Let me tell you a story and tell me how to prevent it from happening The holidays are just around the corner and there is still a sense of fear that lingers in the air. With a distinct smell of our worst nightmares, the ongoing internet meme known as creepypasta still pushes hard to turn a day of cheer, to a day of fear. But as the expanding creepypasta reaches out to cover all corners of the internet, many forget about the origins of this infinite meme. Creepypasta is an internet meme made of short stories, creepy pictures and other media related files that produce a sense of uncertainty and fear. There are at least four different types of creepypasta. A “haunted image” creepypasta is a story with disfigured and illuding pictures. “Lost episode” creepypasta are based on real shows and reform an episode or character into a horrific image. ‘Ritual” creepypasta are fictitious procedures that invoke entities and paranormal happenings. Lastly, “anecdotes” creepypasta are first person narratives about creepy experiences.
Though the creepypasta is based on urban legends, the origin is somewhat split. Urban legend themselves started to be published around 1968 and became worldwide in the 1980’s. From there, the the chain-letter emails started to spread out in the 1990’s and create a new form of urban legends. Finally, on July 6th, 2007, on a forum site known as 4chan, emerged the first known thread of creepypasta.
The idea of creepypasta is to take stories, videos and pictures that have been emailed and shared and produce them into short scary stories. The term creepypasta came from the internet slang “copypasta, which means a text that has been copied and pasted multiple times. Creepypasta stories can also be stories that people come up with too. Stories like Slender Man, Smile dog and Jeff the Killer are stories made by pure imagination, or nightmare.
The forum itself has grown since 2007. Because of the alleged attacks inspired by Slenderman and the two 12-year-old girls who stabbed their friend because of Slenderman, creepypasta has become an internet sensation. It has also been published as a book in Sweden too.
Also because of its growth, the number of people who have uploaded creepypasta have grown too. Many have even started to take on names. Mr. Creepypasta, Creeps McPasta, Miss Shadow Lovely, Creepypasta Jr. and The Creepy Dark are names of the highly regarded uploaders in the creepypasta world.
As the internet grows, so will creepypasta. And though we think that creepypasta is just nothing more than ghost stories, we cannot help but wonder if these stories have a small kernel of truth in them.