CreepCast - Creepy Grab Bag #1 | Creep Cast
Episode Date: June 1, 2024Today the boys read Ben drowned, normal porn for normal people and squidwards suicide…. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Transcript
Discussion (0)
It is the cold habitual and it is the
fruroy of the mountains blue.
The froy at its summit.
Coors Light.
T'envue in a fraud.
Celebrate in a fashion responsible,
you have to have the age legal to consume
the alcohol.
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 been 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 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,
I get ding still. We'll have to
we'll have to definitely see if it
if it just immediately he's like no we know what you're saying
yeah it'll be even funnier 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 yeah
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 uh we haven't covered them just because
they're like too short for their own standalone episode unless you guys yeah 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 you all like it, we can do this with more because honestly, most old school
creepy pasta 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 all, it's my fault. But I wanted to
say that it kind of seemed when we were talking about initially that you were like oh 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 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'm still new this.
It's not so much everyone, as much as it is someone 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 of this when I was growing up.
Well, starting it off on our triptic gambit here is going to be normal corn for normal people on our slash no sleep the classic, the classic Reddit 12 years ago by a user named Reith, 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 Tom Foolery we may come across.
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.
But now Factor is here to also be both of those.
things and make you not miserable. That's because factor meals can be ready in as little as two
minutes and compared to other options are less expensive and way healthier, as all of the meals
are made by gourmet chefs and then approved by dieticians. And on top of that, you have a meal
that's ready to heat and eat, meaning there's no prep work, no cleanup, no cooking, etc.
You can also get as little or as much factor as needed to fit into your schedule, as you can
choose between six to 18 meals every week. And of course, this
can be paused or rescheduled at any time.
You can also get as little or as much factor
as needed for your schedule as you can choose
between four to 18 meals to be delivered each week.
With 35 meal options each week and over 60 add-ons,
it's never been easier to get a variety
of delicious foods that are also good for you
and won't break the bank.
All I assume to you are good things.
Factor is now owned by HelloFresh,
a company that we've worked with before on the show
because all of the products they send us
are fantastic and we can't recommend enough.
And here they are just as committed to delivering healthy, delicious food straight to you.
So while you're enjoying Hunter and I deliver our weaponized stupidity,
you might as well get in on something that's actually good for you.
And right now, there's never been a better time to get in on this offer.
That's because if you head to Factor75.com or click the link below and use code Creepcast 50,
you'll get 50% off your first factor box and 20% off your next month of orders.
That is right.
That means you get half off the first box and 20% off.
your next four boxes again use code creepcast 50 at factor 75.com to get in on this fantastic offer
today 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
you intentionally dwell into the dark underbelly of the internet.
I've seen quite a few things I don't care to admit.
One thing that I'll always remember is a site called normal corn for normal people.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 normal corn for normal people.com.
Pass it on for the good of mankind.
Pretty standard issue chain letter, although the URL and 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 authors 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 corn.
That's so funny. 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 scroll 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 of 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 aspect of being like, oh,
someone sent me this and it's 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
feels threatening in my eyes.
You know what I mean? Like, it's like, you know,
normal corn for normal people. It's fine.
Yeah.
It's not, I mean, 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 made 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's going to go, honey.
I don't know where you're going to do.
I'm a baby.
I'm a little baby.
mommy want milky
baby want milk
that is a wild accusation
you're right though
like it does have the same vibe
it's funny that you see like gay conversion camp
because it has that kind of fanatic
kind of thing where it's like
it's like a passive
aggressive sign is what it feels like
yeah the eradication
of abnormal sexuality it like smacks
with 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 got
guess we should have said that. This is posted 12 years ago, so it's been a while.
Yes, by user Reith, by the way, R-A-T-A-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 said it. 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 just a little baby.
So you have to take yourself to like 12 years ago
Because now like you open Twitter and it's like
Oh, there's three people that died. That's cool. You know like
Right. It's kind of everywhere. But back then you had to go looking for weird stuff, right?
Live leak. Lively. Yeah. Like live leak stuff. Yeah. Like it was much harder to come across than just general internet browsing.
So that's like you can have to be in that mindset like oh, a weird website. Who knows what could be on it?
Right.
So I clicked one of them
and was sent to a white page
with very long list of links
in the form of
normal corn for normal people.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 rape 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.i.
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 two 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.I.
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.A.V.I., whatever,
is that it's so
like 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
the implications and stuff feel very
very weird you know
i'm very very bought in i love
i love these old stories too because they read so much
like actual
social media posts
or forums or blogs
this thing happened to someone
yeah yeah yeah yeah i really appreciate the
like
i don't know the
maybe legitimacy is the wrong word but it feels very sincere
that's right i think yeah it feels legitimate
like it actually
Like, sure, 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.a.i.
A 10-minute video filmed by a hidden camera in which we see a repair man working on a washing machine for the first two minutes.
When it's fixed, the repairman talks to the owner briefly and then leaves.
The owner checks to make sure the repairman is gone.
He begins to lick all over the top of the washing machine.
This goes on for seven minutes.
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'm, 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
propelled into various odd, live leaky kind of videos that is going to go all over the place.
Gimbo.combe. A five-minute video of an obese mime 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.A.I.
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 some.
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.aV. Another four-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. A 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. Tungtide.A.I. 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.A.I 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's no sound.
Well, stuff like this, you have to assume that people have recreated these, right?
I mean, probably.
That one actually kind of, I've, manikins 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 that's what that you can hear maybe like the fluorescent lights buzzing or something yeah exactly it's almost imitates these kind of like weird pickups and feedbacks almost read like little bits of fire like fire crackling or something it's it's it's very it's very menacing yeah stumps dot a vii five minute long video where a man with no legs is attempting to break dance on a dDR mat and what looks like
is something funny?
Is there something you want to,
something you want to bring up?
Well,
the,
the structure of that,
a five-minute-long video
where a man with no legs
is attempting to break dance.
The phrase is the word attempting
is pretty funny.
Literally,
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,
know, kind of like this dulcent, like, you know, watcher, wonder, 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, I don't know,
it always bothers me a bit. I mean, we've officially entered into snuff film territory is what I think
it is. Like, I mean, it's literal torture now. So, yeah, well, wait, wait for this last one.
I mean...
Privacy.AVI
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. Finally, the last video we uncovered, which was
Useless.AVI.I. 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 in 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.
The only proof that normal corn for normal people.com ever existed was a few screen caps people took
and videos from the site that people saved and uploaded on torrents.
the most popular of which being useless.AVI,
which found its way onto a few gore sites.
Wherever you upload them to,
all of the videos from normal corn for normal people.com,
get deleted after a while.
So, what do you think?
Man, that's the end.
First off, is that at the end?
So 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 interested, 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 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 the 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 creepy pastas is how
shortened just to the point. I know we've driven
then this point many times. They just like dive
straight into it. No, no time
to wait around, no time to slow. But 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 100% real.
I think I read it, I don't know,
it was maybe 13, 14,
and I, I went
into it. I think I listened to it actually through
like one of the creepypasta 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? I think
I might have actually sent it to a friend
and been like dude this actually happened
who like wasn't familiar with it or
I used to do that a lot. I used to send friends
stuff and be like this is real knowing it was fake
but yeah there's a bunch of mine say that as well
yeah like weird stuff like there's no this happen
you know what I mean? Bro this is so real
also i was i was the chimp actually it's it happened it's real i was there i was uh 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
an rabid animal animal kind of thing you know what i mean and i think that uh just chip attacks
obviously are just every especially ever since like travis the chimp it's just haunted me for
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 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 Peel included the chimp attack and 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
and was
surprised that it didn't go into that direction
but I think like even just
ending the story on a chimp attack thing
and just being like 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 and 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 unattainable
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.
Yeah. They're very menacing.
Next up, we have been drowned.
Ben drowned.
People in the comments and just across social media have been scolding me saying,
how do you, how have you never heard of this?
What am I supposed to say?
You know what 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 Ben Drown.
I remember the big ones, like without giving anything.
way. 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
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 Barroscoe, 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 first post,
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 creepy pasta wiki
because that seems most reliable.
The story was created by Alex Hall
who goes online as,
or did at one point as
juddusable,
judozoable, whatever that means.
Cedusible.
And of course,
is about a haunted version
of Majora's mask. Do you ever play Major'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.
For a kid's game, at least. Like, you know,
the... I remember, well, I remember, like, watching
and play it with the moon. Yeah, yeah.
A giant, smiling, whatever. Yeah, very creepy.
So, post number one,
September 7th, 2010.
Okay, X.
You'll never guess where this was originally posted.
Okay, X, I need your help with this.
This is not copy pasta.
This is a long read, but I feel like my safety or well-being 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.
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
Brothers, 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, F0, 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.
Is that word 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 band 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, he's like a character out of a show or something, you know?
Would you like to browse my goods?
Yeah, I like that.
Like 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
Because that would creep me out
If I went to a garage zone
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 psychopathy 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
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 act
when he was seven years old.
Why did you say drowning accident just then?
Ben,
drowned.
Okay, all right, all right, right.
I forgot that was the title of the story.
That's the title of the deal,
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 point dexter point there.
You're just like, how did you know that?
Actually, how did you know that?
that was going to happen.
Like the titles
has been drowned.
Oh, okay.
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.
Glazed over is a wild way to say cataracts.
I was already wondering how I could politely excuse myself from the situation when he would tell me he had no idea what a video game was.
But to my surprise, he said he had a few ones in an old box.
He assured me he'd be back in a jiffy and turned to head back into the garage.
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, uh, I'd go to see his frenzy, be like, I'd be right, I'd be right back in a jiffy.
is what they say and they like 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 you know what you
but you can get money from the fans no no no you know what you know what you know as cute is you think
that these fans are going to turn against me when they know that papam meat is the real champion of the
fans i'm a i'm a man at the people dude you think if we had a poll that was which one of the two
creepcast host 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, there's going to be, 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.
When they're 40, they're like, you know what?
Hunter really was the champion, wasn't he?
And my fucking spirit's going to hunt.
him and I'm going to say yes that's a cute little fantasy you've constructed for yourself i'm
going to 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 his table were rather peculiar paintings
various artworks that look like ink blots that a psychiatrist might show you curious i look 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
Major'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 cells, some Freudian
bullshit was projecting itself into the ink plots. 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,
arms 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.
I 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 a weird fucking thing?
What do you mean what?
The old man smiled at me and told me that I could have a free
that it used to belong to a kid
who was about my age that didn't live here anymore.
could what like your grandson what does that mean the child doesn't live here anymore he said 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 he's no no no no no no no you're doing the thing you're doing the thing
did he did he move look i'm sorry no no no he doesn't live here anymore
I'm sorry about Marasca, 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
and yeah, belong 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 sell, 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 gonna laugh
I'm gonna 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
someone took my spleen
is what you're going to say.
And I'm like, what happened?
Ah, yeah, I don't know this guy
was just following me,
but it seemed normal.
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 just, hey, it's my grand,
my grand, because listen,
you can do this in a different way
where the guy's like,
hey, my grand kid used to play games here, right?
But no, this old creepy fuck
is like,
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.
You have,
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
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
yes, yes, clearly there's something weird
about it, but that's not immediately like, I
capture children. Okay.
All right. Can I go back to the story?
yeah i'm waiting to hear what happens next there was are you there 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 and 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, then.
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 safe file named simply Ben.
good bye ben he was saying goodbye ben i felt bad for the man obviously 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 the person that's writing this story too do you think that he's saying like
oh i probably took like i 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? Like, uh, because
he thought he's like goodbye then and he's like,
okay, sure. And he got the, 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
if our narrator is like, oh,
fuck, well, I just like, probably
borderline stole this cartridge
from this guy because he thought 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 he maybe he just wanted rid of it you know and he passed it off
to me that was kind of that was more symbolic for him than anything you know yeah so i mean yeah
even him being the senile i mean i i don't know so it's just like old old brain rot type
stuff yeah he has sympathy for him i think yeah out of curiosity i looked at the safe file
eyeballing it i could tell that he was pretty far in the game
He had almost all of the masks and three-fourth 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.
It 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 save 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 weird that is i remember being a kid and like we would go to i think it was a game stop or like one of those local game stops whatever right uh and they were selling it was like a basket of old p.
2 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.
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 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 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 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 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
to have smoothly it ran. Literally just like
a retail copy of the game, say for a few
minor hiccups here and there. 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 bin.
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 safe 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 Majors 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 recognize that text
you get that message when you get the room key from Andrew at the stockpot
in 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.
The layer 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.
Rye 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 Clocktown. 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. It grabbed straight from the game
itself, but played in reverse.
The music will get louder,
building up so as if you should
expect something to pop out at you,
but nothing ever did.
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.
ground, just quiet enough so that I wasn't sure if I was just hearing things, just loud enough
to keep me determined to find him.
I looked in all four zones of Clocktown, 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 in this powerful sense of depression that was both
foreign and crippling i tried leaving clocktown but every time i attempted to zone out the screen
would fade to black and i would just zone in to another part of clocktown 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 for her 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 mass salesman
smiling at me not link me with skull kid's screen 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 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 what I mean? And I also, and I do remember, I think, like, the South Clocktown, 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, uh, it feels like it's like possibly the ghost of a child or some kind of kid, like,
haunting 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 yeah
you know that 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 in my right voice
or even like the idea I guess more so I meant like
you know 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
I had quake on Nintendo 64
I remember I was so scared playing the game
I was so fascinated by it but
it was so haunting I was like a yell for my mom
I'm like my 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
lose green
rip 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 just
be like hey reddit what happened how do i fix this clip yeah yeah yeah there's like really no
exploration to it.
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.
The same way that also whenever you delete somebody's, um, 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, uh, this is better than I remember.
so far. Yeah, I'm curious. I really don't know where they're where it'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. I turned around and ran out and back into South Clocktown into my horror. The statue
followed me in the only way I can compare is like the weeping angels from Doctor Who. Every so often
at random intervals, the animation would play if the statue appearing behind me. It was like the thing was
chasing me, or I don't even want to say it, haunting me.
Hmm.
The statue, can you explain it 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 Swordmaster'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 as 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 this 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 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, the text box appeared, saying,
That won't do you any good, he-he.
And I was picked up off the ground, levitated upwards on my back,
and the link screamed as he burst into flames, instantly cut.
killing him. I jumped when this happened. I 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 screen, 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 the eerie silence.
I remember 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,
his 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 the camera.
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
safe file added below your turn, entitled Ben.
Ben's safe 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 Clocktown.
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 four-sale sign in the front yard,
and when I rang the door,
how home 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 the means 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 was, of what I saw,
including Skull Kid and the Elogy 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 let 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 conversation.
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 too that you can
watch there. 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?
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 say 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 have
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 I think 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.
Yeah. Yeah.
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 algae of emptiness statue
I had a dream about it.
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 in.
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,
nor 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 been?
Man's expression heard 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 think I would kill him.
I think I would.
Yeah, I would definitely kill him.
You won't wish to Stephen on me, huh?
But do you believe, do you believe right now that he thinks that the game is haunted?
I think he's putting it together.
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 some,
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 kind of 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 grain kit 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.
Yeah. 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 pressed art, 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 bin file
hesitated for a moment
noticing that the stats were not the same
as they originally were two days ago
seemed like he had already completed
the stone tower temple this time
somebody in my courage
I selected it so it seems like since
it started the safe file has progressed
somewhat yeah that's kind of interesting
like oh now it's he's even further along
how the hell does that happen alive in there
progressing yeah
immediately I was thrust into complete chaos
sure enough I was outside stone temple tower
but that's about all that was expected
zone itself wasn't called stone temple tower
but rather ST space O space in space E
and immediately a dialogue box
of complete gibberish that I couldn't make out greeted me
do you read that a saint one
oh it could be yeah I didn't think of it that way
I'm just I'm just kind of I'm just thinking out of
because yeah for people it's ST
no spaces and then space
O space N
space E so it's just
it kind of reads like Saint 1
I don't know yeah or at least the 1
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.
At all of two minutes to take in the environment
before another one
of those algae of emptiness statues
was summoned and immediately after
I was cut into the dawn of a new day screen
except this time it was without the line's subtext.
I was a Deku scrubbing clock town.
This scene would normally play
after the first time you traveled back in time.
Tattle would say,
What just happened?
It's as if it's a...
everything has, but instead of saying, started over, she finished 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 daku 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 mass 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 twisted version of the Happy Mass Salesman's theme was playing.
I saw I had to run towards Woodfall before I noticed a gathering of three figures off to the side,
one of them being Apona.
As I approached to my horror, I saw the happy mass 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.
save with a poda, and the elegy of emptying a statue was doing what it has been doing all along,
just standing there eerily.
It was a happy mass 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 dingh sound
when you're supposed to play your ocarina
and tried a song I hadn't played yet
the Happy Mass Hellsman's own song
and the song that had been playing on loop back in day four
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 a Pona.
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 a pona kept nane
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 emptying a statue
I went down to examine it
and suddenly my Zora's started
doing choking animation
I'd never seen a Zora do before
which didn't even make sense
because Zora's can breathe underwater
regardless
my character choked to death
and died
and again the statue
was the only thing that was highlighted in my death.
I didn't respond 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 point.
The game must have anticipated how I would have tried to escape the day four o'clock town.
The two safe 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
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 or like represented.
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
at like, I mean,
threatening or not threatening? I guess
just to make it easy. I don't find
Ben threatening.
I find the mass 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 like the mass salesman kind of vibe or just the game in general threatening, but I don't find like 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 like he's kind of parading Ben around as like 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 he's it's like he's a statue it's like the the game's version of like a ghost or something
too like it's like a it's like a haunting oh it's like it's indicative of like a statue you'd find
like a cemetery yeah you know what I mean it's like okay so the three safe files together
has been drowned your turn right so the haunted mass salesman is kind of collecting like
collecting souls almost, you know, or like victims in the game, it feels like.
Yeah.
I mean, even the sentence of the files coming together, Ben Drown, now it's your turn.
Yeah.
Like, 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.
Pretty 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, 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 are,
I can picture it in my head.
You know,
if I played the game,
I think I'd appreciate it more,
but I mean,
I can,
I can put it together.
I feel like if you're a diehard of this game,
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.
to do. Anyway, post three, 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
been, 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 blind 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 texts that's already in the game,
spoke to me, talk to me, in reference bin, 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 why 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.
Uh, 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 like what
i would think well all right i'm done i'm looking at the uh the footage you posted
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.
Ugh.
Then he's walking through a field to the tree.
The statue appears behind him.
It's just him and the statue in the field.
scream 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 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 to 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 or 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.
He finished, that's the guy who's writing the story, by the way, Jed Usable.
Right.
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 Yad 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.
I 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 out of 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 by 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 at the game last night,
a text document with his name and a password for YouTube.
The third document called the truth.comptaining what he told me were his notes that he
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. text, 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 Juddusible left the safe 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 laugh 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
you can tell me 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 mass 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 get more out of it.
But it kind of looks like there's
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
he's in 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
to rest here. So he's reading the text on tombstones. He's very slowly walking and they get
kind of dragged over in front of one grave and it says, a vessel that holds wandering spirits
rest 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
in an underground tunnel that the world's
like twisted around and then
when he gets into
into like the interior of the temple
the bin 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 bin 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 I 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 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 files there.
So now it's almost like he's a part of the cycle note 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?
Jad usable or Jusible or whatever.
Jad usable, whatever.
So it's been five days since he posted.
And I think this time, yeah, hey guys, Judd usable 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.
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 in my delirium,
I devised to make a barely 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 prove for you to 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 11 p.m. 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?
A 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 a.m., 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've got the energy to do class today.
I'm going to 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 four-sale sign was up there yesterday,
and I just didn't notice it.
Tyler wants to know what's got to 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 Elgy 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.
I think I'm going to try posting this on the internet.
I 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 is a lot better than I thought it would be.
Gee, I 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.
It gave me quite a scare.
You're really unnerved and hilarious.
I'm going to crash after this.
I began uploading my YouTube video
in 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.
I hope it doesn't mind me using it to upload this.
Posting my summary of day four
with a link to the YouTube video.
I'm going to try to stay awake, but I'm so tired right now.
And then the post began again
the next day at 10.48 a.m.
I had a dream about
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 in. 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 ever 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 playing the game.
I'm going to wait for a bit, though, to see if I can't dig up any information on this bin 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 word.
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. I 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 cleverbought.
What makes you think that this text to speech program is like,
oh, I just do we do a boy?
Like, should I wait until you played the game then?
Okay, whatever.
I'm just going to keep going.
What?
That game.
Major's mask.
Yeah.
How did you know about that?
Because.
Because what?
I did it.
Did what?
I played with you.
What the, what?
Were you scoured?
Who is this?
Big.
The statue? You're inside my computer now?
Yeah.
How?
You're connected me.
How the hell did I connect you?
Cable and cord?
how tell me about yourself what tell me about yourself what do you mean what is it that
where it scares you what the answer answer no answer what what the how did you just open that by
yourself i'm your computer now how much can you control oh what do you want from me
To entertain.
You're stuck inside there.
You can't hurt me.
Huh.
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?
That's messy.
More structured.
Fun.
Fun?
Yes.
Tradition.
I like that.
You think it's funny.
Amusing.
And my notes?
my notes.
You may write them down.
Why are you letting me?
This is amusing to see what you think of me.
Window closes.
Do you want to explain what that voice was?
You weren't doing.
It's chat bot, dude, or clever bot?
I've never heard clever bot.
Does it sound like that?
Yeah.
Shut up.
I hate you.
I'm in the middle.
We are at the end of this story.
I'm gonna 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 hallucinated 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 clap.
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 am 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 could deal with the 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 to you. 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
getting 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 allergy statue.
Always the algae 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.
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 goes to
avoid. 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 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 going to i's getting pretty this is getting
pretty bad it's getting boy 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 bot's the only thing that's going to save this uh i i will also say that like i it feels kind of like
losing the plot a bit, you know, where it was 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 the spirit?
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, the ghost? Was that what was going on, you know?
Like, I, I, 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 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'd be curious to see like if people have done readings of this
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 right 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 re-hashing 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.wm. I looked at the summary that I posted on various forms.
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?
Like...
Could absolutely be, yeah.
I think that's possible.
So maybe here,
Say, Bids, excuse me,
Bid's been tampered with and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Or, shut up.
Ben's tampered with it.
Yeah, everything that we've read thus far could be bad info.
It's true.
That's what I, 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.
in his own censored version.
When asked 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 funny.
It's a funny
predicament of the end.
The moon children
appeared in my dreams last night.
They lifted up their mask
to reveal their hideously disfigured faces.
Maggots crawling out of their orifices,
sunk in 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 mass salesman, announcing that he had a new mask that he wanted me to try.
In his spastic, set in 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 flail 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, 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.
Try telling myself again and again.
Suddenly the moon children stopped and looked at me.
It just stared.
The happy mass 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, couldn't wake up.
I 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's appearing to be.
It seems like as if this keeps going on,
our protagonist is going to be a statue in the game as well.
All right, time for Cleverbaud.
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 join 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
whittle things
make you wonder if I'm there
but you never know
give you whittle hints 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 it up
in an old man's position and like this interesting mystery to just a troll just i could shirt off
his computer 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 do we did your game file that's that's literally what it's like
Will it had of like, oh, well, like 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 like horrible nightmares and then like the reality of it, you like wake up and he's like,
sorry, I ate all your fooop-whoops
No more delicious snacks for you
That whole section was awful
Like I could move your mouse by itself
Deep cringe
Yeah, deep, deep cringe
Okay
You did this before
Yeah
And I will do it again
To who, Ben
Did you know Ben?
Won't tell you,
that information to you.
How did Ben die?
You know.
No, but how did he drown?
Well, tell back to you.
Why?
It is reserved for another.
Who?
Another who asked.
When?
Waiter.
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 twixtor 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.
Like, it's so long, too.
We're going to get through.
We're almost there.
We're almost done.
We're almost done.
Yeah.
Actually, kind of.
I mean, there's still, I guess, a chunk, but it's almost done.
There's another Cleverbot conversation, though, so...
Yes!
Cleverbot!
I'm beginning to think that this thing maybe hasn't been at all.
And 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, please.
I'm going and staying trying to decide what is real and what is it.
Is Ben just playing a trick on me or is this for real?
It's been generating these replies or are people actually posting them?
I just see that screen flicker was in 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 band to try and 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.
This whole document even exists.
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 lived.
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 yeah 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 cleverbot what is it what's the point of playing i die whenever i do anything
You die because you can't figure out the secret.
What?
Cimatic.
What are you talking about?
The beauty and you're suffering.
I can't, bro.
Part of it's exacerbated 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 Drown.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 of 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
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
I'm filling the air starts constrict
I don't think I'm alone here
whatever aura has been here
is getting more violent
trying to contact Ben on clever
body. 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. Now I'm positive of it. Earlier, I thought it was a weird
coincidence, but just now I went to open my window and three floors down at the ground level I saw
the old man. I'm completely positive I did. The same guy. He was just staring up at my window,
standing in the middle of campus. Then he soon as took notice of him, they didn't seem to
acknowledge it. I'm sorry, was there any mo, like, maybe we're reading the,
the text format wrong because it's on creepy post of wiki but and if so my apologies but there's
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 they're
doing this but it just 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 that 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's even notion 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
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 and service to you of the final video you guys saw.
Matt.wm.v.
Last video entry I made,
at WMVVV, began as normal.
I was spawned in Clocktown as usual
and nothing seemed to be out of place.
Determined to set things right
and play the oath to order
on top the clock tower on the fourth day
and 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.
the 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
eventually told me
to go to Icona Canyon
where the game would end
and it would stop haunting me
what?
Why would the game be
whatever
anxious and desperate
to end this nightmare
I played the song of soaring
and ended up there.
I was told to check my inventory,
but I would find the answers there to end the game.
I arrived at Akana Canyon and saved my progress at the owl statue.
As I searched through my inventory, which ha-ha,
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 algae 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 and his security
and makes you drop your guard like a Venus flytrap.
He ensnars them.
Is that what this story's been about?
The Ben's a manipulator or not the child victim
I thought of this old man or that,
but 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 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 been then yeah because
it just makes you seem like the victim is the one that is so you're calling the spirit
but you're calling the old man the old man and you're also calling the child bin so yeah
whatever almost wish he would just have the spirit or like the haunting isn't like
just call it the salesman's face because that's clearly what's being applied right manipulator yeah
or the devil or something.
I don't care.
I'm 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 out these things
and 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 a piece together
the missing links. I'm typing
these closing thoughts on the library computer on
campus, finally. I've emailed myself
the notes I have stored on my
infected computer for the last four days.
Why would you
send an email? Does he not
move through? 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 bin. I would not
wish this horrible torment on anyone, and I've made sure to have my basis covered here.
I didn't run to any problems with them when I was back on my computer trying to email myself
the notes. Went right under his nose. He has no idea what he just let me do. Had no problems
opening the text document for my infected computer, my email either. He had described you how
it feels to finally be able to get the word out on this post. Nightmarion's 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 text,
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 post from me after today's current date September 12th
and after the current time 12.08 a.m. 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. You're sure your safety just
forget about me please. What if Ben is typing all this?
and obviously this goes without saying
but from here on now do not download
any images I may put up
and any files anything
sit day will be my last day
gonna burn the cartridge and 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
wait
yeah yeah okay you were right about he doesn't actually have a roommate right yeah kind of a lazy way to
unveil it but whatever uh i am the genius who picks a little single like ha ha 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 to get
i'm unnecessarily mad i'm sorry i suppose someone to get a hold of me and save me before i got
too immersed into this game would have literally saved my life never proved too much for me
i'm just glad it happened to me and i could get the warning out so the bend dies here
lastly thank you for taking the time to open this and open yourselves up to me by hearing my story
despite maybe not believing me you didn't have to do that really you shouldn't have
your support this entire time has kept me going and now i am finally free of this
thanks again deducible oh god
Like, I was, I liked it in the beginning.
I think the, I think that it's an amazing setup for the idea of a, like, of a spirit
trapped inside of a video game, especially like those old video games with like save files and stuff of like a lingering touch of like the previous owner of something.
It just, it just went on way too long.
Like I think, I think even, you probably could have even had that kind of roommate entry be the last thing.
That's what I thought.
And I think you still could have had, I think you still could have had the twist thing to a 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 why I get for living in a single.
Am I right, fellas?
Wink, wink, wink.
was this just like one of the pivotal
like super popular early creepy pastas?
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 of 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 creepy pasta.
Yeah.
I mean, we're getting into levels.
I know people say the same thing about like SEPs and stuff.
Like where it's like,
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 shlocky bad stuff like this.
I think it's good.
But I do think I'm wondering we need to start branching out out of creepy.
You know, not even 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.
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, that's the game of it.
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 know.
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. 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 to 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.
Audience 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 you're 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 into 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 Jade 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 guest book area of the website
that showed the beginning of the plot.
Hold on, okay.
The sentence I just read says,
the guest book area of the website showed the beginning
of a plot to commit a school shooting.
Probably going to 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
and 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, um, 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 where like
YouTube and stuff at the time and everything and actually being able to have like video footage to add
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 Judd usable
he's got like 67,000
subs. He does a ton of these like
ARG stuff. Like some of it looks. Oh, sick.
Okay, does this? Yeah, yeah. He's
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 have been talking about that forever.
So I'm glad we finally got to read it.
And 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, yeah.
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's Lie.
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 what,
this is a good little, good little early in it.
It's a nice little throwback, if you would.
All right, so this one I'm also very interested in
because 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 the 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 internship aren't, but it did have a perk beyond education.
To adults, it might not seem like a big one, but most kids at the time would go crazy over it.
Since I worked 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 saffed of creativity, so it took them longer to start up the season.
But the delay lasted longer for more upsetting reasons.
There's a problem with the series 4 premiere that said 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 crabby 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-by-valve
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 Goal
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,
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 began 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 and 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,
creepy pasta
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.
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, like, cartoonish worlds.
Real human eyes in SpongeBob.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But everything, everything was hyper-realism.
Okay, all right.
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.
Since we weren't the writers, we didn't question it's appealed 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 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.
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 twist in on itself for a split second, or going back to normal.
The wind through the tree sound gets louder and more severe, as if a storm is brewing somewhere.
The eerie part is that this sound, Squidward's 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 it's said 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 ever 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
after 30 seconds of this
the screen blurred to twitch violently
something flashed over it
as if a single frame was replaced
the delete
animation editor paused and reround frame by frame
what we saw was horrible
it was a still photo of a dead child
I miss this
every other one I would read back then
like if there was a cartoon I watched
I'd read a creepy pasta
and it'd be this like random dead kids
or blood or something
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
ha ha ha ha ha ha
paved that was probably a road
is a really funny line
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
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 and the
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 bin statue.
Yeah.
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.
I was played.
Where's Dan Schneider?
That's why I was about to say,
like as a dead,
Dan Schneider,
Brian Peck thing,
it's funny to imagine them like,
I was just goofing around, you know?
It's just a joke.
It's just a picture of a dead kid on some pavement.
It's not a big fucking,
this is just what guys in hollywood do okay we're just we're 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 like that's just that's but that's
part of showbiz all right that's what we do that's how that that's what we did all every every day
before the the guts game tv show or tempel legends of the hidden temple that's what we do
The screen flipped back to Squidward, still stomping louder than before, half of his body in the frame.
There is now, it 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 a hyper-realistic style.
Let's go.
Look at it as if you'd get it on your fingers if you touch the sun.
screen the wind sounded now as if it were that of a gale blowing through the forest there were even
snapping sounds like branches laughing a deep baritone lasted for longer intervals and came more
frequently after about 20 seconds screen again twisted and showed a single frame photo
editor was reluctant to go back we all were but he knew he had to why does he have to
Why does he need to call the police?
What do you mean?
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.
no other than the first child.
She was laying on her stomach.
Her barrettes?
No, I was just reading like she was laying on her stomach.
Her barrettes?
Oh, like a hair barrette.
It's a beret.
Like you put in your hair.
Oh.
Yeah, yeah.
They were in the pool of blood next to her.
Her left eye was damaged in the same way as the boy.
And she was in a state of undress.
I feel we were reading that about a child, you know.
God, yeah.
Stay of a dress.
Her entrails were piled on top.
of her above another crude
cut along her back. Again, the body
was on the street.
He brings up the street again.
It's very important to mention
the street.
The body was 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 show I resume. Yeah, this is for men.
This is a men's group.
This is for the boy.
Get out of your touch.
Get out of your.
woman loser
well you can't handle
two dead kids well you don't like
seeing some dead kids you're never gonna make it here at
Nickelodeon
the show resumed
uh 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 hyperbrew
god
yes his eyes were now done in hyperrealism 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
people 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
said 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 laugh.
It stopped the still photo that lasted for a good five frames.
The Aeoneramator 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 and dangled.
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 ray 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 gasped,
being 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.
We 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 of a second. That's like,
I'm not even a millisecond of a fucking of a second.
24 frames a second. It's like,
five, 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.
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?
What's so different about it?
They were, it's the same things.
Oh, my God.
But they're in a different place.
Read the next, the next line.
The lead sound editor told us to stop.
He had to call him the creator to see this.
Mr. Hillenberg arrived.
The actual create Stephen Hillenberg.
They're bringing in Stephen Hillenberg now.
They're bringing him in.
I will say that this was years ago.
So this, you know, this was before he was passing.
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 had 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.
Shot quickly panned out.
That deep voice said,
Do it!
And we saw a shotgun in the video.
Squidward's hands.
Yes!
Yes!
Oh my God,
read,
keep reading,
keep reading.
He immediately puts the gun in his mouth
and pulls the trigger.
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 what i 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 said mr hillenberg was like no my creation no not my child my boy not squidward
Man, that's so good.
Just the idea of it being so quick, too, just like,
bam, like all it wants.
Do it.
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.
Man, 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, yeah.
I think so.
I'm pretty sure someone animated the whole thing,
minus the dead kids.
Mr. Hellenberg 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.
Q in the episode twice only served to print the entirety of it in my mind
and cause 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 is I won't say
fuck but I will put hell in there and guess what my mom would be so mad but she doesn't know
she's stupid and my mom is gonna beat my butt bare black and blue it's gonna be my mom is gonna kick
my can when she finds out that I said hell in my video in my story about squidward putting a shotgun
in his mouth and blowing his eyeballs out because
as a dead mutilated children.
Stephen, 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 hear.
The CTO was called
an 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 chain
was a mere 24 seconds before we began viewing it.
Dun, dun, dun.
All equipment involved was examined
for foreign software and hardwell as well as glitches,
such as if the timestamp
was showing us
the wrong time
but everything checked out fine
we didn't know what had happened
to this day
nobody does
there was an investigation
due to the nature of the photos
nothing came of it
no child scene was identified
what
it's just funny
there was 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.
No clues were gathered from the data involved.
Or physical clues from the photos.
I never believed in unexplainable phenomenon before.
But now that I've had something happened to me
and can't prove anything about it beyond anecdotal evidence.
I think twice about things.
All those dead kids, Squidward killing himself and a ghost
possessing the Nickelodeon studios, I think twice now.
I love, credited to,
user slash sewer slide squidward
a 2010 upload wow so this was
so you're saying this was the standard back then
this was the most common creepy posse 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 want to make my own creepy pasta that is in this vein
absolutely it doesn't have to 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
which is a huge...
It's just like reading about dead children
and nothing happens.
Yeah. Yeah, and it's just like,
I just love the idea that'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 Stephen 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, and 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,
um,
there was a video called Red Mist or,
I know there's videos of it online,
but there was like,
red mist or,
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 Miss 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
children that will get the people going and some hyper realistic blood um so i think this was second i could
be wrong though and it could be the other way around hmm they also they straight up reference it in
uh the tv in sponge bob the tv show by the way there's a scene where sponge bob'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 uh it's a slightly more cartoonish animation of this
Squidward sewer slide face.
So the creators of SpongeBob are aware of the story
and have memed on it in the show, which is fun.
Yeah, that's good.
Well, this episode took a lot of life out of me.
Good.
And I'm, I take a lot of life out of you.
Kind of like Ben Drown.
Ben Drown, 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.
I don't know.