Ghost to Ghost

thought digest, 10.29.2025

Hi Deeists,

Happy Halloween! Leave a comment and tell me what you’re dressing up as? This is the first year that I don’t have an elaborate costume planned. It’s not that I’m not feeling the Halloween spirit… I’m just not feeling in the mood to dress up. Although, that said, with the way I’ve been dressing as of late, maybe I don’t need a proper costume.

Today’s fit. Similar to yesterday’s. And the day before…

THE CALL-IN SHOW

Tomorrow’s call-in show theme will be a real homage to Mr. Arthur William Bell III — we’ll be hosting our very own Ghost to Ghost AM episode.

So get your ghost stories ready for 7:30 PM Central, navigate to this very website, default.blog, and in the words of Bell, be sure to call in “if you’ve got a Class-A ghost story, and I mean scary stuff, I want scary stuff!”¹

VIGILANTISM IS THE SCARIEST E-PHENOMENON

Maybe it’s the season, but several publications have recently asked me for my creepiest Internet culture stories.

I’ve given them what they’re looking for – spooky tales from the subterranean Internet. (The best one will be printed in Tablet’s latest, hang tight.)

But to me – one of the more, if not the most, unsettling online phenomena is also one of the most quotidian. It’s when people become fixated on you and appoint themselves your moral watchdog.

I’m not talking about the “archivists of discontent” who keep detailed logs of every embarrassing post or chopped selfie out of some weird schadenfreude. While annoying and even often humiliating to the subject, ultimately, that’s just gossip. Nobody likes it, but there’s no meaningful way to stop people from talking shit. That’s the global village.

What I mean is dedicated vigilantes who decide it’s their personal mission to “hold you accountable.” Every now and then, this serves a purpose — there are legitimate targets here. But most of the time, it comes from obsessives who’ve constructed their own version of who you are and decided you’re doing something wrong.

They’ll screenshot everything. They’ll cross-reference timestamps, analyze metadata, build elaborate timelines connecting dots that don’t actually form a picture. They’ll present speculation as fact, coincidence as evidence, and any attempt at privacy as proof of guilt. What starts as casual observation metastasizes into a full-scale investigation, complete with dedicated accounts, spreadsheets, and collaborative document folders shared among like-minded crusaders. Any success, no matter how trivial — a compliment from a stranger, a piece of content that does well — must be corrected, immediately.

There’s a pervasive belief online that anyone with even modest visibility must be misleading “the Internet” — not just their audience, but everyone — somehow. You’re a grifter; a traitor in waiting; a secret reactionary, a secret communist. Many of our Internet-native insults hinge on this idea: if you succeed, you are not only lying, but lying maliciously, dangerously.

Most people will stop with the odd mean comment. But there are certain individuals who convince themselves they need to expose what only they can see and judge. This happens across domains: the political activist who isn’t pure enough, the Christian influencer suspected of secret immorality, the creator who doesn’t fit neatly into expected categories and therefore must not only be “grifting” but may even be a dangerous plant. I imagine them, hunched over their phones, seething.

What makes it disturbing isn’t the criticism itself but the obsessive certainty, the parasocial conviction that strangers bear responsibility for revealing your supposed duplicity. It transforms random people into prosecutors, judges, and juries, all rolled into one relentless presence in your digital life.

Indeed, the scariest thing about the Internet is not the way snuff videos seem to flow freely, or the way our privacy is regularly invaded by big corporations, but how it has made paranoid schizophrenics of us all.

ME AROUND THE WEB

I went on the Future Commerce podcast! You can listen here.

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WHAT IS IT LIKE TO WRITE CREEPYPASTA?

My name is Chris, and several years ago, I used to write short horror fiction, or “creepypasta,” on the internet.

I first started writing creepypasta in 2017, when I was still in high school. The reasons behind this were pretty simple: I was an energetic kid with a lot of unexpressed creativity, an excess of boredom from an unchallenging school life, and (perhaps most importantly) a newfound access to the wider internet thanks to my sudden ownership of a laptop. In retrospect, the laptop wasn’t anything to write home about; it was an old Dell Latitude model that must have been at least a decade and a half old, and it barely functioned enough for me to actually do schoolwork on it, let alone anything recreational. Still, I made do.

As an adult with access to much better technology and much more free time, it’s hard to believe that I was able to create anything with such limiting circumstances, but I think that speaks volumes about the overwhelming resilience and creativity of kids. It didn’t matter how little I had to work with. I still felt compelled to create.

Even by 2017, the creepypasta fandom had been in decline for some time. I think the reasons behind why are varied and complex, but it certainly didn’t help that a number of real-life tragedies had been committed in the “name” of creepypasta; I”ll refrain from going into any specific details.

Of course, as with any fandom, it’s rarely the fault of the content itself when the people who engage with it choose to commit terrible actions in some misguided perception of loyalty to said content, but as far as mainstream media outlets (which were largely unfamiliar with creepypasta at the time) were concerned, it made little difference. As such, even by the time I started writing creepypasta, its popularity online had begun to wane.

Inspired by the likes of the Slender Man, Candle Cove, and the countless other creepypasta stories that had come before, I turned to the r/NoSleep subreddit as a forum to freely publish my stories, writing upwards of two a week throughout 2017 and 2018. While I would love to say that I’m proud of those stories now, that simply isn’t the case. I wrote them as a teenager, and while they might have been relatively well-written for a teenage author, they certainly don’t hold up to my standards as an adult who has since graduated from university with a degree in writing. I’m quite embarrassed by some of the content I released back then. The only experience I actually had with horror fiction at the time was essentially other creepypasta, which itself wildly varied in quality. I wouldn’t pick up a Stephen King book for another six years. Additionally, I was unsure how to inspire a sensation of fear or dread in an audience without relying on overused tropes like excessive body horror or shock value. I’m not particularly fond of the stories I wrote during this period, and I don’t feel inclined to share them.

Still, the stories did moderately well on the subreddit. My inbox was filled by a steady trickle of YouTube commentators asking for my permission to read my stories on their budding channels. I still remember a few standouts: one person, for example, asked for permission to translate the story into Spanish, since their YouTube channel was for non-English speakers. I even was messaged by some fellow r/NoSleep authors, asking if I was interested in collaborating with them on a project. I politely declined the offer. Though, in my opinion, my stories were nowhere near the level of quality I’d now expect from myself today, they still did well enough to make a small impact in the larger creepypasta community.

However, near the end of 2018, my publications on the subreddit came to a halt.

This was due to a number of factors. For one, my schoolwork became more challenging and demanding, causing me to spend less time on recreational activities overall. Within a few years, a global pandemic and a sudden move to college would further distract me from returning to the subreddit. Additionally, however, I had become somewhat discouraged by another unfortunate trend in the creepypasta community: an abundance of YouTube channels and other outlets that used my stories without permission and without proper crediting. The only requirements that I asked of people who read my stories for their audience was a plug of my Reddit username in both the video itself and the video description. I was increasingly frustrated, however, by a flagrant and continual disregard of my wishes by these YouTube channels. Often, my username would only be included in the video description, hidden away where only a select few viewers would actually bother to seek out the original author. Worse, some channels outright omitted my name entirely. On these videos, I would often leave a comment asking that they properly credit me as the original author of the story. Those comments were usually ignored and sometimes even deleted.

So, my output of creepypasta slowly but surely slowed and stopped. It wasn’t exactly a huge loss for the community; again, I’m not proud of most of the early stories I wrote. Still, it was somewhat discouraging as a young man to be shown the uglier side of creative spaces. In a way, I suppose it was a valuable learning experience. It showed me not only that there were people out there who didn’t have the best intentions for your work, but also that my writing did have value. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t have bothered with effectively stealing it.

I didn’t return to r/NoSleep for five years. In December 2023, however, I felt inclined to return. I had recently come back from a trip to New York City with my roommate, during which a number of ideas for short horror had popped into my head. Additionally, I was interested in applying the new writing skills I had learned from several years at college to this kind of fiction. I ended up writing a two-part anthology called “Tales from the NYC Subway,” and both stories ended up being read on the MrCreepyPasta YouTube channel. During creepypasta’s heyday in the early to mid-2010s, MrCreepyPasta had been one of the premier channels for discovering new and popular stories. Though the channel no longer boasted the same immense viewership it had from ten years prior, it was still somewhat of an honor to have my stories read by such a hallmark in the community.

You may be wondering why I chose, however, to link that MrCreepyPasta video to my story instead of the original text itself. The reason is quite simple. Both of those stories can no longer be found on the r/NoSleep subreddit. Over the past several years, the guidelines on what kinds of stories are considered “acceptable” for the subreddit have been reduced more and more. The success of popular stories on the subreddit caused a plethora of other accounts to begin writing copycat stories, emulating the style and presentation of those more unique, popular creepypasta. Because of this, the subreddit’s rules became exceedingly restrictive. Anthology stories were no longer accepted, which effectively ruled out my own stories. Stories that featured real-world horror were no longer accepted; essentially, only stories with paranormal or supernatural elements were allowed now. Stories had to be told in the first person. These rules did manage to limit the amount of copycat stories being written, and they also made the subreddit more palatable for younger readers.

However, these restrictions didn’t come without pitfalls. Now, there was little variation between the stories that were published. Titles all read the same. Plot beats were formulaic and stale. The r/NoSleep subreddit seemed to become a parody of itself, and it wasn’t long before it had turned into something of a laughingstock. Writers who did create new and interesting stories were basically punished for it by the subreddit’s moderation, which deleted any stories that didn’t follow those specific guidelines. And why was the subreddit attempting to limit content for the sake of younger readers? Shouldn’t younger readers be discouraged from reading stories on a horror fiction subreddit in the first place? Why cater to a younger demographic that should simply not be reading these kinds of stories to begin with?

As a writer, it was frustrating to see something I had spent time and energy on get removed from the subreddit weeks after its original publication. I attempted to appeal to the moderation, but I was told that it was best to publish my story on a different subreddit. This was especially frustrating. The subreddits they suggested were extremely small; publishing there would mean being resigned to having no one read my story. What was the point of writing a story that no one actually saw? And, again, this wasn’t how the r/NoSleep subreddit had always worked. It was the largest short horror fiction subreddit on the platform, with far more readers than anywhere else, and yet it had gradually restricted the type of content it allowed more and more, forcing authors to find alternative outlets or stop writing altogether. I went further and complained on a subreddit for discussion of NoSleep stories. The moderation was apparently the same for both subreddits, and that post too was deleted. I was told I would be banned from r/NoSleep if I attempted to speak about my stories’ deletion any further.

I haven’t written any short horror fiction on the internet since. The creative spaces in which creepypasta used to thrive has slowly but surely been more and more heavily restricted, placing a stranglehold on authors and resulting in cookie-cutter stories that all read extremely similarly. A lack of proper crediting still plagues the community, as well, further discouraging would-be authors from publishing their work.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that creepypasta has, in its own way, adapted and changed to survive on the modern internet landscape. The days of text-based stories may no longer be what they were, but the genre has still thrived thanks to the popularity of analog horror videos and ARGs. The CreepCast YouTube channel has also brought the spotlight back to classic creepypasta and new ones alike. The community isn’t the same, but it isn’t gone either.

And while I no longer feel any desire to write creepypasta, my passion for writing is far from extinguished. I still write for myself, and maybe soon I’ll finally finish a draft of one of my many unfinished novels. I still write short stories and poetry, as well. Though the creative spaces I occupied during my youth are no longer the same, new ones have abounded. It’s just like when I was a teenager writing stories on my beaten up laptop in between classes. The resilience of creators is greater than the circumstances that bind them.

Thanks for the read!

Though I no longer write stories on the internet, I still post regular content on TikTok. You can find me with the handle @killedcatharsis. I mostly talk about whatever things interest me, but some people have apparently found that interesting enough to follow.

Thanks for sticking around!

1. I love how Bell threatened his audience, multiple times, to call in with “actually scary” ghost stories.