Guides
Daily Creepypasta posts one story a night, which adds up to a large archive with no obvious front door. These guides are the front doors: annotated reading lists that pull classics and originals together by theme, articles on the folklore and history behind the stories, and notes for readers who want to write their own.
Seasonal
Reading Guides
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Where to Start with Lovecraft: A Reading Order for 13 Stories
A reading order for the thirteen Lovecraft stories on the site, from the short early tales to the long cosmic ones.
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The Best Haunted House Stories: 18 Classics and Originals
Eighteen haunted houses, from Le Fanu's Dublin lodging house to a robot vacuum's map of a room that isn't there.
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Short Horror Stories You Can Read in 5 Minutes
Fifteen complete stories under 1,300 words, with exact word counts, for a coffee break, a bus ride or the last five minutes before the lights go off.
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M. R. James and His Circle: A Guide to the Antiquarian Ghost Story
How to read M. R. James's seventeen stories on the site, which to start with, and the writers before and around him.
Pacific Northwest Folklore
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Bigfoot in Washington: Ape Canyon, Skamania County and the Making of a Legend
How a 1924 prospectors' story, a 1958 newspaper headline and a 1969 county ordinance made Washington the home of Bigfoot.
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Portland's Shanghai Tunnels: What's History and What's Legend
Shanghaiing really happened in Portland. The tunnel network is another matter. A look at the evidence and at how the legend grew.
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Ghost Towns of the Pacific Northwest: Five Places and Their Real Histories
A mining camp in the Cascades, a town that split in two, the former Wool Capital of the World, a town with two churches and no saloons, and a town under a reservoir.
Creepypasta History
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What Is a Creepypasta? The Word, Where It Came From, and What Counts
The word, its origin in 4chan slang, how folklorists think about it, and the forms a creepypasta can take.
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A Short History of Creepypasta: From 4chan and Something Awful to Analog Horror
Twenty-five years of internet horror, dated: forums and chain emails, 4chan's /x/, Slender Man, nosleep, the wikis, and the move to video.
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Rules Horror and Found-Document Horror: How the Two Big Creepypasta Formats Work
Why a list of rules or a dry official document can be scarier than a straightforward story, with examples from Poe to this year's originals.