Polybius: Was an Arcade Game Secretly Used to Experiment on Players?
In 1981, two young players became seriously ill around the same Beaverton-area arcade. Twelve-year-old Brian Mauro ended an extraordinary Asteroids endurance attempt after roughly twenty-eight hours w...
10 Sep 25min
Jeff the Killer: How a Distorted Face Became an Internet Nightmare
Jeff the Killer is one of the defining monsters of early internet horror: a pale face, blackened eyes, an unnatural smile, and the phrase “Go to sleep.” But Jeff was never a documented murderer. He wa...
2 Sep 23min
The Backrooms: What If You Accidentally Fall Out of Reality?
A preserved photograph from a 2002 renovation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin later became the image at the center of the Backrooms, one of the internet’s most enduring horror legends. In May 2019, an image thr...
27 Aug 24min
Smile Dog: The Cursed Image That Wants to Be Shared
Smile Dog, also called smile.jpg or Smile.dog, is one of the defining image-based horror legends of the early internet. The story centers on a photograph of a dog, usually resembling a husky, with an ...
20 Aug 25min
Sonic.exe: The Haunted Game That Turned Childhood Into Horror
Sonic.exe began as a 2011 creepypasta attributed to JC-the-Hyena: a fictional account of a corrupted Sonic game, a warning from a friend, and a program that seemed to know who was playing it. In Augus...
13 Aug 23min
Ben Drowned: The Haunted Video Game Cartridge
In September twenty ten, an online user named Jadusable claimed to have found an unlabeled Nintendo sixty-four cartridge of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The cartridge contained a save file name...
6 Aug 27min
NoEnd House: The Haunted Attraction That Never Lets You Leave
NoEnd House is one of internet horror’s most enduring haunted-attraction legends: nine rooms, one final exit, and a five-hundred-dollar prize for anyone who can finish. The story, credited to Brian Ru...
30 Jul 30min
Candle Cove: The Children’s Show Nobody Should Remember
Candle Cove began as a short internet horror story by writer and cartoonist Kris Straub, first published online in two thousand nine. It was written as a thread on a fictional nostalgia forum, where a...
23 Jul 28min
