What Are Creepypasta Stories (and Why Do Young Readers Love Them)?
As children’s book writers, we look for every opportunity to inspire kids to pursue their own creative endeavors. That means frequent visits to schools and libraries, where the conversation often finds its way to Minecraft. (Nick has written 19 officially licensed Minecraft books for young readers.) As a widely popular sandbox game—in other words, an open-ended game that allows the player to set their own objectives as they explore a functionally infinite digital world—Minecraft’s potential as a storytelling tool is unparalleled. Every kid who’s played Minecraft has a story about playing Minecraft.
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Some of those stories involve Herobrine. A sinister and chaotic presence within the game, Herobrine is visually nondescript aside from his glowing white eyes; he’s said to stalk players from a distance and interact with the game in unusual ways. An encounter with Herobrine is unsettling and rare, yet many kids we’ve met claim to have seen him firsthand, or else, more commonly, they have a friend or a cousin or a neighbor who has.
But here’s the thing: Herobrine doesn’t exist. The developers of the game have said so repeatedly. There’s no trace of Herobrine in the game’s code. The entity’s exact origins haven’t been pinned down, but its history is well documented enough that we can say with utter confidence that Herobrine was simply a joke that became a hoax that became a full-blown urban legend—one that, nearly 14 years later, has now been around longer than these kids have been alive.
Herobrine is a prominent example of a creepypasta. At its most basic, a creepypasta is a scary story told online—often tied intrinsically to new media, as in the case of Herobrine and other video game hauntings. The term “creepypasta” is a spooky twist on “copypasta,” itself a portmanteau used to describe a sort of authorless meme-ready micro-fiction that could quickly proliferate across the digital landscape through a simple act of “copy and paste.” Copypastas tend to be used for humorous or ironic effect; creepypastas are intended to shock, spook, frighten, or unsettle. The most successful examples carry the possibility, however faint, that they just might be true—not unlike the most enduring ghost stories, always taking place on a night much like this one…
If creepypastas are the ghost stories of the digital age, they make use of all that the age has to offer. From short-form fiction to first-hand testimonials, altered photographs to staged livestreams, these postmodern parables are multi-media by nature, made for virality, and weirdly democratic—or at least decentralized. Literary critics have been theorizing “the death of the author” for the better part of a century, but creepypastas are holding the smoking gun. While some of them can be traced back to an original post, many can’t; and even in the event that an original creator can be identified, creepypastas by their very nature refuse to be leashed by the concept of ownership.
The most popular ones disseminate so quickly along multiple vectors that the very notion of a consistent “canon” version is impossible. In that way, they’re more akin to folklore, urban legends, and campfire tales than the carefully crafted scary stories found in books, movies, or podcasts. But if this is the new folklore, then it is folklore in fast forward, playing out before our eyes in the internet’s Darwinian marketplace of ideas—a space where “survival of the fittest” is redefined as success within the economy of attention. Internet users don’t simply consume media, they share, repost, upvote, and in many cases, adopt, and reinterpret what intrigues them for their own content. We’re crowdsourcing humanity’s new nightmares.
Not all of those nightmares are appropriate for kids. Interestingly, though, children and childhood and children’s media seem to be recurring themes across many of these fictions. Slender Man started out as an eerie addition to black-and-white photographs of groups of children. Video games are frequently haunted by ghosts, malevolent A.I., or even the CIA. Serial killer origin stories are rooted in unhappy childhoods, bullying, and deformity. “Lost episode” creepypastas detail imaginary episodes of well-known television programs, episodes that were deemed too harmful or disturbed to ever see the light of day. The programs are most frequently cartoons—Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the Simpsons all feature prominently—or else involve entirely fictional public broadcasting children’s programming—Sesame Street by way of Elm Street. The adults creating, adapting, and disseminating this content seem to have found ample inspiration in presenting haunted, twisted versions of their own childhoods.
In his excellent essay for Aeon, author Will Wiles wrote, “creepypasta scratches at the unspoken deal made between children and adults. If all is well, the horrors that surround us during childhood are suppressed, and we discover them only as we approach adulthood. Maturity brings the realisation that frightful stuff had been going on around us all the time—so why not possession and mass suicide as well as the usual death, disease and strife?” In other words, many of these memetic fictions project adult anxieties and preoccupations onto idyllic or nostalgic childhood memories, as if retroactively rejecting that the world ever seemed particularly safe, sane, or fair. The world has always been a scary place. Those of us who saw that forbidden episode of SpongeBob SquarePants have known it all along.
Is it any wonder that kids, whether the target audience of these fictions or not, are absolutely fascinated by them? Not only does so much of the content seem to be about childhood; but kids growing up in contemporary times hardly need to be told that the world is a scary and dangerous place. Climate anxiety, gun violence, book bans, a mounting mental health crisis—young people have endless reasons to be fearful, and it’s hard to imagine they find much solace looking to adults for answers and seeing only endless finger pointing. Scary stories have always held a fascination for kids; scary stories that speak to the contemporary moment—that are of, by, and for the internet—naturally resonate all the more. Of course Minecraft is haunted by an anonymous, vaguely predatory agent of chaos. That aligns perfectly with every warning they’ve ever heard about online spaces.
When we concluded our co-authored fantasy series, The Adventurers Guild, we knew that horror was the next genre we wanted to explore. Writing horror for young readers led us naturally to consider creepypastas, and the ways kids who are using them, consciously or not, to map their own modern fears—fears the adults in their lives may be failing to address. That idea informs both the theme and the format of our new middle-grade series, The Doomsday Archives, in which three friends are confronted with cursed relics, ravenous monsters, and the short-sighted, self-serving adults who seek to profit from the chaos as the world teeters on the brink of disaster. Chapters are interspersed with fictional Wiki entries and micro-fictions detailing the cryptids, conspiracies, and creepypastas of the book’s fictional setting of New Rotterdam—a mixed-media spin that we hope evokes the could-almost-be-real chills of the best online legends.
Time will tell if we’ve hit the mark. The surest sign of success? Seeing one of our very own scary stories take on a life of its own online. Stranger things have happened.
Check out The Doomsday Archives, by Zack Loran Clark and Nick Eliopulos, here:
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