A Short History of Creepypasta: From 4chan and Something Awful to Analog Horror

Creepypasta has no single founding moment, and fans argue about what the first one was. What can be done is to put the key events in order. This history sticks to dates that can be checked, and it names and briefly describes the famous stories rather than reproducing any of them. For what the word means and where it came from, see What Is a Creepypasta?

Before the name: chain emails and caving journals (1990s–2001)

The urge to forward something frightening is older than the web. Writers looking back on the genre, including Jessica Roy in Time in 2014, have pointed to the chain emails of the 1990s. They spread hoaxes and urban legends and often threatened readers with a terrible fate if they didn’t pass the message on. They had the key features of creepypasta already: no author, a claim to be true, and a built-in reason to share.

The story most often named as the first true creepypasta is Ted the Caver, which appeared in 2001 as a series of journal entries on a personal web page. It describes a caver and his friend pushing deeper into a narrow passage, with each entry a little more unsettling than the last. Its format was copied endlessly: real-seeming updates posted over time, by a narrator who doesn’t yet know he’s in a horror story.

The forums: Something Awful and 4chan (1999–2008)

Two forums shaped what followed. Something Awful, a humor site founded in 1999, had large and active message boards. 4chan, an anonymous imageboard modeled on Japanese sites, launched in 2003, and its paranormal board, /x/, became the main home of early internet horror. Wikipedia’s account of the genre calls 4chan “the first major source of creepypastas,” and its culture of anonymity, one-upmanship and deadpan hoaxes set the tone.

Several things came out of that period:

The Rake. A humanoid creature put together by 4chan users in 2005, later counted as a creepypasta in hindsight.
The word itself. Creepypasta, a spin on 4chan’s copypasta, appeared around 2007.
SCP-173. On June 22, 2007, an anonymous user posted to /x/ a picture of a sculpture with a dry, clinical “containment procedure” beneath it. That post became the first entry of the SCP Foundation, a collaborative fiction about a secret organization that catalogs and contains anomalies. The project got its own wiki in January 2008 and moved to its current home on Wikidot in July 2008. It has since grown into one of the best-known collaborative fiction projects online.
Creepypasta.com. Launched in 2008 as one of the first sites dedicated to collecting the stories.

2009: Slender Man and Candle Cove

In 2009 the form produced its two most influential works.

On June 10, 2009, a Something Awful user posting as Victor Surge, later identified as Eric Knudsen, entered two doctored black-and-white photographs in a forum contest called “Create Paranormal Images.” They showed groups of children with a tall, thin, faceless figure in a suit standing in the background, along with captions written as if from witnesses. Other users began adding to the story at once. Ten days later, on June 20, a found-footage YouTube series called Marble Hornets began, made by Troy Wagner, Joseph DeLage and Tim Sutton, and it built a long mythology around the character. Slender Man was the clearest proof that a creepypasta could be collectively written, as many people added “evidence” to a figure none of them owned.

Earlier that year, on March 15, 2009, the cartoonist Kris Straub posted Candle Cove on his horror site, Ichor Falls. It’s written as a forum thread in which a few adults half-remember a strange children’s puppet show from the 1970s. It’s very short, and the last line is what most readers remember. It’s still the model for the “lost episode” story. In 2016 it became the first season of Syfy’s anthology series Channel Zero.

The same year, in January 2009, a British teenager named Steven Chamberlain posted No Through Road, a short found-footage film about friends trapped on a looping country lane. It’s often cited as an early forerunner of analog horror.

2010: the communities get organized

In 2010 creepypasta got permanent homes.

r/nosleep, a Reddit community for original horror stories, was founded on March 24, 2010. Its central rule changed how stories were written and read: “everything is true here, even if it’s not.” Commenters must treat every story as a real account, with no debunking and no asking for proof. That made the first-person testimony the house style, and it rewarded writers who could keep a believable voice over several updates.
The Creepypasta Wiki, a user-run archive of stories with ratings and quality standards, was also created in 2010.
Ben Drowned, a 2010 story by Alex Hall about a haunted copy of a Legend of Zelda game, told through posts and uploaded gameplay videos, showed how a creepypasta could unfold live, across platforms, with its audience watching.

In November 2010, The New York Times ran Austin Considine’s article “Bored at Work? Try Creepypasta, or Web Scares,” one of the first mainstream explanations of the genre.

2014: a tragedy, and an archive

In May 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, stabbed a classmate, who survived. They told investigators they did it to please Slender Man. The case brought creepypasta to national attention in the worst possible way. Creepypasta.com and other sites responded by stressing that their stories are fiction. The case is a reminder that the genre’s favorite trick, presenting fiction as fact, depends on readers who know it’s a trick.

That same year, the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center included creepypastas in the scope of its new web archive of digital culture, treating them as folklore worth preserving.

The move to video: analog horror (2015–present)

From the mid-2010s the most influential new work moved from text to video.

Local 58. In October 2015, Kris Straub, the author of Candle Cove, released “Weather Service,” the first video of Local 58. The series is presented as hijacked broadcasts from a small TV station, and its tagline, “ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz,” gave the new genre its name. The genre’s hallmarks are degraded VHS footage, emergency alerts, public-information films and instructions from an authority that is plainly wrong.
The Backrooms. On May 12, 2019, someone in a 4chan /x/ thread asking for images that “just feel off” posted a photo of an empty, yellow-walled office space. Another user supplied the legend: if you “no-clip” out of reality, you end up there, in an endless maze of damp carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights. In January 2022 Kane Parsons, then sixteen and posting as Kane Pixels, released a found-footage short based on it. It grew into a long series, and A24 released Parsons’s feature film Backrooms in theaters on May 29, 2026.
Gemini Home Entertainment (2019), by Remy Abode, and The Mandela Catalogue (2021), by Alex Kister, built long, interlocking stories out of fake educational tapes, home video and broadcast interruptions.

What changed, and what didn’t

In twenty-five years the form has moved from anonymous text to credited authors, from forums to wikis and Reddit, and from text to video and feature film. What hasn’t changed is the central idea, a piece of fiction that presents itself as a found item from the real world. You can trace that idea back well before the internet, to manuscripts in bottles and diaries discovered after a death. Our guide to rules horror and found-document horror follows it through the classics on this site.

Sources

“Creepypasta,” “Analog horror,” “R/nosleep” and “Candle Cove,” Wikipedia, consulted October 2026, and the sources they cite.
Jessica Roy, “Behind Creepypasta, the Internet Community That Allegedly Spread a Killer Meme,” Time, June 3, 2014.
Austin Considine, “Bored at Work? Try Creepypasta, or Web Scares,” The New York Times, November 12, 2010.
Caitlin Dewey, “The complete, terrifying history of ‘Slender Man’,” The Washington Post, June 6, 2014.
SCP Foundation, “The SCP Foundation on 4chan and EditThis.”
Andrew Lloyd, “The Backrooms: How a Creepy Office Photo Became an Internet Bogeyman,” Vice, March 29, 2022.
Nicole Saylor, “Creepypastas, Memes, Lolspeak & Boards: The Scope of a Digital Culture Web Archive,” Folklife Today, Library of Congress, September 26, 2014.
Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, eds., Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet (Utah State University Press, 2018).