Disclaimer: Some content and visual details might be impactful for sensitive viewers and listeners.
Before TikTok horror, viral videos and modern urban legends, the internet had a much darker side.
Welcome to Episode 91 of The Storytelling Podcast, where we return to the early days of the internet to explore 14 vintage creepypastas and digital horror legends that terrified online communities.
But how much of it was real?
Historical and supernatural claims are discussed in the context of their origins and the episode’s fact-check segment. Unverified paranormal accounts should not be taken as established fact.
Subscribe to The Storytelling Podcast for more historical mysteries, unsettling legends, remarkable stories and immersive journeys into the unknown.
WATCH THE VIDEO
CHAPTERS
00:00 – The Early Internet’s Darkest Corner
01:30 – Ted the Caver
08:40 – The Dionaea House
13:20 – 1999: Mr. Bear’s Cellar
18:00 – The Blind Maiden
22:00 – Username: 666
26:00 – Smile.jpg
29:50 – Pale Luna
37:40 – The Rake
42:25 – Polybius
47:10 – Suicidemouse.avi
52:10 – Slender Man
58:05 – The Mothman Digital Sightings
1:03:15 – BEN Drowned
1:08:35 – The Digital Void: Why We Still Fear These Stories
🎥 YouTube Visual Episode: https://youtu.be/fllWkxw6QrY
🎧 Available on all podcast platforms.
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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Hey guys, Alejandra here with your official, behind-the-scenes reality check. Since we are dealing with real internet history, let’s break down exactly what was real, what was fiction, and where these legends actually lived.
- Ted the Caver (2001): The cave in the story is entirely real. The author, Ted Hegemann, based the journal entries on his genuine exploration of Interstate Cave in Utah, USA. While the supernatural elements were fictional additions, the original text—often cited as the first true creepypasta—can be browsed via Ted’s Caving Page Internet Archive Backup.
- The Dionaea House (2004): This viral masterpiece was actually an early Alternate Reality Game (ARG). It was written by professional screenwriter Eric Heisserer, who later earned an Academy Award nomination for writing the hit film Arrival. Because the original site went offline, content curators often review it via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, as detailed in the comprehensive CreepCast Production Analysis.
- 1999 / Mr. Bear’s Cellar (2009): This narrative was pure creepypasta fiction. It was originally written by an author using the alias Camden Lamont on a WordPress blog. There was never an illegal broadcasting channel named Caledon Local 21 in Ontario, Canada, nor do local police records match any of the details.
- Blind Maiden (Mid-2000s): This was a total playground myth. It circulated wildly across early European MSN Messenger groups and text forums. No such functioning URL ever existed to initiate a webcam broadcast at midnight; it was an early form of digital chain folklore.
- Username: 666 (2007): The horrifying YouTube channel glitch was an art piece. It originated on the Japanese video platform Nicovideo before spreading to YouTube. The famous video showing the un-closable, bleeding screen was a clever flash animation created by a legendary Japanese net artist known as Nana825763.
- Smile.jpg (2008): The infamous husky image is a pure Photoshop creation. The original creator of the image remains anonymous, but the underlying curse of insomnia and forced digital forwarding perfectly mirrors traditional paper chain letters adapted for early imageboards.
- Pale Luna (1998): This text adventure game never existed on physical media. No 3.5-inch floppy disks containing a secret real-world coordinates drop were ever distributed in San Francisco. It was a standalone piece of short-form horror fiction tailored to exploit the nostalgia of retro MS-DOS computing.
- The Rake (2005): This creature was entirely crowdsourced from scratch. Users on an early 4chan community text board intentionally started a collaborative thread with the explicit goal of “forming a new monster”. Users agreed on the physical descriptors (pale skin, long arms), and individual writers began weaving independent firsthand logs.
- Polybius (Early 2000s): The government arcade cabinet myth trace back to a specific website. The legend officially surfaced around the year 2000 on an arcade collector database called Coinop.org. While real medical cases of kids getting sick or experiencing seizures in Portland arcades occurred in 1981, they were caused by competitive exhaustion and epilepsy triggers during high-intensity sessions of Asteroids and Tempest.
- Suicidemouse.avi (2009): Disney archives have confirmed this file does not exist. The video that circulated across early video-sharing websites was a fan-made loop consisting of a basic Mickey Mouse animation overlaid with distorted static, backward tracking piano notes, and visual distortions.
- Slender Man (2009): We have definitive proof of the exact day this boogeyman was born. On June 10, 2009, user Eric Knudsen (under the digital alias Victor Surge) uploaded the original black-and-white photos to a specific online contest thread, which you can view in the archived Something Awful “Create Paranormal Images” Thread. The subsequent explosion of modern tulpas and real-world sightings is covered extensively in the Inside A Mind: Rise and Fall of Slenderman Documentary.
- The Mothman Digital Sightings (Late 90s): The digital panic was a product of movie hype and early bulletin board culture. While the original 1966 events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia are a true staple of American cryptid lore, the late 90s “live forum postings” were internet hoaxes engineered to generate buzz surrounding the theatrical release of the 2002 film The Mothman Prophecies.
- BEN Drowned (2010): This legendary haunted cartridge was a brilliant hoax. It was created by a college student named Alex Hall (known online as Jadusable). He utilized standard Nintendo 64 emulation tools and video editing software to fabricate the glitched gameplay footage of Majora’s Mask. The complete archival history of the ARG can be explored directly on the Official Jadusable Wiki Database