Slenderman, Candle Cove & The Rake: Here Are The Spookiest Stories Born On The Internet

Everyone remembers scary stories shared on sleepovers or on the playground at school, and when the internet hit the '90s, that tradition transferred online. Mostly starting in forums and weird parts of the internet, so-called 'creepypastas' are spooky stories that are shared and built upon until they become urban legends in their own right. Some of the most popular ones have gone on to inspire movies, video games, TV shows, and at least one infamous real-life crime.

Slenderman

Forums like Something Awful were the place to be in the 2000s if you were into weird shit and wanted to find other people like you. Here the legend of Slenderman was born of the imaginations of photoshop aficionados and amateur horror writers, in a thread where people edited photos of children to look like they had a tall, shadowy man in the background. Classic Friday night activity. People latched on and started writing their own 'Slenderman experiences' adding to the legend, including German folklore-style tales from the 16th century, a video game, and now a movie. The whole thing became so popular that in 2014, two twelve-year-old girls lured another out into a wooded park in Milwaukee, USA, and stabbed her 19 times. They claimed they wanted to become Slenderman "proxies" in order to see him and live with him in his mansion in the woods, as you do.

The Expressionless

The Expressionless is a story based on a single photograph of two nurses holding down an extremely creepy-looking mannequin. The black-and-white photo was taken in 1968 by a 'Lord Snowdon' and was titled, 'Student nurses with a waxwork patient', but should have been called, 'Most cursed image of all time', due to how I should never have seen it and probably will die in seven days. The story itself was anonymously posted to the internet sometime around 2012. In it, a woman walks into the Cedar Senai hospital covered in blood, with a face expressionless as a wax doll that, unsurprisingly, makes everyone who sees it highly uncomfortable. She then proceeds to pull a mangled kitten out of her mouth, bares huge, pointed teeth and proclaims, 'I... am... God...' Which is totally fine and will not at all prevent me from sleeping ever again.

The Rake

The Rake originated on the most infamous of internet forums, the hive of scum and villainy that is 4chan's /b/. For those who don't know, 4chan is an online message board where people are basically the worst, and /b/ is the 'random post' section. In late 2005, an anonymous user asked people to create a new scary monster. Originally described as having three eyes, no noticeable mouth and pale skin, this was then elaborated into a short story, in which a couple wake up to what looks like a naked, hairless man at the end of their bed that moves on all fours like a mutated dog. Great! I guess it's time to start running to bed again and leaping on before anything can grab my ankles. Because I totally stopped doing that as an adult.

Candle Cove

Sometime in 2009, web cartoonist Kris Straub wrote a short story that looked like forum posts between people who remembered watching a weird kid's show in the '70s called 'Candle Cove'. As they reminisce on how effed up it actually was — including stuff like puppets pirates, a skeleton called The Skin-Taker, and an episode where the puppets all just scream for half an hour — they finally discover the show never existed. They'd been separately watching it in TV static. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. A great, albeit short, story on its own, Candle Cove was adapted as the first season of horror anthology show Channel Zero in 2016, where it was given a longer plot surrounding one of the characters mentioned in the original story. This is one of my favourites because the forum posts are written super realistically, and it's such a good premise — half-memories of old kid's shows that were really disturbing is actually super relatable. Or is that just me?

Zalgo

Zalgo is less a single story than a weird catchphrase, inserted into comics to make them seem apocalyptic and ominous. In 2004, a Something Awful user posted an edited Archie comic to one of the forums, in which he replaced the dialogue with stuff like, "Zalgo is upon us, Arch," and, "These are the end times. We've got to be prepared. Zalgo!" It's associated with scrambled text, pictures of people bleeding from their eyes, and some kind of unimaginable god who will bring the end of the world. If HP Lovecraft had been alive in the 2000s, we can only assume he'd be doing stuff like this, although the DeviantArt images under the Zalgo hashtag are extremely emo-looking. 

Russian Sleep Experiment

This story emerged back in 2009, when blogging reigned supreme and everyone had a LiveJournal or WordPress. An experiment was performed on five Russian inmates in the '40s, who were told that they'd be gassed with a stimulant, and if they could remain awake for 30 days they'd be given their freedom. From there the story devolves into screaming, faeces smearing, and eerie silences, like any great horror story should. This premise seems kind of cheesy in the beginning, but after imagining the maddened prisoners begging for more drugs, pulling their organs out of their still-living bodies and cannibalising their own limbs, I'll give it props — pretty horrifying. After it was posted on a bodybuilding forum (lol), the story got popular and people started sharing a black-and-white image along with it — something like Gollum but with bigger teeth and black holes for eyes. Turns out it's a Halloween decoration you can get at wholesalehalloweencostumes.com, which is decidedly less spooky.