Creepypasta

About

Creepypasta is a form of Copypasta that consists of short horror stories that are often posted on message boards or sent via email. Many are meant to be legitimately scary and unnerve the reader, while others are intentionally written to be silly or incoherent.

Origin

The exact origin of creepypasta online is currently unclear. Early forms of creepypasta took the form of chain letter emails that were popular in the 1990s. According to Wikipedia:^[1]

There are many forms of chain email that threaten death or the taking of one’s soul by telling tales of other’s deaths, such as the Katu Lata Kulu chain email, stating that if it is not forwarded, the receivers of the message will be killed by the spirit. Another involved an email involving a homicidal Mickey Mouse, who will intrude the recipient’s domain to kill him or her unless sent to the number of recipients (25). Any lower they will suffer death, injury, paranoia, and bad luck.

Creepypastas became popular on the image board 4chan, and the earliest known archived thread^[2] dates back to July 6th, 2007.

Spread

A TV Tropes page for creepypasta^[12] was created on December 3rd, 2010. A New York Times article titled “Bored at Work? Try Creepypasta, or Web Scares”^[11] was published on November 12th, 2010. A Facebook^[13] fan page has 9,277 likes as of October 28th, 2011. Creepypasta archives can be found on various sites including Creepypasta.com^[9], the Creepypasta Wiki^[10], Tumblr^[6], the SCP Foundation^[7], and Microhorror.^[5]

Notable Creepypastas

The Russian Sleep Experiment

The Old Lady

Bad Dream

Candle Cove

Lavendar Town Suicides

Usage in Humor

A parody form of creepypasta, sometimes referred to as “retarded creepypasta”^[4] or just “bad creepypasta”^[3], is intentionally silly, anti-climatic or intellectually incoherent. Notable examples of this kind of creepypasta include “Then Who Was Phone?”, and “Skeleton Popped Out.”

A FEW YEARS AGO A MAN WAS WALING DOWN A ROAD BECAUSE HIS CAR BROKE DOWN AND HE SAW A CAR COMING UP BEHIND HIM SO HE STUCK OUT HIS THUMB TO HITCH HIKE AND THE CAR STOPPED AHEAD OF HIM. HE RAN UP TO THE PASSENGER SIDE AND OPENED THE DOOR. WHEN HE OPENED THE DOOR A SKELETON POPPED OUT!

Video Creepypasta

Several creepypastas are accompanied by video uploads on YouTube that help illustrate and provide addition depth to the story. Notable examples include Smile.jpg, The Grifter, Squidward’s Suicide, Ben Drowned and suicidemouse.avi. The creepypasta video titled “The Scariest Picture on the Internet” was uploaded to YouTube on September 18th, 2010 and has received 366,823 views as of October 28th, 2011.

Search

Search queries for “creepypasta” began to pick up in August of 2007, around the same time the earliest archived 4chan threads were posted.

External Links