#creepypasta

My story started the same as so many others. The loss of a job, the breakdown of a five-year relationship, and the urgent need to find a new place to live, lest I end up sleeping in my car.

I guess you could call me an old codger – the kind who’s spent his entire life living in the same small village on the west coast of Ireland. Call me the parochial type – wedded to the land, having spent my working life as a small hold farmer before enjoying my retirement amongst old friends and family. These days I prop up the bar at McCafferty’s pub, sipping pints of Guiness whilst telling tales of years past.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Anthony Salaria, and this is my story. I used to think the world was a big place. Now I know better. The world is only as big as the distance between you and whatever is trying to kill you.

Please stop writing creepypastas. It's not funny, anymore. Just when I thought the genre was dead, a bunch of brand new chucklefucks start trying their hand at creating the next internet urban legend. Oh, wow, look at you... you live in a small town, right? There's a strange tradition, isn't there? Maybe a figure that's "entirely too" this with "way too many" that... For fuck's sake, just give it up. You want to go viral, to get noticed, reap accolades and secure a movie deal.

The knocking starts precisely at 3:14 AM. It isn't frantic, and it isn't loud. It’s a rhythmic, heavy double-tap—knock-knock—followed by a pause just long enough for me to take a breath, and then another double-tap. Knock-knock.

Editor's note: The following pages were found on the laptop of Elena K., a doctoral student at the Art History Institute in Zurich, who has been missing since March 14th. Her advisor passed the file on to us with the request to publish it — maybe someone recognizes something, maybe someone comes forward. We have changed nothing in the text. The image related to her notes is shown above. Please look at it while you read, for better understanding. Aside from this file, only one other thing was…

The first warning sign came about eighteen months in. I remember it precisely because I had been sweating my ass off—hunched over a server tower in the equipment room, staring at temperature readouts that were climbing way too fast. The fan wall was choking itself to death on all the dust bunnies that accumulated on its intake. I couldn’t afford to take a server offline, since it communicated with all the others. Which meant I was doing it live—on my hands and knees, myself.

There are a lot of clichéd "traditions" that I don't think anyone has actually participated in for about hundred years or so. Wishing on a star, for example. A shooting star, maybe... but just an average, normal star that's there every night? Never seen someone do that. Tying a string around your finger to remind you of something. Might've been helpful to someone at some point in history, but it's more likely they just wrote it down.

The clock was ticking. Like a pickaxe in my skull. It's now 2:45. Fifteen minutes until I hear your footsteps; not that bare feet can make much noise on that gravel road. Seventeen minutes until I hear your broken nails on the wooden door. Blindly scratching away, trying to find the handle. Twenty minutes until your voice is calling out to me. But it will be strangled, like always. It's hard to talk with maggots eating at your vocal cords.

In 1996, a boutique robotics company quietly manufactured a line of luxury, life-sized animatronics. They were marketed exclusively to wealthy families as elite, high-tech playmates for children. But the line was canceled almost immediately. Rumors spread about a prototype that came off the assembly line completely wrong—warped, oversized, and deeply unsettling. My little sister, Rose, found her in a salvage yard behind one of the abandoned corporate warehouses.

Every marriage reaches a point where one partner looks at the other and thinks the same thing. "You are NOT the person I married." Often, this is because someone forgot an anniversary, gained a little weight, or suddenly developed strong political opinions after listening to a few episodes of a popular podcast.

You remember Freddy Fazbear's? You know, that popular pizzeria in the '80s with the toy animatronics? Everyone else remembers the birthday parties—the greasy pizza, the arcade carpet sticky with soda, the plastic tokens, and that unbearable, synthesized marching-band tune that played from the stage on an endless loop. They remember the balloons and the paper hats. I remember the silence.

Jeanette moved closer to the glass, and besides a bony hand, she also saw the terrifying face of an old woman with a scarred face and 4 eyeballs. Jeanette was completely paralyzed, not knowing what to do. "Who are you and what do you want from me?" "You are the one who summoned me along with your friends during the evening séance, remember that, Darling?" "Siltani, come here" — and so I came, from the Land of the Whispering Bones and Shadows, here I am, and from now on I will give you no…

I'm getting a headache, everything sounds painfully loud in an empty basement.

“Hey y’all, it’s Red, White, and Ruin here with a new ghostbox urban exploration for you to watch from the safety of your home. Lucky you! Today, we’re walking through the dead Cherry Hill Mall. Let’s take a look, huh?” I said in my chipper announcer voice. I hit stop on the video I was recording and sighed. Being this perky all the time was exhausting. I sighed, took in my surroundings, and frowned. “Jesus, what a dump.”

It’s 3:00 AM. The house is quiet. My room is pitch black save for the blue light of my monitor, and my reflection is starting to look like a stranger. I’d heard about Megan Is Missing. Heard it was controversial, banned in some places, a found-footage nightmare that leaves you terrified to blink. Naturally, I had to see it. A torrent file, a quick download, and there it was: a murky, grainy file on my desktop, waiting.

It started at 3:14 AM. I was working late in my home office, the blue glow of my monitor the only light in the room, when my living room television suddenly flickered to life. It didn't turn on to my cable box; instead, it booted directly into a static-filled, analog snow screen.

I remember when I first woke up here just a couple of weeks ago. It’s probably not like any place you’ve ever seen. Not that it matters anymore, now that I'm stuck here. You see, for the past few weeks, I've been stuck in some sort of hell. Because I have found myself trapped. Trapped in a never-ending expanse of cardboard. I don't know if I'm alone here or not; I'm mostly writing this so my mind has something to do. Hell, I don't know if I’ll even get out of here, wherever this place is.

They tell you nostalgia is a warm blanket. They lie. Nostalgia is a rotting canvas, and the paint never quite dried.

it starts with the reporter Dan come to ask my story, a no name reporter who wanted fame for himself but nobody, even police believe him enough to give him my story, so he secretly came into my room in the asylum, pretending to be my relative Dan:*coming to the cell* hey, your the guy named Alex, the white haired with red scarf you always hold like a lifeline? I heard you were hard to the staff I was barely awake in my white room y-yes?