major home of creepypasta-style horror?

r/nosleep. Its house rule reads 'Everything is true here, even if it's not', so commenters must stay in character and treat each story as something that really happened.

Which fictional 4chan monster from 2005 is retroactively counted as a creepypasta?

The Rake. An anonymous poster opened a thread proposing 'lets make a new monster', and the humanoid creature the board settled on predates the word creepypasta by about two years.

Which Syfy anthology series bases each season on a different creepypasta?

Channel Zero. Screenwriter Nick Antosca built four seasons from stories first posted online, starting with Candle Cove and then the haunted-house tale No-End House.

Which horror creator was to curate a never-made Machinima series about Slender Man and Ben Drowned?

Clive Barker. Machinima announced 'Clive Barker's Creepy Pasta' in 2015 alongside a RoboCop series, but the company closed in 2019 with the show still unmade.

Which American institution has preserved creepypasta sites in its Web Cultures Web Archive?

Library of Congress. Its American Folklife Center treats creepypastas, memes and reaction GIFs as the folklore of the internet age, and began planning the archive in 2014.

"Dead Bart" and "Suicidemouse.avi" belong to which creepypasta subgenre?

Lost episodes. Each poses as a missing instalment of a much-loved cartoon, far darker than anything that aired, turning childhood nostalgia against the reader.

A 2019 SpongeBob SquarePants episode had a scene re-edited for alluding to a creepypasta about which character?

Squidward. His red-eyed double from the creepypasta popped up in 'SpongeBob in RandomLand'; the showrunner called the story 'ridiculous fanfiction', and the shot was later swapped out.

The cursed picture in the creepypasta 'smile.jpg' shows a grinning dog of which breed?

Husky. The tale says the picture torments whoever sees it until they 'spread the word' by showing it to someone else, a curse that conveniently demands reposting.

In the internet legend of the 'black-eyed kids', what do they keep asking strangers for?

To be let inside. In the account usually credited with starting the legend, by Texas reporter Brian Bethel, two kids outside his car insist they 'can't get in' until he lets them.

The Mandela Catalogue is cited as an example of which creepypasta-descended subgenre?

Analog horror. The style imitates old TV broadcasts and tapes; in The Mandela Catalogue, made by an 18-year-old during lockdown, doppelgangers called 'alternates' can even hijack the signal.

In the two doctored photos that introduced Slender Man in 2009, whom does the figure loom behind?

Groups of children. Eric Knudsen captioned the pictures as evidence from a library fire and the day fourteen children vanished, and that scrap of story is what set other users writing.

On which forum was Slender Man born in 2009?

Something Awful. Its users were running a contest to doctor ordinary photographs into convincing 'paranormal images', and one entry arrived with captions that turned it into a story.

Under which pseudonym did Slender Man's creator post the first images?

Victor Surge. He soon came back with another picture and a fake doctor's report about earlier 'victims', and within days other forum users were adding sightings of their own.

What is Slender Man called in the web series Marble Hornets?

The Operator. Marble Hornets also gave the mythos its crossed-circle symbol and the idea that he scrambles any camera or tape recorder he comes near.

Which Minecraft mob is creator Notch's nod to an internet horror monster?

Enderman. The monster is Slender Man: the mob echoes him in its name and its tall, dark, long-limbed look, and it leaves players alone until they look straight at it.

Which free 2012 PC game sent players into dark woods while Slender Man hunted them?

Slender: The Eight Pages. Mark Hadley's free game drew so many downloads that its website went down, and a commercial sequel, The Arrival, followed a year later.

Who played Slender Man in the 2018 Screen Gems film?

Javier Botet. The Spanish actor has Marfan syndrome, and the unusually long limbs and fingers it gave him have made him a go-to performer for creatures such as Mama.

Which Stephen King story did Slender Man's creator, Eric Knudsen, name among his direct influences?

The Mist. He listed it beside Mothman, shadow people and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, saying he wanted something whose motives 'can barely be comprehended'.

In which US state did the 2014 Slender Man stabbing case take place?

Wisconsin. Two 12-year-olds attacked a classmate in Waukesha, and she survived; the Creepypasta Wiki answered the uproar with a blog entry insisting 'We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult'.

Which 2016 HBO documentary examined the stabbing carried out in Slender Man's name?

Beware the Slenderman. Irene Taylor Brodsky's film stays with the two girls' families and asks how and why rather than who, looking hard at untreated childhood mental illness.

Fans often liken Slender Man to the Gentlemen, the silent suited ghouls of which TV series?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the 1999 episode 'Hush' the pale, bald, black-suited Gentlemen steal a whole town's voices, a decade before Slender Man was invented.

What phrase is Jeff the Killer known for whispering?

Go to sleep. In the best-known 2011 version he says it to his brother Liu on the night he snaps, and the line now captions the white-faced image in countless jump-scare pranks.

How much did the 2015 Indiegogo campaign for a Jeff the Killer film raise before closing?

$402. The 2015 campaign was abandoned almost at once; a new adaptation was not announced until August 2026, after the Backrooms film had shown that creepypasta could sell tickets.

The Backrooms originated in a 2019 thread on which 4chan board?

/x/. It is the site's paranormal board; the thread asked for 'disquieting images that just feel off', and a reply to one photo of empty yellow rooms invented the place.

The original Backrooms photo was taken in which Midwestern city?

Oshkosh. The room was the upstairs of an old furniture store being gutted for a hobby shop in 2002, and nobody traced the photo there until online sleuths did in 2024.

Which YouTuber's 2022 Backrooms short grew into a web series and a hit 2026 film?

Kane Parsons. He was 16 and had taught himself the free 3D software he used to build the short's endless rooms on his home computer.

Which studio released the 2026 Backrooms feature film?

A24. The film cost about $10 million and needed only two weekends to pass Marty Supreme as the highest-grossing release in the studio's history.

In the original Backrooms post, what verb describes slipping out of reality?

Noclip. It is a cheat code that lets players pass through walls and floors; the post imagines doing the same to reality by accident and landing in endless yellow rooms.

Which offshoot of the Backrooms swaps yellow offices for endless white-tiled, water-filled rooms?

The Poolrooms. They grew out of Jared Pike's 'Dream Pools', renders he began posting in 2020 to practise 3D modelling, and fans adopted them as a rare safe corner of the Backrooms.

Which Zelda game is Ben Drowned based on?

Majora's Mask. The story opens with a college student picking up an unlabelled Nintendo 64 cartridge at a yard sale, 'Majora' scrawled on it in marker and a stranger's save file inside.

Under what pen name did Alexander Hall create Ben Drowned?

Jadusable. Hall, then a college student, wrote every post in character as the cartridge's unlucky buyer, so the pen name is also the name of the story's narrator.

In the creepypasta Ben Drowned, the ghost BEN haunts the player as an eerie statue of which character?

Link. The frozen, grimacing copy of the hero is a real figure from the game, and in the story it trails the player everywhere, turning up out of nowhere.

What is the name of the cult in Ben Drowned's second arc?

The Moon Children. Hall built the cult a fake website for readers to pick apart, which turned the second arc from a ghost story into something closer to an alternate reality game.

Ben Drowned's final arc, Awakening, ended in 2020 on which fitting date?

Halloween. Its author had left the story hanging in July 2011, then came back nine years later and spent from March to 31 October 2020 finishing it.

What does SCP stand for in SCP Foundation?

The site's motto is "Secure, Contain, Protect".

SCP-3008, one of the SCP Wiki's best-loved entries, is an endless version of which chain's store?

IKEA. People trapped in its endless showroom build forts out of the stock, because when the lights go off at closing time the faceless figures in staff uniform turn violent.

What lets anyone legally sell a game or film based on the SCP Foundation?

A Creative Commons licence. The wiki took it on almost by accident when it moved to a new host in 2008, and it means no company can ever own the stories outright.

Which 2012 game brought a wave of new members to the SCP Wiki?

SCP – Containment Breach. Finnish developer Joonas Rikkonen gave it away free, and videos by YouTubers such as Markiplier and PewDiePie carried the wiki's monsters far beyond its own readers.

Which 2019 shooter, set in a secret bureau that locks away paranormal objects, was largely inspired by the SCP Foundation?

Control. Sam Lake's story of a hidden agency that contains things which break the laws of reality grew out of the wiki's case files, which Kotaku says 'largely inspired' the game.

Who wrote the creepypasta Candle Cove?

Kris Straub. The web cartoonist put it online in 2009 among his tales of a fictional town, Ichor Falls, on terms that let readers copy it anywhere, and they did.

The creepypasta Candle Cove is told entirely as what?

Posts on a nostalgia forum. Strangers swap ever-darker memories of a 1970s children's puppet show, until one learns from his mother that he had only ever been staring at static.

The author of Candle Cove says the idea came from an article in which publication?

The Onion. Its joke story 'Area 36-Year-Old Still Has Occasional Lidsville Nightmare' was about a grown man still troubled by a real 1970s Sid and Marty Krofft children's show.

What is the villain of the fictional Candle Cove show called?

The Skin-Taker. The story's narrators first take a moustached puppet for the villain, then recall he was only the sidekick to a skeleton pirate dressed in children's skin.

Which Harry Potter actress starred opposite Paul Schneider in Syfy's 2016 adaptation of Candle Cove?

Fiona Shaw. Aunt Petunia herself played the mother of a child psychologist who comes home to investigate the disappearance of his brother and other children decades earlier.

Which web series by Candle Cove's author is a spin-off of the story?

Local 58. It is named for Channel 58, the station said to have aired Candle Cove, and it tells its stories through hijacked broadcasts and public service announcements.

The 'This Man' hoax, built on an identikit sketch, said people everywhere kept seeing one stranger where?

In their dreams, claimed a website set up by Italian marketer Andrea Natella. He later admitted inventing it all and basing the sketch on a photo of his father as a young man.

The gaunt, long-haired figure of the viral 'Momo Challenge' hoax was really a photograph of what?

A sculpture by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso, first shown in public in 2016. He threw it away in 2018 after its rubber and plant oils had rotted, months before the panic over the hoax peaked.

The real room in the original Backrooms photo, tracked down in 2024, was being refitted as what?

A hobby shop: a HobbyTown branch photographed its new premises, a former furniture store, for a renovation blog. The picture sat online for years before it became the internet's favourite endless maze.

In 'The Russian Sleep Experiment', what do researchers use to keep five prisoners awake for fifteen days?

A stimulant gas, pumped into a sealed chamber, turns the prisoners violent and leaves them craving more of it. The gaunt figure in the photo usually shared with the story is really an animatronic prop.

Loab, a red-cheeked woman who went viral in 2022 as a new kind of cryptid, was produced by what?

An AI image generator kept returning her after artist Steph Maj Swanson asked for the opposite of a prompt. Feeding her picture back in produced ever gorier results, earning her the label of first AI-generated cryptid.

A grim fan theory shared as creepypasta claims the Rugrats babies exist only in the mind of which character?

Angelica Pickles conjures her playmates in the theory because the real babies never survived. Similar bleak rewrites exist for Ed, Edd n Eddy and Phineas and Ferb.

The Lavender Town Syndrome legend may echo a real 1997 anime broadcast that gave hundreds of viewers what?

Seizures struck hundreds of viewers in Japan when one anime episode set off photosensitive epilepsy. The legend swaps that broadcast for eerie music on a Game Boy cartridge.

The Backrooms are a famous example of which internet aesthetic of eerily empty, in-between places?

Liminal spaces show ordinary, usually busy places completely empty and stripped of context. Some writers credit the Backrooms with starting the whole aesthetic.

Which towering Trevor Henderson monster lures prey into the forest by mimicking human voices?

Siren Head stands 40 feet tall, a withered body topped by two rusted loudspeakers. Shown a line-up of internet monsters, manga master Junji Ito picked it as the best.

In the creepypasta 'Abandoned by Disney', which colour-inverted mascot costume pulls off its own head?

Mickey Mouse, in photo-negative colours, waits in a 'mascots only' room at Mowgli's Palace, a resort the company supposedly built and deserted. Author Slimebeast posted the story in 2012.

Which TV series spoofed Slender Man in 'Thinman', a 2014 episode whose monster proves to be a hoax?

Supernatural revealed its 'Thinman' as two ordinary men, a deputy and his accomplice, trading on an internet legend. Law & Order: SVU drew on the same mythos that year in 'Glasgowman's Wrath'.

Writers often liken creepypasta to which 1990s online nuisance that spread hoaxes and urban legends?

Chain emails spread hoaxes and urban legends by threatening anyone who failed to forward them. The word creepypasta appeared around 2007, a twist on copypasta, slang for text copied and pasted from board to board.

Which legendary 1981 arcade game supposedly gave Portland players amnesia while men in black collected data?

Polybius was almost certainly invented to promote the website coinop.org, where it first appeared. It echoes real events of 1981, when two Portland players fell ill and the FBI raided the city's arcades days later.

In the creepypasta 'Dead Bart', a fake Simpsons episode, Bart dies after being sucked out of what?

A plane window, broken by Bart himself on a family flight, sends him falling to his death. The 'episode' ends in a graveyard whose tombstones carry the names of every Simpsons guest star.

In the creepypasta Sonic.exe, which sidekick is the first character the player controls and loses?

Tails goes first, followed by Knuckles and Doctor Eggman, each killed at the end of a level. The story was pulled from the Creepypasta Wiki in 2014 after complaints about its quality.

Which actress played Wren, one of four friends who watch a summoning video in the 2018 film Slender Man?

Joey King made the film in the same year as her Netflix hit The Kissing Booth. Shot in Massachusetts, it took $51.7 million worldwide on a $10 million budget.

Which Riverdale actor led the podcast drama of 'Borrasca', a horror story first serialised on Reddit?

Cole Sprouse voiced Sam Walker, whose family moves to a former mining town in Missouri. The story's success got its author, Rebecca Klingel, hired to write for Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House.

In Candle Cove, a mother reveals that her son's favourite pirate puppet show was really half an hour of what?

TV static was all the screen ever showed, his mother says, though he would sit and watch it for thirty minutes. Until then the grown-up fans recall screaming marionettes and a young heroine named Janice.

Japan's Red Room Curse legend says death follows the sight of what on a computer screen?

A pop-up ad that cannot be closed slowly spells out a question about a red room. The legend grew from an interactive Flash animation uploaded to GeoCities in the late 1990s.

The web series Petscop pretends to be footage of an unfinished 1997 puzzle game for which console?

PlayStation footage, credited to a fake studio called Garalina, kept viewers guessing for 30 months. Creator Tony Domenico revealed himself, and that it was all fiction, only after the finale.

Which creepypasta entity, born from doctored cartoons, gave its name to glitchy text stacked with accent marks?

Zalgo began with cartoon characters redrawn bleeding from the eyes and praising an unseen horror. The stacked marks are real Unicode combining characters, and enough of them have crashed messaging apps.

In the creepypasta 'Killswitch', what does the rare 1989 horror game do once a playthrough comes to an end?

Deletes itself, so nobody can replay it, and only 5,000 copies of the Czechoslovak game were said to exist. Players guide either a woman named Porto or a ghost called Ghast.

In 'The Expressionless', what is clamped in the jaws of the blank-faced woman who walks into a hospital?

A kitten, which she pulls out and throws aside before collapsing on a bed. Set at Cedars-Sinai in June 1972, the tale turns when doctors try to sedate her and her look never changes as she attacks them.

In 'Suicidemouse.avi', which real film critic finds the cursed reel while reviewing shorts for a Disney DVD set?

Leonard Maltin really did host the Walt Disney Treasures DVDs, which lends the tale its plausibility. In the story he walks out partway through, leaving an employee to watch the ending alone.

In Ben Drowned, the ghost in the cartridge begins talking to the narrator through which real chatbot?

Cleverbot, a real online chatbot, becomes the ghost's mouthpiece once the haunting spreads beyond the game. BEN also changes the wallpaper on the narrator's computer.

In Dathan Auerbach's creepypasta-born novel Penpal, a kindergarten class sends letters tied to what?

Balloons carry the children's letters, and the replies are plotted on a classroom map. The narrator's reply is a single blurry Polaroid, the first sign that someone has been following him.

Eric Heisserer, author of the web horror tale The Dionaea House, earned an Oscar nomination for writing which film?

Arrival earned Heisserer a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. His career began when Warner Bros. bought The Dionaea House, a story told through blogs about a predatory home found in many places at once.

Which veteran creature performer played the faceless stalker in the 2015 film Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story?

Doug Jones is the man beneath the Faun of Pan's Labyrinth and the Amphibian Man of The Shape of Water. Here he wears a plain suit and has no features at all.

Which object class does the SCP Foundation give anomalies that are exceedingly difficult to keep locked up?

Keter does not mean dangerous, only hard or costly to hold. By the site's 'locked box' test, a button that could destroy the universe counts as Safe, because it does nothing when left alone.

SCP-096, which the SCP Foundation nicknames the 'Shy Guy', relentlessly hunts down anyone who does what?

Sees its face, and the creature covers it, screams and weeps for a minute or two, then runs to the viewer wherever they are. Even a photograph or video recording is enough to set it off.

SCP-049, a humanoid held by the SCP Foundation, bears the appearance of which figure from medieval medicine?

A plague doctor, though the robes and ceramic mask appear to have grown out of its body. It is cordial with staff until it senses what it calls 'the Pestilence' in someone.

In The Mandela Catalogue, what name is given to the shape-shifting impostors that steal their victims' identities?

Alternates psychologically torture their victims and can hijack TVs, computers and car GPS units. Alex Kister began the series at seventeen, filming at home with friends as the cast.

In The Mandela Catalogue, the leader of the impostors invading Mandela County poses as which archangel?

Gabriel is the disguise, and the series heavily implies that the figure behind it is Satan. Its creator has said the story grew out of his own crisis over religion.

Sad Satan, a murky 2015 horror game posted by a little-known uploader, was supposedly found where?

On the dark web, claimed the uploader, who said an anonymous subscriber had sent him the address. Copies that circulated later differed from his footage, and one carried malicious files.

Which creepypasta ritual has players knock 22 times on a wooden door, then evade a summoned figure until 3:33 a.m.?

The Midnight Game calls for a candle, salt, matches, paper and a drop of the player's own blood. It surfaced on 4chan in 2010 and has since been turned into films, books and video games.

In the smile.jpg creepypasta, how can a tormented viewer end the nightmares the cursed picture brings?

By showing it to others, which passes the curse along. The story claims the picture first appeared on a bulletin board system in 1992.

Which Brian Russell creepypasta, about a sinister walk-through attraction, became a 2017 season of a Syfy anthology?

The No-End House follows friends through a house of horrors that may be more than a tourist stop. Later seasons adapted tales of a hidden cellar door and of woods combed by search teams.

Which Marvel actress voiced journalist Alice Sharman in the podcast of the Reddit serial The Left Right Game?

Tessa Thompson also co-produced the 2020 podcast, in which a reporter joins a convoy testing a route said to lead out of our reality. Amazon later bought the rights for a screen adaptation.

A famous creepypasta about an NES cartridge haunted by a demon called Red twists a game starring which monster?

Godzilla is the star of the real game, Monster of Monsters, which the story fills with creatures that were never in it. Its author also drew the custom sprites behind the fake screenshots.

The creepypasta video 'The Wyoming Incident' purports to show hackers hijacking what in a rural county?

A television signal in Niobrara County is cut into by grey, bodiless faces and a piercing tone said to make viewers ill. The story adds that the hackers were never caught.