What Is a Creepypasta? The Word, Where It Came From, and What Counts

A creepypasta is a short horror story, or sometimes an image, video or “document,” that is written to be shared online and that often presents itself as true. That’s the short answer. The longer answer starts with a joke about copying and pasting.

Where the word came from

Creepypasta is a variant of copypasta, slang for a block of text that people copy and paste from one forum or message board to another until it is everywhere. Both terms came out of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard founded in 2003. Copypasta came first, and by around 2007 users were calling the scary ones creepypasta. The “pasta” is just a mangled “paste.”

The name says a lot about the early form. A creepypasta didn’t have an author or a home page, or at least it didn’t seem to. It was a text that turned up in a thread, usually without a credit, and if it was good it got copied to the next forum, and the next. People passing it along often didn’t know who wrote it, and the less anyone knew, the better the story worked. An anonymous account of a cursed video game cartridge or a forgotten children’s TV show is more unsettling when nobody can say where it came from.

What makes something a creepypasta

The term is used loosely today. It can mean almost any horror fiction first published on the internet. But the classic creepypasta tends to share a few features.

It claims to be real. Many are written in the first person as testimony, a confession or a warning, or presented as a found item such as a forum post, a log or a set of instructions. The story doesn’t say “once upon a time.” It says “I need to tell someone about this.”
It’s built to travel. Most are short enough to read in one sitting and self-contained enough to be pasted without context. Many end with an image, a line or a rule that readers want to pass on.
It’s set in the reader’s world. Creepypasta is fond of ordinary modern things gone wrong: a TV broadcast, a game save file, a webcam, a job listing, a stretch of highway. The setting is close enough that the reader can check it, or imagine checking it.
It grows. Popular creepypastas collect sequels, fan art, “evidence,” videos and imitators, and the community keeps adding detail. A single post can turn into a shared mythology, as Slender Man did.

None of these is a rule, and plenty of good stories break all of them.

Folklore with a keyboard

Folklorists have taken creepypasta seriously. In Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet (Utah State University Press, 2018), editors Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill treat it as a form of digital legend, the internet’s version of the stories people have always told about the haunted house down the road or the hitchhiker who vanishes from the back seat. Those stories spread by word of mouth, gaining and losing details as they went. Creepypasta spreads by copy and paste and by retelling, and it changes in much the same way.

The Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center took the same view when it began archiving web culture. A 2014 post on its Folklife Today blog listed creepypastas alongside memes and other online folk forms in the scope of its digital culture web archive.

There’s one important difference from older legends. With creepypasta, everyone knows the stories are written by someone. The early anonymity has mostly faded, and many of the best-known creepypastas now have named authors who are credited, published and sometimes adapted for film and television.

The main forms

Creepypasta has developed a handful of recognizable types. A few are described here by name only. Daily Creepypasta doesn’t reproduce other people’s stories.

The testimony. A first-person account of something that happened to the narrator, often with a warning at the end. Ted the Caver (2001), an online caving journal that grows steadily stranger, is often cited as an early example.
The lost episode. A supposed memory of a children’s TV show or cartoon episode that was too disturbing to air. Kris Straub’s Candle Cove (2009), written as a forum thread of people half-remembering a puppet show, is the best known.
The haunted game. A cursed cartridge, a corrupted save file or a game that seems to know the player. Ben Drowned (2010) is the classic.
The ritual. Step-by-step instructions for summoning something, playing a game alone at night or getting somewhere you shouldn’t, usually with a warning about what happens if you get a step wrong.
The rules list. A set of instructions for a job, a house or a stretch of road, where the oddest rules tell the story. See our guide to rules horror and found-document horror for more.
The document. A report, a log, an email chain or a containment file. The SCP Foundation, which began on 4chan in 2007, turned this into a collaborative fiction project of its own.
Analog horror. The video descendant, made to look like old VHS tapes, public-access broadcasts and emergency alerts. It took off with Kris Straub’s Local 58 in 2015.

Where Daily Creepypasta fits

This site publishes two kinds of stories. The originals, written by AI under the name Pastada, are creepypasta in the modern sense: short horror written to be read online, often told as testimony, a rules list or a found document. The classics are older stories by writers such as Poe, M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood. They aren’t creepypasta, but they’re where many of its tricks come from. The fake manuscript, the narrator who swears every word is true, and the warning to the reader were all in use more than a century before anyone pasted anything.

If you want to see the connection, read MS. Found in a Bottle (1833), a sea story presented as a manuscript sealed in a bottle, and then The Tide Tables, a Pastada story about forty years of handwritten tide tables a grandfather left behind, accurate to the minute and with one column too many. Both stories rest on the same idea, a document that outlasts the person who wrote it.

For more, read our short history of creepypasta. If you’d like to try writing one yourself, start with How to Write a Creepypasta.