Creepypasta: How Internet Ghost Stories Became Modern Folklore

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Creepypasta takes its name from 4chan slang around 2007: a horror version of copypasta, the blocks of text users copied and pasted across message boards. Its roots run back to 1990s chain emails and to Ted the Caver, a 2001 story formatted as a personal web journal with dates and photographs. By 2005 anonymous users were crowdsourcing a monster called the Rake, inventing fake historical documents such as a 1602 mariner's log to prove it existed.

This episode follows the genre from its 2010 peak, when the Creepypasta Wiki and Reddit's NoSleep forum launched, through its favorite tricks: first-person narrators, embedded links and doctored images, lost episodes of beloved cartoons, and haunted video games like Ben Drowned and Sonic.exe. It also confronts the real violence tied to these stories, and how Hollywood and the Library of Congress came to treat them as the defining myths of the early internet.

Folklorists call these stories anti-legends: unlike a traditional legend with a moral, they offer no lesson or resolution and aim only to undermine a reader's sense of safety.
Lost episode tales such as Squidward's Suicide, Dead Bart, and SuicideMouse.avi work by turning childhood nostalgia into a threat.
In the 2014 Wisconsin stabbing, two 12-year-old girls attacked a friend to appease Slender Man. Creepypasta.com later posted a disclaimer saying it was a literature site, not a cult.
The Backrooms, an endless yellow office maze born on an image board, is becoming an A24 film directed by Kane Parsons, a 17-year-old YouTube creator.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has archived creepypasta to preserve the development of digital culture.

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