It’s said that the oldest and most powerful of all emotion is fear, so it’s not surprising we all enjoy sharing and listening to a scary story or two.
Today, the traditional creepy tale told around the hearth or campfire has been upgraded in the form of the creepypasta. The name derives from the practice of “copypasta” or copying and pasting scary short stories on message boards and in email. Creepypastas share many of the same characteristics as traditional ghost stories and urban legends.
Are you sitting comfortably? We’ve collected 10 of the scariest short stories the internet can provide. Just don’t read them at night or when you’re home alone. And maybe keep the lights on too.
1. The Angel Statue
A few years ago, a mother and father decided they needed a break, so they wanted to head out for a night on the town. They called their most trusted babysitter. When the babysitter arrived, the two children were already fast asleep in bed. So the babysitter just got to sit around and make sure everything was okay with the children.
Later that night, the babysitter got bored and went to watch TV, but she couldn’t watch it downstairs because they did not have cable downstairs (the parents didn’t want children watching too much garbage). So, she called them and asked them if she could watch cable in the parents’ room. Of course, the parents said it was OK, but the babysitter had one final request … she asked if she could cover up the angel statue outside the bedroom window with a blanket or cloth, because it made her nervous. The phone line was silent for a moment, and the father who was talking to the babysitter at the time said, “Take the children and get out of the house … we’ll call the police. We don’t own an angel statue.”
The police found both of the children and the babysitter slumped in pools of their own blood within three minutes of the call. No statue was found. (Source)
2. This New Old House
Photo: Alexander Andrews / Unsplash
We bought an old house, my boyfriend and I. He’s in charge of the “new” construction–converting the kitchen into the master bedroom for instance, while I’m on wallpaper removal duty. The previous owner papered EVERY wall and CEILING! Removing it is brutal, but oddly satisfying. The best feeling is getting a long peel, similar to your skin when you’re peeling from a sunburn. I don’t know about you but I kinda make a game of peeling, on the hunt for the longest piece before it rips.
Under a corner section of paper in every room is a person’s name and a date. Curiosity got the best of me one night when I Googled one of the names and discovered the person was actually a missing person, the missing date matching the date under the wallpaper! The next day, I made a list of all the names and dates. Sure enough each name was for a missing person with dates to match. We notified the police who naturally sent out the crime scene team.
I overhead one tech say “Yup, it’s human.” Human? What’s human?
“Ma’am, where is the material you removed from the walls already? This isn’t wallpaper you were removing.” (Source)
3. A Mother’s Call
A young girl is playing in her bedroom when she hears her mother call to her from the kitchen, so she runs down the stairs to meet her mother. As she’s running through the hallway, the door to the cupboard under the stairs opens, and a hand reaches out and pulls her in.
It’s her mother.
She whispers to her child, “Don’t go into the kitchen. I heard it too.” (Source)
4. My Daughter Learned to Count
My daughter woke me around 11:50 last night. My wife and I had picked her up from her friend Sally’s birthday party, brought her home, and put her to bed. My wife went into the bedroom to read while I fell asleep watching the Braves game.
“Daddy,” she whispered, tugging my shirt sleeve. “Guess how old I’m going to be next month.”
“I don’t know, beauty,” I said as I slipped on my glasses. “How old?”
She smiled and held up four fingers.
It is 7:30 now. My wife and I have been up with her for almost 8 hours. She still refuses to tell us where she got them. (Source)
5. When Charlie Goes Away
I hate it when my brother Charlie has to go away.
My parents constantly try to explain to me how sick he is. That I am lucky for having a brain where all the chemicals flow properly to their destinations like undammed rivers. When I complain about how bored I am without a little brother to play with, they try to make me feel bad by pointing out that his boredom likely far surpasses mine, considering his confine to a dark room in an institution.
I always beg for them to give him one last chance. Of course, they did at first. Charlie has been back home several times, each shorter in duration than the last. Every time without fail, it all starts again. The neighbourhood cats with gouged out eyes showing up in his toy chest, my dad’s razors found dropped on the baby slide in the park across the street, mom’s vitamins replaced by bits of dishwasher tablets. My parents are hesitant now, using “last chances” sparingly. They say his disorder makes him charming, makes it easy for him to fake normalcy, and to trick the doctors who care for him into thinking he is ready for rehabilitation. That I will just have to put up with my boredom if it means staying safe from him.
I hate it when Charlie has to go away. It makes me have to pretend to be good until he is back or they’ll know it was me. (Source)
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6. He Stood Against My Window
Photo: Iz zy / Unsplash
I don’t know why I looked up, but when I did I saw him there. He stood against my window. His forehead rested against the glass, and his eyes were still and light and he smiled a lipstick-red, cartoonish grin. And he just stood there in the window. My wife was upstairs sleeping, my son was in his crib and I couldn’t move I froze and watched him looking past me through the glass.
Oh, please no. His smile never moved but he put a hand up and slid it down the glass, watching me. With matted hair and yellow skin and face through the window.
I couldn’t do anything. I just stayed there, frozen, feet still in the bushes I was pruning, looking into my home. He stood against my window. (Source)
7. White with Red
A man went to a hotel and walked up to the front desk to check in. The woman at the desk gave him his key and told him that on the way to his room, there was a door with no number that was locked and no one was allowed in there. She explained that it was a storeroom, and that it was out of bounds. She reminded him of this several times before allowing him upstairs. So he followed the instructions of the woman at the front desk, going straight to his room, and going to bed.
However, the insistence of the woman had piqued his curiosity, so the next night he walked down the hall to the door and tried the handle. Sure enough it was locked. He bent down and looked through the wide keyhole. Cold air passed through it, chilling his eye. What he saw was a hotel bedroom, like his, and in the corner was a woman whose skin was incredibly pale. She was leaning her head against the wall, facing away from the door. He stared in confusion for a while. Was this a celebrity? The owner’s daughter? He almost knocked on the door, out of curiosity but decided not to.
As he was still looking, the woman turned sharply and he jumped back from the door, hoping she would not suspect he had been spying on her. He crept away from the door and walked back to his room. The next day, he returned to the door and looked through the wide keyhole. This time, all he saw was redness. He couldn’t make anything out besides a distinct red color, unmoving. Perhaps the inhabitants of the room knew he was spying the night before, and had blocked the keyhole with something red. He felt embarrassed that he had made the woman so uncomfortable, and hoped she had not made a complaint with the woman on the front desk.
At this point he decided to consult her for more information. She sighed and said, “Did you look through the keyhole?”
The man told her that he had and she said, “Well, I might as well tell you the story of what happened in that room. A long time ago, a man murdered his wife in there, and we find that even now, whoever stays there gets very uncomfortable. But these people were not ordinary. They were white all over, except for their eyes, which were red.” (Source)
8. Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv
There is a video on YouTube named Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv. If you search this, you will find nothing. The few times you find something, all you will see is a 20 second video of a man staring intently at you, expressionless, then grinning for the last two seconds. The background is undefined.
This is only part of the actual video.
The full video lasts two minutes, and was removed by YouTube after 153 people who viewed the video gouged out their eyes and mailed them to YouTube’s main office in San Bruno. Said people had also committed suicide in various ways. It is not yet known how they managed to mail their eyes after gouging them out. The cryptic inscription they carved on their forearms has not yet been deciphered.
YouTube will periodically put up the first 20 seconds of the video to quell suspicions, so that people will not go look for the real thing and upload it. The video itself was only viewed by one YouTube staff member, who started screaming after 45 seconds. This man is now under constant sedation and is apparently unable to recall what he saw. The other people who were in the same room as him while he viewed it and turned off the video for him say that all they heard at the time was a high pitched drilling sound. None of them dared look at the screen.
The person who uploaded the video was never found, the IP address being non-existant. And the man in the video has never been identified. (Source)
9. The Woman in the Oven
During the summer of 1983, in a quiet town near Minneapolis, Minnesota, the charred body of a woman was found inside the kitchen stove of a small farmhouse. A video camera was also found in the kitchen, standing on a tripod, pointing at the oven. No tape was found inside the camera at the time.
Although the scene was originally labeled as a homicide by police, an unmarked VHS tape was later discovered at the bottom of the farm’s well, which had apparently dried up earlier that year.
Despite its worn condition, and the fact that it contained no audio, police were still able to view the contents of the tape. It depicted a woman recording herself in front of a video camera, seemingly using the same camera that the police found in the kitchen. After positioning the camera to include both her and her kitchen stove in its view, she turned on the oven, opened the door, crawled inside, and then closed the door behind her. After eight minutes into the video, the oven could be seen shaking violently. At this point thick, black smoke emanated from it. For the remaining 45 minutes of video, until the batteries in the camera died, it remained in its stationary position.
To avoid disturbing the local community, the police never released any information about the tape, or even the fact that it was found. Police were also not able to determine who put the tape in the well, or why the height and stature of the woman in the video did not come close to matching the body that they had found in the oven. (Source)
10. Expressionless
Photo: Creepypasta Wiki
In June 1972, a woman appeared in Cedar Senai hospital in nothing but a white, blood-covered gown.
Now this, in itself, should not be too surprising as people often have accidents nearby and come to the nearest hospital for medical attention, but there were two things that caused people who saw her to vomit and flee in terror.
The first being that she wasn’t exactly human. She resembled something close to a mannequin, but had the dexterity and fluidity of a normal human being. Her face was as flawless as a mannequins, devoid of eyebrows and smeared in make-up.
There was a kitten clamped in her jaws so unnaturally tight that no teeth could be seen, and the blood was still squirting out over her gown and onto the floor. She then pulled it out of her mouth, tossed it aside and collapsed.
From the moment she stepped through the entrance to when she was taken to a hospital room and cleaned up before being prepped for sedation, she was completely calm, expressionless and motionless. The doctors thought it best to restrain her until the authorities could arrive and she did not protest. They were unable to get any kind of response from her and most staff members felt too uncomfortable to look directly at her for more than a few seconds.
But the second the staff tried to sedate her, she fought back with extreme force. Two members of staff had to hold her down as her body rose up on the bed with that same, blank expression.
She turned her emotionless eyes towards the male doctor and did something unusual. She smiled.
As she did, the female doctor screamed and let go out of shock. In the woman’s mouth were not human teeth, but long, sharp spikes. Too long for her mouth to close fully without causing any damage …
The male doctor stared back at her for a moment before asking “What in the hell are you?”
She cracked her neck down to her shoulder to observe him, still smiling.
There was a long pause, the security had been alerted and could be heard coming down the hallway.
As he heard them approach, she darted forward, sinking her teeth into the front of his throat, ripping out his jugular and letting him fall to the floor, gasping for air as he choked on his own blood.
She stood up and leaned over him, her face coming dangerously close to his as the life faded from his eyes.
She leaned closer and whispered in his ear.
“I… am… God…”
The doctor’s eyes filled with fear as he watched her calmly walk away to greet the security men. His last ever sight would be watching her feast on them one by one.
The female doctor who survived the incident named her “The Expressionless”.
There was never a sighting of her again. (Source)
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Featured photo: Joris Voeten / Unsplash
