You Have Been Spooked By The Spooky Skeleton

About

You Have Been Spooked By The Spooky Skeleton, stylized as U HAVE BEEN SPOOKED BY THE SCARY SKELETON, is a catchphrase combined with ASCII artwork featuring human skeleton. In online discussions and comments, the ASCII copypasta accompanies a chain letter message indicating that users should repost the image, in a similar vein to the You Have Been Visited By image macros.

Origin

While the origin is unknown, the text was first paired with a different different ASCII of a skull (shown below) in a Adult Swim forum post^[1] and then on a Pastebin^[2] on October 1st and 2nd, 2012.

While the exact origin of the dancing skeleton ASCII copypasta remains unknown, its earliest instances popped up on websites like Steam, Reddit and Vimeo^[3]around Halloween 2013. On October 4th, Steam user JonnyGFlea posted the dancing skeleton ASCII on another user's profile page^[9] (shown below). On October 9th, Redditor Nin_umb submitted a screenshot of the Steam user's comment in a r/Steam^[4] post tiled "So, it has come to this," receiving 490 points (92% upvoted).

The dancing skeleton is created from six Unicode symbols including: Light Shade “░” – 0×2591, Left Half Block “▌” – 0×258C, Right Half Block “▐” – 0×2590, Full Block “█” – 0×2588, Upper Half Block “▀” – 0×2580 and Lower Half Block “▄” – 0×2584.

Spread

Around Halloween 2013, Reddit users began posting bait-and-switch posts, calling out other users by name or by category in the post title and then posting the Spooky Skeleton, with chain mail message attached, in the body. A popular example was by user dustin_yo in r/Braveryjerk on November 5th 2013 ^[5]. The post gained 96 points (99% upvoted).

On November 28, 2013, user xSIXx uploaded video titled SPOOKED to YouTube based on this commenting fad. The video received 6,065 views.

On December 24th, 2013, "spooky skilenton group" was united on Steam.^[6] On October 11th, 2014, Dr.Cokesniff has written it under the definition of 2spooky4me on Urban Dictionary.^[6] A trollpasta SKELETONS WILL EAT YOU was submitted to Trollpasta wiki.^[7] On October 28, 2014, spooky skeleton was posted on Reddit to r/ledootgeneration/. It gained 46 points (92% upvoted).^[8] Two days after, the same ASCII could have been found on r/copypasta/ subreddit with 32 points (87% upvoted).^[9]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References