About

Majora's Mask Creepypasta, also known as "Ben Drowned", is an online legend about a haunted The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask cartridge for the Nintendo 64 video game console. It is often associated with the phrase "You shouldn't have done that" and is popular among users of 4chan's /x/ paranormal board.

Origin

On September 7th, 2010, 4chan^[6] user Jadusable posted a thread about his experiences with a haunted Majora's Mask cartridge for the N64. He explained that after receiving a suspicious looking Majora's Mask cartridge from an old man, he went to his dorm-room to play it and noticed it had a save file named "BEN" on it. He decided to ignore it and created a new file, but during the course of the game characters would refer to him as "BEN" at various moments. Figuring it would help the problem, Jadusable deleted the "BEN" save file, but this caused characters to not refer to his name at all. He then attempted to perform the "4th day glitch", a hack that allows players to get an entire extra day to the game, and was ported to the Majora boss battle at the end of the game. He noticed that text was being displayed incorrectly, and the music being played was a reversed version of the game's "Song of Healing" before being ported back to Clock Town. At Clocktown he discovered that the textures were missing, the music was distorted and the town was empty of the normal characters. He began posting links to YouTube videos he claims to have recorded while playing.

Free.wmv and TheTruth.txt

In the description of the fourth video in the series, a person claiming to be Jadusable's roommmate claimed that Jadusable was moved out of his dorm but gave him a flash drive containing the final video "free.wmv" and a text document titled "TheTruth.txt." He was told not to release these videos until September 15th, 2010, at 23:04 PM. The text file was released on Mediafire^[8] that contained Jadusable's notes taken during all his experiences. He claimed that Ben started haunting his computer and would communicate with him through Cleverbot. He warned that no one should believe anything coming from his YouTube account after September 12th, 2010. Shortly after, Jadusable's YouTube channel began to change with his profile image turned into an Elegy of Emptiness Statue painting, and his location became "Now I am everywhere."

Spread

A video outlining some of the methods used to create the "Ben Drowned" videos was uploaded to YouTube by HolyHeeroYui on September 12th, 2010.

The entire creepypasta was posted to the Within Hubris^[7] forums on February 21st, 2011. The story has been posted on Joystiq, Kotaku, Xugo Gaming, FunnyJunk and Inu's Creepy Stuff. Facebook^[5] fan page with 6,270 likes as of October 27th, 2011.

Catchphrases

Several catchphrases were popularized by the creepypasta including "You shouldn't have done that…", "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?", "YOUR TURN" and "YOU'RE NEXT."

Arc 2

On September 17, 2010, a comment was posted to Jadusable's YouTube channel that linked to the now defunct youshouldnthavedonethat.net. According to Jadusable Wiki^[1], the website was for some sort of cult known as the "Moon Children".

"At first, it seemed like an innocent cultist site (well, as innocent as a cultist website could be). It was a simple layout with seven tabs: Theories, The Truth, About, Contact Us (with a subpage called Press Room), Creed, Search, and Home. Past this point, viewers reportedly started to see things: references."

On September 20, 2010, Jadusable revealed that the website was fake, and the entire story was something he came up with in college.

"I have a ridiculous amount of mail right now, but rest assured I will get to each and every one of your letters. Thank you for your interest in this story and thank you for supporting it. Just so everyone is clear – the story is not over yet, but it is paused for now. Check the menu bar for new links being put up of the Archive/Stories/Q&A, these are all coming tomorrow."

Fanart

Several pages worth of fanart can be found on deviantArt under the tag "#majoras mask creepy."^[17]

Several songs were posted on YouTube as honor to the Creepypasta:

Hubris Arc

A forum board known as Within Hubris was launched on February 17, 2011.^[3] Strange occurrences started happening within the site's few days of existence. Users started noticing strange events occurring inside the protected forum known as Wayward Horizon. Although they were able to see posts being made, they were not able to read them due to a password keeping them out. A password was finally discovered, but changed after a couple of days. Nevertheless, Guide, the Forum's main admin, revealed an upcoming trailer to a game that was being released as the "Third Arc" of the story. Several months later, on July 15th, 2011, Jadusable placed the game on an indefinite hold. ^[4] An early version of the game was released in April 23 ^[18] , and later information on Alex Hall's new project was announced.

April Fool's Joke

On April 1st 2012, Jadusable uploaded a video on his Youtube account parodying his own videos, but instead used Goron Link as a character, and having him dance to Jibbs' King Kong. The video received backlash from the fanbase and initiated several discussions against Jadusable admin's account, Guide, in the Within Hubris forums.

Videos

Search Interest

Search queries for both "majoras mask creepypasta" and "ben drowned" picked up in September of 2010, the same month it was first posted to 4chan's /x/ board.

External References