What Is Creepypasta? Meaning, Origin and History

Creepypasta is horror fiction that spreads on the internet. The word comes from “copypasta”, online slang for a block of text copied and pasted from site to site, and creepypastas began the same way: short, anonymous scary stories passed between forums and message boards, usually told as if they really happened.

Since then the name has grown to cover almost any scary story written for the web, from one-paragraph urban legends to novel-length sagas. This guide covers what the word means, where creepypasta came from, the stories that made it famous and where to start reading.

Creepypasta at a glance

• Meaning: horror stories, images and videos shared online, often presented as true.
• Name: “creepy” + “copypasta” (text copied and pasted around the internet).
• Where the word started: the 4chan message board, around 2007.
• Often called the first creepypasta: Ted the Caver, posted online in 2001.
• Most famous creepypastas: Slenderman, Jeff the Killer, BEN Drowned, Smile Dog and Candle Cove.
• Recognised as folklore: the Library of Congress American Folklife Center has collected creepypasta as part of its archive of internet culture.

What does creepypasta mean?

A creepypasta is a piece of horror written to be shared. Most are short stories, but the label also covers cursed images, “lost episode” write-ups, haunted video game accounts, found-footage videos and rituals you are dared to try. What links them is the way they travel: copied, reposted, retold and added to by strangers until nobody is quite sure where they started.

Many creepypastas are written in the first person and set somewhere ordinary, such as a bedroom, a childhood TV show or an old video game cartridge, so they feel like something that could have happened to the reader. That “this might be real” quality is a big part of the genre.

Why is it called creepypasta?

The name is a play on copypasta, a 4chan term for text that gets copied and pasted again and again. “Pasta” has nothing to do with food: it is a corruption of “paste”. Scary copypastas became creepypastas, and the name stuck as the stories spread far beyond 4chan.

When did creepypasta start?

Creepypasta grew out of older traditions: campfire tales, urban legends and the chain emails of the 1990s that warned of curses and hoaxes. The word itself appeared on 4chan around 2007, but stories now counted as creepypasta go back further. Here are some milestones:

• 2001: Ted the Caver, a blog-style account of a cave exploration that goes wrong, appears online. It is often called the first creepypasta.
• 2005: 4chan users invent The Rake, a pale humanoid creature, through a collaborative thread.
• Around 2007: the word “creepypasta” starts being used on 4chan for scary copy-and-paste stories.
• 2008: Creepypasta.com launches and begins publishing stories daily.
• 2009: Eric Knudsen creates Slender Man on the Something Awful forums, and Kris Straub publishes Candle Cove.
• 2010: BEN Drowned and The Russian Sleep Experiment spread online, and the genre reaches a peak in popularity.
• 2011: Sonic.exe is posted, launching years of fan-made games.
• 2016: the TV series Channel Zero begins adapting creepypastas, starting with Candle Cove.
• 2019: The Backrooms begins as a single photo on 4chan and grows into one of the biggest internet horror stories of its decade.

What was the first creepypasta?

Ted the Caver (2001) is the story most often named as the first creepypasta. Written as a series of updates from a man exploring a narrow cave with a friend, it builds dread slowly and was widely believed to be real. Some people point further back, to hoax chain emails of the 1990s, which spread in exactly the same copy-and-paste way.

Types of creepypasta

• Lost episodes: descriptions of disturbing episodes of real or invented TV shows, like Candle Cove and Squidward’s Suicide.
• Haunted video games: cursed cartridges and corrupted files, like BEN Drowned, Sonic.exe and Lavender Town Syndrome.
• Monsters and killers: characters who became icons, like Slenderman, Jeff the Killer, Eyeless Jack and Laughing Jack.
• Cursed images: pictures said to harm anyone who sees them, like Smile Dog.
• Fake history and experiments: invented “records” of real-sounding events, like The Russian Sleep Experiment and Polybius.
• Places that shouldn’t exist: impossible spaces, like The Backrooms and NoEnd House.

Are creepypastas real?

No. Creepypastas are fiction, even when they are written as diaries, news reports or confessions. Feeling real is part of the craft, and some stories have been so convincing that readers took them as fact. A few real crimes have been linked to people who believed in creepypasta characters, most famously the 2014 Slender Man stabbing in Wisconsin, which is a reminder that these stories are made up, however true they feel.

The most famous creepypastas

If you are new to creepypasta, these are the classics most readers start with:

• Slenderman: the faceless figure in a black suit who stalks children.
• Jeff the Killer: a teenager disfigured in an attack who tells his victims to “go to sleep”.
• BEN Drowned: a haunted Zelda cartridge and the ghost inside it.
• Smile Dog: a cursed image of a grinning dog that demands to be spread.
• Candle Cove: a forum thread about a children’s show nobody else remembers.
• The Russian Sleep Experiment: five prisoners kept awake for fifteen days.
• Ted the Caver: the slow-burn cave story that started it all.

Browse all of the famous creepypastas, the top rated stories as voted by readers, or the latest stories published on Creepypasta.com.

Creepypasta FAQ