Creepy Grab Bag #1 | Creep Cast
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Welcome back to another enthralling, creepy, dare I say satisfying episode of Creepcast. Today we are going over three classics. We've been talking about doing this for a while. It was going to be a little grab bag of shorter, older horror stories. And the ones that we've came out with are Ben Drowned, Normal Corn for Normal People, and Squidward's Sewer Slide. Woo!

Let's go. Sewer slide. YouTube censorship, baby. Let's get it. Let's do it. I'm so excited. Patented. Patented my friend Harry. He just said that yesterday, and I was like, that's a really great... I feel like sewer slide is a lot more fun to say. Also, it might get dinged still. We'll have to...

I have to definitely see if it just immediately is like, no, we know what you're saying. Yeah, it'll be even funnier if it's like you and I talking and it's like you going bleep. And I'm like, oh, I love bleep. Like, that's awesome. I love bleep. But anyway, yeah, we're covering three classics today. These are ones that I've known about for a long time. I know a lot of you all have as well. We haven't covered them.

just because they're like too short for their own standalone episode, unless you guys want like a 20 minute episode or whatever. But judging by the views on the left, right game, I don't think that's true. Yeah. So we're going to combine these. We'll see how you all like it, like broken up three different stories. If y'all like it, we can do this with more because honestly, most,

Old school creepypasta that at least got really famous, I think was shorter form like this. So if this does well, we'll do more of it in the future. And if you hate it, then we'll pretend like it didn't happen. And it's all Hunter's fault. So I know it is my fault. It's my fault. But I wanted to say that it kind of seemed when we were talking about it initially that you were like, oh, yeah.

We might as well not cover those because they're so well known or like, they're just like, they're such like old classics or whatever, but in a different, in a different way where you, I, I, I, once again, I have just assume I've never read any of these. So it seemed like you were extremely surprised when I had, because it kind of seemed like you were like, Oh, I feel like everyone's heard of, you know, been drowned or normal corn and that kind of stuff. So, you know, I, I'm still new to this, but I think so much everyone, as much as it is,

who has a horror YouTube channel. Right, right, right, right. That's more so what I'm mad about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I completely missed out on all the good internet stuff when I was younger. I didn't have internet until I was like 18, a freshman in college. So I missed out on all of the goodness, uh,

of this when I was growing up. Well, starting it off on our triptych gambit here is going to be normal corn for normal people on r slash no sleep. The classic, the classic Reddit 12 years ago by a user named wreath, R E A T H E.

Oh, actually, oh, I get to start the story off. It's in quotes. Oh my God, I'm so excited. Hold on, hold on. Let me clarify, as I do with most of these episodes. Oh, my dearest Hunter, I've never read this before. There's no telling what tomfoolery we may come across. Fuck you! Don't worry, Hunter. All we have to do is go back into the French Quarter and everything will be okay.

Hey everyone, I want to take a quick break from the show to talk about today's sponsor, Factor. Factor delivers fresh, never frozen, dietitian approved meals straight to your door. And these fresh, easy to make meals means that meeting your nutritional goals have never been easier. I understand that a lot of us eat unhealthy because it tends to be the most affordable and easiest option.

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Thank you all so much for watching the ad. Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring the show. It really does mean the most. Hope you all check them out. Link is in the description and we are back to the episode. All right. Okay. Normal, normal corn for normal people. I'm so excited. I get to start the story. All right. Everybody knows that if you surf the web long enough, you'll see some sick shit. This is especially true if you intentionally dwell into the dark underbelly of the internet. I've seen quite a few things. I don't care to admit.

But one thing that I'll always remember is a site called NormalCornForNormalPeople.com The first strange thing about this site was that I didn't find it by actually looking for it. It was emailed to me by someone I didn't know. The email was as follows: Hi there! Found this site is very nice, thought you might like. NormalCornForNormalPeople.com Pass it on! For the good of mankind.

Pretty standard issue chain letter, although the URL in the last remark really piqued my curiosity. I was having a very boring day when I got this, so I made sure my antivirus was working and then I clicked on it. It was a very average, very generic looking site. It gave the impression that the creators just barely gave a shit about making it look professional.

The author seemed to have a very tenuous grasp on English, and on the front page was a long, boring, and incoherent rant that I don't remember or have saved. The site had a strange tagline, which even today people haven't figured out the meaning of, which was... Normal corn for normal people. A website dedicated to the eradication of abnormal sexuality. And from the sound of that, I wasn't sure whether I was here to watch...

I wasn't sure if I was here to watch it or if I had stumbled onto some kind of eugenics program. But I was here now and I was very, very curious to see what normal people get their rocks off to. So I scrolled down through the rant and nothing. Page didn't seem to link anywhere else. And I was about to leave when I noticed every word of the rant was its own hyperlink.

Oh, I like that. First off, I just want to say, just to interject, I just want to say that

Getting this kind of email too is I really liked how casually he's approaching you know the The aspect of being like oh someone sent me this and as just like a goof I said like you know I checked it out Yeah, but honestly that's like it's a pretty fucking horrifying thing to get an email or like to get a message of yeah It's also so not threatening that it be that it feels threatening in my eyes. You know I mean like it's like You know normal corn for normal people. It's fine

Yeah. It's not weird stuff on here. It's normal. I mean, the concept alone raises weird questions, right? Like what would, what would you define as normal? Right. Or why is there a website dedicated to it? It makes me like,

A lot of people have commented on this story being like, I would assume a title like this would be like some weird gay conversion thing or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what you kind of the train you're expecting it to go down. But I don't know where this story is going to go, honey. I don't know where this story is going to go. I'm just a baby. I'm a little baby. Mommy want milky. Baby want milk. That is a wild accusation.

You're right, though. It does have the same vibe. It's funny that you say gay conversion camp because it has that kind of fanatic kind of thing where it's like a passive-aggressive sign is what it feels like.

Yeah. The eradication of abnormal sexuality, like smacks of the pulpit. Yeah. You know? And also like you have to kind of transport yourself back. This is 12 years ago, right? So. Oh yeah. I guess we should have said that this is posted 12 years ago. So it's been a while. Yes. By user wreath.

by the way, R-E-A-T-H-E, so for credit. We were going to mention that at the beginning, but at the end, I mean, but, oh, you did? Oh, okay, well, I don't, it's just that whenever you start talking, my brain just kind of like zones it out and quits paying attention because I don't care. I don't know how to process words. I'm just a little, little baby.

So you have to take yourself to like 12 years ago. Cause now like you open Twitter and it's like, oh, there's three people that died. That's cool. You know, like it's kind of everywhere. But back then you had to go looking for weird stuff, right? Live leak, live leak, live leak stuff. Yeah. Like it was much harder to come across than just general internet browsing. So that's like, you kind of have to be in that mindset, like, oh, a weird website. Who knows what could be on it?

So I clicked one of them and was sent to a white page with very long list of links in the form of normalcornfornormalpeople.com slash and then random letters. So I stopped for a minute and asked myself if I really wanted to waste God knows how much time clicking random links that will likely give me a virus that will break my computer. God! I figured I'd just try it for maybe five minutes just to see if anything came up.

I clicked one of the links and was sent to another page. This page apparently had totally different URLs than the last one. I was just about to say, "Fuck this!" when I clicked on the third link and a video download came up. It was called peanut.avi. It was a 30 minute video of a man, a woman, and a dog in a kitchen. The woman would make a peanut butter sandwich and the man would set it down for the dog to eat. This was all that happened for 30 minutes.

It was obvious that the cameraman had to stop filming and wait until the dog was ready to eat again, and the dog seemed rather sick by the end of it. I know what you're thinking. "What the hell does that have to do with corn?" I have no clue. I've seen a little over two dozen videos from this site and the majority had no sexual activity at all. After watching peanut.avi, I went on a certain image board I frequent to play online show and tell, like I always do with weird shit like this.

But someone had already made a thread about it. Some guy who had received the same chain letter I did. The image board thread got lots of people with nothing better to do dig through the site. That's how I saw other videos. Most of those few dozen videos were very uneventful and consisted of people talking to the cameraman in a room with nothing in it but a desk and a few chairs. I mean, literally nothing on the walls or in terms of furniture. The whole room had a very cold, sterile feel to it.

You know what this kind of reminds me of is that old video online. Soup.avi? Yeah, exactly. So I actually... Do you think that it was born from this? I can't remember, but I remember... I can't remember which way it was, but I remember hearing speculation that one inspired the other. I can't remember which came first, though. It's interesting. They're reading definitely the same, like even just so far with the peanut butter, like of the... Because the thing with the soup.avi, whatever, is that it's so...

Like it's nothing happens to the point where it does feel like a snuff film. Like it feels like this is a video we should not be seeing kind of thing, even though nothing explicit truly happens. It's so uncanny and like just vile. It's odd. I think it's far more menacing to me that it's so, I mean, we're going to get to more intense stuff, but it begins so sterile, right? Like what, what could possibly be the motivation of a dog eating a sandwich? Right.

But it like... I don't know. I mean, honestly, I'm very bought in right now. The implications and stuff feel very weird, you know? I'm very, very bought in. I love these old stories too because they read so much like actual social media posts or forums or blogs. Yeah, like this thing happened to someone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate the like...

i don't know that maybe legitimacy is the wrong word but it feels very sincere that's right i think yeah it feels legitimate like it actually yeah like sure it's it's fiction but it feels like unfiction almost you know yeah yeah no definitely yeah the conversations were just idle banner about previous jobs or embarrassing childhood moments i kept expecting some kind of discussion about what the people were filming or what the site was about but of course nothing

You would never know these videos had anything to do with corn if you saw it out of context. I will say one thing though, the people who appeared in these videos were quite attractive. However, the other videos that actually did feature content which I suppose could be called sexual is where things got weird. I'll give a brief descriptions of the stranger videos. If you're really eating up with curiosity, you can try to hunt them down on a torrent site. First up, lickedclean.avi.

Ugh.

Isn't this, like, so much worse than just, like, normal snuff film stuff, you know? Well, you know what's weird? It's, like, which I don't want to get ahead of myself, but so far, even, like, the vignettes or how it's set up, I kind of like it more than 1999, if I'm being honest. Really? I think so. I mean, like, the deal with 19... I mean, I...

I'll redact that statement. It's the first one, but I feel like I'm a little more bought in if I'm being honest. Okay. I respect that. You did get taken out of 1999 a little bit whenever he talked about his personal life and stuff like that. Well, even just the aspect of like, oh, it's in his basement. It kind of has the Poughkeepsie tapes vibe, which I like, but it is very like one note of like,

It's like a guy, like a kidnapper who is recording these things. And I feel like we're getting ready to, it feels like we're being propelled into various odd live leaky kind of videos that is going to go all over the place. Jimbo. AVI, I guess the second one, a five minute video of an obese mind performing his act.

It was actually pretty funny, particularly one part where he pretends to pull up a chair, then pretends that it breaks because of his weight. In the last 30 seconds of the video, the camera cuts to static briefly and cuts back to the man sobbing quietly, still wearing the mime outfit and makeup. Some kind of obscure fetish? Diana.avi Four minute video in which the cameraman talks to a woman in a room different than the interview room.

This room looks like one you'd find in a normal person's house. Exactly where they are is never specified, as Diana only talks about her violin playing. She obviously plays her violin, but she keeps getting distracted by something. I didn't notice this until someone on the image board thread pointed it out, but if you look at a mirror in the background, you can see a fat man in a chicken mask masturbating.

Jessica.avi Another 4 minute cameraman video. This time he's outside a house talking to another young woman. They talk about canoe rides. The camera zooms out to reveal the city streets behind them occasionally. The strange thing is, no one so far has been able to identify where this street is. Guesses have ranged everywhere from Europe to Australia to the Philippines, but there's yet to be a match for the street shown in the video. TongueTie.avi

10 minute video. The first five minutes consist of an elderly woman making out with a mannequin. The video cuts out like it did in Jimbo.avi halfway through. And the scene is now a group of mannequins huddled together in a circle around the camera. The lights have been dimmed and the elderly woman is nowhere to be seen. From this point on, there is no sound. With stuff like this, you have to assume that people have recreated these, right? I mean, probably. That one actually kind of... Mannequins are always kind of like a...

I don't like them. So creepy. So the idea of like, it just cuts to them around the camera and that's it for five minutes. That's not fun. In complete silence. Yeah. Kind of imagine like a...

just like the gain of the camera mic just kind of playing. So it's just like weird little slight crackles and pops, almost like... You can hear maybe like the fluorescent lights buzzing or something. Yeah, exactly. It almost imitates these kind of like weird pickups and feedbacks, almost read like little bits of fire, like fire crackling or something. It's very menacing. Yeah. Stumps.avi.

Five minute long video where a man with no legs is attempting to break dance on a DDR mat. And what looks like, I'm sorry, Hunter, something funny. Is there something you want to, something you want to bring up?

Well, the structure of that, a five minute long video where a man with no legs is attempting to break dance. The phrase, the word attempting is pretty funny. Literally, it's just the word putting attempting in there that makes it very funny and tragic. What's funny about a disability, Hunter? Yeah, nothing. Nothing, sorry. In what looks like the kitchen from peanut.avi, but much dirtier.

There's a radio playing music unseen in the background, but it stops at the four minute mark when the man collapses on the mat in exhaustion. He breathes heavily and pleads with someone off screen to let him rest. This off screen person becomes terrifyingly enraged and yells at him to keep dancing, which he does. You can hear this off screen person begin to scream as the video ends abruptly. That became a lot less funny at the end of the... Yeah, you want to talk about how funny that was, Hunter? Talk about how funny that was? No. That's good.

That one does kind of amp it up to me because you imagine whoever's running this site has some sick game or like motive behind this, right? But to hear like... To me, it's always scary when...

people or creatures or something like that exhibit rage, you know? Because we're used to seeing, like, you know, kind of like this dole-scent, like, you know, watcher, wanderer, you know, character. Like, we see a bunch of stuff about serial killers being these stoic figures that stalk people or whatever. But the idea of, like, something...

full of anger, you know, like it, um, I don't know. It always bothers me a bit. I mean, we've officially entered into snuff film territory is what I, what I think it is. Like, I mean, it's literal torture now. So yeah, we'll wait, wait for this last one. Privacy dot ABI.

The woman from Diana.avi is masturbating on a mat- do we need to censor that word? Y'all know what I mean. On a mattress in the interview room, while the man from Stumps.avi walks around on his hands while wearing some kind of goblin mask. The door in this room was always closed in other videos, but now it's open. In this video, the only light is in the room and the hallway is dark.

Near the end of the video, you can see an animal quickly run through the hallway. And finally, the last video we uncovered, which was "useless.avi". In this 18 minute video, a blonde woman from one of the previous interview videos is tied down to a mattress in the interview room. She attempts to scream, but her mouth is taped over. After seven minutes, a man in a black suit and mask opens the door, but he does not enter.

He holds the door open for the animal that was running in the hall in the previous video. It's revealed to be an adult chimpanzee, its hair shaved and its entire body painted red. It seemed to be starved and abused, with several wounds along its shoulders and back. When the chimp enters the room, the masked man closes the door behind it. The chimpanzee sniffs the air for a moment, may have been blind, and notices the woman tied to the mattress.

It goes into a frenzy and begins to maul her. The assault goes on for a grueling seven minutes until the woman finally dies. The chimp eats flesh from her corpse for four minutes as the video ends. The thread exploded with activity after this video was uncovered, and people discussed it long into the night. When I came back to the image board the next day, I found that the thread was deleted.

I tried to start another one, and they banned me. I tried emailing the guy who sent me the chain letter with the site's URL, sent him five messages, never got a response. I've tried to discuss this website on various places, and I got banned frequently. The site itself was also deleted about three days after useless.avi was uncovered, likely because someone contacted the authorities about it.

So, what do you think? Man.

That's the end. First off, is that at the end? As far as I know, yes, that is the end of the story. As far as I know, there's no sequels or anything. I think it's especially 12 years ago. What I'm interested in, I mean, like there has to be no way that like 1999 isn't influenced by this kind of thing or even that this story isn't influenced by the Poughkeepsie tapes in some kind of way is what I would say.

um yeah i mean they're very similar yeah but also keep in mind like 2012 snuff films and like the dark web stuff like that was everywhere oh yeah like everyone talked about everyone had a story about it that was that was the thing to make horror stories around the amount of times that my friends told me about videos they saw in like even just like in passing at school like hey i just saw a video about this or we know x y or z whatever it was insane back in those times so i think like um

I don't know. I mean, like, man...

what are just uh i really liked how they played with all the vignettes and i liked how subtle and sweet it was like kind of like how short and sweet it was actually that's one thing i feel like i'm liking a lot more about a lot of the early creepypastas is how short and just to the point i know we've driven them they just like dive straight into it straight into it to wait around no time to slow because of that but because of that it uses the archetype of an online forum in a very effective way where it just feels like a post

You know what I mean? And I do feel like people expanded on storytelling later on, but I do feel like right now, if I read this when I was younger, I'd be like, this is a hundred percent real. I think I read it. I don't know. It was maybe 13, 14. And, uh, I, I, I went into it. I think I listened to it actually through like one of the creepy pasta YouTube channels. So I went in under the assumption, like this is fake, but I remember a bunch of people being like, is this real? You know, did this actually happen? Um,

I think I might have actually sent it to a friend and been like, dude, this actually happened. Who wasn't familiar with it. I used to do that a lot. I used to send friends stuff and be like, this is real, knowing it was fake. I had friends of mine say that as well. Just like, where's stuff like this? No, this happened. You know what I mean? Bro, this is so real. I was the chimp, actually. It happened. It's real. I was there. I was honestly really creeped out about a blind...

shaved chimpanzee that they've just painted red. Also, that's a terrifying image. It's a terrifying image just because, I mean, like raw power, like, I mean, just like it's a rabid animal kind of thing, you know what I mean? And I think that just chimp attacks obviously are just

Especially ever since like Travis the Chimp, it's just haunted me forever. I remember seeing that Oprah interview with the survivor of the Travis the Chimp attack. That was a pretty heavy thing to just throw out there onto the news, you know, when all that was happening. It was. It was. It scarred me forever. I have never forgot about that. Especially when Oprah stands up and takes her hat off of her head and like reveals her face. It's unbelievable.

So, you know, and I know that like Jordan Peele included the chimp attack in Nope, and that was a big part of it as well. One thing I will say about the last video, I actually thought it was going to be a lot more graphic in that nature.

um and was was surprised that didn't go into that direction but i think like even just ending the story on a chimp attack thing and just being like you know now if you ever upload videos there it's just there's just so much mystique still it's kind of like that idea that like the person is still out there doing stuff but you can't it's like when the killer gets away you know what i mean yeah yeah it has that kind of vibe except it's just like oh

Living on the... Like, existing in the vibe of just, like, the guy who was maintaining this website is still out there and you just have no idea is very haunting. It's like an unobtainable...

antagonist almost right because like how do you even start to try to find the person that did that right it's just kind of there's some stories that are just kind of about the passing evil in the world right like there goes a glimpse of what's happening behind the curtain but it's intangible you're never going to catch a ghost and

They're very menacing. Next up, we have Ben Drowned. Ben Drowned. People in the comments and just across social media have been scolding me, saying, how have you never heard of this? What am I supposed to say? I have never heard of it. I'm sorry. All right? I'm sorry. I've never heard of it. But now, today, we will finally rejoice. We'll become one. Yeah, so I remember...

I don't remember all the details of Endron. I remember the big ones, like, without giving anything away. I remember, like, the save files and some of the conversations and stuff like that. I don't think I remember how it ends. So I'm excited to look at this. I will say, also, someone who, like, was familiar with normal corn and stuff, I'm glad it still holds up. Like I said, I read it when I was younger, and it was... It scared me. Like, it was good. But looking back now, I think it's kind of similar to Barosco. Like, those...

The nuance of it bothers me more now than it did then. So it definitely holds up. Yeah. No, I'm stoked. Let's get into it, which looks like this. It looks like the, this, uh, the first post it's, it's broken up into a series of posts here. And the first post was uploaded or at least as dated September 7th, 2010. Yep. And this again, most of our information comes from creepy pasta, the other creepy pasta wiki, because that seems most reliable. The story was created by Alex Hall, uh,

who goes online as or did at one point as Judd, Judd, doosable, doosable, whatever that means. Doosable. And of course is about a haunted version of Majora's Mask. Do you ever play Majora's Mask? No, but my friend had the Nintendo 64 game. I remember the gold cartridge very well. Yeah, it's a very strange game. You know, like in hindsight, a lot of the aesthetics were kind of weird. The choices were

And for a kid's game, at least like, you know, the, uh, I remember, I remember like watching him play it with the moon or smiling or whatever. Yeah. Very smiling moon. Yeah. So post number one, September 7th, 2010. Okay. X is you'll, you'll never guess where this was originally posted. Okay. X, I need your help. This is not coffee pasta. This is a long read, but I feel like my safety or wellbeing could very well depend on this.

This is video game related, specifically Majora's Mask, and this is the creepiest shit that has ever happened to me in my entire life. Having said that, I recently moved into my dorm room starting as a sophomore in college and a friend of mine gave me his old Nintendo 64 to play. I was stoked, to say the least. I could finally play all of those old games of my youth that I hadn't touched in at least a decade.

His Nintendo 64 came with one yellow controller and a rather shoddy copy of Super Smash Bros. And while beggars can't be choosers, needless to say, it didn't take long until I became bored of beating up level 9 CPUs. That weekend, I decided to drive around a few neighborhoods about 20 minutes or so off campus, hitting up the local garage sales, hoping to score on some good deals from ignorant parents.

I ended up picking up a copy of Pokemon Stadium, Goldeneye, F-Zero, and two other controllers for $2. Satisfied, I began to drive out of the neighborhood when one last house caught my attention. I still have no idea why it did. There were no cars there, and only one table was set up with random junk on it. But something sort of drew me there. I usually trust my gut on these things, so I got out of the car and I was greeted by an old man.

His outward appearance was, for a lack of a better word, displeasing. It was odd. If you asked me to tell you why I thought he was displeasing, I couldn't really pinpoint anything. There was just something about him that put me on edge. I can't explain it.

All I can tell you is that if it wasn't in the middle of the afternoon and there were other people within shouting distance, I would not have even thought of approaching this man. What would you say this old man looks like? When he says that, what would you say? My mind immediately goes to a Vietnam War veteran. I don't know why.

I kind of go the other way a bit. I almost imagine he's too clean cut, you know, like glasses, trousers, you know, like very... Oh, yeah. Hello. Well, this is my garage sale. Kind of like he's like a character out of a show or something, you know? Would you like to browse my goods? Yeah, I like that. His hair is like super thin. Yeah. You can see the top of his scalp. Yeah. And he combs it over and he's just like, would you like to buy...

A lamp. Yeah, that guy. 'Cause that would creep me out. If I went to a garage sale and it was just one old man with a table and he's just like, "What do you think of this?" And it's like a butterfly collection. You're like, "You're a fucking psychopath, you old freak."

I haven't seen my grandson in a long time. You kind of look like him. You smell like him too. Just like him, but you smell like lavender. Let me touch you. I want to caress your cheeks and pinch your cheek just like my grandson. He died in a drowning accident when he was seven years old. Why did you say drowning accident just then? Been drowned. Okay, alright, alright.

I forgot that was the title of the story. That's the title of the deal, Ben John. I forgot that was the title of this story because this story does go to a drowning being related. And I was like, there is no way you just pulled that out of the air. You had such a fucking Poindexter point there. You're just like, how did you know that? Actually, how did you know that that was going to happen? Like the title says Ben John. Oh, okay. Yeah.

He flashed a crooked smile at me and asked what I was looking for. And immediately I noticed that he must be blind in one of his eyes. His right eye had that glazed over look about it. I forced myself to look to his left eye instead, try not to offend, and asked him if he had any old video games.

I hate that.

I hate when old people use the word jiffy. Is that a reoccurring problem for you? There's been many times with my grandpa. I'd go to see his friends and he'd be like, I'll be right back in a jiffy. That's what they say. And they scuttle off because old people are bugs. They're a waste of space. They deserve to die. Kind of like how you feel about our fans. No. Exactly. No. But you can get money from the fans. You know what's cute is you think that

these fans are going to turn against me when they know that Papa Meat is the real champion of the fans. I'm a man of the people, dude. You think if we had a poll that was which one of the two Creepcast hosts cares about us more, you think you would win that? No, I don't think I'd win because I think you're the more popular host for sure. But I think that in people's body and mind, they know. People know deep down, even if they won't admit it now, they're going to be 40 years old. There's going to be some Creepcast fan who's, I don't know,

i don't know how old our fans are hopefully like 20 i don't know how old people are would sit there and they when they're 40 they're like you know what hunter really was the champion wasn't he and my spirit's gonna haunt him and i'm gonna say yes that's a cute little fantasy you've constructed for yourself i'm gonna go back to the story now never ending story as i watched him hobble away i couldn't help but notice what he was selling on his table

Littered across this table were rather... peculiar paintings. Various artworks that looked like ink blots that a psychiatrist might show you. Curious, I looked through them. It was obvious why no one was visiting this guy's garage sale. They weren't exactly aesthetically pleasing. As I came to the last one, for some reason, it looked almost like Majora's Mask. The same heart-shaped body with little spikes protruding outward.

Initially, I just thought that since I was secretly hoping to find that game at these garage sales, some Freudian bullshit was projecting itself into the inkblots. But given the events that happened afterward, I'm not so sure now. I should have asked the man about it. I wish I would have asked the man about it. After staring at the Majora-shaped blot, I looked up and the old man was suddenly there again, arm's length in front of me, smiling at me.

I'll admit, I jumped out of reflex, and I laughed nervously as he handed me a Nintendo 64 cartridge. It was the standard gray color, except that someone had written Majora on it in black permanent marker. I got butterflies in my stomach as I realized what a coincidence this was and asked him how much he wanted for it. The old man smiled at me and told me that I could have it for free. It used to belong to a kid who was about my age that didn't live here anymore. There was something weird- What? What? What?!

What? What a weird fucking thing. What do you mean what? The old man smiled at me and told me that I could have it for free, that it used to belong to a kid who was about my age that didn't live here anymore. Like your grandson? What does that mean the child doesn't live here anymore? He opened by saying he went to a weird neighborhood. So I assume he means the neighborhood. That makes it even worse!

That makes it so much. An old boy used to come play this game in my basement. Well, it doesn't mean that. Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're doing the thing. You're doing the thing. Did he move? Look, I'm sorry. No, no, no. He doesn't live here anymore. I'm sorry about Boroska. Okay. I know that you have this knee jerk reaction whenever kids come into stories now because of all that. I get it.

But just because you have an old man who's like, oh, well, I came across this cartridge. Yeah, it belonged to some kid who lived around here. I don't really need it. You can have it. It is not infeasible. Kid moves away. Parents start giving his stuff away. Old man buys like a trunk of clothes or whatever. Who knows what? And oh, look, there's a game cartridge in there. I'm going to laugh. I'm going to laugh so hard, Isaiah. I'm going to...

"Rafflecopter" as the kids say. The day that you were like, "Hey, I can't record today because someone harvested my organs." Because you're so... fucking naive. You're gonna let someone come in and cut up all your gutty works and take it... "Yeah, sorry, I can't. Uh... someone took my spleen." Is what you're gonna say, and I'm like, "What happened?" "Ah, yeah, I don't know, this guy was just following me, but it was... it seemed normal!" "Is... that's... that's you!"

That-- that is such a cryptic message that it used to belong to a kid who was about MY age who didn't live here anymore. What is that even-- did he live in the house? Then why does it be like, "Hey, it's my gran-- my gran--" 'Cause listen, you can do this in a different way where the guy's like, "Hey, my grandkid used to play games here." Right? But no, this old creepy fuck is like, "There was a whole thing

The kid doesn't live anymore, but if you want it, you can have it. I don't know. I'm an old man. Doesn't make any sense, dude. Go ahead. Keep reading. Go ahead. No, I bet the old guy's fine. Oh, I bet he's a...

perfectly normal guy. He could rationalize it in his mind. Our protagonist could rationalize the interaction as just like a weird way to phrase some kid that lived down the street. The next sentence he says that he phrased it weirdly, but it's not, it's not

the old man going, it's the kid I had in my basement. It's just like, oh, a kid lived around here. And that's enough nuance that your brain could be like, oh, that's a weird way to say it. I love that the literal next sentence is, there was something weird about the way the man first did it. Yes, clearly there's something weird about it, but that's not immediately like, I capture children. Okay. Alright. Can I go back to the story? Yeah, I'm waiting to hear what happens next. Are you? There are

There was something weird about how the man phrased that, but I didn't really pay any attention to then. I was too caught up in not only finding this game, but getting it for free. I minded myself to be a bit skeptical since this looked like a pretty shady cartridge and there's no guarantee it would work. But then the optimism inside me interjected that maybe it was some kind of beta version or pirated version of the game. And that was all I needed to be back on Cloud 9.

I thanked the man and the man smiled at me and wished me well saying, "Goodbye, Vin." At least that's what it sounded like to me. All the way in the car ride home, I had a nagging doubt that the man had said something else. My fears were confirmed when I booted up the game. To my surprise, it worked just fine. And there was one save file named simply "Ben." Goodbye, Ben. He was saying goodbye, Ben. I felt bad for the man.

a grandparent and obviously going senile. And I, for some reason or another, reminded him of his grandson, Ben. Oh, that's kind of interesting. The whole idea too about being like, goodbye, Ben. And then feeling like you, like, do you think that the person that's writing the story too, do you think that he's saying like, oh, I probably took

This old man was like, oh, of course this is yours because you were Ben. So now he feels like he stole it in a way. Wait, what do you mean yours? Like it was the old man's? Because he thought he's like goodbye then. And he's like, okay, sure. And he got the game cartridge for super cheap, right? Yeah. So he goes back and sees the goodbye Ben thing or he sees the Ben. He's like, oh, he said goodbye Ben. So now the guy I'm wondering if our narrator is like, oh, fuck. Well, I just like.

Probably borderline stole this cartridge from this guy because he thought that it was... There's also a level of like an old man, because he says a grandparent, right? He's like, oh, I assume this was his granddad. Like, that's kind of sad. Maybe he just wanted rid of it, you know, and he passed it off to me. That was more symbolic for him than anything, you know? Yeah. I mean, yeah, even him being senile, I mean, I don't know. It's just like old brain rot type stuff. Yeah, he has sympathy for him.

I think. Out of curiosity, I looked at the save file. Eyeballing it, I could tell that he was pretty far in the game. He had almost all of the masks and three-fourths remains of the bosses. I noticed that he had used an owl statue to save his game. He was on day three and by the Stone Tower Temple with hardly an hour left before the moon would crash. I remember thinking that it was a shame that he had come so close to beating the game, but he never finished it.

I made a new file named Link out of tradition and started the game ready to relive my childhood. You know, there's something kind of interesting too. You ever like go to a buddy's house or you ever get like a, buy like a used game or something or like a used memory card and you see all the saved games and there is like a weird kind of like, I guess not nostalgia, but there's something that's just like,

You're kind of taking over somebody else's life on that system. You know what I mean? You know how weird that is? I remember being a kid and like we would go to, I think it was a GameStop or like one of those local GameStops, whatever. Right. And they were selling, it was like a basket of old PS2 memory cards.

that are used. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember being like, man, that's kind of... There's something kind of haunting about that. Like, it'd be cool, theoretically, to grab one and be like, oh, let's see what's on here, you know? But... Well, you know what's weird is I always used to get freaked out because... I don't know if people feel the same or if you feel the same, but whenever I...

I did the same thing with like PS2 memory cards and they'd have like a little basket and it's like they're all just like a set price. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. But my whole thing was I always got hung up in the idea that like, oh, I'm going to get some memory card of like a guy who was super shitty. Like a guy that I... Like there was a kid in my school who was such a dickhead about video games and I was always like...

I almost, every time I got to use the memory card, I was always like, God, I hope it's not this guy's memory card. It was like some kind of weird ownership aspect. I don't know. It was just, it was such a weird thing, but I always, I got hung up about it, man. I'm looking at pictures. I was like, how big was that memory card? I have, I looked up the picture of the one I have eight megabytes and it felt like it held so much, you know, anyway, for such a shady looking game cartridge, I was impressed at how smoothly it ran literally just like a retail copy of the game, say for a few minor hiccups here and there. Like,

like textures being where they shouldn't be, random flashes of cutscenes at odd intervals, but nothing too bad. However, the only thing that was a little unnerving was that at times the NPCs would call me "Link" and at other times they would call me "Ben". I figured it was just a bug, a fluke in the programming causing our files to get mixed up or something.

It did kind of creep me out though after a while, and it was around after I had beaten the Woodfall Temple that I regrettably went into the save files and deleted Ben. I had intended to preserve the file just out of respect of the game's original owner, it's not like I needed two files anyway, hoping that would solve the problem. It did and it didn't. Now NPCs wouldn't call me anything. Where my name should be in the dialogue, there was just a blank space.

My save file name was still called "Link" though. Frustrated and with homework to do, I put the game down for a day. I started playing the game again last night, getting the lens of truth and working my way towards completing the Snowhead Temple.

Now, some of you more hardcore Majora's Mask players know about the fourth day glitch. For those who don't know, you can google it, but the gist is that right as the clock is about to hit zero on the final day, you talk to the astronomer and look through the telescope. If you time it right, the countdown disappears and you essentially have another day to finish whatever you were doing.

So I had to do the glitch to try and finish the Snowhead Temple. I happened to get it right on the first try and the time counter at the bottom disappeared. However, when I pressed B to exit the telescope, instead of being greeted by the astronomer, I found myself in the Majora boss fight room at the end of the game, the trippy boxed-in arena, staring at Skull Kid hovering above me.

There was no sound, just him floating in the air above me, and the background music which was regular for the area, but still creepy. Immediately my palms began to sweat. This was definitely not normal. Skull Kid never appeared here. I tried moving around the area, and no matter where I went, Skull Kid would always be facing me, looking at me, not saying anything. Nothing would happen though, and this kept up for around 60 seconds. I thought the game had bugged or something, but I was beginning to doubt that very much.

I was about to reach for the reset button when text appeared on my screen. "You're not sure why, but you apparently had a reservation." I instantly recognized that text. You get that message when you get the room key from Anju at the Stockpot Inn. But why was it playing here? I refused to entertain the notion that it was almost as if the game was trying to communicate with me. I started navigate the room again, testing to see if that was some sort of trigger that enabled me to interact with something here.

Then I realized how stupid I was to even think that someone could reprogram the game like this was absurd. Sure enough, 15 seconds later, another message appeared on the screen. And again, like the first one, it was already a pre-existing phrase. "Go to the lair of the temple's boss? Yes? No." I paused for a second, contemplating what I should press and how the game would react, when I realized that I couldn't select "no."

Taking a deep breath, I pressed Jest and the screen faded to white, with the words "dawn of a new day" with the subtext "all eyes beneath it" or at least all lines. Where I was ported to filled me with the most intense sense of dread and impending fear I had ever experienced. The only way I can describe the way I felt here is having this feeling of inexplicable depression on a profound scale.

I am normally not a depressed person, but the way I felt here was a feeling that I didn't even know existed. It was such a twisted, powerful presence that seemed to wash over me. I appeared in some kind of weird Twilight Zone version of Clock Town. I walked out of the Clock Tower, as you normally do when you start from day one, only to find that all of the inhabitants were gone. Usually, with the fourth day glitch, you can still find the guards and the dog that runs around outside the tower.

This time, they were all gone. What replaced them was the ominous feeling that there was something out there. In the same area as me and that it was watching me. I had four hearts to my name and the hero's bow, but at this point I wasn't even considered for my avatar. I felt that I personally was in some kind of danger. Perhaps the most chilling thing was the music. It was the song of healing, read straight from the game itself, but played in reverse.

The music would get louder, building up so as if you should expect something to pop out at you, but nothing ever did, and the constant loop began to wear on my mental state. Every now and then I would hear the faint laugh of the happy mass salesman in the background, just quiet enough so that I wasn't sure if I was just hearing things, but just loud enough to keep me determined to find him. I looked in all four zones of Clock Town, only to find nothing. No one.

textures were missing. West Clock Town had me walking on air. The entire area felt broken, hopelessly broken. As the reverse song of healing repeated for what must have been the 50th time, I just remember standing in the middle of South Clock Town realizing that I had never felt so alone in a video game before. As I walked through the ghost town,

I don't know whether it was a combination of the out-of-place textures and the atmosphere and the haunting melody of the once peaceful and soothing song being butchered and distorted, but I was literally on the verge of tears and I had no idea why. I hardly ever cry. Something had gripped me here, this powerful sense of depression that was both foreign and crippling. I tried leaving Clock Town, but every time I attempted to zone out, the screen would fade to black and I would just zone in to another part of Clock Town.

I tried playing my ocarina. I wanted to escape. I did not want to be here. Every time I played the Song of Time or Song of Soaring, it would only say, Your notes echo far, but nothing happens. By this point, it was obvious the game didn't want me to leave, but I had no idea why it was keeping me here. I didn't want to go inside the buildings. I felt that I would be too vulnerable there to whatever I was terrified of.

I don't know why, but I came up with the idea that maybe if I drowned myself at the laundry pool, I could spawn somewhere else and leave this place. As I zoned in and ran towards the pool, that's when it happened. Link grabbed his head, and the screen flashed for a brief moment of the happy masked salesman smiling at me.

not Link, me, with Skull Kid's scream playing in the background. And when the screen returned, I was staring at the Link statue from playing the song Elegy of Emptiness. Are you familiar with what these things look like, by the way? I feel like very, like...

I wouldn't say I'm definitely an expert, but I feel like the only thing I truly remember, if I'm being honest, is just the mask on the cover of the game and the smile of the moon. But I'm just getting pictures, like I'm kind of painting pictures of myself that are like to myself that are...

You know like just variants of that you know I mean yeah, and I also and I do remember I think like the South Clock Town Like I feel like I remember that pretty well Yeah and honestly this is I love the the world building of this too because it kind of feels like so far if I had to guess anything just because we're at a preamble here is It feels like it's like possibly the ghost of a child or some kind of kid like

this game or is stuck in this game and is maybe looking for somebody to like take his place in the game or something or, you know, that kind of vibe. But I love the idea of because I feel like everyone has been there, right? Or at least me when I was younger, I used to play like trapped inside of a game. Am I right, boys? Or even like the idea, I guess more so I meant like, yeah, when you're like transfixed and you're scared playing a game, but you don't want to turn it off. But it's like you also don't want to proceed forward in a weird way.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I remember I had Quake on Nintendo 64. I was so scared playing that game. I was so fascinated by it, but it was so haunting. I would yell for my mom. I'm like, Mom! Come here and watch me play this! Whatever, but I was just horrified the whole time. It's kind of one of those things. So it's like to be trapped in this, to be actually transfixed in this, but then also to have the game be altered in this way where you're like, I feel like I cannot even like

grip of the controller is just a really interesting archetype. Yeah, it's also like it's a weird area of gaming where like, you know,

Everyone's experience was personal. You know, online play wasn't a huge thing yet or whatever. You could kind of... Yeah. Like, not that it happened to you, but you could see this situation playing out in your head, you know? Because nowadays, if this started, you'd just be like, hey, Reddit, what happened? How do I fix this glitch? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, like, really no exploration to it. Yeah. There's also something interesting of, like, owning someone else's game cartridge or something that's, like, theirs. You know what I mean? It's almost like buying a house to somebody who died or something. Yeah.

The same way that also whenever you delete somebody's... Whenever you delete someone's save file, it's almost like you're deleting their memory or their soul off of this thing. And that's just... It's so like...

I don't know, cheesy, but I also love that idea of just like a horror concept. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It's this is better than I remember so far. Yeah, I'm curious. I really don't know where they were. It's what's going to go. So I'm curious. We shall continue on. I screamed as the thing just stared back at me with that haunting facial expression.

Hmm.

The statue, can you explain a little bit why, like what that looks like? Yeah, it's kind of, it's a statue of Link that looks like Link, but made out of clay, almost. By this point, I was on the verge of hysterics, but not even once did the thought of turning off the console occur to me. I don't know why I was so wrapped up in it. Terror felt also real. I tried to shake the statue, but it would literally appear right behind me every single time.

Link started to begin to make weird animations I had never seen him do before. He would flail his arms around or spasm randomly and the screen would cut to the happy mask salesman smiling again for a brief moment before I was face to face with that statue again. I ended up running into the Sword Master's Dojo and ran to the back. I don't know why, but in my panic I just wanted some kind of assurance that I'm not alone here. To my dismay, I found no one.

and as I turned to leave, the statue cornered me in the cubby in the back. I tried attacking the statue with my sword, but to no avail. Confused and backed into a corner, I just stared at the statue, waiting for it to kill me. Suddenly, the screen flashed again to the Happy Mass salesman and Link turned to face my screen, standing upright, mirroring the statue, looking at me along with his copy. Literally staring at me.

Whatever was left of the fourth wall was completely shattered while I ran out of the dojo terrified. Suddenly, the game warped me to an underground tunnel and the reverse song of healing queued up again as I was given a brief moment of rest before the statue started appearing behind me again, this time aggressively. I could only take a few steps before it would summon behind me again. I hurriedly made my way out of the tunnel and appeared in Southern Clock Town. As I ran aimlessly in a sheer panic, suddenly...

A Re-Dead screamed and the screen faded to black as Dawn of a New Day and the line title card appeared again. The screen faded in and I was standing on top of Clock Tower with Skull Kid hovering over me again, silent. I looked up and the moon was back, looming just meters above my head, but the Skull Kid just stared at me hauntingly with that mask. A new song was playing. The Stone Tower Temple theme played in reverse.

In some sort of desperate attempt, I equipped my bow and fired off a shot at the Skull Kid and it actually hit him and he played an animation of him reeling back. I fired again and on the third arrow, a text box appeared saying, "That won't do you any good, hee hee."

and I was picked up off the ground, levitated upwards on my back, and the Link screamed as he burst into flames, instantly killing him. I jumped when this happened. I had never seen this move used by anyone in the game, and Skull Kid himself didn't have any moves. As the death screen played, my lifeless body still burning, Skull Kid laughed and the screen faded to black, only to have me reappear in the same place.

I decided to charge him, but the same thing happened. Link's body was lifted off the ground by some unknown force and he immediately burst into flames again, killing him. This time during the death scream, the faint sounds of the reverse song of healing could be heard. My third and final try, I noticed that there was no music playing this time, that all there was was eerie silence.

I remembered that in the original encounter with the Skull Kid, you were supposed to use the ocarina to either travel back in time or summon the giants. I attempted to play the Song of Time, but before I could hit the last note, Link's body once again horrifically exploded into flames, and he died. As the death screen neared its end, it began to chug, as if the cartridge was trying to process a lot of something.

When the screen came to, it was the same scene as the first three times, except this time, Link was lying on the ground, dead in a position I had never seen in the game before. His head tilted towards the camera, with the Skull Kid floating above him. I couldn't move. I couldn't press any buttons. All I could do is just stare at Link's dead body. After around 30 seconds of this, the game simply fades out with the message, You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?

before kicking you out to the title screen. Upon getting back to the title screen and starting again, I noticed my save file was no longer there. Instead of Link, it was replaced with Your Turn. Your Turn had three hearts, zero masks, and no items.

I selected your turn, and immediately when I did, I was returned to the clock tower rooftop scene of my Link dead and the Skull Kid hovering over, with the Skull Kid's laughing looping again and again. I quickly hit the reset button, and when the game booted up again, there was one more save file added below your turn, entitled Ben. Ben's save file is right back where it was before I deleted it.

at the Stone Tower Temple with the moon almost crashing. I turned the game off at that point. I'm not superstitious, but this is way too messed up, even for me. I haven't played it at all today. Hell, I didn't even get any sleep last night. I kept hearing the reverse song of healing music in my head and just remembering the sense of dread I felt exploring Clock Town.

I drove back to the old man's house today to ask him some questions with a buddy of mine, no way I was going there alone, only to find that there's a for sale sign in the front yard and when I rang the door, no one was home. So now I'm back here writing down the rest of my thoughts and recording what happened. Sorry if some of this has grammatical errors and whatnot, I'm running on no sleep here. I'm terrified of this game, even more so now that I relived it a second time writing this all down,

But I feel like there's still more to it than meets the eye, and that there's something calling me to investigate this further. I think Ben is something in this equation, but I don't know what. And if I could get a hold of the man, then I would be able to find some answers. I need another day or so to recuperate before tackling this game again. It's already taken a toll on my sanity, I feel like. But next time I do this, I'm going to be recording my footage all the way through.

The idea to record only came to me towards the end, so you can see the last few minutes of what I saw, including Skull Kid and the Elegy Statue, but it's on YouTube here. I'm going to stay in this thread for a little while longer before I fall asleep to answer any questions you guys might have, or hopefully listen to your ideas or theories to help me shed some light into this, or maybe things I should try to do. I think I'm going to play Ben's file tomorrow to see what happens. Maybe I was supposed to do that all along.

I don't believe in paranormal shit, but this is a little messed up. But maybe this Ben guy is just a really good hacker or programmer. I don't want to think about the alternatives if he isn't. That's the end of the copy paste. I'm hoping that maybe this is some kind of running gag the developers had and that other people have gotten gag or hacked copies of the game like this.

This just really scares me end of post one. I really like that There really is a little video file to that. You can oh, yeah the whole that's the whole thing I think is recorded all the big story moments Yeah, I was noticing that too. Just kind of like very whimsical very ethereal. Did you picture this whenever he was reading the story? Did you picture that do you still picture a guy who is just sitting there watching the game or do you feel like he is totally submerged and like

He is completely like in the, not like in the game, but like his perception is like, he's no longer just a guy holding a controller. I don't think he literally got pulled into the game or anything, but I think that, yeah, I mean, you've been there, like, you know, you're playing a game like late at night or whatever, and you're like zoned in and then you kind of like snap out of it a bit, you know?

I think he's in that kind of state, like where the things happening to Link actually scare him. But then it's like terrifyingly broken by these fourth wall moments where like the thing in the game looks directly at him or whatever.

Well, it also feels like the only reason I was wondering, because I agree. I don't think he's literally in the game, but I do think I'm wondering how much of like his psyche or whatever is getting sucked into it to where it's like he's in a trance almost or something to where now it's like you're kind of like stuck in this hell loop. You know what I mean? He's kind of hearing the same songs going backwards or whatever.

It's just kind of interesting and to especially be in such like a familiar world as something like a Zelda game or something feels kind of interesting. Are you ready for post two? Post two! September 8th, so literally the next day. Yep. I'm going to post what happened and link the video footage, but last night everything got too real for me. I think I'm done messing around with this. I passed out pretty much immediately after making that thread.

But last night, the Elegy of Emptiness statue, I had a dream about it. A dream that it was following me in my dream. That I would be minding my own business when I'd feel my neck hair stand up on end. I would turn around, that thing, that horrible, lifeless statue would be staring with those empty eyes right at me, merely inches away. In my dream, I remember calling it Ben. And never before had I had a dream that I could remember so vividly.

But the important thing is, I did get some sleep, I suppose. Today, putting off playing the game as long as I could, I drove back up to that neighborhood to see if the old man came back. As I expected, the car was still gone and no one was home. As I was walking back to my car, the man next door mowing the grass killed the power to his lawnmower and asked me if I was looking for someone. I told him that I was looking to talk to the old man that lived here, to which he told me what I already knew, he was moving.

trying a different avenue i asked if the old man had any family or relatives i could talk to i discovered that this old man had never been married or did he have any children or grandchildren through adoption starting to become worried i asked one final question one that i should have asked from the beginning who was ben man's expression turned grim and i learned that four doors down around eight years ago on april the 23rd

The man informed me that it was the same day as his anniversary, that's how he knew the specific date. There was an accident with a young boy named Ben in the neighborhood shortly after his parents moved and despite any further attempts to talk to the man to get more information,

He wouldn't divulge anything else. If you were him as well and you went back to the area to get some answers from the old man and the house was for sale, what would be your initial reaction to that? If I had a haunted copy of a game and I thought the ghost of a child was stalking me because of this old man, I think I would kill him. I think I would. Well, yeah. All right, you want to put your one wish to Steven on me, huh? But do you believe right now that he thinks that the game is haunted?

I think he's putting it together. By this point in the story? Because that's what he says at the end of part one where he says, I hope he was a really good hacker programmer because of the alternative. Now he's just figured out that Ben is the name of a boy that died. Not a kid who got really good at programming, right? Right.

Right. I was curious because I was just like, if you went back, I was trying to put myself in those shoes of just being like, because you can kind of justify it where it's like, oh, well, you know, he had the garage sale. He's probably selling some stuff before he was going to move, but it would still just be one of those things that would just be like, this is turning into a very series of like,

I don't know, horrifying things that keep coming, like a domino effect almost or something. Oh, no, I would definitely blame the old dude. Oh, 100%. His initial reaction is like, well, maybe it was like his grandkid or something, and that makes sense, but now it absolutely doesn't make sense. Yeah, you've thrown all of that out the window pretty much. I went back and started playing again. I loaded up the game, and immediately I jumped at the title screen where the mask flies by. The sound that played was not the normal whoosh sound. It was something much more higher pitched.

I press start, bracing for the worst, but just like two nights ago, the files "Your Turn" and "Ben" were displayed. Truth be told, I looked at the Ben file earlier. It seems to fluctuate between displaying the owl save and not. I brought up the Ben file, hesitated for a moment, noticing that the stats were not the same as they originally were two days ago.

it seemed like he had already completed the stone tower temple this time somebody my courage i selected it so it seems like since it started the save file has progressed somewhat yeah that's kind of interesting like oh now it's he's even further along how the hell is that there's something alive in there progressing yeah yeah immediately i was thrust into complete chaos sure enough i was outside stone temple tower but that's about all that was expected

The zone itself wasn't called Stone Temple Tower, but rather ST O N E.

And immediately a dialogue box of complete gibberish that I couldn't make out greeted me. Do you read that as Saint One? Oh, it could be. Yeah, I didn't think of it that way. I'm just thinking a lot because, yeah, for people it's S-T, no spaces, and then space O, space N, space E. So it kind of reads like Saint One. I don't know. Yeah, or at least the one is supposed to be.

Like, emboldened out of it. Yeah, it could be. Right. Link's body was distorted. His back was cocked violently to the side where his posture was permanently disfigured. Link's expression was dull, almost monotonous. He had an expression on his face that I didn't recognize before. It was a blank look as if he was dead.

As Link stood there, his body spasmed irregularly back and forth, I examined what had become of my avatar and noticed I had a C button item I had never seen before. Some kind of note, but pressing it did nothing. Sounds played back and forth that I didn't recognize from the game, almost demonic in nature, and there was some kind of high-pitched yip or some kind of laugh or something playing in the background.

I was a Deku scrub in Clock Town.

This scene would normally play after the first time you traveled back in time. Tatl would say, "What just happened? It's as if everything has..." But instead of saying, "Start it over," she'd finish her remark in a broken text as the laugh of the happy mass salesman played in the background.

I was put back in control of my character, but from a screwed up camera angle. I was looking from behind the door to the clock tower, watching my avatar run around as a Deku scrub. Seeing as how I really had no place to go because I couldn't see anything, I begrudgingly went into the door. There, I was greeted by the happy mask salesman who simply told me, "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" before the screen whited out. I was in Termina Field as a human again.

I might as well not have been playing the same game anymore. I was being warped around and there was no sign of a day clock or anything. I took a moment to get my bearings as I looked around the field and immediately I could tell that this was not normal. There were no enemies and a twisted version of the Happy Mass Salesman's theme was playing. I decided to run towards Woodfall before I noticed a gathering of three figures off to the side, one of them being Epona.

As I approached, to my horror, I saw the Happy Mask Salesman, the Skull Kid, and the Elegy of Emptiness statue just standing there. I figured maybe they were bugged out, but by now, I told myself that I should know better. Nevertheless, I approached them carefully and found that the Skull Kid was playing some kind of idle animation on loop, say with a poda, and the Elegy of Emptiness statue was doing what it has been doing all along, just standing there eerily.

It was the Happy Masked Salesman that scared me more profoundly than the other two. He too was idle, wearing that shit-eating grin, but wherever I moved, his head slowly turned and followed me. I not engaged in any dialogue with him, nor was I in combat with him, yet his head still continued to follow my movements. Reminded of my first encounter with the Skull Kid on top of Clock Tower, pulled out my ocarina, to which the game played the ding sound when you're supposed to play your ocarina,

and tried a song I hadn't played yet, the Happy Mass Salesman's own song and the song that had been playing on loop back in day 4, the Song of Healing. I finished playing the song and as I did, an ear-piercing shriek blasted on my TV. The sky immediately started flashing, the Happy Mass Salesman's twisted theme song sped up, intensifying the fear inside me, and Link exploded into flames and died.

The three figures stayed lit up during my death screen as they watched my lifeless body burn. I can't describe to you how sudden and terrifying the transition from eerie to terror it is. You're going to have to watch the video if you want to see firsthand. That same fear that caused me to lose sleep two days ago started to grip me again as I was met with the text "You've met with a horrible fate, haven't you?" for the third time. There has to be some kind of meaning behind that.

I had little time to ponder as I was immediately given another small cutscene of transforming into Azora and now I find myself in Great Temple Bay. Hesitant but curious to see what the game had in store for me, I slowly made my way towards the beach, where I found Epona. I wondered why the game had decided to put her here. Was the game implying she was trying to get a drink? Unable to take the mask off, I decided that riding the steed wasn't the reason she was placed there.

Suddenly, I realized that Epona kept neighing and the way she was angled made it look like she was trying to signal a point to me off in the distance. It was a hunch, but I dove into Great Bay and started swimming. Sure enough, I almost missed it. I found something at the bottom of the ocean. One last Elegy of Emptiness statue. I went down to examine it and suddenly, my Zoras started doing choking animation I'd never seen a Zora do before.

Which didn't even make sense because Zoras can breathe underwater. Regardless, my character choked to death and died. Again, the statue was the only thing that was highlighted in my death. I didn't respawn this time. I was booted back to the main menu as if I restarted the console. The press start screen was before me. I knew the only reason why it would put me here is because the save files had changed again. Taking a deep breath, I pressed start and I was right.

The new save files told me about Ben. Now, it made sense why the statue appeared when I tried to go to the laundry pool. The game must have anticipated how I would have tried to escape the day 4 clock town. The two save files told me his fate. As I suspected, Ben was dead. He had drowned. The game obviously isn't through with me. It taunts me with these new save files. It wants me to keep playing. It wants me to go further. But I'm done with this shit. I'm not touching any more of the files.

This is already way too horrifying for me, and I don't even believe in the paranormal, but I'm running out of explanations. Why would someone send me this message? I don't understand it. I just get too depressed thinking about this. The footage is up here for those who want to see it and try and analyze it. Maybe there's some kind of coded message in the gibberish or something symbolic in what I went through. I'm too emotionally and mentally drained to screw with it anymore. End of post two.

So do you think that Ben here is, how do you read this? Do you read it as a threat or do you read it as Ben reaching out for help? I think Ben's trying to tell him something is the vibe I get. Maybe not help. Maybe if it's something as simple as a kid trying to communicate with the outside world, right? Like he's stuck in the game or something like that.

His ghost is stuck in it. So if Ben is that statue or is represented by that statue and he's following him around, there's something haunting about the statue out in the ocean, you know, like the same place he drowned, like representative of it. That's pretty brutal. It feels like a digital map of something that maybe happened in real life or something like a recreation. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me ask you this. Do you find his presence threatening or do you find it like, I mean, I,

Threatening or not threatening, I guess, just to make it easy. I don't find Ben threatening. I find the Masked Salesman threatening. Yeah. I think he is the entity who is pulling the strings and Ben's a victim in it. I find the game, yeah. I find the Masked Salesman kind of vibe, or just the game in general threatening, but I don't find the...

It's odd. I don't find the statue necessarily, which obviously the statue, I believe, is supposed to represent Ben. Yeah. But I don't find that as threatening as the salesman or even just the game as a whole contorting around and stuff. It feels like a trap almost, like a bear trap. Yeah, yeah. I think that's accurate. And he's kind of parading Ben around as his last victim, right? I think so. I mean, that's at least what it thinks like. And it feels like, especially because he's a statue...

It's like he's a statue. It's like the game's version of a ghost or something, too. It's like a haunting. It's indicative of a statue you'd find in a cemetery. You know what I mean?

It's like, okay, so the three save files together is Ben drowned your turn, right? So the haunted mass salesman is kind of collecting souls almost, or like victims in the game, it feels like. Yeah, I mean, even the sentence of the files coming together, Ben drowned, now it's your turn. Yeah. It's like he is coming to... It's almost as if every time that this guy...

Goes on and plays this game. It's almost like the ritual is becoming more and more complete. Yeah. Yeah, I agree It's like a seance or something good so far pretty good so far. Yeah, I feel like people I feel like I don't know I enjoy it. I feel like it's an interesting thing It also feels very catered like I do you find that because you said you're not you don't really know this game super Well, do you think with him saying such? specific

landscapes and names do you think that's distracting or do you i can picture it in my head you know if i played the game i think i'd appreciate it more but i mean that's what i say i can put it together i feel like you can just go to the video and just see exactly what he's talking about yeah that makes it more helpful too anyway post three uh which is two days after post two

I know it's early in the morning. I've stayed up all night. I can't sleep. I don't care if people see this. That's not the point. I just want the word to get spread so I don't suffer for nothing. I've lost the will to talk about this. The less I dwell on this, the better. I think the video just speaks for itself.

I did what you guys told me to do. I played the Elegy of Emptiness song at the first prompt by the game I was given, but I think that's what the game or Ben, man, I can't even believe I'm even humoring the absurd idea that he exists in the game, wanted me to do. He's following me now, not just in the game, he's in my dreams. I see him all the time behind my back, just watching me.

I haven't gone to any of my classes. I've stayed in my dorm room with the windows closed and the blinds shut. That way I know he can't watch me. But he still gets me when I play. When I play, he can still see me. The game is scaring me now. It talked to me for the first time. Not just using text that's already in the game. It spoke to me. Talked to me. It referenced Ben. It talked to me. I don't know what it means. I don't know what it wants. I never wanted this. I just want my old life back.

Stuff like this doesn't happen to people like me. I'm just a kid, not even old enough to drink yet. It's not fair. I want to go home. I want to see my parents again. I'm so far away from home here at this school. I just want to hug my mom again. I just want to forget that statue's horrible blank face. My original game follows back, just the way I left it before it was gone. I don't want to play anymore. I feel like something bad will happen if I don't, but that's impossible. It's a video game. Haunted or not, it can't hurt me, right?

Like seriously though, it can't, right? That's what I keep telling myself. Every time I think about it, I'm not so sure. I don't know. The game actually talking back to you, that would fuck me up. Yeah, I would say it would. Just speaking to you. Just sitting there thinking about it too, though you're playing the entire time it's been text and then all of a sudden it actually talks to you. I feel like I'd be like, well, I have gone officially too far. I'm fucked. That's immediately what I would think. Well, all right, I'm done. I'm looking at the footage you posted earlier

It's like full bore cut scenes and stuff. I love all the inclusions of the videos, like just like the weird mods and stuff. How fun.

The music is inherently creepy in the game too, honestly. He plays the song, the music's being played backwards, and then it cuts to black. And every time that he does anything, the text says, you shouldn't have done that. Then he's in the happy mask shop. Shouldn't have done that. Game freezes, cuts to black. And I'm going to read the text that it says. It says first, Ben is getting lonely. Then he's walking through a field to the tree.

statue appears behind him it's just him and the statue in the field screen cut to the man and then the text says you will be given one last chance back to where it all began come play with us dawn of the final day and it goes back cuts him back to the main screen yeah that's terrifying the game being like you get one last chance right what's i mean is i'm like yeah it's just like you get one last chance and it's like well what am i doing wrong i don't know what i'm doing wrong

Especially it looks like, yeah, it's just, it's, it's super odd. The game saying repeatedly too, you shouldn't have done that is so menacing. You should have done that. And then to think too, now I'm in this place of sympathy even more for Ben where it's like, we're just seeing our main protagonist go through it now, but then you just have to assume that Ben was going through the exact same thing in his neighborhood before, you know what I mean? Before he drowned. Yeah. Now part five, wait, sorry. Post four, four, four, which was made two days after post three.

Let me just clear things up. I know you guys are worried about Jed Usable is okay. That's the guy who's writing the story, by the way, Jed Usable. He finished moving out today and he said he's going back home. He's just taking the semester off. I'm not really sure what's happened. I have a vague idea, but you guys probably know more than I do. I'm Jed Usable's roommate and obviously I knew something was wrong with him for a few days now.

He stayed in his room all the time, fell out of contact with literally all of his friends, and I'm pretty sure he hadn't been eating hardly anything. After the second day, I couldn't stay in there anymore, so I've been crashing at a buddy's place, only coming into my room to get stuff that I need. I tried talking to him several times, but he would cut me off or keep the conversation brief when I asked him about his strange behavior. It's like he was convinced something was hunting him.

Yesterday, I came to grab my philosophy book and he approached me looking awful, like horrible bags under his eyes. He handed me a flash drive and gave me specific instructions. He told me that he needs me to do one last favor for him. He finally explained to me what has been going on, gave me the account info to his YouTube account and told me that he's getting away from here, that it lured him to play it again instead of trying to change things, that he shouldn't have done that.

and to upload the footage and inform people what happened. I told him he could do it himself and he got this wild look in his eye and told me that he is never looking at that game again and that's the last thing he said to me. Never even said bye when his parents came to pick him up. I never even got to meet his parents. Honestly can't tell you what happened. When he spoke it was kind of hard to understand him and his screwed up appearance really distracted me.

On the flash drive, there was footage of the game last night. A text document with his name and a password for YouTube. A third document called "TheTruth.Text" containing what he told me were his notes that he'd taken. He told me that this meant everything to him, that I follow his instructions exactly,

Normally, I wouldn't be so to the letter for a request over a video game, but the way he spoke and the way he looked made me know this was really serious, and I'm going to honor that. I've had this video since yesterday, but had to have someone help me use Pinnacle. That's not really my forte. That, after watching it, I had to go back through and look at his other videos on his YouTube account to realize what was going on, and even then, I'm really, really confused.

This video I'm releasing tonight, the truth.txt, will be released on September 15th, just like you requested. I haven't dared peek at it yet, so the first time I see it will be the first time you see it out of respect to my friend. To answer your questions, no, I haven't tried calling him yet. I think I'll give him a call tomorrow to see if he's okay or not. He should have gotten back home by now. About the video. In this video, I cut straight to when he uploaded the bin file in the game.

Looking back, I realized that Judge Usable left the save select screen in because it said different names sometimes, so my bad for that. But all it said this time was the same as the end of his last video. Link and Ben. Nothing different. I wasn't there when he played it, but it looks to me like in the beginning when he first spawns, he's testing out his equipment or seeing what items he has or something. Because apparently they've changed randomly before. Then after that, I just think the game got too personal for him.

and we have his footage so I will click through the footage once again I kind of like the idea too that his roommate took over the post for it or just kind of let you know what happened and the guy couldn't even like keep preparing it yeah or like keep typing into it so he's playing the game normally I think someone who's more familiar could tell me if things specifically nothing horrifically wrong has happened yet I don't think okay here we go first thing a picture appears of the bin statue

or the Elegy Statue next to the Masked Salesman and says, keep this picture, yes or no. He selects no and the screen starts shaking. Well, that's cool. There's always like broken text whenever he's talking to these creatures. Maybe if you went through and analyzed, you could get more out of it. But it kind of looks like they're saying, believing in your friend, believing in your friends and racing...

that belief by forgiving this could also be text from the game these feelings shave because i'm not familiar with the text game happened i think it is text from the game it's just so broken up but whenever it goes correctly that's when you know it's the game speaking to him statue appears behind him once again camera pans over it and then he's shoved

I think he just got teleported underwater. Oh, what the? What is that? I don't like that. So after he fights that thing underwater, Link suddenly appears in front of a grave.

Like, not the statue. Like, his character appears in front of a grave. And it says on the front of the grave, the melody that summons the tears of angels rests here. After that, he goes to another grave that says, the soul of a brave soldier from Akana rests here. So he's reading the text on tombstones. He's very slowly walking. And then gets...

kind of dragged over in front of one grave. And it says, a vessel that holds wandering spirits rests here. And then Link trips and falls. He clips through the floor and falls through the world in front of the grave. And then the text says, this is once again a black screen. The game speaking directly to him says, it'll be our little secret, okay? And you can hear the man laughing. Weird. He then comes to an underground tunnel that the world's like twisted around.

And then when he gets into like the interior of the temple, the Ben statue is there once again in the underground, literally underneath a graveyard, right? The Ben statue. And then screen goes black and says, you can't run. The screen comes to and now Link is standing in line with the Ben statue in front of the salesman.

And the audio is like backwards and weird and creepy and I don't like it. I don't want to listen to it. The camera then pans around Link and the text from the game speaking to our player says, please help me. And he gets thrown back to the start menu. So after that, he goes back into the game and there are now two save files. One that says Link and

and another that says Matt. So I'm guessing our author's name was Matt, and he did not do what he was supposed to with that final chance, probably. And now his save file's there. So now it's almost like he's a part of the cycle now too, I imagine. Then we have our final post. Yeah, interestingly enough, it's September 15th, which is five days after...

Jawsable. Is that how you're saying his name? Jadusable or Jadusable or whatever. Jadusable, Jadusable, whatever. So it's been five days since he posted and I think this time, yeah, hey guys, Jadusable here. So now it's actually him posting and not his roommate. Yep. This will be the last time you'll be hearing from me and this is my final gift to you. These are the notes that I have taken and the realizations I made. Before I delve into this, I want to thank you for following me and thank you for listening. It feels like the weight of a powerful burden is about to be lifted.

By the time you read this, I won't be around anymore. And after spending four days with this maddening game, I began to understand what's really at play here. And hopefully after reading this, we can ensure that this never happens again. These are the things that I could not share with you while this was going on due to the circumstances to which I'll explain. With Ben blocking any attempt I made to try and relay the truth to you, I tried, ever so subtly, to warn you guys in various ways.

Amidst the chaos and my delirium, I devised to make a fairly noticeable pattern in my videos. In all five videos I recorded over the four days, I have either had the Mask of Truth interacted with a Gossip Stone, or the Lens of Truth equipped at some point. For you Zelda enthusiasts, these are all symbols of honesty and trustworthiness, and I would hope that one of you may have picked up on the reference.

As I played the file, which I would name "Ben", being mindful of how Ben was watching over my every move in the game, I made a point to avoid doing anything too obvious, but I sent out a hidden message to you guys. I never quipped the lens, nor the mask, nor visited a stone. It worked and the video was uploaded. I prayed that someone would notice the pattern didn't apply to Ben.

The tags followed suit too. I hope you guys paid attention to those as well. They were my little message to you. Nothing big enough that would catch Ben's attention or make him suspect anything. With Ben manipulating and changing my files, I honestly hope that what you guys saw was close to what actually happened. But there's no way for me to know. This may be a long read. I don't have time to proofread or make all my research pretty, but here it all is. That's pretty sick that the stuff...

in game is actually like he was holding like items of honesty during like moments of legitimacy or whatever. All right. So he's talking about, uh, this is, here's everything I was able to compile that Ben wouldn't let me put out there, which we don't know what that means yet per se, but September 6th can't believe what this is at 11 PM. Can't believe what happened. Not sure if this is some kind of elaborate hoax, despite the fear I can't help, but be exceptionally curious about this. Who or what is a statue?

Lot of questions here. I'm starting this document as a diary so I can keep track of everything. I'm typing up a summary of what happened so I can come back to it later. The next day, beginning at 2:00 AM, he has updates at read. Summary was posted here. You can go back and look at my first post for day four for that, which we already saw, I believe. I can't sleep. I've been trying so hard, but the harder I try, I just get more restless. I feel like that statue is appearing whenever I close my eyes.

Didn't sleep at all, just going to start my day. I don't think I have the energy to do class today. Gonna drive back down to talk to that old man. Taking my buddy Tyler with me just in case. Back home now. No sign of the old man. Really weird that he appears to be moving the next day. But maybe the for sale sign was up there yesterday and I just didn't notice it. Tyler wants to know what's gotten me all worked up. I didn't tell him. Going to eat, feel like death.

Could have sworn driving back from Subway that I saw the Elegy statue buried in some shrubbery staring at me go by. Now I definitely, definitely need sleep. Don't think a lot of people would believe me if I told them about what's happening. Think I'm going to try posting this on the internet. Think I'll just use the summary. These notes are pretty sporadic. Connected my capture card to my computer to upload the footage. Thought my computer froze for a second. Made this strange popping sound when I hooked everything up. But now it seems to be working fine again.

My computer can't die on me now. Footage just finished uploading. Quality's a lot better than I thought it would be. Gee, guess this is a really special cartridge. I've never had it come through this clear before. Thought I saw an icon pop up on my desktop that looked like the statue's face for a split second. Gave me quite a scare. Getting really unnerved and hilarious. Gonna crash after this. Began uploading my YouTube video on an alternate account. I don't remember having uploaded a Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines video last year.

This is probably the account that I shared with a friend of mine last summer. Hope he doesn't mind me using it to upload this. Posting my summary of day four with the link to the YouTube video. Going to try to stay awake, but I'm so tired right now. Then the post began again the next day at 10 48 a.m.

I had a dream about the statue. I dreamed that it was following me in my dream. That I would be minding my own business when I'd feel my neck hair stand up on end. I would turn around, that thing, that horrible lifeless statue would be staring with those empty eyes right at me, merely inches away. My dream, I remember calling it Ben. Power of suggestion, most likely. And never before had I had a dream that I could remember so vividly. Really don't want to play this game again. I think I'm going to go back to see if they had old man's there instead.

No old man, but I had an interesting conversation with this neighbor. Post the full thing with my summary of tonight's attempt to play in the game. Going to wait for a bit though to see if I can't dig up any information on this Ben guy. I've been getting random inexplicable headaches due to the lack of sleep and keep hearing that song in my head. Also, it's flu season, so I need to be careful not to get sick. My immune system's going to be shit right now because of the all-nighter. My computer just, on its own, opened up a text document and wrote the words, Hi. Hi.

and www.cleverbot.com by itself. WTF. I went to the website, it's one of those bot chatting programs. I think it's best if I just let the conversation speak for itself. Hello? Hello. Who is this and how are you able to control my computer? Who am I? Right, forgot you're a bot. Do you really think that? Listen, I know whoever's screwing with my computer can see my screen right now. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, and I'll wager that you're one of those IT kids who thinks he's tough shit. You know what you're doing right now is illegal, right? Is it? No shit. Are you familiar with the terms invasion of privacy? Get off my computer, kid. I am your computer. Cool story. Anyway, I'm calling DPS. You picked a bad time to screw with me, kid.

I should wait until you play the game again. What is this voice? Why are you making- It's Cleverbot! What makes you think that this text-to-speech program is like, oh, I'm just a weirdo boy! Should I wait until you play the game then? Okay, whatever, I'm just gonna keep going. What? That game. Majora's Mask? Yeah. How did you know about that? Because. Because what? I did it. Did what? I played with you. What the- what? What?

were you scared who is this big the statue you're inside my computer now yeah how you look at that to me how the hell did i connect you cable and cords how tell me about yourself what tell me about yourself what do you mean what is it that will scare you what the what answer answer no

answer what the how did you just open that by yourself? I'm your computer now how much can you control? all what do you want from me? to entertain you're stuck inside there you can't hurt me go play no you can't hurt me took you longer to type that so? you're not sure if you're so powerful why use a ridiculous website like this to chat with me? it's messy more structured fun fun? yes

I like that. You think it's funny? I'm using my notes. You may write them down. Why are you letting me? It is amusing to see what you think of me. Window closes. You want to explain what that voice was? You were doing it's chat bot dude or clever bot. I've never heard clever bot. Does it sound like that? Yeah. Shut up. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

I hate you. I'm in the middle. We are at the end of this story. We're going to keep going. Okay. What have I done? I've invited it into my computer. I continue to write these notes, write my summaries. I feel like I am a prisoner in my one place of security.

I don't know. I don't know if I'm hallucinating or not. I feel like I'm going insane right now. I can feel it watching over me, even as I type this. Ben is controlling everything in the game, toying with me, leading me like a sheep, but for what? What's the purpose? I know Ben drowned, but why these hauntings? What am I even doing?

It can probably even see this right now. Bid called me to Clem. Are you bored? I'm not bored. I just know that you're going to derail this. I just know you're going to derail this. He tells me that he's sorry and wants to be free. That I can free him. That's just like how he got on my computer from the capture card. He could spread, but he needs my help. Says I'm special because I can help him.

This is the first nice thing he said. He promises to leave me alone if I do it. He swears he will. I don't know what to think right now. How can I even trust this thing? I'm terrified of him. But now it's saying that it was just having fun. It's twisted and screwed up version of fun. He's saying that the game is over. I do want it to be over. He says that he just wants to be free. That he's trapped in the cartridge of my computer and he wants to be freed.

I don't want to have to deal with this. I don't know how long I can deal with watching. It's watching my every move, every keystroke. I have nothing private anymore. It knows everything that's been on my computer. It tells that it, if it wanted to, it could do horrible things to me, but it hasn't so I should trust it. Something tells me that I'm being played again, just like in the game. Ben called me to Cleverbot again. I ignored it and went to go take a shower.

When I came to my laptop, I was welcomed with an image elegy statue staring at me with those dead eyes. I don't want to talk to him. Screw you, Ben. I'm not talking to you. Screw you, Ben. I'm not talking. Screw you, Ben. I'm not talking to you. Screw you, Ben. I'm not talking to you. It's been more than half an hour and the messages have stopped. Ben has stopped. I'm beginning to think that Ben isn't confined to just my computer cartridge. I'm beginning to feel something.

It's hard to explain it. I've never been spiritual, but there's something different about the air in my dorm room now. I'm begging to see the Elegy statue randomly as I search the internet in places I shouldn't. Places where he shouldn't be. I'd be scrolling down and suddenly I'd be staring at a picture of the Elegy statue. Always the Elegy statue. I don't know how much more of this I could take. Let me move into the next day. Okay, so I will say right now...

I was locked in when he was talking about like he was playing the game and he was having moments of like

I am so into it. It feels like it's happening to me. I can't control what's going on. Please help. And then it was ghost of a boy. I was sold. Right. But now that it's kind of like, these are the things I was writing down as I was playing the game and I'm conversing with him in the computer, but I feel like my life is falling apart when he could just like, like I get you're in a game session and weird things are happening and you become curious about

So you check it out again, but it's like, he doesn't have that same attachment to his computer. Just don't use the computer. I'm not gonna lie. It's getting pretty, this is getting pretty bad. It's getting more. It's, it's, it's dragging itself out way too far. Yeah. Like there's so much excess fat to where I'm like, I'm just, I'm waiting for clever bot to come back. Yeah, I know you are clever. Clever bots. The only thing that's going to save this. Uh, I, I will also say that like,

It feels kind of like losing the plot a bit, you know? Where it's like, oh, well, there's a ghost in the game and now I'm like experiencing it and stuff like that. But now it's just kind of like...

I'm trying to get out the truth about Ben. It's like, is that what this story was about? Like besting? Yeah. It feels kind of convoluted. Yeah. I thought it was just about a weird experience that happened. Were we trying to like beat the ghost? Was that what was going on? You know, like, I, I, I, I don't, I don't, I don't know. It feels like whenever this was like, there's a mystique to it and stuff, but now it's like,

all these like weird things of him like journaling his entries like it just feels weird too because now that's like a complete polar opposite to what he's been doing this entire time feels so now it's mapped out out yeah yeah very very i mean it's all it's on his website so it's obviously legitimate but i feel like maybe other creators i listen to just cut out this part maybe i

I'd be curious to see, like if people have done readings of this, that they've just like, I'm not going to include this. Or maybe this is another point of it. Like maybe this is because we're reading it on a creepypasta wiki, right? Where it's all laid out in order. Maybe this note section was like supplemental reading during the actual story. In that case, it might work better, you know?

If like as you're reading his segments, he's like, here's my notes of as things were happening. But because it was a text document at the end, it's all showing up here. So maybe we're not supposed to read this because we're kind of just recapping a lot of stuff that happened. So what if we skip the stuff that's just rehashing what we've already read? Well, I mean, do you want to? I just mean if it's like most of this looks new. I'm just saying if he gets to another long segment that's like,

I was playing the game and this happened. And it's like, yeah, we know. We already read that, you know? Right, right. Just if we get to the same thing again. But for now, we'll just continue with September 9th. My worst fears confirmed. Ben is tampered with my summary of Ben.wmv. I looked at the summary that I posted on various forums for the Ben.wmv file and parts have been omitted.

There's no mention of Ben existing outside the game. Okay, see now it's starting to make sense why this document's here. Because in the version that gets uploaded or shared around, Ben edits out the parts that mention what Ben's currently doing, right? I mean, do we even know that he actually had a roommate? Oh, that's a good point. Could that just be Ben posting? Like, is it something similar to, you know what I mean? Could absolutely be, yeah. I think that's possible. So maybe here...

Say Ben's been tampered with and stuff like that. Ben's tampered with it. Yeah, everything that we've read thus far could be bad info. It's true. It's like, yeah, I'm curious to see. There's no mention of Ben existing outside the game. There's no mention of the Moon Children. How could he have been that quick to delete the post without me noticing?

I'm wondering if maybe it appeared to me that I was posting everything, but in reality, Ben was posting his own censored version. I'm going to ask Ben why he did it. He's responding to me on Cleverbot. It's just giving the generic response it usually does. Just talking to a bot this time. I think Ben is mad at me. That's a funny, that's a funny predicament to be in.

"The moon children appeared in my dreams last night. They lifted up their masks to reveal their hideously disfigured faces. Maggots crawling out of their orifices, sunken black holes where their eyes should be, yellow smile that slowly grew bigger and bigger as they came closer to me. They told me that they wanted to play. I tried to run from them, but the four children pinned me down to the ground with surprising strength. Over them stood the happy mask salesman, announcing that he had a new mask that he wanted me to try.

In his spastic, sudden movements matching his in-game appearance, he took out a mask and modeled off of someone's face that I couldn't recognize, a younger looking face, and handed it to the moon children. Giggling, they lashed it to my face, their horrible, broken bodies bouncing up and down. Two of them held me down while the other two began to sew the mask onto my face. My shrinks and screams caused the happy mask salesman's face to turn into the most horrific smile I had ever seen.

He sporadically moved around, examining this procedure like a curious doctor. In that impossible movement, I flailed around, but it was no use. I was rolled in the back of my head because of the pain. It felt so real, but I couldn't wake up. I couldn't wake up no matter how hard I tried, and I couldn't wake up.

After the mask was melded onto my flesh, they began sewing my legs together. Then my arms, horrible feeling of a needle puncturing your legs and pulling them in, rupturing your Achilles tendons and tying them together resonated throughout my entire body. I tried to scream, but the mask was pressed so tightly against my face that it was my new face, and my new face had no mouth.

I didn't make a sound. I tried telling myself in my head that I was dreaming. I tried telling myself again and again. Suddenly the moon children stopped and looked at me. They just stared. The happy mask salesman slowly bent down and stared at me, inches away from my face, and grinned when he simply said, You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you? Before the moon children resumed with increased vigor. I couldn't wake up. I couldn't wake up. They wouldn't let me wake up until they had crafted me into another elegy statue.

I woke up sweating, crying, and shaking uncontrollably. I immediately ran to my computer and went for Ben. So basically in his dream, he's experiencing what Ben experienced in some way, becoming a model within the game, right? Yeah, that's what it's appearing to be. It seems like as if if this keeps going on, our protagonist is going to be a statue in the game as well. All right, time for Cleverbot. Are you ready? Yes. Answer me, Ben. Welcome back. What is the point of doing this? Why? Amusing to see.

Fun to play. Fun to play with you. Make you feel safe. I wonder how you would have reacted. To what? If I hadn't revealed myself and stayed hidden. Only doing little things to play with you. Close out your windows. Turn off your computer. Move your mouse by itself. Riddle things.

Make you wonder if I'm there, but you never know give you a little hint that I am

I wanted to do something different for you. Okay, this story has officially lost me. Ben goes from being the dead soul of a child who died tragically trapped within a game that somehow wound up in an old man's position and like this interesting mystery to just a troll. Just I could shirt off your computer, mom. He's like a malevolent demon kind of thing, like a trickster. And not even a good one. He's like the equivalent of your little brother with the controller, like

Why don't I go ahead and take all your snacks? I just went ahead and deleted your game file. That's literally what it's like. Any good will it had of like, oh, well, maybe some of the absurdity that happens because Ben's just a kid, you know? Now it's just like...

I'm dead and caught in this purgatory hell forever, but you can't play with your mouse. You can't play with your mouse anymore. Sorry, Bozo. Who gives a fuck, Ben? You stupid bitch is what I want to say to him. God, annoying little prick. Also, it's like, why are you also losing this much sleep over this stuff too? It's like, you're having horrible nightmares and then the reality of it, you wake up and he's like,

Sorry, I ate all your Fwoop Woops. No more delicious snacks for you. That whole section was awful. Like I could move your mouth by itself. Deep cringe. Yeah. Deep, deep cringe. Okay. You did this before? And I will do it again. To who? Ben? Did you know Ben? Won't tell that information to you.

How did Ben die? You know... No, but how did he drown? Won't tell that to you. Why? It is reserved for another. Who? Another who asked. When? Later. Okay, what? Hold on. He's not talking to Ben? Who's he talking to then?

That's what I don't get. Did I miss something? Is he talking to like the spirit of the salesman? Yeah. That's what I'm guessing. But no, he's explicitly said every time up until now, I think Ben's mad at me. Ben won't talk to me. He opens the conversation by saying, answer me, Ben. Yeah, but I'm a twister like that. I'm a man of many faces. I'm a very twicky, twicky demon.

That's what it feels like. This is the kind of hell I'm in. This is fucking pretty hard right now. It's so long, too. We're going to get through it. We're almost there. We're almost done. We're almost done. Actually, kind of. I mean, there's still, I guess, a chunk, but it's almost done. There's another Cleverbot conversation, though. Yes! Cleverbot! I'm beginning to think that this thing maybe hasn't been at all. In its sadistic nature, I wouldn't be surprised if it took the boy's name after it killed him.

My room is beginning to feel different again. There's something out there. I feel really threatened. Like there's something that is trying to reach out to me and strangle me, but it can't quite get there. I think Ben doesn't want to play with me anymore. I'll play again. I'll play the game again. Ben, can you see this? I'll play the game again. Please just stop this. Please, please. I'm going insane trying to decide what is real and what isn't.

Is Ben just playing a trick on me or is this for real? Is Ben generating these replies or are people actually posting them? Did I just see that screen flicker or was it my imagination? Imagine depending on the internet and trusting your eyes for your entire life and then being blinded. You can't rely on it anymore. You second guess everything. For the brief moments I am looking at my responses to the videos, people were pointing out things that looked fake or photoshopped or whatever. There's literally no way for me to know if Ben changed something on purpose to try to shut me up.

Or if maybe those replies were just constructed by Bandit trying to discourage me from even reaching out. See, I get caught in an infinite loop like this and this is what has been wearing on my insanity and pushing me to the edge. As I'm writing this, there's no way of telling if anyone even cares as much as I think they do. Just another trick. Does this whole document even exist? Am I writing nothing? I'll also say, um...

I feel like the story should have ended after the roommate's post. Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's just dragging way too long. It is dragging way too long. And, like, that ending worked where it's like he left and I thought the whole part about, come to think of it, I never met his dad. I thought that was implying that, like...

maybe the creator was going out to drown himself in a lake or something like possessed by the spirit of Ben or something like that. Then the cycle continues with the roommate or something, or even it's like Ben gives his final message kind of thing. And you don't know if the roommate's even real, but he like, you know, you never hear from our protagonist again. And the last gameplay we see there is the whole, like, uh, you shouldn't have done that segment, which is a good point to end on. I think, I think that's a high note, but anyway, we're back to clever bot.

I can't bro. Part of it's exasperated by you, admittedly, but... Ben's making me play the game again. It tells me that it has something very important to show me. So it's two summaries we read earlier.

And then the next day, the Drowned.wmv playthrough was up when I woke up today. I remember typing it up, but I don't even remember posting it. He censored it again. There's no mention of the old man. I have no voice anymore. I'm only posting what he wants me to. I'm the mask he uses to disguise himself as he lies.

There's an entire video summary of a video that I don't remember doing. Reading through the summary, this sounds morbid, resembling my dream from two nights ago except on a far more sadistic scale. These moon children. There's something more to them, almost as if they're another entity from Ben. Something happened last night that I can't remember. I'm posting the fourth summary to the forums now. Shadow of my chair moved.

Ben won't let me visit YouTube. I can browse the rest of the sites, but he keeps on exiting the window when I go to YouTube. Why? For the love of God, pull up a different computer. A feeling the air starts to constrict. I don't think I'm alone here. Whatever aura has been here is getting more violent. Trying to contact Ben on Cleverbot. He's not responding. I just get the AI. My ears aren't fooling me. I'm hearing the reverse song of healing. Keep hearing it.

I'm sorry, was there any mo- like, maybe we're reading the text format wrong because it's on Creepypasta Wiki, but...

And if so, my apologies. But there has been no mention on the... If I'm not criticizing the story, I'm criticizing the wiki. Why is that the first mention we get of him appearing in real life? I'm assuming it's supposed to be that he's, like, going insane and he's hallucinating him. Right? Like, they're building up this whole... They're doing this, but it just seems like such a non... Like...

The old man, like, so here's the thing. Are we supposed to assume that the old man, I mean, I might be reaching. Are we supposed to assume the old man is the smiling salesman, right? And did he drown the child, Ben? That's my thought, at least, yeah. So now it's like, I guess like premonitions or some kind of like. He's coming for him next, yeah. Yeah, or something. Yeah, that's what I figure at least. Okay, so that gets you an auction.

That's where my notes in. I fled my room, taking the cartridge with me. I don't want to go into details of what happened. I'll lose my train of thought as I hammer the details or the cartridge, which part? - I don't want to get into details of what happened. Why? You've literally painstakingly put down like extremely specific times, but like why not get into the details now?

We're almost there, man. It's been roughly two days since then. This is my last summary in service to you of the final video you guys saw. Matt.WMV. Last video entry I made, Matt.WMVV, began as normal. I was spawned in Clock Town as usual and nothing seemed to be out of place. Determined to set things right and play the oath to order on top of the clock tower on the fourth day, I prepared myself. Spent up time and got to the final day, making my way to the observatory.

As I got up to the telescope room and approached the astronomer, he would not let me look into his telescope. He told me that it would be cheating and that I should follow the rules. Despite my repeated efforts, the game would not let me do the fourth day glitch, no matter how hard or what I tried. I tried working around the game and doing the glitch, but it was adamant this time. Regardless of if I simply had the illusion of free will in prior games, this time the game became more aggressive than anything I've ever seen.

What? Why would the game be- whatever.

As I searched through my inventory, which, haha, because when this opened, Ben had saved his last file at the owl statue, so now he's mimicking the final steps of Ben. As I searched through my inventory, I finally noticed what I was missing a reoccurring song, the Elegy of Emptiness. Obviously, once I traveled there and learned the song, I suppose that was the last thing I needed, it needed, before Ben decided it had enough unplaying with me.

Ben is a manipulator. He tries to fool his victims into security and makes you drop your guard like a Venus flytrap. He ensnares them. Is that what this story has been about? That Ben's a manipulator and not the child victim? I thought this old man or that, but why is, how is the old man connected to Ben? I thought the old man's worse than Ben because he was doing all this stuff. I thought Ben was just a kid to drown. Why is he manipulator? Why does he do it? If he is, if he is also, because I know they had like, he had like the one kind of, he had the one line that was like,

Oh, I think the spirit might be taking his name since that was his last victim, but that was the case. It just feels weird that you still refer to it as Ben then. Yeah. Because it just makes you seem like the victim is the one that is. So you're calling the spirit Ben, but you're calling the old man the old man and you're also calling the child Ben. So yeah, whatever. I almost wish he would just have the spirit or like the haunting is like call it the salesman's face because that's clearly what the manipulator. Yeah. Or the devil or something. I don't care.

I am nothing but a puppet to him. He enjoys seeing what kind of human emotions he could trap into by doing different things. And this ancient demon who apparently like kills children or whatever was content to be like some people I just move their mouse around. There's still some things about this whole experience that still don't make sense, really. But then again, I never was going to figure it out these things. I'm not exactly in the right state of mind to. I've given you all the pieces of the puzzle for you to analyze and piece together the missing links.

why would you send an email? does he not move through co- whatever

I'm then going to combine those copy paste these notes with the closing openings that I've typed here on the safe public computer to the one text document. Not taking any chance of spreading Ben. I would not wish this horrible torment on anyone and I've made sure to have my basis covered here. I didn't run into any problems with Ben when I was back on my computer trying to email myself the notes. Went right under his nose. He has no idea that what he just let me do.

Had no problems opening the text document for my infected computer in my email either. Can't describe to you how it feels to finally be able to get the word out on this post. Nightmarians here.

That said, do not download any of my videos or anything about my videos through YouTube Video Audio Ripper. Screen grab, whatever. I don't know how he could spread, but I know that just watching them on YouTube, reading my texts won't be able to allow him to spread. How do you know that? Otherwise, he wouldn't have needed my help in the first place. I thought you said he loves tormenting people. Okay, what? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But I strongly recommend you not take anything you see streaming online onto your own personal computer.

This will be my last posting, putting up this form here for the world. If you see any further posts from me after today's current date, September 12th, and after the current time, 12:08 AM, just credit them. It already has proven to me that Ben can access my account password and manipulate my computer, and like I said, I have no idea to what extent it can do this, but know that it will do anything to break free. He is desperate. To ensure your safety, just forget about me. Please. What if Ben is typing all this?

and obviously this goes without saying but from here on out do not download any images I may put up and any files anything Sith day will be my last day gonna burn the cartridge then come back to destroy my laptop again even though I don't know you this sort of this is sort of bittersweet for me a semester I really didn't have any friends or rather I stopped paying attention to them but I suppose that's partially to blame because I am the genius who picked to live in a single I suppose

Yeah, yeah, okay, you were right about he doesn't actually have a roommate, right? Yep. Kind of a lazy way to unveil it, but whatever. I am the genius who picks to live in a single life. Haha, I am a guy who chose to live in a single, which for those watching at home means I do not have a roommate. So hypothetically, if someone were to say they are my roommate, they would be untrustworthy. I suppose someone would get...

Oh god. *laughs*

Like, I was- I liked it in the beginning.

I think that it's an amazing setup for the idea of a spirit trapped inside of a video game, especially those old video games with save files and stuff of a lingering touch of a previous owner of something. It just went on way too long. I think you probably could have even had that kind of roommate entry be the last thing. That's what I thought. I think you still could have had the twist thing, too, of being like, is that even really his roommate?

And I think it still would have read fine. Just leave the question available. You don't have to explain everything in the audience. Even at the end, you don't need that line. I guess I live in a single. Just let the audience speculate if that was maybe him or not. Because you've set up like eight times in a row that Ben can manipulate what you post. So cool. Just you've never brought up the roommate. Leave that as enough breadcrumbs. Yeah. You'll be like, well, I guess that's what I get for living in a single. Am I right, fellas? Wink, wink.

Was this just like one of the pivotal, like super popular early creepypastas? This blew up. Also like, okay. So in all honesty, you're spoiled, right? Because we've been going through and cherry picking like the best ones, right? With a couple exceptions, like Jeff, the killer for fun or whatever. Sure. You have been reading the cream of the crop. This is better than I think the average creepypasta.

Yeah, I mean, we're getting into levels. I know people say the same thing about like SCPs and stuff. Same thing, same thing, yeah.

Where it's just like there's a couple really good ones and then the rest are just utter trash because it's a lot of people that don't know how to write or whatever. I still think there's merit to reading a lot of the schlocky bad stuff like this. I think it's good. But I do think, I'm wondering, we need to start branching out of creepy, not even branching out of creepypastas because that's not what I'm saying, but I do think exploring other good, uh,

areas of horror as well. Like even if we dip back into Twitter, ARG stuff, or even if we go into other storytellings, but I think like, I think me and you need a breath of fresh air from creepy pastas. Yeah. Uh, also I will say one detail, which is kind of nice. If you just ended the story there, he emphasizes 18 times, don't download anything. And in the roommate's post, he's like, Oh, here's a download to the text document. Right.

Yeah. I mean, Ben posted, yeah. Ben posted that before he was able to do that. But at the same time, I think it's more ominous if it's like, Hey, here, download this without hearing that warning at the end. Yeah. You just don't because the entire story before that is a warning. Gosh, leave something up to like, leave them something to chew on. You don't have to spell out every detail. The authors do that all the time. They're like,

but no, what if people miss this clever thing I set up? Good. Yeah. That makes it more satisfying for the people that do. That's the whole point. Also, that's like the, one of the first rules that you hear about is your audience is much smarter than you think they are smarter than you think. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think like, even just the part of like no corn or normal corn, whatever, like,

the way that they build that up is a nice way like maybe to a point to where you know it's early days to where it's like very quick but even then it's just something where i've i feel like i've left it to where i'm like what is that person doing now you know or is there another website that he just doesn't know about like there's a lot of fun building to like oh like a fun little world building thing this one yeah it's just like you you have a dead horse and you're just beating it

I guess it's grave. I mean, like you're not even digging the grave. You're just pulverizing it into the ground. Okay. So here's some interesting lore with on that, uh, the page of like the creator, he has some stuff written about like the development of the story and stuff like that. Um, so the guy's name, Alex Hall, in his second year of college, he said about writing a horror story and J.J. Usable's like a fictional character, stuff like that. There's a section called controversy where it says not long after the discovery of

You should not have done that.net. Users noticed a discussion among minor characters in the guestbook area of the website that showed the beginning of the plot. Hold on. Okay. The sentence I just read says, the guestbook area of the website showed the beginning of a plot to commit a school shooting. Probably have to censor that, but...

That's probably not a good thing to write when you're in college. Yeah. I don't know if that's this guy. I think it's saying on the website people were discussing it. Oh, I see. Yeah, not him. What I will say for everyone is the link we put down there, it's much better formatted in that there is a text document of his notes that you can just not read, right? So you can just read the story as is and then end with the friend posting the update.

Right. I really do think you can just end there too. Yeah. You get the kind of, you get, you get the same kind of satisfaction of what he was trying to go for. I believe. And also like not to let the ending take away from it. The whole, uh,

The YouTube channel is insanely well done. Modding the game that everything that's described actually happens. That's awesome. That's incredible. A very fun use of like interacting with a new platform or like you knew were like YouTube and stuff at the time and everything. And actually being able to have like video footage to add to your story is just another, it's like, it's just a nice evolution of storytelling, like horror storytelling on these blog posts. Yeah. And actually if you go to his YouTube channel called,

It's called Jedusable. He's got like 67,000 subs. He does a ton of these like ARG stuff. Like some of it looks... Oh, sick. Okay. Yeah, yeah. He uploaded three years ago was the last one. But there's like dozens of videos on here and some of it looks really good.

Yeah, I'd be curious to check that out. That's kind of sweet. Yeah, it does good work. So yeah, I love the YouTube channel stuff like that. Did not need that text document. Yeah, no. I mean, you know, it is what it is. It's one of the most, one of the most classic. I mean, we've had people been talking about that forever. So I'm glad we finally got to read it. At least I know now what it is. I feel like I'm in the club. You're in the club. But lastly, that's also the second one that we've read, right?

that was a user suggestion. So far, the users have suggested that and the thing in the basement scheme better at mimicking people. So what is that? Well, you know, it is what it is. Lastly, we have another extremely popular one here, Wendy. It's called Squidward's Sewer Slide. This one's a good high note to end on, I think. Squidward's Sewer Slide. I like it. It feels very cheesy. I hope that this is funny. I'm very excited. So...

we've kind of hit the bases because the first one was like internet stuff. And the second one was video game stuff. And now we're doing a TV thing, right? There's a bunch of creepy pasta based around media like that. That was really common. So we're, you know,

this is a good little, good little, nice little throwback if you would. All right. So this one I'm also very interested in. Cause I remember watching this so much, the image of like Squidward with the burnout eyes sticks in my head. Now this, this Hunter, as someone who is not creepy pasta savvy in a younger age, this was the standard. 90% of the ones you read were stuff like this. This was like,

The poster child for just like creepypasta back then. All right. Okay. Here we go. I just want to start off by saying that if you want an answer at the end, prepare to be disappointed. There isn't one. I was an intern at Nickelodeon Studios for a year in 2005 for my degree in animation. It wasn't paid, of course. Most internships aren't. But it did have a perk beyond education. To adults, it might not seem like a big one. Most kids at the time would go crazy over it.

Since I work directly with the editors and animators, I got to view new episodes days before they aired. I'll get right to it without giving too many unnecessary details. They had very recently made the SpongeBob movie. The entire staff was somewhat sapped of creativity, so it took them longer to start up the season. But the delay lasted longer for more upsetting reasons. There was a problem with the series 4 premiere that set everyone and everything back several months.

Me and two other interns were in the editing room, along with the lead animators and sound editors, for the final cut of an episode. We received the copy that was supposed to be "Fear of a Krabby Patty" and gathered around the screen to watch.

Now given that the final cut isn't final yet, animators often put up a mock title card at the beginning, it's sort of an inside joke for us, with phony, oftentimes lewd titles being used such as "How Sex Doesn't Work" instead of "Rock-A-Bye-Bye Valve" in which SpongeBob and Patrick adopt a sea scallop. Nothing particularly funny, just work-related chuckles. So when we saw this title card, "Squidward Suicide," we didn't think it more than a morbid joke.

One of the other interns did a small throat laugh at it. The episode started with the happy-go-lucky music playing as normal. The story began with Squidward practicing his clarinet, hitting a few sour notes like normal. We hear SpongeBob laughing outside. Squidward stops, yelling at him to keep it down, as he has a concert that night and needs to practice. SpongeBob says okay and goes to see Sandy with Patrick. The bubble splash screen comes up and we see the ending of Squidward's concert.

This is when things begin to seem off. While playing, a few frames repeat themselves, but sound doesn't. It's supposed to be synced with the animation, so yes, that's not common. But when Squidward stops playing, sound finishes, as if the skip never happened. There's slight murmuring in the crowd before they begin to boo him. Not the normal cartoon booing that's common in the show, mind you. You could very clearly hear malice in it. Squidward's in full frame and looks visibly afraid.

The shot goes to the crowd with SpongeBob in center frame. He too is booing, which is very much unlike him. That isn't the oddest thing, though. What's odd is that everyone has hyper-realistic eyes. Yes! Oh my gosh. Oh, I forgot about this. Okay, so Hunter, some lore, right? Every single, without fail, every single video game, movie,

TV show, whatever, creepypasta would have some mention of hyper-realistic body parts. They're like, she was stabbed to death and a hyper-realistic heart fell into the screen or he was shot in the head and hyper-realistic blood splattered across the wall. It was just, that's what, all the time, implying that. Yeah, that's supposed to be the uncanny aspect of these cartoonish worlds. Yeah, that it's like real human eyes in Spongebob. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But everything, everything was hyper-realism. Okay, alright. All very detailed. Clearly not shots of real people's eyes, but something a bit more real than CGI. Pupils were red. Some of us looked at each other, obviously confused. But since we weren't the writers, we didn't question its appeal to children yet. The shot goes to Squidward sitting on the edge of his bed, looking very forlorn. The view out of his porthole window is of a night sky.

though it isn't very long after the concert. The unsettling part is that at this point, there's no sound. Literally zero sound. Not even the feedback from the speakers in the room. It's as if the speakers were turned off, though their statuses show them working perfectly. Squidward just sits there in silence, blinking for about 30 seconds, then starts to sob softly. He puts his hands, tentacles, over his eyes and cries quietly for a full minute more.

I imagine he puts his hands in his face. It's like, this was one of the most terrifying stories to children online, by the way, keep that in mind. All the while a sound in the background is very gradually growing from nothing to barely audible. It sounds like a slight breeze through a forest.

The screen slowly begins to zoom in on his face. Slowly, I mean that it's only noticeable if you look at shots 10 seconds apart side by side. His sobbing gets louder and more full of hurt and anger. The screen then twitches a bit, as if it twists in on itself for a split second, before going back to normal. The wind through the trees sound gets louder and more severe, as if a storm is brewing somewhere.

The eerie part is that this sound, Squidward sobbing, sounded real. It was like it wasn't coming from the speakers, but that speakers themselves were holes that the sound was traveling through from the other side. Yeah, that's how speakers work. It's almost as if the speakers weren't speakers, but instead holes that sound is projected out of.

As good a sound as the studios like to have, they don't have the equipment to be able to produce audio of that quality. I love the sound of the wind and sobbing. Very faintly audible. Something sounded like laughing. Came at odd intervals and never lasted more than a second. So you had a hard time pinning it. We watched this episode twice, so pardon me if things sound too specific. I've had time to think about them.

*laughs*

I miss this. I miss this kind of thing. Because every other one I would read back then, like if there was a cartoon I watched, I'd read a creepypasta and it'd be this like random dead kids or blood or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He couldn't have been more than six. His face was mangled and bloody. One eye dangling over it popped. He was naked down to his underwear, stomach crudely cut open and his entrails splayed out beside him.

He was laying on some pavement that was probably a road.

Pavement that was probably a road is a really funny line. He's laying on some pavement that was probably a road. Yeah, it's a picture of a dead kid and someone in the back's like, is this a road or a sidewalk? Quick. We thought it was a basketball court, but we're pretty sure that it was a road. At first, we thought this was a lake until someone pointed out, no, that's pavement, actually. No, that's not water. That's pavement. That is, in fact, pavement. We can't confirm. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

And it's just for a single frame. Oh my God. The most upsetting part was that there was a shadow of the photographer, but no crime tape, evidence tags, or markers. It turns out this man wasn't a police officer at all. Yeah. Wait, hold on guys. This isn't evidence. I think this is the guy who did this.

And then the guy taking the picture turns around the camera and it's the Ben statue. You want to know why I killed this kid? The angle was completely off for a shot designed to be evidence. It would seem they were the person responsible for the child's death.

We were, of course, mortified, pressed on, hoping that this was just a sick joke. Yeah, that's what I like to do to my workplace friends. Display images of children I killed.

We're just interns. I didn't know. I'm just an intern Nickelodeon. Where's Dan Schneider? That's what I was about to say. Like as a Dan Schneider Brian Peck thing, it's funny to imagine them like, I was just goofing around. It's just a joke. It's just a picture of a dead kid on some pavement. It's not a big fucking

And this is just what guys in Hollywood do. Okay. We were just, we're just Hollywood script writers. This is what we do. We just, we just have some pool parties with like 14 year old girls at our house, throw some dead kids onto sets and then not a big deal. Cocaine. Like that's just, that's, but that's part of showbiz. All right. That's what we do. That's how that's what we did all every, every day before the, the guts game TV show or Timpani.

Legends of the Hidden Temple. That's what we did. The screen flipped back to Squidward, still sobbing louder than before. Half of his body in the frame. There is now what appeared to be blood running down his face from his eyes. The blood was also done in a hyper-realistic style. The blood was also done in a hyper-realistic style. Let's go. Look at us as if you'd get it on your fingers if you touched the screen.

We have to go back and see.

Well, we will after we do our edit because we're interns. The editor leans around. He's like, we have to go back. Could be a dead child. Could be a photo of a dead kid, you know? I have a feeling this is just going to get progressively worse here. Yeah, of course. We all were. We knew we had to. This time, the photo appeared to be of a little girl older than the first child. She was laying on her stomach. Her barrettes?

No, I'm just reading. She was laying on her stomach. Her barrettes. Oh, like a hair beret. It's a beret. Like you put in your hair. Oh, yeah. They were in the pool of blood next to her. Her left eye was damaged the same way as the boy. And she was in a state of undress. I feel weird reading that about a child, you know? God, yeah. State of undress. Her entrails were piled on top of her above another crude cut along her back. Again, the body was on the street. Yeah.

on the street and the photographer's shadow was visible, very similar in size and shape to the first. I had to choke back vomit and one intern, the only female in the room ran out. Let's try resume. Yeah, this is for men. This is a men's group. This is for the boys. Get out of here, woman loser.

Well, you can't handle two dead kids. Well, you don't like seeing some dead kids. You're never going to make it here at Nickelodeon. The show reserved. Yeah, the loser woman got out of there. About five seconds after this second photo played, Squidward went silent. All sound cut out. Like it did when the scene started. He put his tentacles down and his eyes were now done in hyper-frequency. God. Yes. Yes.

His eyes were now done in hyper-realism like the others were at the beginning of the episode. They were bleeding, bloodshot, and pulsating. He just stared at the screen as if watching the viewer. After about 10 seconds, he started sobbing. This time, not covering his eyes. The sound was piercing and loud. The most fear-inducing thing of all was that his sobbing was mixed with screams.

Tears and blood were dripping down his face at a heavy rate. The wind sound came back, and so did the deep voice laughing. It's not the still photo that lasted for a good five frames. The animator was able to stop it on the fourth and backed up. This time, the photo was of a boy about the same age, but the scene was different. His entrails were pulled out from his stomach wound by a large hand. Right eye popped, dangling, blood trickling down it.

The animator proceeded. The next frame was different, but we couldn't tell how. He continued to the next. What does that mean? The next frame was different, but I won't explain it. He continued to the next image and it was the same thing. He then went back to the first and played them quicker and I lost it.

I vomited on the floor. So much vomit. Everyone's vomiting. The animation and sound editors gasping at the screen. Why are these interns still there? Why are they not like, no. We have to finish. The five frames were not five different photos. They were frames from a video. We saw the hands slowly lift out the guts. Saw the kid's eye focus on it. We even saw two frames of the kids beginning to blink.

That would be, uh, you would barely be able to notice that in video. You would. And also at the beginning, it's like, I'm not even a millisecond of a fucking of a second, 24 frames a second. It's like five. So you, it would just almost look like a still image. Yeah. It would be hard to tell. You wouldn't see the focusing or the hand moving or the blinking. Also, did you sit there and play it back and forth over and over to catch all that? Also, also, I know that we're literally critiquing Squidward's sewer slide, but I have to get something out of today. Um,

The part about it was different, but we couldn't tell why. Yes, you could. It was moving. It was another instance in time. Why the heck is this different? What's so different about it? It's the same thing. Oh, my God. But they're in a different place. Read the next line. The lead sound editor told us to stop. He had to call in the creator to see this.

Mr. Hillenburg arrived. The actual creator, Stephen Hillenburg. They're bringing in Stephen Hillenburg now. They're bringing him in. I will say that this was years ago. So this, you know, this was before he was. Yeah, before it's bad, but still, it's just funny. It is funny. It is funny. But I just said that to say it wasn't trying to be disrespectful to him. Yeah, no, no, no. He was confused as to why he'd been called down. So the editor just continued the episode. Once the next few frames were shown, all screaming and sound again stopped.

Squidward was just staring at the viewer, his face taking up the full frame for about three seconds. The shot quickly panned out. That deep voice said, Do it! And we saw a shotgun in Squidward's hands. Ha! Ha ha ha! Yes! Yes! Oh my god, read! Keep reading, keep reading! He immediately puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Ha!

Yes, the next line. Realistic blood and brain matter splatters the wall behind him in his bed and he flies back with force. Yes! I love it. Yes! We did it.

We did it, we did it, Joe. We did it. The last five seconds of the episode show his body on the bed, on its side, one eye dangling from what's left of his head above the floor, staring blankly at it. Then, the episode ends. I was really hoping that they would have said Mr. Hillenburg was like, No! My creation! No, not my child! My boy! Not Squidward! Man, that's so good!

It's just the idea of it being so quick to just like spam, like all at once. I mean, immediately do it. Boom. Like all at the same time. Like it's the devil laughing at him and showing him dead kids. And he's also sad about his performance. So he puts a shotgun in his mouth.

Yeah, that's insane. That's literally the smiling friends bit from the last episode where it's like he could not attend as he shot himself in the face with a 3D printed shotgun. Like the drive-by nature of it. I think so. I'm pretty sure someone animated the whole thing, minus the dead kids. Mr. Hillenburg was obviously angry at this. He demanded to know what the hell was going on. Most people left the room at this point. So there was just a handful of us left to watch it again.

You in the episode twice only served to imprint the entirety of it in my mind and caused me horrible nightmares. Sorry, I stayed. I'll also guarantee you that whoever wrote this was young enough to be like, I just said hell.

While riding. And mom isn't going to know. I won't say fuck, but I will put hell in there. I'll put hell in there. And guess what? My mom would be so mad, but she doesn't know. She's stupid and I hate her. My mom is going to beat my butt bare black and blue. It's going to be a bruised butt. My mom is going to kick my can when she finds out that I said hell in my story about Squidward putting a shotgun in his mouth and blowing his eyeballs out because of dead mutilated children.

"Steven, what is this?!" The only theory we could think of is that the file had been edited by someone in the chain from the drawing studio to here. The CTO was called and... in to find out when it happened. Analysis of the file did show it was mixed with new material. However, the time step of the change was a mere 24 seconds before we began viewing it. *gasp* Dun dun dun!

What?

It's just funny. There was an investigation due to the nature of the photos, but nothing came of it. It's just like, you know those photos? The most interesting part? Yeah, nothing really came of that. You know those dead kids? Well, don't worry about it. We're on to the next part. No child. We didn't know what the fuck happened there. Who knows? It doesn't really matter. Yo, that was weird. No child scene was identified.

I love "credited to user/sewerslide squidward"

A 2010 upload. Wow. So this was, so you're saying this was the standard back then. This was the most common creepypasta you'd find. If you just went to creepy to like recently posted, like sure. If you go to like top rated, you would find better stuff. But if you went to like recent and just clicked on one, this was, this was the standard. Yeah. I, uh, I want to make my own creepypasta that is in this vein.

It doesn't have to be a parody of something, but I do want to have something that is this needlessly violent that leads absolutely nowhere. It's just like reading about dead children and nothing happens. Yeah, and it's just like, I just love the idea that it's supposed to be creepy that in the episode it's like, do it! And a cartoon octopus kills himself and that's supposed to be like, oh my god.

No way. And it's like, yeah, so Steven Hilleberg was pretty upset. And those pictures of the actual dead children that were absolutely real, we don't even know what the hell happened. I ended up working at Bed Bath & Beyond after that because my cartooning career went nowhere. The end. Anyway, that was weird. See you kids next time. This also, I remember, was...

There was a video called Red Mist. I know there's videos of it online, but there was like Red Mist or it was like another 4chan post or something like that. Because I'm pretty sure the original Squidward sewer slide got uploaded to 4chan, I think. But it was either...

Red Mist was inspired by this or vice versa. I'm pretty sure Red Mist came first, but it's like an animation of the things that are happening. I'm pretty sure this version was the only one to mention the photos of dead kids or whatever. Because back then, that was how you spiced it up, right? Like, my story's not doing well enough? Throw in some dead children. That will get the people going. And some hyper-realistic blood. So, I think this was second. I could be wrong, though. And it could be the other way around.

Hmm. Also, they straight up reference it in the TV in SpongeBob the TV show, by the way. There's a scene where SpongeBob's like flipping through. It's like, oh, what's behind this door? What's behind this door? And they open one door and it's the it's a slightly more cartoonish animation of the Squidward sewer slide face. So the creators of SpongeBob are aware of the story and have memed on it in the show, which is funny. Hmm.

Yeah, that's good. Well, this episode took a lot of life out of me. Good. And I'm honestly... Take a lot of life out of you? Kind of like Ben Drown. Ben Drown, Ben Drown, Ben Drown Goldblum. Ben Drown Goldblum? Ben Drown Goldblum? All right, everyone, goodbye. I'm leaving. I'm leaving. I'm running away. I'm running away, never going to return. Goodbye.