21 Apr Creepypasta is Dead

📅 Published on April 21, 2020

“Creepypasta is Dead”

Written by Christopher Howard “Slimebeast” Wolf
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Omega Black
Narrated by N/A

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).

🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 11 minutes

Rating: 9.12/10. From 25 votes.

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Creepypasta is dead.

Its corpse is filled with parasites.

There was a brief, wonderful window of time in the early 2010s where everything was perfect. Slenderman was still scary. Candle Cove could have been a real show. Jeff the Killer was… well, let’s just say his flaws hadn’t been fully explored just yet.

A closed community of readers and writers frequented a small selection of websites – mostly 4chan – and shared anonymous tales of terror. Then, it got popular. YouTube got a hold of it, and soon hordes of new authors were trying to get noticed by minor celebrities like UnclePasta, DaPastaCreep, and whoever else was lucky enough to snag a memorable channel name.

Where talent failed, clickbait reigned supreme. Creepypasta became less about trying to convince people your story was true, and more about fitting into a “Top 10 True Vampire Encounters” video. The plot quickly became less important than thinking of a catchy title.

The fandom grew and mutated, as fandoms tend to do. It’s just the nature of fame. Monsters and serial killers were turned into eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, shipped and re-shipped with each other in risqué fanfic.

Hollywood took notice and tried to exploit the audience for a cash grab. TV shows and movies were spat out with little to no regard for their source material. Watered-down nightmare fuel. White-washed cursed images. The shadows that stalked the night became shadows of their former selves.

Even the SCP Foundation and NoSleep are now showing the same signs of degradation that will eventually lead them into obscurity. Give it time.

Throughout it all, through the rise and the fall of a niche art form, there was Macabaroni.com – a somewhat clever combination of “Macabre” and “Macaroni”. In other words, creepy pasta.

Launched in 2008, Macabaroni was a labor of love. It was created as a repository for anonymous horror stories that would otherwise be lost forever to the depths of imageboard history. The creator, ScareWare, reposted stories he found across the web, and accepted the occasional submitted work if it met his quality standards.

A few years ago, after more than a decade of operation, the website was sold at auction. There was no warning. No announcement. One day, it was safe in the hands of a long-time community member… the next, it was purchased by a small Silicon Valley media company that specialized in fan sites for popular television shows.

People who knew the owner were just as shocked as the rest of us. There was talk about ScareWare saying the site was “hard to keep control of” before the sale, but other than that, no one actually expected him to step down. It was even more confusing when he disappeared from the internet completely.

For about a year, the previously indispensable resource for all things creepypasta languished under the control of a company that didn’t understand it. They tried to polish up the site’s image and make it friendlier to casual visitors. In all fairness, they were just trying to cater to a more diverse and expanding fan base.

Unfortunately, small companies have to turn a profit. When Macabaroni.com failed to bring in said profit, they immediately put it back up for sale. Again, without warning and without a single word to the readers. You know, looking back at it… I wonder how many authors even heard that their stories were being sold for-profit along with the site.

The newest buyer was Liam Schilling. He was a random entrepreneur that had amassed personal wealth by selling work-at-home eBooks and get-rich-quick video seminars. The things that bored soccer moms waste their money on and never actually learn from. Somewhere along the line, he got the idea to invest in web development. One of his business contacts probably told him that ad parking and domain name speculation were the next hot trends in virtual real estate. That bubble had burst years ago, much like creepypasta itself.

Regardless, Liam was the proud owner of Macabaroni.com, for the small fee of one hundred thousand dollars. I guess he could afford to overpay.

This is where I come in.

I’m not a skilled author. Obviously. I just enjoyed the spooky stories I read, and tried to emulate that to create my own content. I started by hacking out clumsy revenge fantasies, and then moved on to gory monster stuff. Wendigos, mostly. Nowadays, you’re likely to find me writing psychological, slow-burn plot lines. Twelve-part story threads, and the like.

I was one of many, many authors who had submitted written work to the site. I guess Liam made his way down the list of emails, asking random people if they would be interested in volunteering to help review and green-light submissions.

I was enticed by the chance to help new writers step into the spotlight. If they weren’t quite ready yet, I could offer them critiques that might help them grow. The creepypasta community was dying, but in one small corner of the internet, I could try to keep part of it alive.

I quickly agreed to help with the site, and Liam answered back immediately. Much to my own surprise, I was given the “keys to the kingdom” with little to no questions asked. At the time, I thought he trusted me because of the quality of the stories I had sent in. In retrospect, he likely didn’t care enough about the content to bother finding out who I was. As long as he didn’t have to do the work, he was willing to take the risk.

Macabaroni was just another revenue stream to him, and any warm body would do in my position. To him, the site where I spent so many sleepless nights was no different from TopSportsBettingTips.net or KitchenBathroomCountertops.org. Both of which he also owned.

There were so many Skype calls… so many long, drawn-out monologues where he would tell me about how smart he was, and how many business opportunities he had lined up. All while I just nodded along, never able to get a word in.

One of Liam’s favorite phrases when it came to the site was “make it go away”. Problem with the WordPress theme? Make it go away. Random DDoS attack on the site? Make it go away. Authors coming around and asking for us to pay them a cut of ad revenue? Make it go away.

I convinced myself that no matter how much Mr. Schilling disrespected the site, I would be there to guard the stories I loved. I would make sure a new generation of fans could experience all of that fear in unapologetic, hyper-realistic detail.

Across the next year, I did my best to ignore the warning signs. At first, it was easy to assume Liam was just making mistakes because he was new to creepypasta and didn’t know anything about it. I figured that he would do his research and come to understand that he bought something very important to a lot of people.

Eventually, I understood that he had no interest whatsoever in becoming a part of our community.

Stories were going missing. I don’t know how many times it happened before I noticed. When one of my favorite classics, “The Cackleman”, disappeared overnight, I contacted Liam to report what I assumed was a database glitch.

I already expected his usual response. He would just tell me to get rid of the problem, even though I had only agreed to review submissions. How did he get me to handle every facet of the site’s operation? I guess you only get to be a rich scumbag by being very good at manipulating people.

I was surprised when the reply to my email wasn’t his usual “make it go away” catchphrase.

Apparently, Liam’s girlfriend had sat down and looked at the site. I never really knew much about her, but he was living in Taiwan at the time and I always pictured her as a pretty, much-younger lady who probably regretted her life choices.

One thing I did find out about her was that she hated The Cackleman. Liam’s exact words were “gross” and “disturbing”. I tried to explain to him that the whole point of creepypasta was to be “disturbing”, and that “gross” was subjective. Regardless, he decided the story was offensive and had deleted it himself.

Deleted. Just like that. For all he knew, and he knew very little, that could’ve been the only preserved copy of the story. He was willing to just erase someone else’s work, something so many readers loved, with no forewarning… and he saw nothing wrong with it.

I watched in stunned silence as more stories vanished over the course of months. Mr. Shush. Bill the Bleeder. The Weird Case of Casey Weir.

He made them go away. The fact that he didn’t ask me to remove anything proved that he knew it was wrong. He knew I never would’ve agreed to do it, so he just hoped I wouldn’t notice.

At that rate, there would be no stories left. Horror is offensive. That’s kind of the point.

What’s worse, people were contacting me about the missing content. I had to walk a tightrope of explaining why exactly the stories were gone without making Liam look bad. A gnawing, cold feeling in my stomach told me that if he felt everyone was pissed off at him, he might actually throw a tantrum and torch the entire website out of a petty need for revenge.

He outright owned one of the largest archives of our shared history, and the website traffic would be just as valuable to him with a parked advertising page. Maybe it would make even more money without stories getting in the way of the ads.

Eventually, I couldn’t stand the random deletions any longer. Being used, being unappreciated, that was my own fault for letting it happen. However, watching Liam Schilling throw away great pastas like an infant pushing a plate of spaghetti off his high chair was breaking me.

I waited for our weekly Skype call to give him the news. I was going to quit, effective immediately, with absolutely no notice since no one else seemed to be giving any.

It was the dead of night in his part of the world, so he’d have to sleep on what I was about to say.

I let him drone on and on about himself, as per usual. He talked about his vast intelligence and his keen business sense. He mentioned the business deals he was working on, and how much money he would make. I guess he expected me to be jealous or to admire him. Instead, I just interrupted him once in a while with sarcastic comments.

“Cool!” I cheered. I may have even thrown in an “Awesome!” or two.

I think I went a bit too far when I shouted, “Wow, bro, that sounds epic!” But he didn’t seem to notice.

I guess he thought I was genuinely impressed. No surprise there. He probably spent the majority of his time surrounded by a corporate cult of yes-men who bought all of his self-serving double-talk.

Finally, the hour-long speech was drawing to a close. It was time to tear him down with my own diatribe on how much of a disappointment he had been. I was ready to list every one of his failings, and to let him know I would use his own story submission form to directly contact anyone who volunteered for him in the future. He’d have to run the site himself, or not at all.

Before I got the chance to speak, the sound of a sharp knock came from his side of the call. It sounded a bit distant, and if I had to guess, I would say it was coming from the front door of the house.

“Hang on, that’s probably Akemi,” Liam snorted as he hauled his pale, doughy form up from his desk chair and left the room. He had been wearing boxer shorts the entire time.

Well, at least I finally knew the name of the girlfriend. Something that was never important enough to him to mention.

I sat there, holding my tongue once again. After everything that had built up to that moment, I was left with self-righteous blue-balls. Typical.

Liam entered the room again onscreen. More accurately, he burst in. He looked panicked. Horrified. He closed the door behind him and, after a moment of flustered inaction, he propped a chair against the doorknob.

“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” I asked. Seeing that look of fear on a human being’s face, even one as punchable as his, made me forget all of my hatred.

“Shut up! Stop making noise!” Liam whispered angrily. I saw his hand move to the side of his computer, and figured he must have turned the volume to zero.

I watched as Liam took his cell phone in shaking hands and dialed a number I couldn’t see. He said something in another language. Mandarin, I would assume.

All the while, a slow, steady banging could be heard in the background. Someone was repeatedly striking a door. Hard. As Liam stumbled over his words, I heard the sound of that far-off door cracking under the weight of fists.

Within moments, the door to his home office was rattling from the blows of that same intruder. I could only look on as the door came off of its hinges and fell to the floor, knocking over the propped chair. Liam stared forward, toward the webcam, toward me. I’ll never erase his wide-eyed, vacant expression of dread from my mind.

In the darkness of the hallway behind him, I saw a human shape. I saw white, piercing eyes like flashlights, and a gleaming grin that looked more like a white void than teeth.

“The Cackleman”.

For a moment, I considered the idea that it was all a prank. It seemed too insane to be real. That moment didn’t last long, however.

I instinctively covered my mouth, as if screaming would make any difference at that point. The Cackleman stepped into the room, fluorescent lights doing nothing to illuminate his pitch-black body. He was a black hole of a person, save for those high-beam facial features. Just like in his story. The story Liam had deleted.

I heard the hollow, reverberating laughter of the Cackleman as my eyes focused and fixed on other figures behind him.

A human corpse, puppeted like a marionette by ropy tendrils of its own blood. Moving methodically as those red, congealed feelers sought out cracks and crevices to use for leverage. I’d recognize “Bill the Bleeder” even if there hadn’t been any fan art of him.

Then, torn black jeans and army boots. Fingerless gloves and military jacket. A sweatshirt hoodie with no face inside – just the tremendous, open mouth of a lamprey. It was “Mr. Shush”, the slasher icon popular with edgy teens.

Following behind, an unassuming young man in a bow-tie, sweater-vest, and coke bottle glasses. “Casey Weir”… for some reason, he always scared me the most. I guess the quiet ones are the worst.

Behind the foursome, I could see motion… more creatures and killers packed into the hallway. Other characters from other stories Liam unceremoniously deleted.

Remnants of discarded legends.

Ghosts of the stories he had killed.

Suddenly, Liam snapped back to reality. He turned in his chair, away from me and toward the things behind him. The things that were now pushing against each other and vying for position. Everyone wanted to be the first to get a piece of him, and no one wanted to be left out at the end.

“Make… it… go away…” he timidly whined.

If I still had any question about whether or not this was a joke, it would have been gone the moment Mr. Shush bit into Liam’s face. I just shook… shook, and stared… until a stray spatter of blood covered the webcam’s lens.

I could hear the screaming, then a pathetic gurgling, coming from my speakers long after the visuals were obscured. The inhuman, echoing laughter never stopped. If the story held true, any trace of Liam… if anything at all was left of him… would disappear into the endless abyss of the Cackleman’s body. Not a single scrap would be found.

Thus ended the cautionary tale of Liam Schilling. His demise was as uncanny and traumatic as any classic creepypasta, and I suppose there’s a bit of poetic justice somewhere in there. If he had bothered to read the stories he was hosting, he would’ve known not to meddle with such things.

Then again, maybe his story is just yet another silly revenge fantasy. A greedy, brutish slob is drawn and quartered while the person he wronged gets to watch. I don’t know. I didn’t feel vindicated. I only felt sick.

Needless to say, Macabaroni.com was sold yet again. I don’t know if one of Liam’s family members put it up for sale, or if was one of his business partners. Part of me believes the site is selling itself… a digital flytrap that lures in the cockroaches of the community. Maybe it’s killed before. No one has heard from the original owner in a couple of years now.

The weirdest thing about all of this, if you can believe anything is weirder than what I’ve told you already, is what happened to the stories.

I can’t find them.

No one can.

The Cackleman, Mr. Shush, Bill the Bleeder, The Weird Case of Casey Weir, and all the rest… they’re gone. Like, completely gone. It’s like everyone in the realm of internet horror is suffering from a shared case of the Mandela Effect.

These stories just do not exist on any platform, in any format. Not on 4Chan, SomethingAwful, or even Reddit. Even the Creepypasta Wiki doesn’t have it, and they’ll publish pretty much anything these days.

I think that the stories and characters I grew up with are gone forever. Worse yet, maybe they’re finally free.

The only thing I can think of that might fix both of those problems is if I, or someone like me, wrote and posted those stories again. Maybe fiction is just a cage in which we trap our demons.

I don’t know if anyone’s going to actually take the time to rewrite them, though.

Creepypasta is dead.

Rating: 9.12/10. From 25 votes.

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

Written by Christopher Howard “Slimebeast” Wolf
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Omega Black
Narrated by N/A

🔔 More stories from author: Christopher Howard “Slimebeast” Wolf

Publisher's Notes: N/A

This story is featured alongside 5 others in Christopher Howard Wolf's collection of short stories, Too Spooky Tales: Book Three: Echos Of The Passed, now available on Amazon.com. From Christopher Howard Wolf, also known as Slimebeast, come 6 original scary stories that probe the border between life and death. From a visceral experience with a hospital ghost, to a quest for the perfect meal, "Too Spooky Tales" brings unexpected horrors from dark places.