Buzz
Creepypastas took over the internet in the early 2010s, propelling the success of many creators who quickly became mainstream. Their appeal lay in their straightforwardness and easily understandable narratives. In just a few years, certain patterns emerged. As Mytour previously discussed, many stories revolved around an ordinary individual or a humanoid infiltrating someone's home.
Yet, there were also those that were far more peculiar. Not just inventive, but deeply mind-altering. Singular, one-of-a-kind tales that redefined internet horror. Despite their bizarre concepts, they drew significant attention from readers captivated by their enigmas or eager to delve into the strange scenarios they presented. These stories went beyond typical storytelling methods and reached readers in an unsettling, otherworldly way.
10. The Pancake Family
This is the only tale where the antagonist is a brutal killer, but the extent of their crime is far more shocking than a typical slasher horror. The narrative, presented as an interview, follows Police Detective Milgate as they receive a lead in the long-unsolved case of the Driscoll family's disappearance, hidden in the form of a breakfast menu. Their investigation reveals a chilling discovery: the family had been paralyzed, hooked to IVs, and slowly crushed in a hydraulic press over the course of years, remaining alive until the authorities arrived.
There are some plausible issues with the story. It's hard to fathom how the electricity required for a hydraulic press could be used at an abandoned site without attracting attention. It's also difficult to believe that even with assisted breathing and IV drips, basic bodily functions could be maintained. However, the strong characterization of the investigator and the quality of the writing allowed many to lose themselves in the story, regardless of these inconsistencies.
9. The Vanishing of Ashley, Kansas
This 2012 narrative is presented in a dry, pseudo-documentary format, much like a paranormal account you might find in a Time-Life book claiming to be nonfiction. The events, laid out in chronological order, began in 1952 in the small town of Ashley, Kansas (population 679). On August 8, reports flooded in to the police about a small black opening in the sky. By August 10, the sky over Ashley had gone completely dark, and by August 11, residents began to claim they were seeing or speaking with loved ones who had recently passed. On August 12, every child in Ashley vanished without a trace.
The final call to the police came on August 14, a fully transcribed conversation in which April Foster describes her child emerging from a towering column of fire and then following her home. The most bizarre moment in the story is when Officer Allan Mace attempts to drive into Ashley but somehow ends up back in the neighboring town of Hays, without any turns or bends in the road, a description just vague enough to be utterly disorienting.
The reader is given a detailed account of the events, but the cause behind them remains a mystery. There’s no explanation as to why these strange occurrences specifically target Ashley, Kansas. As a result, there’s no reliance on overused tropes like an ancient curse or a satanic ritual being the root cause. Some might find this lack of explanation unsatisfying, while others may find it all the more chilling due to its randomness.
8. The Woman in the Oven
This story is similar to #9 with its detached third-person perspective, but it focuses on a single, baffling mystery rather than a series of strange occurrences. In 1983, a farmhouse near Minneapolis, Minnesota, became the site of a grim discovery: a charred woman's body was found inside an oven. When the police arrived, a camera mounted on a tripod was pointed at the oven, but there was no tape in the camera or the room. A tape was later found at the bottom of a dry well, showing the woman adjusting the oven temperature, climbing inside, shutting the door, and later, the oven jostling with screams from inside, but the door remained closed throughout.
The story is filled with haunting contradictions. What could possibly drive someone to end their life in such a horrifying and painful way? If they were able to thrash around in the oven, why didn’t they simply open what is typically an easy-to-open door? The most unsettling aspect is the forensic finding that the woman in the footage and the woman found in the oven were clearly different people.
7. Search and Rescue Woods
Unlike the previous, shorter stories, this 2015 tale is a multi-part saga that unfolds over eight chapters. It’s so detailed that it was adapted into a 2018 season of the TV show Channel Zero, albeit with a very loose interpretation of the original material.
Search and Rescue Woods is the online alias of a park ranger who shares stories of strange happenings they’ve witnessed in the woods. The first entry, though odd, stays within the bounds of what could be physically possible. The narrative then shifts to describe fully intact, isolated staircases found scattered throughout the woods. Occasionally, these staircases are even found upside down, an impossibility in terms of structural integrity.
As the tales unfold, the ranger’s encounters expand to include bizarre cryptids: a man with a face too large for his head, a “blurry man,” and a faceless individual. The story doesn’t attempt to connect the dots between these strange events, with the protagonist taking on more of a role as an observer than an active participant. The forest itself becomes a landscape that feels too strange to be explained by simple malevolence.
6. My Sugar Daddy Asks Me for Weird Favors
By the mid-2010s, Reddit’s r/nosleep had surpassed 4chan and Something Awful as the leading platform for short horror stories on the internet. As of October 2024, this 2020 story holds the title of the highest-rated tale in the subreddit’s history. It’s a succinct, straightforward story, mysterious and suspenseful from the very first line.
A college student stumbles upon a Tinder ad offering $700 with no strings attached, except for delivering a package to a mansion. After fulfilling the task, she is ominously warned to “watch out.” The favors escalate in value, yet their purpose remains unclear, with the student asked to deliver a briefcase, drop off a car, and return once more to the mansion.
At the climax, she is forced to spend the night in a house and obey bizarre, seemingly nonsensical rules. Among them, she must leave the television tuned to static all night and refrain from answering the door after 10 p.m., no matter who knocks—even if it’s the police. Throughout the night, despite the mounting stress, she complies with each rule. She’s absolutely certain she followed them all.
This tale masterfully avoids self-aware commentary while fully embracing genre tropes. The ridiculously high payments for simple tasks set off immediate alarms, making the reader brace for the inevitable twist. By the end, it echoes the unsettling sensation found in the classic ‘final exam dream,’ in which the dreamer believes they’ve overlooked something crucial but can never quite recall what.
5. The Backrooms
At just a few sentences, this entry is by far the shortest on this list and consists entirely of lore, with no actual narrative. In 2019, a 4chan user responded to an unsettling 2003 photo of an empty, fluorescent-lit office by weaving a darkly humorous description of how one might accidentally fall into an alternate dimension (dubbed ‘noclip,’ a gaming term for when players glitch out of the game world). The unfortunate ‘dimension traveler’ is left to wander through miles and miles of eerily empty office space, with only the sinister presence in the next room to keep them company.
The piece succeeds largely due to its unexpected embrace of the ordinary. Before The Backrooms gained its cult following, we might have imagined alternate dimensions as places full of bizarre, alien lifeforms or strange, surreal landscapes, as seen in the eerie The Twilight Zone episode ‘Little Girl Lost’ or H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond.’ The Backrooms subverts this idea completely: its environment is unsettlingly familiar. It resembles the sterile, dreary spaces of hospital waiting rooms, underfunded classrooms, or soulless cubicle farms from tedious office jobs.
It’s the ordinary transformed into something strange. It’s those places you don’t really recall because they were just part of your journey, insignificant stops on the way to somewhere else. Rather than a nightmarish location that’s hard for the reader to picture, The Backrooms takes those drab, unremarkable, everyday spots—the ones that are easy to recall—and turns them into an entire new world. Even the idea of a vague, unidentified hunter lurking in this dimension seems less frightening than the concept of a reality built on these familiar yet unnerving spaces.
4. NES Godzilla Creepypasta
In 2011, Cosbydaf created one of Creepypasta’s most ambitious stories, during a time when corrupted video game footage or screencaps were a popular genre. For his tale, Cosbydaf chose the 1989 video game Godzilla: Monster of Monsters. In his version of the story, the main character, Zach, stumbles upon a mysterious game cartridge at a garage sale, and upon playing it, he discovers that the game’s levels are corrupted, revealing strange new monsters and areas never intended to be part of the original game.
As the narrative unfolds, Zach uncovers the existence of a malicious force within the game, one that poses a real threat to him and has the power to harm him unless he succeeds. To enhance the authenticity of his story, Cosbydaf meticulously edited screenshots of the original game and introduced new characters, particularly the iconic villain, Red.
Even at the height of its popularity, the story faced criticism for its corny conclusion, rough writing, excessive length, and how the detailed gameplay descriptions detracted from the atmosphere and suspense. Two years later, Cosbydaf began work on a sequel, aiming to refine the story with a completely different explanation for the events. Recently, a fan-made game based on Godzilla: Monster of Monsters has been in development, featuring the story’s version of the game and releasing several new levels.
Interestingly, the story and its characters have gained significantly more attention in recent years compared to when it was first released. Since 2020, countless videos about it have emerged, with some amassing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of views. In addition, there are numerous analyses of the story, its sequel, gameplay footage from the fan game, and comedic skits featuring the characters, among other things.
3. The Burgrr Entries
In this final story, a 2013 compilation of fictional journal entries by Jonathan Wojcik, the world is on the brink of collapse, yet no one seems to notice, except for the protagonist. A new food craze called “Burgrr” is sweeping the nation, leading to the sudden emergence of fast-food joints in bizarre locations like drive-thru windows perched on trees. The shelves are stocked with Burgrr-branded products, emblazoned with nonsensical slogans such as “IT CAN DREAM A GREAT FLAVOR!” and featuring an anthropomorphic burger mascot. Eating too much of this food transforms people into eggs, which hatch into enormous insects. The insects, upon emerging, fly off to an unknown destination, and one day, the protagonist finds the courage to follow them.
The Burgrr Entries taps into the eerie disquiet that comes with the awareness that the world is ending, while society blindly continues as if nothing is wrong. The story takes this unsettling concept and adds a darkly comical twist by introducing a truly inhuman force behind it—a corrupt and alien organization unlike most fictional depictions of extraterrestrial entities.
The tale utilizes the familiar trope of a malevolent corporation masking itself as a friendly, consumer-friendly entity, a strategy that many real-life companies use today. However, Burgrr takes this trope to a terrifying extreme by making the company’s incompetence part of its chilling effectiveness. In 2023, Jonathan Wojcik released a tenth-anniversary edition of the story, expanding and illustrating his bizarre and nightmarish world even further, much like Elias Witherow did before him.
2. Feed the Pig
In 2017, Elias Witherow released The Black Farm, a well-received horror novel that earned its place as one of the “Best of Booktok.” It was actually an expansion of his 2016 story, Feed the Pig. The tale follows a man who wakes up bound in a room that feels like it belongs in a dilapidated farmhouse. However, the air is thick with distant screams, shrieks, and unsettling laughter echoing from the walls. Various grotesque humanoids appear in the room, and the man learns that this is his eternal afterlife. The only way out is to feed the pig—specifically, to feed himself to the pig.
Feed the Pig provides a unique, yet chilling depiction of Hell. While few people can relate to traditional images of Hell, such as a fiery cave, Witherow’s version of Hell feels disturbingly mundane—something one could almost imagine themselves trapped in. This makes it easier for the reader to grasp the protagonist's reluctance to endure the gruesome task necessary to escape, yet also understand how he might be ultimately driven to face it. The story concludes with an ambiguous ending, adding to its lingering sense of unease.
1. Dogscape
Although the Something Awful forum had significantly faded in online prominence by 2020 and was sold off by its creators, back in 2008 it still held enough influence to transform a joke into a sprawling horror epic. This was the case with Dogscape, which began as a thread about “dog flotillas” but quickly expanded into a terrifying narrative where dogs merged into a planet-wide biomass, coating the Earth with a layer of mangy, furry tissue. A small group of survivors attempts to preserve humanity amidst the grotesque canine mass. The most notable story within this universe takes the form of journal entries written by one of the lone survivors, wandering through this new world.
Similar to The Backrooms, Dogscape creates a terrifying environment by distorting the ordinary, even the mundane. Imagine if the Earth’s surface was covered not by monstrous reefs or fungus like the massive Oregon Armillaria ostoyae, an organism that spans over 3 miles (4.8 km), or even by packs of wild rats. Instead, it’s dogs—creatures typically linked to lighthearted, often bumbling associations like cartoon characters (Odie, Marmaduke) or noble heroes (Rin Tin Tin and various rescue dogs). Transforming these familiar, friendly animals into an immense, devouring horror taps into a far more unsettling, uncanny part of the mind.
