Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Ben Drowned

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

In September 2010, a college student bought a used copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask at a garage sale, and discovered a save file named BEN belonging to a boy who had drowned years before. What started as glitchy gameplay quickly became something far more sinister: a presence that manipulated the game, invaded his computer, and refused to be deleted. Ben Drowned is the creepypasta that redefined internet horror... and it may have been watching you all along.For more follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226Join Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI, gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and gave us America’s Most Wanted. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. You’ll also get ad-free and early released episodes across the Crime House lineup.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, exciting news. Crime House Plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four-part limited series on the Crimes That Built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page. This is Crime House. An old man gives a video game away for free. It seems like a memorial, a way to hold onto a piece of a child who met a tragic end.

But then you turn the game on, and something inside it knows that you're there. By the time you realize that whatever is trapped in that cartridge has found its way out, It's already too late. Welcome to Twisted Tales, a Crimehouse Original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week, I'll take you deep into humanity's darkest stories and the creepiest corners of the internet. If you've ever had a haunted moment

or a twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments, the creepier, the better. And for early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to our Crimehouse Plus community on Apple Podcasts. Today, I'm telling you the story of Ben Drowned. For a lot of people, it's the first thing they think of when you say the word creepy pasta. and for good reason.

It's about grief, isolation, loneliness, and a haunted video game that drives you insane. So Ben Dround was first posted on 4chan in September of 2010 by a user called Judusible, real name Alex Hall. And it only took a few days for it to go viral. Because this wasn't just a wall of text. It came with video evidence. And it used a real game,

The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, which already has this deeply unsettling, melancholic atmosphere built right into it. And on top of that, the story didn't drop all at once. It unfolded across multiple forum posts over the course of several days. People were reading each update as it happened, theorizing, arguing, trying to figure out what was going on. It didn't feel like reading fiction. It felt like watching something actually happening to someone. And fair warning, if you played Majora's Mask as a kid, this story is going to hit different.

It starts the way a lot of college stories do, with a kid looking for cheap entertainment. Alex has just moved into his dorm for his sophomore year of college. A friend gives him an old Nintendo 64 with one controller and a beat-up copy of Super Smash Brothers. He appreciates the gesture, but it doesn't take long before he's bored of it, so one weekend Alex decides to go hunting. He drives about 20 minutes off campus, hitting up local garage sales looking for old games. He scores a few good ones, Pokemon Stadium, Golden Eye, F0, and he's feeling pretty satisfied. But as he's driving out of the neighborhood, one last house catches his eye.

There's nothing remarkable about it, no cars in the driveway, just one table set up with random junk on it, but something pulls him in. So he gets out of the car and is greeted by an old man. And something about this guy is off. Alex can pinpoint exactly what it is. The man isn't threatening. He's not rude, but there's something deeply unsettling about his presence. Later, Alex says that if it hadn't been the middle of the afternoon with other people

within shouting distance, he never would have approached this man. As Alex gets closer, he realizes that one of the old man's eyes has that glazed over look that tells Alex he's clearly blind on one side. It's kind of creepy but normal. So when the old man flashes a crooked smile and asks what he's looking for, Alex forces himself to look at the man's good eye instead. instead of the glazed one and asked if he has any old video games. The old man says he doesn't know what a video game is, but then he says he might have a few

in an old box. He says he'll be right back and hobbles back into the garage. While Alex weighs, he looks at what's on the table. It's covered in these strange paintings, inkblots, abstract shapes, the kind of thing that a psychiatrist might use in a Rorschach test. They're not exactly the type of thing you hang on your wall, but the last painting stops him cold. It looks like Majora's mask. The same heart-shaped body with spikes sticking out. At first, he chocks it up to his imagination. He'd been secretly hoping to find that game all day,

some Freudian thing projecting itself onto the inkblots. But given what happens next, he's not so sure. He later says he should have asked the old man about that painting, he wishes he had. But when he looks up from the painting, the old man is just there, right in front of him smiling. Alex jumps. He hadn't heard him coming. The old man hands him a Nintendo 64 cartridge without a label, but someone had written one word in black permanent marker, Majora. Alex's stomach drops. This seems too good to be true. He asks how much. The old man tells him he can have it for free, and he says that it used to belong to a kid about his age who didn't live here anymore. There's something weird about the way that he says that, but Alex is too excited to think about it. He

thanks the man who smiles and says goodbye then, or at least that's what it sounds like. On the drive home, Alex can't shake the feeling that the old man said something else. And when he boots up the game and finds a single save file on the cartridge, the feeling turns to certainty. The save file is named Ben. The old man wasn't saying goodbye then. He was saying goodbye, Ben. Alex figures the old man must be going senile, a grandfather who sees his grandson and every person who visits. Sad but not sinister. He leaves the Benfile alone out of respect and creates his own file named Link, the way most people do when they play a Zelda game. And at first, everything seems fine. The game runs smoothly. A few minor glitches here and

there, textures slightly out of place, occasional flashes of cut scenes at random moments, but nothing alarming. It's a used cartridge. This stuff happens. But then the NPCs start calling him the wrong name. Sometimes they call him Link, sometimes they call him Ben. He figures it's a bug, the two save files getting crossed somehow, but it keeps happening, and it starts to get under his skin. So eventually he does something he'll regret. He deletes the Ben file. And that's when things get weird. Now the NPCs don't call him anything at all. Where his name should appear in the dialogue, there's just a blank space. Like someone erased something that was supposed to be there. His save file still says link, but the game has forgotten that name completely.

Frustrated and a little creeped out, he puts the game down for the night. The next time he plays, he's working his way through the Snowhead Temple when he decides to try a well-known glitch. Majora's mask players call it the fourth day glitch. Right as the clock is about to hit zero on the final day, you look through a telescope. And if you time it perfectly, the countdown disappears. You get an extra day. He nails it on the first try. The timer vanishes, but when he exits the telescope, he isn't standing in front of the

astronomer anymore. He's in the final boss arena, the trippy boxed-in room where you fight Majora at the end of the game. And floating above him is Skull Kid. No sound, no music, just the background ambiance of that eerie room and Skull Kid hovering silently, staring down at him. No matter where Alex moves, Skull Kid follows, always facing him. always watching, always silent.

Then text appears on the screen, a message he recognizes from the game. You're not sure why, but you apparently had a reservation. That's the text you get when you receive a room key at the stockpot in. It has no business being here. None of this has any business being here. More text. Go to the layer of the temple's boss. Yes, no.

He can't select no. He presses yes. The screen fades to white. Two lines of text. appear, dawn of a new day, and beneath it a row of vertical lines like pipes. Where Alex ends up next is where the story really starts to dig its claws in. He spawns in Clocktown, the central hub of Majora's mask. Normally it's bustling. Guards patrol the streets, a dog runs around, Townsville go about their routines. It's the one place in the game that

feels alive. But this version of Clocktown is completely empty. Every single inhabitant is gone. The streets are deserted. Textures are broken. In West Clocktown, he's walking on air. The whole area feels shattered. And the music, the music is the song of healing played in reverse. If you know Major's Mass, you know the song of healing. It's one of the most beautiful, soothing pieces of music in the game. You play it to release trapped souls to ease suffering and to bring peace. Hearing it played backwards is deeply, profoundly wrong. And it loops over and over and over. Ever so often, just barely audible underneath it, Alex hears the faint laugh of the happy mask salesman. It's quiet enough that he's not sure if he's imagining it, but loud enough that he can't

stop listening for it. He searches all four zones of Clocktown, and they're all empty. Every time he tries to leave through a gate, the screen fades to black and dumps him back into another part of town. tries to play his ocarina, the song of time, the song of soaring, but every time the same message appears. Your notes echo far, but nothing happens. The game will not let him leave. It's holding him prisoner. Alex describes this as the most intense feeling of isolation he's ever experienced in a video game. Standing in the middle of an empty, broken town with that reverse melody drilling into his head on an endless loop, he says that he was on the verge of tears. It was like something had gripped him, some powerful twisted presence that washed over him and wouldn't let go.

He'd never been depressed, but whatever was happening in the game was reaching through the screen and pressing down on his chest. He didn't want to go inside any of the buildings. He felt too vulnerable, too exposed. Like whatever was watching him would have an easier time getting to him if he was indoors, cornered with no room to run. He couldn't explain why he felt that way. He just did. Eventually, desperate to escape, he gets an idea. Maybe if he drowns Link in the laundry pool, he'll respond somewhere else. He runs towards the pool, and that's when it happens. Link grabs his head. The screen flashes for just a split second, and there the happy mass salesman was smiling directly at the camera. Not at Link, at Alex, at whoever is holding the

controller. And when the screen returns, he's staring at the elegy of emptiness statue. It's one of the creepiest models in any video game. It's a statue version of Link with this blank dead-eyed expression, a hollowed shell with a frozen grimace that looks like someone tried to make a doll out of a corpse. In the normal game, you use it to hold down switches. It's purely functional. But here, standing in the middle of this ghost town with a reversed song of healing playing and no one else around it, it is absolutely horrifying. Alex turns and runs. He makes it back to South Clocktown, and the statue is behind him. Every time he takes a few steps, every time the camera shifts, there it is, always facing him with that horrible blank expression. Alex says that this is the point

where genuine terror sets in, but the thought of turning off the game never crossed his mind. He's so deep inside this nightmare that the idea of simply pressing a button and walking away, doesn't even occur to him. As he explores the game, Link starts glitching, his body spasms, his arms flail in animations that don't exist in the actual game, movements that were never programmed, never meant to be seen. And between each spasm, the screen flashes to the happy Mask salesman's grinning face for a split second before cutting back to that fucking statue,

inches away from Link staring. Alex runs into the swordsman school, desperate for shelter hoping to find someone, anyone, just to feel like he isn't alone. But the dojo is empty too. And as he turns to leave, the statue has cornered him in the back of the room. He swings his sword at it. Nothing happens. He's trapped, backed into a corner by a thing with dead eyes and a frozen smile. And then, Link turns to face the screen. He stands upright mirroring the statue's posture. both of them staring directly out of the television, at Alex, at you. Whatever was left of the fourth wall, it's gone.

The game warps him to an underground tunnel. The Reverse Song of Healing starts up again. He barely makes it a few steps before the statue appears behind him more aggressively than before. He stumbles out into South Clocktown, a monster screams and the screen fades to black. Dawn of a New Day. He's back on top of the clock tower,

Skull Kid floating above him, the moon hanging impossibly close. A new song plays. The Stone Tower Temple theme reversed. He fires an arrow at Skull Kid. It hits. He fires again. On the third shot, a text box appears. That won't do you any good.

He-he. Link is lifted off of the ground by some invisible force. His body suspended in the air. Then he bursts into flames. Alex has never seen this animation. Skull Kid doesn't have attacks like this. This isn't something that exists in the game. He tries again.

Same thing. Flames. Death. On his third attempt, he tries to play the Song of Time on his ocarina. Before he can hit the last note, flames again. This time, the death screen stutters. The cartridge seems to be straining under the weight of something. When the screen finally loads, Link is lying on the ground in a position that doesn't exist in the game's animation files.

His head is saying. tilted towards the camera. Skull Kid floats above the body. No buttons work. No inputs register. All Alex can do is watch. After 30 seconds, the screen fades. One final message. You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you? And then it kicks him back to the title screen. His save file is gone. In its place, your turn. Three hearts, zero masks, no items. He selects it. He's back at the clock tower rooftop. Deadlink. Skull Kid laughing on a loop. He hits the reset button. When the game boots back up, there are two save files. Your turn and beneath it, Ben. Right back where it was before he deleted it, as if it had never left. He turns the game off.

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I want to let you know that Crime House Plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four-part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th, or you can binge all of them right now, add free with Crimehouse Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.

Alex doesn't sleep that night. He keeps hearing the reverse song of healing in his head. He drives back to the old man's house the next day with a friend hoping for answers. There's a for-sale sign in the yard, no one's home. He talks to a neighbor, learns that the old man was never married. he never had kids, meaning no grandkids. So who was Ben? The neighbor's expression changes.

He tells Alex that about eight years earlier, there was an accident involving a young boy named Ben who lived a few doors down. He remembers the date because it was the same day as his wedding anniversary, April 23rd. Shortly after, Ben's parents moved away. The neighbor won't say more than that, but Alex has already started to put the pieces together.

Ben didn't just stop playing the game. Ben died. Alex goes home and can't resist turning the game back on. He loads the Ben file and immediately everything is chaos. The zone name isn't Stone Tower Temple. It's S-T-O-N-E. Broken, spaced out, wrong. Link's body is grotesquely distorted.

His back wrenched to one side, his posture permanently disfigured. His face is blank, not scared, not angry, just empty. Like he's already dead. Sounds that don't belong in the game play in the background. Distorted and almost demonic. Link spasms in place. And within two minutes, the elegy statue appears again. The screen cuts to dawn of a new day,

but this time without the row of pipes beneath it. Something has changed. From here, the game throws him through a series of nightmarish scenarios. First, he's a Deku scrub creature in Clocktown. Then he's warped to Termina Field, where a twisted version of the Happy Mass Salesman's theme plays and three figures stand in a cluster. Epona, the horse, the Skull Kid, and the Elegy Statue.

The Happy Mass Salesman is there too, idle, grinning. But his head follows Alex's movements. Wherever Link goes, the salesman's eyes track him. Slowly, deliberately. Alex pulls out his ocarina and plays the song of healing, the Happy Mass Salesman's own song. An ear-splitting shriek explodes from the TV. The sky starts flashing. The music accelerates. And Link bursts into flames again

while the three figures watch his body burn. You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you? He's transformed into an aquatic Zora creature next in the Great Bay Zone. Alex finds Ipona on the beach, angled towards the ocean as if pointing at something. He swims in that direction, and at the bottom of the ocean, he finds one last elegy statue. His Zora starts choking, an animation that shouldn't exist because Zoras can breathe underwater. The Zora dies, and the save files change one last time, telling him everything he needs to know. Ben drowned.

And whatever's inside this cartridge, it isn't Ben. It's something else entirely, something that took Ben's name after it killed him. But the story doesn't end with the game. That's what makes Ben drown different from every other creepypasta, because Ben, or whatever is posing as him, him gets out. Alex connects his capture card to his computer to upload the gameplay footage. He hears a strange popping sound when he hooks everything up,

but the computer seems to work just fine afterwards. He doesn't think much of it. He should have. Because shortly after, his computer starts acting on its own, programs open by themselves, an icon that looks like the Eligy statue's face flashes on his desktop for a split second. And then, without any input from Alex, a text document open. on his screen. Two things are written in it. Hi, and a link to Cleverbot, one of those old

chatbot websites where you type messages and an AI response. He goes to the site and something is talking to him through it, something that says its name is Ben. Alex's first instinct is that some hacker kid is messing with him. He threatens to call campus security, but the responses don't read like a prankster. They're too specific. When Alex asks who's doing this, the entity responds, Ben. When he asked how it got onto his computer, it says, you connected me. Alex asks how? Cables and cords.

The capture card. The cable running from the Nintendo 64 to his laptop. That was how it traveled. The conversation gets more unsettling from there. Ben asked Alex to tell him about himself. Ask what really scares him. When Alex refuses to answer, Ben says something that's stop. him cold. Go play. Alex pushes back. He says Ben is stuck inside the computer that he can't

actually hurt him, but it takes him longer to type that sentence than the others. And Ben notices. Took you longer to type that, the entity says. You're not sure. When Alex asks why Ben is using a ridiculous chatbot website instead of just communicating directly, the answer is chilling. Less messy, more structured, fun. And then, Tradition. I like it. The window closes on its own. Alex sits in his dorm room staring at his screen, realizing what he's done. The cartridge was a cage, and he opened the door.

Over the next few days, Alex's mental state spirals. He stops going to classes. He stops eating. He closes his windows and pulls the blinds shut. That way, at least it can't watch him from outside. He starts seeing the elegy statue everywhere, not just in the game. Scrolling through the internet, he'll suddenly be staring at it in places that it has no business being in. Random images on random websites, always that same blank, hollowed face.

He can't tell anymore if Ben is putting them there or if his mind is breaking. And then he has a nightmare that will haunt him for the rest of his life. The moon children from Majora's mask, those eerie kids wearing the boss masks who sit in the moon at the end of the game, they appear to him. They lift their mass and underneath are faces that are barely faces at all. There's maggots crawling from their mouth and noses, sunken black pits where their eyes should be. Yellow grins that stretch wider and wider as they get closer, and they tell him they want to play. Alex tries to run, but the moon children pin him to the ground with impossible strength. The happy mass salesman stands over them, watching, moving in those glitchy motions that match

his in-game appearance. He announces that he has a new mask that he wants Alex to try. It's modeled after someone's face, a younger face, but Alex can't recognize who. The children take the mask and press it against his face. Then they begin to sew it on. Two of them hold him down while the other two work with needles. The feeling is vivid, the puncture of the needle, the pull of the thread through flesh. Alex screams, but the mask is pressed so tightly against him that it becomes his face, and his new face has no mouth to scream from. Alex tries to tell himself it's a dream and to force himself awake, but the moon children stop what they're doing and just look at him,

like they heard him thinking about it, and then the happy mass salesman bends down, inches from his face, and grins. You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you? The children resume their work. They sew his legs together, then his arms, The feeling of his Achilles tendons being punctured and stitched resonates through his entire body. He can't scream, he can't move, he can't wake up. They don't stop until they've turned him into another elegy statue.

He wakes up sweating, crying, and shaking. Alex tries to get the word out about what's happening, but Ben tamperes with his form post, taking out any mention of the entity existing outside of the game. Alex realizes that what people are reading online might not even be what he actually wrote. Ben is controlling the narrative, using Alex as a mask to hide behind. The irony isn't lost on him.

In a game about masks, he's become one. Alex confronts Ben on Cleverbot again. He asks what the point of all this is. Ben's answer is simple and sickening. There's beauty in your suffering. And then comes the cruelest trick of all. Ben reaches out through Cleverbot again, and this time his tone completely shifts. He says he's sorry, that he was just having fun, his twisted, broken version of it.

Ben says the game is over now, that he just wants to be free, that Alex is special and he can help spread Ben beyond his digital prison. If Alex helps him, Ben swears he'll leave him alone forever. Alex is terrified, exhausted, and desperate. He almost believes it. But something stops him. The same gut feeling that pulled him to that garage sale in the first place. He realizes he's being manipulated, that Ben is a predator disguised as a victim. Alex can't take it anymore. When his roommate comes in to grab a textbook, Alex hands him a flash drive with the footage,

his YouTube login, and a document he calls the truth. He tells his roommate to upload everything and get the word out. He says he's going home and he leaves without saying goodbye. In his final message posted by his roommate, Alex writes that he's going to burn the cartridge and destroy his laptop. He warns everyone, don't download the videos, don't save the images, don't take anything from the screen onto your personal computer. Because he doesn't know how Ben spreads, but he knows that Ben wants to. His last words are a plea. If you see any post from me after today, don't believe them.

It's not me. It's Ben. and whatever you do, don't play the game. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a crimehouse original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about Ben Drown? Have you ever had a creepy experience with an old video game?

Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another story guaranteed to keep you up at night. Until then, stay curious. And remember, there's no reason to fear the dark, unless you try to hide from it.