10 of the Strangest Popular Creepypastas

Creepypastas pervaded the internet in the early 2010s and launched the careers of multiple mainstream creators. Many of them succeeded through their directness and easily communicated premise. Within a few years, certain formulas arose. As Listverse has covered before, many of them were about a normal person or a humanoid breaking into a home.

Some, however, were vastly stranger. Not just more creative but mind-bending. Completely singular tales to offer as internet horror. Yet they found sizable audiences anyway in readers who were intrigued by their mysteries or wanted to explore the bizarre scenarios they set up. They went far past the familiar plot mechanics and reached the readers in a more uncanny place.

Related: Top 10 Creepiest Unsolved Mysteries of the Internet

10 The Pancake Family

This is the only story where the villain is a psycho killer, but the nature and extent of their crime goes far beyond a stock horror slasher. In this story, which is formatted as an interview, Police Detective Milgate receives a tip in the old unsolved case of the missing Driscoll Family in the form of a breakfast menu. They investigate the location and find the unthinkable fate of the family: They were paralyzed, put on intravenous units and the like, and slowly crushed together in a hydraulic press. This took place over the course of years so that they were still alive when the police arrived.

There are some plausibility issues with the story. It is awfully hard to imagine the electricity used to run a hydraulic press being employed at an abandoned facility without drawing attention. It also strains the belief that even with assisted breathing and IVF drips, basic life functions would be able to continue. The characterization of the investigator and quality of the prose allowed many to immerse themselves in it regardless.^[1]

9 The Disappearance of Ashley, Kansas

This 2012 story is told in a clinical pseudo-documentary style, similar to a description of a paranormal event in a Time-Life book that purports to be nonfiction. In chronological order, the events that unfolded in 1952 in Ashley, Kansas, (population 679) began with dozens of reports to the police of a small black opening in the sky on August 8. By August 10, the sky of Ashley was all dark, permanently. By August 11, Ashley residents began reporting seeing or having conversations with people they knew who’d recently died. On August 12, all the children in Ashley disappeared simultaneously.

The final call to the police was on August 14, a fully transcribed call where April Foster describes her child emerging from a great column of fire and then following her home. The single most surreal passage is a description of how Officer Allan Mace attempted to drive into Ashley and somehow ended up directly back in the neighboring town of Hays with no curves or bends, which is just descriptive enough to be bewildering.

The reader is given a detailed breakdown of events but no inciting incident. There’s no indication why this happens to Ashley, Kansas, in particular. As a result, there’s no sense of something so trite as these events being the result of an ancient curse placed on the town or maybe of some satanic ritual. Some may find that arbitrary and unsatisfying. Others will find it all the more unsettling for that lack of motivation.^[2]

8 The Woman in the Oven

This story resembles #9 in its detached third-person tone but is much narrower in focus, featuring a single baffling mystery instead of a town’s worth of them. In a farmhouse near Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1983, a charred woman’s body was found in an oven. A camera on a tripod was aimed at the oven when police arrived at the scene, but there was no tape in the camera or room. A tape was found afterward at the bottom of the dry well. It showed the oven, a woman setting the oven temperature, climbing inside, closing the door, then later jostling the oven and screaming but not opening the door.

The contradictions are haunting. What could compel someone to end themselves in such a tortuous way? If they were sufficiently lucid to thrash about in the oven, why did they not attempt to open what’s generally a fairly easy door to open? Most intriguing of all, what are the full implications of the fact that forensic analysis indicated that the woman in the video and the woman the police found in the oven were clearly different people?^[3]

7 Search and Rescue Woods

The previous stories were fairly short, even by the standards of short internet fiction. This 2015 story stretched out over eight parts. It provided enough material for a 2018 season of the TV show Channel Zero (albeit a very loose adaptation).

Search and Rescue Woods is the username of a park ranger who tells about the strange occurrences that they’ve seen in the woods. In the first entry, they remain strange but well within the realms of physical possibility. Then, the main character describes fully intact, otherwise isolated staircases that they began to find in the woods. Sometimes upside down, in ways that should be structurally impossible.

From there, the stories expand to include encountering uncanny cryptids like a man whose face is too big for his head, a “blurry man,” and a man with no face on his head. The story does little to attempt to tie the events together, and the protagonist is more a narrator than a driver of the action. The tableau it creates of the forest is of a place often too bizarre for mere, comprehensible malevolence.^[4]

6 My Sugar Daddy Asks Me for Weird Favors

By the mid-2010s, 4chan and Something Awful had been replaced by the Reddit forum r/nosleep as the most popular source of short horror stories on the internet. As of October 2024, this story from 2020 is the highest-rated tale in the subreddit’s history. It is brief, simple, mysterious, and tense from the second sentence.

A college student sees a Tinder listing that offers $700 with no requirement to perform a sexual favor. It turns out to only be delivering a package to a mansion. When she does it, she gets told to “watch out.” The favors escalate in payment and become no clearer in purpose. Delivering a briefcase to the mansion, dropping off a car, then driving back to the mansion.

Finally, she has to spend the night at a house and follow seemingly arbitrary rules, such as leaving the TV on a channel showing only static all night and not answering the door after 10 p.m., even if the police came knocking. Despite all the pressure she receives through the night, she follows all of them. She’s… she’s sure she followed all of them.

Without any overtly meta content, this story uses tropes of the genre perfectly. The high payments for easy work are unquestionably too good to be true and leave the reader immediately bracing for when the other shoe drops. Toward the end, it mimics the famous form of stress nightmare called the “final exam dream,” where the dreamer has the feeling that they failed to do something vitally important, but they just can’t remember what.^[5]

5 The Backrooms

This is the shortest bit of writing on this list by a wide margin, and it’s pure lore without any narrative. In 2019, a 4chan poster responded to a 2003 photo of an off-putting fluorescent-lit empty office space with a darkly whimsical description of how people could unintentionally enter an alternate dimension (“noclip,” as the author put it, a slang term for a glitch in games where the player character drops out of the game world). The accidental dimensioner visitor can then look forward to millions of miles of essentially empty office space. Empty, that is, except for the thing in the next room that just heard them.

This anonymously authored piece works due to its counterintuitive use of the mundane. If we were to imagine entering another dimension before The Backrooms gained a following, we probably imagine surreal swirling shapes, maybe lifeforms unlike anything familiar. Think The Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost” or the H.P. Lovecraft story “From Beyond.” The Backrooms flips that on its head: The Backrooms is, in initial appearance, far too familiar. It’s overly similar to hospital waiting rooms, classrooms at underfunded schools, cubicle farms from unpleasant jobs of days past, etc.

It’s the mundane being made alien. It’s the places you don’t really remember because they were just where you had to be on your way to where you wanted to go. Instead of a Hellish location that a reader cannot really draw upon visceral memories to imagine, The Backrooms takes the empty, drab, most banal areas of life, the places that are all too easy to remember, and makes them the whole of a new reality. Even the idea of there being a vaguely described hunter in that dimension has less existential horror than that.^[6]

4 NES Godzilla Creepypasta

In 2011, Cosbydaf made one of the most ambitious stories in Creepypasta history, at a time when stories based around footage or screencaps of corrupted video games were fashionable. Cosbydaf selected the 1989 game Godzilla Monster of Monsters. In his story, the protagonist, Zach, happens to find a cartridge at a garage sale wherein the levels are corrupted so that bizarre new monsters and levels not previously seen in the game are there to play.

Over the course of the story, it is revealed that there is a malicious entity that exists within the game that means Zach harm, and it is able to inflict it if Zach doesn’t win. Cosbydaf extensively edited screen captures of the real game to offer verisimilitude to his story and created whole new characters that became semi-iconic, particularly the villain Red.

Even during the height of its popularity, the story was often criticized for its cheesy ending, unpolished prose, excessive length, and how all the descriptions of gameplay got in the way of a sense of atmosphere or dread. Cosbydaf began a sequel two years later that sought to correct many of those imperfections with a wholly dissimilar explanation for the events. In recent years, a fan game modifying Godzilla Monster of Monsters into the version featured in the story has begun development and released many levels.

Curiously, the story and its characters seem to have acquired more visibility in recent years than it enjoyed when it was initially published. There are numerous videos devoted to it since 2020 that have hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions, of views. There are also analyses of the story itself, its sequel, gameplay footage from the fan game, comedy skits featuring the characters, etc.^[7]

3 Dogscape

Although the Something Awful forum has declined in online prominence to a point where it needed to be sold off by its original creators in 2020, back in 2008, it had sufficient clout that a joke could spawn a sprawling horror epic. So it was with Dogscape, where a thread that started with a description of “dog flotillas” expanded in scope so that somehow the dogs had merged into a planet-sprawling biomass, coating the earth in a layer of furry, mangy tissue, on which a small number of people attempted to continue the human race. The most noted story in this universe was styled as a series of journal entries for one wandering survivor.

Like The Backrooms, Dogscape makes a horrific setting by twisting the benign, even banal. It would be one thing if the surface of the earth was coated by immense reefs, fungus like the famous Oregon Armillaria ostoyae, which is a single organism that stretches out over 3 miles (4.8 km), or even feral animals like rats. Dogs have so many benign, bumbling associations like comical cartoon dogs (Odie, Marmaduke) or heroic associations (Rin Tin Tin and countless rescue dogs) that converting a dog into an unthinkably vast, all-consuming monstrosity hits a more uncanny, uncomfortable section of the brain.^[8]

2 Feed the Pig

In 2017, Elias Witherow released The Black Farm, a successful horror novel that is listed as one of the “Best of Booktok.” It was, in fact, an expansion of his 2016 story Feed the Pig. It’s a story of a man who awakens tied up in a room. The room is like one that could be found in a rundown farmhouse, except distant screams, shrieks, and laughs echo through the walls. Various grotesque humanoids enter his room. He learns this is his eternal afterlife. His only way out is to feed the pig, specifically, to feed himself to the pig.

Feed the Pig offers a unique but more evocative portrayal of Hell. While few among us have been in anything similar to a traditional depiction of Hell, such as a cave full of fire. Witherow makes Hell so mundane that it is one a person could envision themselves in. So the reader can both understand the protagonist’s hesitation to undergo the ordeal required to escape and how he could be ultimately compelled to brave it regardless. It’s capped by an ending that leaves the situation ambiguous but no less haunting for it.^[9]

1 The Burgrr Entries

In this final story, a 2013 collection of fictional journal entries by Jonathan Wojcik, the world is ending, and no one notices except the protagonist. There’s a new food sensation called “Burgrr,” which is causing popular restaurants to pop up all over. They appear in completely random locations, such as drive-up windows on trees. The shelves are filled with Burgrr products, featuring broken English slogans like “IT CAN DREAM A GREAT FLAVOR!” and an anthropomorphic burger mascot. Eating enough Burgrr food converts people into eggs for large insects. When the insects hatch from their human hosts, they fly off in a direction that, one day, the protagonist is able to follow.

Burgrr Entries taps into the ambient fear of how uncanny it is that the world is ending, that society is being corrupted by something malevolent and unknowable. Yet everyone is still going on about their lives, as if nothing is amiss. Burgrr takes it to a comical extreme by having a properly inhuman force behind it and making it an alien organization in a way most fictional extraterrestrial presences fail to be.

It takes the familiar trope of having a malicious company present itself as superficially pleasant in the way many corporations attempt to do today but makes its sheer incompetence all the more horrifying for how effective it remains regardless. Like Elias Witherow before him, in 2023, Jonathan Wojcik released a tenth-anniversary edition of the story, which further fleshes out and illustrates his absurd nightmare world.^[10]