Bittersweet Infamy - #30 - The Momo Challenge

Episode Date: October 31, 2021

Halloween special + season finale! Taylor tells Josie about the terrifying online suicide hoax. Plus: Madam Koi Koi, Africa's legendary high-heeled ghost.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy. The shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. I just felt a cold chill go down my spine. Oh, it's an air conditioner. Yeah. Taylor, happy Halloween. Best holiday of the year. Halloween. Halloween night. JT LaRoy's birthday. It's it's all the ghosts and the goblins are out rattling their chains. E.T. is about to get in a bike and fly away. Candy's about to be downed. Next. Yeah, I hear the monster mash playing in the distance. Parents are going to be drool at that house party while the

kids are trick or treating. What is your best memory of trick or treating best or scariest? They're the same today. Today they're the same. I have I have a scariest in the sense that it's scary what a disrespectful little prick I was. I went to this. It was me and my brother. I feel like we were dressed as Ninja Turtles, but I don't I don't remember if that was this Halloween or another one. But we went to the door and this older woman was like, aren't you cute? And she gave us juice boxes. And I looked up at her and I was like, give me candy, stupid. And Halloween was over for the year. Yep, I bet it was. Dan Dan Basso was not fond of that kind of talk. And he took me the fuck home. Yes, he did. Damn. I'm a I'm nicer now. I've learned the miss don't

don't define me by the mistakes of my youth, please. No, you will not be tried in the adult court here. Don't worry. I hope not. But yeah, I was a little Ninja Turtle with a fucking sassy mouth and very little patience for juice boxes. And it all came together. There's a lot of sugar in a juice box too. I just that should be that should be stated. My issue clearly wasn't that I needed to get more amped up. No, not at all. So because this is bittersweet infamy, our year is not on the January to December timeline. So blaze we on the October 31st is the is the end and beginning of our year, which means this is the end of our first year of Bittersweet infamy. No, I was gonna say, we're sending it out with a big Halloween jamboree. Yeah,

I love it. And Halloween all together. Absolutely. It is all happening. This is it y'all. This is it how low we eat of year one, season two coming up. But we won't really market. We'll just keep the episodes going the same. But that's okay. There's it's a completely cosmetic distinction, but it's something isn't it nice to set yourself something to be excited about. In our new year, we're gonna switch things up a little bit directly. Taylor will be taking our next episode. Yes, you'll hear his story tonight. And then the next one will also be Taylor. So what a great beginning to the new year. Nothing but Taylor. Nothing but Taylor. It's all happening. Oh, God. No. Oh, no. Do you have a story for me is the question. Oh, yes, I do. So I had a chance to talk to my

my 10 year old niece today. And we talked a little bit about ghost stories because she's a 10 year old girl. She's fascinated by scary scary stories. Right. Not Slenderman, I hope. You know, I didn't bring up Slenderman. Nope. Nope. I kept that one on the back burner. So it wasn't going to be like, I know this story about some 12 year old girls. No, no, no. But I was asking her about some scary stories. And this is not one that she told me. But it did kind of remind me of maybe being in elementary school and thinking of of some spooky stuff that might happen at school. Okay. Have you ever heard of the story of Madam Koi Koi? No, but I'd like to. Madam Koi Koi was a teacher at a boarding school in Nigeria. She was a beautiful young woman who worked as a teacher there. She

wore very stylish clothes and her makeup was always done and she always had red high heels on. Fancy lady. Very fancy lady. Also a very cruel teacher. Oh, Madam Koi Koi. Beat her children, beat her students senseless. It was rough. Very little patience. A lot of patience, I guess, for, you know, doing her makeup and getting ready in the morning, but none for her students. Well, we a lot things. We have priorities, Josie, priorities. Well, self care, you know. So at one point, the students are just overrun with her cruelty and her abuse. And the administration does nothing at this boarding school. And it's also a boarding school. So they have to live there. She doesn't live there, but they are constantly in her realm. Right. And so

one day, Madam Koi Koi gets very upset at this girl and she boxes her ears and the girl has damage. She's bleeding her ears and all this. Yeah. And all the kids are fed fucking up. So they devise a plan that evening that they're going to ambush Madam Koi Koi on her way out. They're teaching Mrs. Tingle. Yeah. That's what they're doing. Helen Mirnaz, Madam Koi Koi, it is on. And they beat her with her own textbooks. Jesus. To the point. That's like a prison beat down. Yeah. To the point where they realize she's dead. They take her body and they throw it over the back fence of the school and they come back to the classroom and they arrange it like it was a burglary. And they're hoping that, okay, that's

that's what will happen. The administration doesn't say anything. Days go by. Madam Koi Koi does not show up. The students are never suspected. Her body is never found. They don't know what happened. But then they start hearing her heels in the hallway. Madam Koi Koi, no. That's the sound of her walking in her red heels and she haunts each and every one of her students as they sleep. Oh, Madam Koi Koi is going to box you to death. Yeah, dude. Haunting. Just like you did to her. Day out. They're so sleep deprived. They can't do their schooling. They drop out of school. They lead horrible lives because they can't go to school, obviously. So she ruins it. So Madam Koi Koi appears in a whole bunch of different traditions. She peers in Ghana as

Madam Moke, which is the which is the Ghanaian word for high heel. So she's like interesting. Miss high heels. But usually typically she's known as Madam Koi Koi. And so she's in Ghana, but also Tanzania and South Africa. And there's a lot of different versions. Some of them she's this cruel, cruel teacher. And other cases, she's a benevolent teacher. And she's always trying to wrangle her students. And at one point, a student runs off of the campus out of the school bounds. And she's running after him with her shoe with her high heel in her hand, being like, come back, come back, come back, like a chocolate style thing. And she doesn't see this car coming down the road and she gets. Oh, no, she's killed. And she constantly tortures and

haunts her students. Because she was in this story, she walks around with only one red heel. Yeah. And she's always she's not a boy. She's not a boy. And she's or like Koi, Koi, Koi. And she she she's always asking for her high heel. Where's my high heel? Where's my high heel? Which I think is a good one. There's also another story where you can only see her by her heels. You don't see any apparition. You just see the heels moving around. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. She's scary. I know. I know. I love her. She's she's sexy, though. She's so sexy. Yeah, it's like a like a mean, misfrizzle kind of vibe where the students turn on her. I just love it. But I love the idea of like a school teacher who's typically, you know, that's a character that's

seen as more benevolent, right? Unless you're a nun. But here she's just a regular red high heeled stylish lady. But there's there's also there's also a great tradition of, you know, the evil teacher from wayside school and Mrs. Mrs. Trenchbull from Matilda. And that's students. There's a lot of Miss Finster from recess. There's a lot of evil teachers in law, right? But she's never beautiful. That's true. That's true. Madam Koi Koi does sound like a piece of ass. I gotta give her that. She's always dressed the fuck up apparently. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Madam Koi Koi. Here's to you. Taylor, please don't scare the fuck out of me. I like it's already dark over here. I just can't.

Don't tell me what to do. You know, I'm a screamer too. I'm just going to blast out this microphone. Will the snowball make it or will it melt? That's called a snowball's chance. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, I'm Madam Koi Koi is a lovely sag because to start this week's story, I want to talk a little bit about Yokai. Okay. Do you know what Yokai are? No, I do not. Yokai are folkloric Japanese spirits, and they each have their own unique appearances and behaviors. There are hundreds of them. They date back to ancient times, and there were other more modern Yokai added along the way. I love them. I love Yokai. Some are disturbing, some are sad, some

are funny, some are cute. They're evocative and creative and vivid, and they all have these complicated backstories. Here are just a few. Okay. The Kambari Nudo is a hairy Yokai in priests' robes that only appears on New Year's Eve to silently watch you use the toilet. Yeah. Okay. Totally. If it likes the look of you, it might rub your back or lick you with its long prehensile tongue. Gross. As I'm on the toilet, just to be clear. As you're shitting on New Year's Eve. Okay. Okay. I mean, what a way to ring in the New Year, right? Just clean out the system. Well, I've got some terrible news. If molested by Kambari Nudo, you not only suffer a year's bad lack, you also become constipated. Is it like a year's worth of constipation? I hope to never know.

The Yokai Maikubi consists of three severed heads, which appear on the surface of the sea, breathing fire and snapping at each other. And legend says that three samurai got drunk and belligerent at a festival, and in the throes of an argument, they all chopped each other's heads off at the same time. And now they live on as Maikubi, their argument everlasting. The bickering. Bickering into eternity. Kuchisake Ona is among the most terrifying of the Yokai. She has long black hair and she wears a mask over her mouth, so she was ahead of that trend. Big end to it, yeah. And she carries around a sharp weapon in some tellings it's scissors and others it's a blade. She prowls the night asking potential victims

if they think she's beautiful. What are you supposed to say? Well, your fucked is the bad news. Okay. If they say no, she kills them. She gets you with her scissors instantly. Okay. And if they say yes, she removes her mask to reveal that the corners of her mouth are slit from ear to ear. She asks her victim if they still think she's beautiful. And if the individual responds with no, she kills them. And if they say yes, she cuts the corners of their mouth so they look like her. Oh yeah, that's a lose-lose situation right there. It's a lose-lose situation and now there's all these people who will come up to you in masks asking for directions. That might be Kuchisakeyona. Like, you don't know. You got to be careful out there. Do they got scissors? You

just have keep those headphones in, you know what I mean? Look at your phone. Yes ma'am, no ma'am. My favorite yokai of all is Beto Beto san. Is it Beto or Rourke? Is it like skinny guy on a skateboard? Skinny white guy on a skateboard? Oh, amigo, yes. Absolutely. Uh, no, it's um, so Beto Beto san never used to have a form, but this like popular artist depicted it as a big circle. He kind of looks like a Mr. Men character. He's a big round circle. He's got two legs and a big smiley mouth. He's just like a big smiling circle. Okay, okay, like pac-man-esque. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And according to Japanese folklore website, Hyaku Monogatari Kaidan Kai, when you are walking down a lowly mountain road at night and you hear footsteps behind you,

don't be alarmed. You have probably attracted the attention of that amiable yokai Beto Beto san. If you aren't in the mood for yokai company, just step to one side of the road and say, oh please Beto Beto san, you first. With that said, Beto Beto san will walk on by. Oh, I like him. Yeah, he's a cutie. Footsteps at night, not great, but when you're like, oh my god, it's just Beto Beto san. Yeah, man, go on through. Yeah, that's nice. That's a comfort. Yokai are Japanese, but every culture, every geographic region, every population has its own unique local bogeymen. Totes. In BC, we have Ogopogo, a Loch Ness monster look alike who lives in Okanagan Lake based on local indigenous folklore about a creature called the Naitaka. San Diego

boasts the Proctor Valley monster. I don't know. Do you know him? No, I feel untethered. He's a bovine cousin of Bigfoot. He's like a big jacked bull guy. Okay, okay. In Texas, y'all better make sure to get Batman inside for the night, lest you run afoul of the chupacabra. True, true. It's scary out there. Other places have La Llorona, Mothman, The Nandi Bear, The Jungshi, Madam Koi Koi. Boom. The list goes on forever. And as the world grows larger, and our global village becomes smaller, it only makes sense that we would encounter new monsters in the scariest place of all, the internet. Are you going to tell me the Slenderman story? I'm going to step out of my script for a minute and give it to you folks straight.

Josie and I don't tell each other beforehand what we're going to do as our topics. And typically, that doesn't create any sort of complications. Tonight it has. I'm not doing Slenderman, but I'm doing something Slenderman adjacent. You better believe I have a Slenderman section in it. Okay. And so what that means is that you get a sublime site, which is Taylor Basso, under the gun. I'm going to be editing this thing live. So please forgive me if on the fly, I'm telling you information that you already know if you listened to our last episode. If you haven't, go back and it wasn't our last episode because Nadine's episode. If you haven't listened to episode 28, Josie tells the story about Slenderman and the Slenderman stabbings and creepypasta and da da da da. And there were

many times as she was talking where I was like, shit, that's in my story too. So there's enough different that I can make it work, but we've got a live ball here. Enjoy. Okay, okay, I have to say I was like picking up this vibe from you when I was telling that story. I was not happy. I was like, Taylor does not like this. Since the advent of machines, which for so many of us work beyond our beyond our comprehension. Oh, totally. That I was gonna say, I hope that's not just me. I look at a TV, I'm like, I don't know how that fucking thing works. And Bjork didn't explain it to me very well. Cathode ray tube barely understood the premise of that. And then we got a flat screen

and it's like, well, I'm done. How does sound go through the air to another place? Like, it's impossible anyway. Since the advent of machines, we've been frightened of the ghosts inside them. Technology that is haunted, programmed to kill, or otherwise not of this world. Or of the very real bad guys that can access us through our devices. Totally. Tonight's terrifying tale is about scary stories and how they spread. It's about the monsters we create in the throes of grief. It's about parental anxiety around razor blades and Halloween candy amplified for a digital age. And it's about the birth of a modern icon in terror. Presented for the approval of the Midnight Society.

Episode 30, The Momo Challenge. Oh, shit, oh, do you remember Momo? I remember Momo because I was teaching in a second grade classroom. And these fucking second graders told me about Momo and showed me Momo. Okay, so let's let's talk through that because I had a pick on deck to send to you. If you'd never seen Momo before. But I'm gonna describe a bit more about what the Momo Challenge is and how it operates. But one thing to know straight up is that it's the picture that is used to depict Momo, this internet monster, is a very particular image.

Josie, how would you describe it? Do you need to look at it again? Are you good? No, no, thank you. So it's, from what I remember, and maybe I do need to see it again. Let me grab it for you. Yeah, stretched out mouth, an overly large mouth, like pale pale whites, kind of clown-esque is what I was remembering. But also like a worm, like a worm and a clown, a worm with teeth and a clown got together and that created Momo. Okay, I've just sent Josie the image. Okay, I am opening it. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so Jesus fucking Christ. No eyelids. Okay, so there's kind of like a, it's reminded me a lot of um, Beeljuice, some of like the the characters that Alec Baldwin and uh,

G, what's her name? Gina Davis. Davis, thank you. Gina Davis and Alec Baldwin like try and make themselves really spooky so they like elongate their features. It kind of has that vibe. So she has this much too wide of a mouth and no eyelids so her eyes are just like jutting out and it's kind of greasy hair. She does look like a Muppet that went terribly wrong. Yes. Like like a student of Jim Henson's was like, what about this? And everyone was like, oh god, no, what? Kids are going to watch this. What the fuck? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I'm going to introduce you to this week's subject, hashtag queen Momo via the celebrated Halloween medium of scary story. This is a completely fictional account written by yours truly. Taylor Mitchell. This is not real. This is not real.

You may find this story frightening, upsetting, disturbing. It may haunt your nightmares. If you don't, I didn't do a very good job. Happy Halloween. Oh fuck you. Okay, let's go. I'm ready. The time is 11 39 p.m. Too late. It's too late. That's way too late. Go to bed. Go to bed. Rita knows this because she's sitting in the darkened laundry room, the only room in the house with an analog clock on the wall. Rita, what are you doing? Usually if she wanted to know the time, she would just pull her phone out of her pocket. Tonight, that phone is turned off in a shoebox under her bed, and she'd do absolutely anything before she looked at it. Instead, she huddles under a duvet waiting for the seconds to tick down until she's finally free.

It all started a week earlier, bizarrely enough, with Peppa Pig. Rita's mother was at work, and her grandmother was upstairs sleeping, so Rita was looking after her four-year-old sister Maria. For 14-year-old Rita, this meant plunking Maria on an iPad to watch cartoons while she vaped out the bedroom window. What flavor vape? I feel like I gotta know Rita. Oh, cotton candy. It's 14. Cotton candy. Good for her. Good for her. Nothing's too sweet when you're 14. No, nothing. Nothing. A hole in your lung and never too sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Rita's owned out and absolutely scurled on her phone until, suddenly, Maria made a noise and hurled the iPad away from her. When Rita investigated the iPad, she almost did the same thing. On the screen,

in the middle of this seemingly innocuous video, was a woman? Not quite. She looked more like a demon. Giant bulging eyes, stringy, jet-black hair hanging limply about her face, and most distinctive and frightening of all, her lips pulled up into an inhuman rictus grin. And on the screen below her face flashed a phone number in the words, Take the Momo Challenge Now. After the initial shock, Rita rolled her eyes. Some stupid prank video uploaded by a dipshit 12-year-old. She grabbed her phone, tapped in the number, and typed, Hey, asshole. Real cool as scare little kids. Almost immediately, her phone vibrated in her hand, and she read the response. You have started the Momo Challenge.

Complete the game, and you will be blessed with amazing luck. But fail even one challenge, and you and the ones you love will suffer the curse of Momo. And then immediately afterwards, a second chat bubble. Challenge number one, watch a scary movie. Rita laughed. Sure, Momo. Why not? She was planning on watching a scary movie that night anyway. So later that night, she put on Candyman, had some popcorn, mission accomplished. The 1992 one? Or? Double feature, baby. Ooh. I just watched the 1992 one, actually the other night.

With the other Vanessa Williams. With the other Vanessa Williams. Yes. Yeah. She appears in the new one as well. Oh, cute. Oh, that's wonderful. I mean, is it cute? It's terrifying. Yeah, in a cute way. And the next day she got another message, and it was similarly innocuous. Walk through a graveyard. There was a graveyard right next to her school,

and Rita was kind of having fun, so she did that too. Rita kept doing the challenges until one day she got a more insidious task. Say something horrible to your best friend. No way Rita's doing that, so she texted Momo back. Sorry Momo, you just lost a customer. Almost the second the message landed, she got a response. It would be terrible if the curse of Momo found little Maria. Rita froze. How did this person know about Maria?

Who was on the other end of this exchange? Were they watching her? Could they harm her family? She's in the iPad. She thought about telling her mother or her grandma, but her mom was always working, and her grandma didn't really speak English well enough for Rita to communicate something weird like this. Also internet like this, yeah. Yeah, exactly. She resolved to just do the stupid challenges

and get rid of whoever this was. So when she went to school that day, she busted pretty hard on Lauren's gap tooth. Which is so true. It was really me. Made Lauren cry. Aww. Rita felt bad, but this is what she had to do for her family. So the tasks continued, getting more and more violent and cruel.

Slash a car tire, slap a stranger, and then run away. Ooh, that's an offense. Things Rita didn't want to do, things that weren't in her nature, but every time she'd express uncertainty, Momo would threaten her sister, her grandmother, Rita herself. So she did as she was told. Losing sleep, losing weight, becoming withdrawn, avoiding her concerned family. Until one day she looked at her phone and saw Momo's latest challenge.

Carve the name Momo into your arm. Seeing this message was like an ice bath. She powered down her phone, she threw it under her bed, she wasn't going to look at it again, and she wasn't going to do this challenge. And that brings us to the laundry room. Huddled under a blanket with Rita as the clock ticks down till midnight, her deadline for this horrible challenge.

Watching in the dim light as the hands move from 11.58 to 11.59. And then, finally, midnight. Nothing happens. Rita breathes deeply, her heart rate slows. And then, she hears a scratch. Scratch, scratch. It's a kitty. Sounds like clawed feet coming down the hall.

Distinct from the koi koi noise, you understand. Scratch, scratch. Rita's heart beats faster. Scratch. And then a bang as the door shatters, and a stringy-haired face with a bird-like grin cranes its head into the room. She has pendulous nude breasts that graduate into chicken-like legs. The woman fills the door frame, and the room goes dark.

Come on, Rita. The creature hisses through razor-sharp teeth. Let's get my name on your arm. The end. What? What happened? We're scrambling. Oh, Rita's done.

Momo got Rita. Oh, Momo killed them all. Oh, Momo. Momo killed them all. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Momo. Obviously, none of that actually happened.

Just want to put that out there, none of that actually happened. That was a fictionalized retelling of the Momo Challenge. An internet hoax from the late 2010s that suggested an evil entity calling itself Momo was targeting children via the web and inciting them to self-harm or suicide through a series of increasingly macabre challenges. At its peak in February 2019, the hoax received global news coverage and social media saturation. Of important note, although this challenge was a hoax, we are going to be discussing actual instances of self-harm and suicide among children,

and how these real-world tragedies influenced the creation of pieces of folk horror like Momo. Yeah, voted. Let's make Hillary Duff and go back to the beginning. That was not in the script. That was on the fly. That was live ball. Live ball, people. Live ball, baby.

Live ball. It's all happening. So internet spooks like Momo have their roots in a decidedly analog form of horror, the chain letter. Yeah, boo. Versions of chain letters can be found as far back as antiquity. There's a really interesting Smithsonian magazine article that I'll shout out in the end credits that had a lot of info on chain letters that I couldn't include here,

because it was just kind of out of scope, but it's really interesting. I recommend it. Okay. But the modern chain letter, like the chain letters such as we know it, do this for this, on paper by post, dates back to the late 19th century. They included prayer chains, pieces of advocacy and satire, promises of good luck, and much to the chagrin of the receiver, threats of curses. Unless the message has passed along.

From the early 1990s to the 2000s, the chain letter saw a modern boom with the advent of... Email. You've got mail. I'm addicted to my email. I hated those fucking chain letters. The worst. Did you ever receive one? Oh yeah, multiple.

It was horrific. Because especially... What was the gist? It was like, send this to 10 people that you know, 10 different people that you know, within the next 24 hours or the next week, and you'll have the best luck of your life. And if you don't do it, you'll lose all of your friends. Or you'll be cursed, you'll da-da-da-da-da. Oh, a lot of them were just straight up like, a fucking ghost will kill you.

Some of them just got right to the point. No, they certainly did. But it was always like, you never know really where it came from, and then it came from a friend that you like, kind of liked and trusted, and you're like, wait, really? So this is real? No, they had to do what they had to do. They had, and that's exactly it.

Yeah, they had to do it. You never seen the ring, you gotta pass the videotape along. Pass that tape. Let's go. So I was looking all over, because I like you, of course, got chain letters in my email inbox when I was blah blah blah blah blah blah at Hotmail.com. Uh-huh, triballoverock at Hotmail.com. Oh, uh, Cranberry underscore J at Hotmail.com.

So, God bless whoever has that email now. You're getting droves of email from all of our fans. You're gonna get a lot of chain letters right now. So I was looking around for like an era appropriate one, like one that I remembered reading, and I couldn't find them anywhere. Sadly, they seem to have been lost to time. So here's a more recent one from scaryforkids.com. Oh, god.

I would wager this was written by a child, and you'll probably see why. Okay. But this is, here's, here's a chain letter. Hi, I am Teddy. I am seven years old. I have no eyes and blood all over my face. I am dead. If you don't send this to at least 12 people,

I will come to your house at midnight, and I'll hide under your bed. When you're asleep, I'll kill you. Don't believe me? Case one. Patty Buckles got this chain email. She didn't believe in chain letters. Well, foolish Patty. She was sleeping when her TV started flickering on and off.

Now she's not with us anymore. Case two. George M. Simon hated chain emails, but he didn't want to die that night. He sent it to four people. Not good enough, George. Now George is in a coma. We don't know if he'll ever wake up.

If you send this to zero people, you will die tonight. If you send this to one to six people, you will be injured. If you send this to 11 people, you will get the biggest fright of your life. But 12 and over, you're safe and we'll have good fortune. So it's a win-win deal. Wow.

Yeah. It's a win-win deal. Is that the end of it? The win-win deal. No, that's me. That's me. If you are safe and we'll have good fortune. Okay, okay.

Yeah, that's me. I'm just trying to sell it. I felt like I was like, at some point, halfway through reading that, I felt like a mobster giving a small business owner the shake down. Yeah, totally. As I just wanted to, you know what I mean? Fucking hate chain emails.

I'm about to remind you something else. I'm sure you hate. Oh, God. Okay. As technology and the internet became more sophisticated, so too did the scares they could deliver. Josie, when you were a young and on the internet, did you ever encounter a screamer?

I don't think so. Do you know what a screamer is? No. So a screamer is basically it's either a video or a still image, or it can even be a game where they'll be assholes and they'll preface it with something like, hey, spot the five differences in this photo. And so you'll just be looking in really, really close.

And then it's usually Linda Blair's character from The Exorcist pops up on the screen and goes, wah! And just scares the shit out of you. Yeah, yeah. It's a classic jump scare. Yeah, find two dogs that look different in this. I think you're just- Yeah, exactly.

And there's no dogs. That's the worst part. There's no fucking dogs that are different. Salt in the wound. So one popular screamer from 2004 was called The Maze. To quote Wikipedia disguised as a computer game, the player is supposed to use their mouse to move a blue square along a given path without touching the walls.

As the player progresses, the walls get smaller, making it more difficult for the player to avoid touching the walls and forces the player to bring their faces closer to the screen. And then, yeah, they hit you with The Exorcist. Meanwhile, the chain letters of yore gradually evolved into what is now called the creepypasta, a term first coined on 410 in 2006. So this is where I need to start editing on the fly. This was covered in episode 28.

So I'm going to give you the abbreviated version of what a creepypasta is just in case you don't want to listen to that one. That's- yeah, that's fine. That's really fine. For those who didn't, we really had no way of knowing you would be getting this much creepypasta information. Sorry. Okay.

Creepypastas are pieces of memetic, creepy text that are forwarded around the internet. According to Aja Romano writing for The Daily Dot, their horror is often enhanced by their brevity, their journal style, format, or their casual, here's a creepy thing that happened to me once, narrative style. Though many creepypasta are no more than a paragraph or two long, often the stories will span many updates and branch off into varying multimedia formats. I'm surprised that you're- in Canada, wouldn't it be a creepypasta? Wow.

Oh my god, you my fair ladyed me. Good for you. I should be creepypasta. I pronounced my own last name wrong. Like my last say basso, that's for sure not how that's pronounced. So interestingly, many though certainly not all creepypasta dwell on the medium of technology itself. One tells the tale of the disturbing and mysterious children's show, Candle Cove,

that only appears on television at certain times to certain children. Another, the Lavender Town Suicides is a narrative in which music from the Pokemon Red and Green Games inspired mass child suicides which are then covered up. I kind of like the song, I gotta say. I love that song. It's great. In Ben Drowned by Alex Hall. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

A young man purchases a haunted copy of the Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask for Nintendo 64 and is played by a supernatural entity called Ben. This was only the beginning of an unfolding multimedia saga that concluded in 2020. Ben Drowned and its various offshoots have been consumed by hundreds of thousands of readers and are widely credited with helping establish the creepypasta as its own literary genre worthy of analysis and criticism. Said Hall on his work, Relevantly, there's something spooky about something that people have programmed to do a specific thing that has suddenly gone haywire and is starting to turn malicious.

It's, that's totally the, the poltergeist, the ring, like all of that is, is technology based. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. However, Ben Drowned has an unexpected and tragic real world post script. In 2016, a 12 year old American girl named Caitlyn Davis committed suicide. I didn't know that. I'm about to reveal some really upsetting details about this girl's death. So please brace yourself. Caitlyn hanged herself in her front yard while live streaming the event.

To, to a website called live.me. The video spread on YouTube and Facebook and Facebook took two weeks to pull it down. Two fucking weeks? Mark, get on it. I agree. Or rather, Mark, go fuck yourself. Yes. Well, also a valid point. Yes. Caitlyn struggled with poor mental health, self harm, and said that she was subject to

emotional and sexual abuse from family members. Where Ben Drowned comes into the story is that after her death, a blog run by Caitlyn emerged where she seemed to indicate that she was in some sort of online relationship with a person that she believed to be the Ben character from this creepypasta. Oh, I don't think they ever came to a satisfactory answer about what it was. It's speculated by some that Caitlyn may have been catfished by another internet user taking the guise of this character. Yeah, totally.

It may also have been like a role playing exercise. Like, I don't think it's clear. Said creator Hall, in part, I wondered if I never wrote that story. Would that stuff have still happened? No one can ever say for sure. It's a hard moral issue and a tragedy, but I don't think that authors can necessarily be held responsible for what some fans do because of an obvious work of fiction. Yeah.

Yeah, it's tricky. You want to play explain, but can it and it's also that the thing that we were talking about in terms of like scary stories get spread around like it's just how they how they do, you know, they proliferate and that's kind of what this is about. That's what that's what what I'm telling you is about. Yeah, yeah. The most famous creepypasta also had the most infamous real world consequences. Slenderman.

Slenderman. Slendermancito was created in 2009 on the Something Awful Web forums by a user named Eric Nudson. And you should find out all about that by going back and listening to episode number 28. We're just gonna that's a hyperlink. It's an oral hyperlink. Long story short, this is a very famous creepypasta that bore out two 12 year old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, stabbing a classmate

19 times in an isolated patch of forest. Yeah, I did. It's a pretty gnarly story and it ties very much back into what we're talking about in terms of of online horror and online lore, right? Yeah. And and how that affects the people who are consuming it, especially children. Totally children. Yeah, I think that's a good focus.

Not even just effects because I don't I don't mean to say that in a like a night trap is making our young men into rapists kind of way. I just mean that like it's it's it's a valid enough form of literature and art or whatever it is that enough people are interacting with it that they're doing pretty seismic shit in their lives because of it. You know what I mean? I think about this a lot when I am teaching composition and like how to research things on the Internet, too, because that's like something that it's a part of my class that

I teach is like how to find credible and trustworthy sources online, because that's where the information is coming from for the majority of research out there. It doesn't take place in the library and libraries know that, you know? But it's about trying to distinguish on this medium that is new. It's brand new trying to distinguish what is real and what is not. And it is a very hard job for kids and adults. And I think that's where it kind of like it doesn't it makes it so tricky because as adults, it's a challenge for us to model appropriate behavior with with the Internet or with devices

or with anything because we don't know. Nobody modeled it for us. And it is it's an entirely new technology and it's an entirely new interaction with story. Even if you just focus on story, like it's it's entirely new and how we approach it. Kids are experimenting with it. We're all experimenting with it, but these kiddos are the forefront. You you raise the point that it's both kids and adults interacting with it and so much of like,

I mean, when it comes to things that are like hoaxes, for example, which is what I'm going to be talking to you about, concerned parents are so much of how this propagates. Concerned parents who don't necessarily have better Internet literacy than their children. Yeah, yeah, right. Which is what it is. I'm not saying I'm not saying that we all need to be fucking terminally online and able to sniff out these things, but there has to be a happy medium, right? So Slenderman creator Eric Nedson said after this whole thing went down,

he said, I'm deeply saddened by the tragedy in Wisconsin and my heart goes out to the families of those affected by this terrible act. An admin on the creepypasta wiki posted the following notice. This wiki does not endorse or advocate for killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line between fiction and reality and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a satanic cult. When children kill or are killed or maybe most horrifyingly kill themselves,

that's like an unthinkably tragic situation, a child committing suicide. We don't know what to do with the grief born from such a horrifying situation. We look for external sources and when the obvious behavioral problems, traumatic homes, and bad influences don't emerge, we look to the media they consume, especially that which we mistrust or don't understand. In 2004, an 11-year-old Japanese girl known only in the press by her pseudonym Girl A murdered her classmate Satomi Mitorai in their empty elementary school classroom in Sasebo, seemingly out of the blue.

The motive was traced to petty online disagreements between the girls with the perpetrator characterized as an otherwise upbeat, grounded, normal child. In search of a greater meaning, spectators blamed the controversial novel and movie Battle Royale, which Girl A enjoyed, as well as her participation in online horror communities and her enjoyment of an online horror flash animation known as the Red Room, which tells the story of an online suicide game. Oh. Meanwhile, a lone class photo of the perpetrator did the rounds on the internet

and she's wearing, it's like the whole class in the picture. They're all like out on the playground. You know, sometimes you go out to the playground to take your class picture. Yeah, yeah, and the equipment is behind, like the slide. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. A little fucking tire you can run through, whatever. Yeah. And it's the whole class and everyone's faces have been blurred out except for victim and perpetrator. And so she's in there and she's wearing this blue University of Nevada sweatshirt

that has like Nevada across the front. Okay. And so this girl became known online as Nevada Tan. And she became a piece of internet horror lore herself with fan art, cosplays, tributes. A lot of like edge lords in that era were always making these images. It would be like Nevada Tan, like covered in blood and very like stoic with her box cutter kind of thing. Whoa.

Did she harm the other student with a box cutter? Is that what happened? I don't remember the exact details. It happened in the classroom, I remember that. Okay. And it was very like that story you told about those young girls stabbing their friend, the slender man stabbing, because like she said some like kind of really like put this cloth over your face.

And she was like, I'm not going to do that. What the fuck are you talking about? Right. But very naive and childlike, right? And then killed her. Yeah. The internet is vast and shapeless and often lawless. It's easy to feel like we can't control it or contain it,

especially when it comes to our children and its influence over them. Digital anxieties like these have existed since the advent of technology, but have increased many times over as our loved ones interact with social media, consume content and exchange private messages to which we're not necessarily privy. You can park your child in front of an iPad to watch YouTube videos while you make your chilesurianos, but rarely will a parent sit over their child's shoulder to literally monitor every single piece of media they consume. Oh, totally.

Yeah. No way. You could be a household that like child safety, you're watching everything that your kid is watching. Screen time is limited, blah, blah, blah. And then they go over to your friend's house, to their friend's house. Yeah. And it's all rules out the window, no whole bars.

They watch whatever the fuck they want. Or they're in school or yeah. Right. I remember watching American Pie when I was probably much too young, because a friend had torrented it on their desktop computer and I watched it that way. Yeah. So just putting it out there for all your scared parents. That fear that you're talking about has given rise to all kinds of panics,

concerns, and urban legends around what exactly kids do when we're not looking. Some of them are false. The cat in the Talking Angela app is not, it turns out, really a front for predators to spy on your children. Okay. But others are inexplicably real. This was the case in the early 2010s when a YouTube scandal called Elcigate took place. Oh.

Elsa, like from Frozen? Elsa from Frozen, yeah. Oh fuck. Parents discovered that seemingly innocuous children's videos featuring characters like Elsa from Frozen or Peppa Pig would suddenly take nefarious and disturbing turns. One featured Peppa Pig going to the dentist and having all of her teeth painfully extracted. Another featured Spider-Man injecting a mysterious substance into the stomach of a pregnant Elsa. These videos would enter YouTube's algorithm and get auto-fed into sidebars alongside other

legit children's videos, which the kids would then watch, which would complete the loop, right? Yeah, and the thumbnail is completely innocuous. Yeah, yeah. Whatever, no big deal. Yeah. These videos were a mixture of deliberate or some of them seem to have been like algorithmically generated creations. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. But whatever they were, they racked up Buku views. In 2017, YouTube clamped down on the so-called Elsa Gate channels, scrubbing them from the website. In the late 2010s, online scares that target children took on a new wrinkle as QAnon, and its accompanying nebulous statistics and conspiracy theories about child trafficking emerged. Right, Pizza Gate.

Pizza Gate won 2020 Conspiracy Theory, so this happened a little afterwards, but Pizza Gate was like 2016. Yeah. One 2020 conspiracy theory alleged that global elites are snatching kids from their homes and sending them around the world in plain sight using seemingly benign means like the Wayfair Furniture app. Would you do this one? No, Wayfair Furniture app.

The app. So the idea, and they literally just had one of these, I want to say like a couple weeks ago, with Walmart, I think, because what happens is, what happened in the Walmart case was these shoes had names that could conceivably be interpreted as the names of children that you were buying at walmart.com. Okay. And because, so you've got a pair of shoes, that goes out of stock, but for some reason, I don't know the exact reason why.

Some algorithms, the way they deal with that, isn't to delist it. It's just to hit the price up to like five grand, so no one will actually buy it. Oh, okay, okay. One social media post about the Wayfair conspiracy theory said, So Wayfair has third party vendors that are human sex trafficking on their website. There are items like throw pillows, cabinets, etc. Priced at $10,000 to $20,000 and named after missing girls. Please be careful, said Wayfair.

There is, of course, no truth to these claims. The products in question are industrial grade cabinets that are accurately priced. Whoa. It was alongside this renewed panic around our children's online safety that MoMo was born, although, because we're doomed to repeat history, MoMo was merely the newest iteration of an old Russian viral sensation, the Blue Whale Challenge. On November 22nd, 2015, a Russian teenager named Rina Palenkova posted an image of herself with the caption, Nya-bye, like N-Y-A-bye as in bye-bye.

Okay. She, unfortunately, she killed herself the next day. News of her death circulated online via a Russian social media site called V-Contact, which I gather is like their Facebook, says BBC. These forms were places where teenagers met to talk about everyday things like school and which classmates they fancied, as well as darker subject matter, depression, loneliness, and suicide. It was in these groups where the line between fact and fiction was often blurred, that users posted feverishly about Rina.

Then more deaths followed. On Christmas Day, 12-year-old Angelina Davidova killed herself, and then two weeks later, so did teenager Diana Kuznetsova. We know very little about these suicides and their potential connections, but an article by journalist Galina Mersalieva in Novaya Gazeta linked the deaths, along with 127 others between November 2015 and April 2016, to a purported life or death game called the Blue Whale Challenge. Oh, shit. I've not heard of this.

Mersalieva claimed that participants were set 50 tasks over 50 days, starting with the innocuous, watch a horror film, and eventually graduating into self-harm and on the final day, suicide. More deaths were linked to the challenges in the U.S. and India. One victim was said to have posted an image of a blue whale shortly before dying on her Instagram. One was found to have painted a mural of a blue whale at school. One image that I call bullshit on depicts a blue whale carved into somebody's forearm. I don't think that's real.

Oh, okay, okay. It's too- I'm not trying to be an asshole. It's too nice a whale. It's, you know, it's someone- a gifted carver did that. Countries like Bangladesh, Italy, China, and Saudi Arabia issued statements and took steps like restricting internet and video games to curb the spread of the blue whale game. In Tunisia, seven parents claimed their children had committed suicide as a result of the game, said an alarmist article in Forbes magazine. With the Blue Whale Challenge, you're entering into a new world of Jumanji.

Except this game, there is no happy return. If you have ever received an invitation to join this game, swim far, far away. Wow, they're really just Jumanji, eh? The hilariously melodramatic piece inexplicably ends with a quote from Inception. Not a relevant one, either. I remember I looked at it, I was like, that doesn't- what the fuck does that have to do with anything? You just want to use that quote. You just- you just like Inception, don't you?

Yeah. You get there real high and just be like, Inception, dude, have you seen it? It's wild! Oh, you don't want to talk about Inception? Watch Jumanji the other day. In November 2016, a 21-year-old producer of witch house music named Philip Budeikin confessed to being the creator of the Blue Whale Challenge. Whoa. He was sentenced to three years in prison.

Maybe more would be. Then in June 2017, a postman named Ilya Sidorov was also arrested for masterminding a Blue Whale group. In June 2018, so was a Russian financial analyst, I suppose he would be Russian, wouldn't he, named Nikita Neranov. So they all confessed to perpetuating the Blue Whale Challenge or creating it? Yes, yes, or some version of the Blue Whale, their own Blue Whale Challenge, amongst some group of talks. Okay.

So that confirms that, right? Right. Well, a Russian journalist named Evgeny Berg decided to do some digging into the phenomenon. God bless Russian journalists. Really? Well, God, that's a fucking hard graft, isn't it? Yep. He found that the original number of 130 in the Novaya Gazeta came from a man named Sergei

Pestov, whose daughter had committed suicide. He had trawled the internet looking for cases that he believed were connected cases, and he had come to this figure of 130 and given it to this reporter. Oh. Berg said that the Blue Whale Challenge was merely the creation of a grieving parent trying to unravel his own personal tragedy. Whoa. Yeah, no, it's hard stuff.

Said journalist Mirsalieva, who originally broke the story. So this is the woman who got this number from Sergei Pestov and put it out there that the Blue Whale Challenge was a thing. Yeah. This number 130 wasn't based on the conclusions of one father who lost his child. No, this is absolutely wrong. It was based on the conclusions of over 200 parents who lost their children. The father of the girl who died just helped during that period of time.

I don't have any reason not to trust them. I checked many things. Further digging by Berg and the BBC revealed that many of the many suicides attributed to the Blue Whale Challenge, not one had been conclusively linked to the phenomenon. Oh, okay. Okay. So is what you're saying, this parent who was looking for some connections found some tenuous ones here and there?

Yeah. And by stating that it was a Blue Whale Challenge, then created the challenge that got replicated by other people around the world? Is that? Basically, yes. Okay. Basically, yes. Okay.

Through the connections that he's making to try and make sense of an senseless thing, he creates the actual phenomenon. Yes, yes. He authors the thing himself. Alexandra Arkupova, a professor in folklore studies at Russian State University for the Humanities. God bless her also. She checked out some of the online Blue Whale groups that emerged, and she found they'd

all been established after the so-called appearance of the challenge in this article. Gotcha. Okay. And they were all administrated by 12 to 14-year-old copycats. Whoa. Quoting BBC, far from being manipulative adults, all the curators seemed to be just kids who had read or heard about the game. In fact, Arkupova's research suggests that the challenge might not have really existed

in any substantial way before the Noviya Gazeta article was published. These kids get ahold of it, and they're like, yeah, this is true. Have you seen this? Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah, I'm in a Blue Whale group. Well, the thing is, in all of these groups, this is, I'm quoting from Alexandra Arkupova now.

In all these groups, people, mainly young people, were waiting for this game. The game never starts. Because there was nobody running it, because it wasn't an actual thing. Okay, okay. Yeah, or if it falls to shit, because it's a 12-year-old running it or whatever. Right, yeah. As for the so-called masterminds, I can't vouch for them all, but I can tell you that Philip Budeikin, the original confessor, he seems to have filled online groups with shock

content related to Rina Palenkova and suicide in order to get as many followers as possible and then advertise his music. Which house, baby? Ooh, damn. Some, some marketing models that we will not follow for Bittersweet Empathy. I don't want my marketing to end me up in the Russian clink. Only one person ever did that right, and that's Pussy Riot. You know what I mean?

Totes, totes. Of the 15 charges initially brought against Budeikin, all but one completely crumbled by the time the case went to trial. Wow. In short, we don't know if the Blue Whale Challenge even existed in any form before the original article about it emerged. It seems to be an attempt to give monstrous form to a more sobering reality rushes extraordinarily high rate of teenage suicide.

The Blue Whale Challenge also unintentionally ended up being a dress rehearsal for an even more nebulous challenge that took over the entire world, the Momo Challenge. The fucking Momo. Yeah. Ugh. Get your foam Momo masks on, bitch. It is happening. In July 2018, Momo emerged to stalk our children, and nobody was safe.

She took the form of a bird-like, bug-eyed, thin-lipped, stringy-haired woman with nude breasts and chicken legs. But you can't- in some of the images, they've cropped it so it's just Momo's face. In others, you can see more of her body, but I think those are used less because it's more obvious that it's not a real photo when you see the full body. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, Jim Hinton's students went a little crazy versus like, holy shit.

Yeah. That makes sense. When you get that tight close up on Momo's face, she's gross. Momo is scary as hell. If I was a child, I would be losing sleep over Momo. Oh yeah. She would interrupt seemingly innocuous children's video content exhorting tauts to harm or kill themselves.

The rules of the challenge vary depending on the telling. Some reports have it mimicking the structure of the Blue Whale challenge with participants completing different levels. Others have it being introduced to children via WhatsApp rather than YouTube content. Some had it on Fortnite or Snapchat. Okay. When I say the rules in the format of the challenge are unclear, this is because that like the Blue Whale challenge,

there is no evidence that the Momo challenge ever even existed. The official YouTube account on Twitter said, we want to clear something up regarding the Momo challenge. We've seen no recent evidence of videos promoting the Momo challenge on YouTube. Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges are against our policies. This of course didn't stop the hysteria. The first real world reporting, let's say, around the challenge involves the July 2018 investigation of the suicide of a 12-year-old girl in Buenos Aires.

But it wasn't until February 2019 that the phenomenon reached global saturation. According to Wikipedia, the challenge has or claims to have existed in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Luxembourg, Belgium, Iran, Pakistan, the Philippines, France, Switzerland, Indonesia, Brunei, Hong Kong, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. Fuck, dude. So Momo got her fucking air miles, man. Yeah, I did.

She was flying a bit. She did not, it sounds like she didn't make it to Africa. They're dealing with Madame Cocoy. Yeah, yeah, they had enough on their plate. Yeah. So where did Momo come from? Pits of hell, yes, but where did Momo come from? There are different ideas on its origins, but the most coherent timeline I could find

comes from Know Your Meme. Know Your Meme may be funny, but they are no joke. They have this thing documented down to individual posts, so you can watch Momo spread from community to community, like forgive the metaphor like a virus. Yeah, no, totally. That is, I really like Know Your Meme. I go on there when you want to know your meme. Yeah, when I want to know, I use memes a lot in my class because I think they're quick hand,

they're an interesting intersection of text and image. I think it's an interesting site for writing or for composition. But you could use a meme that you're like, oh, it's a cute little frog. And then you go to KnowYourMeme.com, you're like, oh, this is Pepe the Frog and he's the symbol of the alt-right. So I'm not going to use that. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Yeah.

And they are the thorough as you're about to document. Yeah. The iconic image of Momo is a statue created by an artist named Keisuke Iso, working for a Japanese special effects company called Link Factory. Oh, I knew it. The statue's appearance was inspired by a yokai. Oh, shit, full circle, dude. Specifically, Momo is inspired by an ubume, the ghost of a pregnant woman who has died.

She stops passersby and asks them to care for her baby, then disappears. When the unwitting babysitter looks down at the bundle in their arms, they're shocked to find a bunch of rocks all swaddled up. To prevent a woman becoming an ubume upon her pre-partum death, the fetus should be removed and buried with her in a hug. If this can't be done, the doll can be substituted. Oh, wow, okay. So this statue of, it's called Mother Bird is the name of the statue.

And so Mother Bird was shown at vanilla gallery in 2016, where someone took a photo of it and posted it to Instagram in August of that year. Okay. After that, it fell into the hands somehow of Spanish speaking web users who created an urban legend around the image being connected to a mysterious WhatsApp number. So this is right around the time of Blue Whale, right? Yeah. Like a year, a year after or so.

On July 18th, this was posted, this image with the accompanying lore was posted on the R Creepy subreddit. Okay, right. Then it spread to YouTube. Then it spread to 4chan. Then the suicide that I mentioned in Argentina happens. That's a piece of real world news. Fox News gets ahold of that on August 2nd.

Yeah, dude. So now Momo has entered the public consciousness. It's late 2018. The craze kind of dips a bit and it dies down a bit until six months later. February 25th, 2019, a Scottish mother, Lynn Dixon calls the police saying Momo told her son to hold a knife to his neck. The next day, February 26th, Northcott School in Hull posts a warning on Twitter about Momo hacking into student programs to issue them the challenge.

Then the police service of Northern Ireland posts a warning on Facebook that was frequently circulated. Parents were panicking on social media and one in particular had a very wide reach. Kim Kardashian had an audience of 129 million followers on her Instagram account. That's right, that's right. Where she pled for social media companies to do something about the plague of bird women attacking our children. And from there, it's spread like wildfire, says Taylor Lorenz for the Atlantic.

All of these challenges and trends follow the same formula. A local news station runs a piece overstating a dangerous teenage trend. Concern parents flock to social media to spread the word. Actual teenagers and anyone else who lives their life extremely online mock them for their naivete. Brands and influencers hop on the trend, parodying it and exploiting it for their own game. And trolls take advantage of those who believe it's real, often by creating and posting content that seemingly confirms parents' worst fears. See, and I heard about it from a group of second graders who were semi-fascinated by it,

but semi-scared, and they had all seen it through older siblings or local news. So I don't think any of them had actually, because, you know, for them, like Peppa Pig was like, no, I'm too old for Peppa Pig. But it's like, okay, you are a target, whatever, you're eight years old. But they're playing that like older game. So like, yeah, I know, like my baby sister saw it and like freaked out. Meanwhile, they're at home like pissing their gauntlet. Like, oh, my God, Bobo is coming in.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it was so strange to hear about it from them because then I looked it up and I felt, I was like, well, I'm not going to go to like YouTube to look at it. But I did see it on local news shit. And I was like, this is wild. Why would somebody do this? This is horrible. They should stop.

Momos, cut it out. No, that is, that is wild, though. Yeah, that feedback loop. And like, I think such a big part of the online space, too, is about taking the piss out of naive people who are like, don't you get it? It's a joke. Oh, you know, but it spreads so much. So it's like, well, is it a joke when your three year old sister hears about it?

Like, no, it's not. If Momo wasn't real, if Momo wasn't real, she's real now. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So as with the Blue Whale Challenge, while police officers in many jurisdictions around the world have investigated cases of self-harm and suicide, allegedly connected to the Momo Challenge, none have actually been proven to link back. Right.

When people take their own lives, by and large, there tend to be far more tangible forces at play than a mythical bird lady from the internet. True, true. So now that Momo had reached the Mo Mainstream, journalists began to dig in and they traced the original image back to this artist who reacted to the news with total bemusement. He told the Sun, people do not know if it is true or not, but apparently the children have been affected and I do feel a little responsible for it. I feel like I'm in trouble, but it's all out of my hands.

Yeah, totally. He added that the natural materials used to make the statue had biodegraded, forcing him to throw it out. Quote, it was rotten and I threw it away. The children can be reassured that Momo is dead. She doesn't exist and the curse is gone. That's actually a really good response, considering- No, I love that because I feel like most people, including me, probably would go like,

okay, Momo was never a thing, it's just a statue. But he's like, no, Momo was alive and I killed her. You're welcome. Yeah, yeah. She's dead and gone. And the kids are believing that it's real, then you might as well follow that logic and kill it, you know? With her curse dispelled by her very creator, Momo quietly lost momentum and faded into

the background. In fact, she appears to have undergone a bit of a rebranding as terminally online obsessives kind of fell in love with her. The Momo massive created memes depicting Momo's face with encouraging messages like eat healthy, get lots of sleep, be loved. Self love, self care. Yeah, yeah. Fan art and videos, New Works of fiction, BuzzFeed released a limited edition newspaper,

one wonders what that was about, with Momo as the cover girl with large hearts in her eyes. In July 2019, Orion Pictures and Vertigo Entertainment announced that a Momo movie was under production, though like the challenge itself, it has yet to materialize. It should also be noted that a Korean thriller called Search Out was made in 2020 that was based on the Blue Whale Challenge. So there's like a K-thriller treatment of the Blue Whale Challenge if you're interested in that, it's called Search Out. I haven't watched it, but sounds cool.

Yeah, I want to watch it. What are the lessons to be learned here? There's a kernel of truth to online suicide challenges in that cyber bullying does happen. Sexual extortion does happen, says Folkloreist Benjamin Radford. These things are real and they do happen, but he encourages a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking to prevent moral panics, quote, If you think about it, adults have a hard time getting teens to clean up their rooms, much less get kids to perform a series of increasingly bizarre tasks for 50 days consecutively.

I'm just, I'm enjoying that one. There you go. I didn't know I was going to take that turn, I like that. From Dr. April Foreman, licensed psychologist and executive board member of the American Association of Suicidology. Parents who are concerned about their kids being exposed to disturbing images on social media should have a frank conversation with them about their internet use. We need to remind parents that things are happening

that are sort of the new media analogues of strangers giving out candy on the side of the road. In addition to implementing parental controls and filters on all their kids devices, parents should also say to their kids, you may see some weird stuff, if you do turn it off, just let me know. Totally, yeah. One last word from Momo's papa, Keisuke Aiso. According to the adorably named website, Spoon Tamago, the artist himself has always been fascinated with the idea of fear and horror as a child,

and to this day he has fond memories of being too afraid to go to the bathroom at night. As long as no one gets hurt, he believes it's healthy and normal for children to experience fear. Happy Halloween, everyone. And when you were reading your story right before we taped this one, I was shitting razor blades. You gave me a fright because you were saying like a Ben Drowned. I was like, oh no, she's doing Ben Drowned. And then you were talking slender.

Oh, she's doing slender, man. So a creepy pasta is, oh fuck, this is bad. It was deadly, but I couldn't say anything. I couldn't, I just had to like try to keep a straight face. I was just, my heart, I think it ended up, I had enough stuff that you didn't cover. No, there's, you had a lot of cool, cool stuff too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were fine.

I wonder what put us both in this mindset of like, I don't know, digital archaeology and, you know, we both went, we both went internet-y. My thing, one of the things that pulled me to the story too was that it was involved kids, and that kind of had a Halloween-y vibe to me, because Halloween is for kids more or less, you know. Right. So this one has been on my docket for ages, and I actually started looking into it once, and then I, I think I found the Wikipedia page kind of dry or something, so I just was like, okay, maybe there's not enough here or whatever. Yeah.

And then as we came up to October, I had a couple in my head, but neither of them was like, Halloween-y, neither of them was scary enough for me. I wanted to do, I wanted to do something scary. And so I was hemming and hawing between those, and then I went for a run one day, and the entire, I remembered that I had wanted to do the Momo challenge, and I, then I had these thoughts about like, oh, yokai, and you can slot the story in here, like it really all came to me at once, which was nice. Yeah. No, I like the way that you put it all together.

Yeah, there's something about those like very old stories. Yeah, this is just the new that. It's just the new that, yeah. And now we have analytics to track literally how it happened. And timestamp it, and like, no, yeah, exactly. I tell my students this a lot, that Aristotle hated writing. He thought it was a corrupting technology that would ruin the way that people think. Fair enough.

Yeah, I mean. Was he wrong? Here we are. We're writing and we're corrupt. Yeah, yeah, totally. But I just, I think that applies so well to our, the like the computer technology and the internet technology that we have is that like, it's very easy to be like, it's horrible. It's terrible. It's ruining everything.

But it's, it's technology is not good, nor is it bad. So next time you hear from us, it'll be me on the stick again, telling the story. And I, we don't know yet what it'll be, but you have my word. It will not involve creepypasta. You don't have my word. Oh my God, please don't. I feel like fucking Striganona. There's creepypasta all around me.

I need to eat my way out. I do love pasta, so. Who doesn't? But what if I? It's actually pronounced pasta. It's actually pronounced pasta. Pasta. What if I told the story about pasta that happened to be.

That was creepy. Scary and creepy. Abnormal pasta, yeah. Abnormal pasta. If you can, if you got something in that vein that can legitimately carry an hour, oh my God. Oh, the challenge, the pasta challenge. One last thing.

Happy Halloween everybody. I hope you have a wonderful spooky moonlit night, black cats only. Fuck yes. Ghouls and gals. Ghouls and gals. Be safe. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts.

We usually release a new episode every other Sunday and you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. The sources for this week's episode were the Wikipedia articles for Jump Scare, Ben Drowned, Elsie Gate, Sasebo Slashing, and Ubume. The Cult of Zelda, Majora's Mask on the Ringer, March 3rd, 2017. The Definitive Guide to Creepy Pasta, The Internet's Urban Legends by Aja Romano for the

15th Dot, October 31st, 2012. The Four Chain Letters swept the Internet, they raised funds for orphans and sent messages from God by Mail and Solly for Smithsonian Magazine July 2nd, 2020. Something is wrong on the Internet by James Bridal on Medium, November 6th, 2017. Momo's sculpture has been destroyed by E.J. Dixon for Rolling Stone, March 4th, 2019. Keisuke Aiso's Ubume sculpture that was misappropriated as the face of the Momo hoax on Spoon Tomago, March 5th, 2019. Blue Whale, What is the Truth Behind an Online Suicide Challenge?

by Ant Adine for BBC, January 13th, 2019. Cyber Bullying taken to a whole new level. Enter the Blue Whale Challenge by Andrew Rosso for Forbes, February 28th, 2018. He's the guy who ended the article with an inception quote. According to his byline, he's their crypto and blockchain person, I don't know. Momo Challenge, Why Parents Are Freaking Out Over This New Game, also by E.J. Dixon for Rolling Stone, February 26th, 2019. The bogus Momo Challenge Internet hoax explained by Amanda Sakuma on Vox, March 3rd, 2019.

The information on Yo-Kai came from two websites, predominantly Hyaku Monogatari Kaidan Kai and Yo-Kai.com. Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins. The song you're listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele. Thank you for one year. You couldn't be more amazing for listening and helping us hold this space. Thanks so much and happy Halloween. Enjoy yourself, eat lots of candy, get cavities, do it up.