So friends, as finals approach and you’re doing all that late night studying, you are bound to get distracted and wander into the weird places of the internet.
The dark depths of various forums and message boards are where scary stories known as “creepypastas” are born. The name is derived from another internet phenomenon known as “copypasta,” which are basically ridiculous posts that get copied and pasted over and over and over. But these are better. These are CREEPY.
My first encounter with creepypasta was on a dark and stormy night in Eames Hall my freshman year. I was studying late into the evening, and after hours and hours of diligent work I decided to reward myself with a short internet break. Somehow I wandered into the badlands of the internet, but feeling brave, I continued on.

Much like Simba’s wanderings into the elephant graveyard, this was a bad idea. The first creepypasta story I came across is a classic one titled, “Gateway of the Mind.” The gist of the supposedly true tale recounts a team of scientists in 1983 conducting a radical experiment where they surgically sever all connections to the subject’s five senses and observe him over time. If you’re interested in reading the whole thing, it can be found here. It’s a little unsettling, but not as bad as some other pastas I’ve read since.
Perhaps the most well known is our tall, dapper friend Slender Man.

Slender Man

Origins: In June 2009, a contest was launched on the Something Awful forums to edit photos to include supernatural things. User Victor Surge posted two black and white photos of children in playgrounds with a tall figure in the background wearing a black suit. He also included text with the photos, describing the figure as “The Slender Man” and dating the photos as taken the day before fourteen children vanished. These descriptions added to the story of Slender Man and helped him go viral.

One of the original Slender Man photos.

Development: Slender Man quickly grew into a viral sensation; fans making more photos, drawings, stories [creepypastas], as well as videos and even games. The first video series involving our dapper faceless man is known as Marble Hornets. It also originated on the Something Awful forums, by user ce gars. The story tells of his friend Alex Kralie, a film school student working on a project called Marble Hornets. After stumbling across something unsettling, Alex abandons the project, dumps all his footage with Jay, and disappears. Jay then begins sifting through the footage and embarks on a creepy journey, all the while documenting his findings on his YouTube channel and Twitter. Apparently Marble Hornets is being turned into a feature length film, produced by Mosaic.



So friends, if you would like to scare yourself into not sleeping so you can stay up and study, I’d recommend watching the Marble Hornets series, browsing the Creepypasta wiki, or perhaps seeing the Evil Dead, the trailer of which Brady just showed me. I will not be sleeping tonight, or ever, and I may be crying right now.

Happy spring everyone!!

-Trudy