About

The McGrady Tape is a creepypasta story about a supposed videotape dropped off at a Blockbuster in McGrady, North Carolina, containing a recording of a person's face looking under a bathroom stall for 40 minutes straight. The story went viral on TikTok in March 2023. The footage used in the viral video, however, is actually from a 2016 YouTube prank video.

Origin

On March 22nd, 2023, TikToker^[1] @creeptime posted a video sharing a story about an unlabeled videotape known as the "McGrady Tape" that was left outside of a Blockbuster in McGrady, North Carolina sometime in 2001. Employees purportedly saw a car drop the tape off and drive away. They retrieved the tape, played it in the backroom and found it contained a silent, 40-minute-long recording of a person staring up at someone from under a bathroom stall. The tape was then supposedly handed to police and a dog determined it had traces of human decomposition on it. The video gained over 4.2 million views in six days.

During the video, @creeptime shows a purported still from the tape of a head staring up from the bottom of a bathroom stall. The still is actually taken from a prank video uploaded by YouTubers^[2] PrankCity on January 4th, 2016, where they prank people using bathroom stalls by putting a mannequin head over and under the stalls (shown below).

Spread

The story spread over the following days. On March 22nd, 2023, Twitter^[3] user @kidhxney posted, "I just scrolled onto a tik tok that has actually deeply unsettled me to the point I had to get up and shut my bedroom door out of terror." Later in the comments, she posted a screenshot of the video, writing, "idk how true it is because I refused to look into it last night but if you’re curious, look up the mcgrady tape on tik tok specifically." On March 23rd, NAYAG^[4] then reported on it.

Search Interest

External References