It’s almost Halloween, which means that for many its time to find as many ways as possible to scare yourself on the Internet — or at least get thoroughly creeped out.
Scientology conspiracy Wikipedia spiral & night vision YouTube videos
The “Church of Scientology” page leads to the “Operation Snow White” page which leads to the “Operation Freakout” page which Oh my God leads to a bout of 4 a.m. paranoia that somewhere in your small and simple life you have crossed the Church of Scientology and it is coming for you, to blot your identity from government records and to frame you for insanity and to forbid you from making any Tom Cruise joke ever again.
The night vision YouTube videos are similarly terrifying, but more in a “Blair Witch” way – this community of shaky hand-held YouTube videos supposedly documents paranormal attacks, ranging from Slender Man sightings to live alien autopsies. Channels like LiveSciFi boast hundreds of thousands of subscribers, all queued up in night vision horror.
So I guess the thing that makes these two scary things even scarier is the vague verisimilitude. Like, I’m an adult. I can evade Scientology conspiracies, and I can spot a fake YouTube hoax. I can do that, right? Right? – Julia Carpenter
The Bong-Chon Dong Ghost comic
This terrifying webcomic, allegedly created by a South Korean artist, was first posted in the summer of 2011 but periodically resurfaces in scary-stuff roundups and message board threads. It serves up a variation on a classic theme—the eerie late-night encounter—enhanced by a clever use of technology (make sure you have audio, flash and javascript enabled). The heart-stopping surprise at the end remains terrifying no matter how many times you’ve read the comic. If you’re a sucker for a scare like me, you’ll love/hate the comic. – Niraj Chokshi
Creepy text-based adventure games
I don’t like jump scares. I like the ones that creep up on you. This is why I’m so interested in absorbing horror through words – something that a whole bunch of text-based adventure games do really well. The games themselves are little self-contained rabbit holes of fantastical dread, but I do find myself playing one after the other when the mood strikes.
There are lots, but my favorite right now that’s playable in-browser is probably The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo, a game that uses childhood friendship as its unlikely starting point. – Abby Ohlheiser
AskReddit thread: What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?
In this thread, users submit the scariest, shortest stories they can think of. Some are original and others, like many ghost stories, are versions of something we’ve all heard around a campfire.
The thread is two years old, but I check it a few times every year. Beside the fact that some of them are down-right terrifying, what I admire most about these short stories is the creativity to build narrative suspense in only a few words. – Ric Sanchez
Weird horror video games and disturbing creepypastas
Every once in awhile, a weird little indie video game will appear randomly on the Internet, and end up circulating around. I don’t even play video games that aren’t indie and creepy and mysterious, but for some reason I find myself drawn to the playthrough videos of these weird little viral nuggets of unease. “Sad Satan” is a good example. It seems to have come from nowhere, and it’s like some weird, deeply unsettling art project I can’t seem to look away from.
Sometimes they’re games you can buy on Steam, like “The Static Speaks My Name.” Kotaku has a playthrough of this that’s pretty typical of my rabbit hole genre — it’s a game designed to disturb, and I’d never play it in a million years. But I still read through the description of it, and it still disturbs me.
I know these games — even the ones that seem to have creepy origin stories — are manufactured to creep me out. But I seek them out anyway. That’s also the allure of creepypastas. A creepypasta is a short story or video made with the intention of unsettling the viewer. They tend to be written as if they’re true. People make up conspiracies, urban legends, childhood memories, and so on to try to freak each other out. I’ve spent hours on the creepypasta wikia site, torn between disdain for the poorly written stories, terror, and a compulsion to just keep reading. – Rachel Feltman
Underground World News
This isn’t creepy, per se, but it’s definitely both terrifying and entertaining — like visiting a perverse alternate universe, and then realizing some people actually live in it. Underground World News is the Web site of popular YouTube conspiracy vlogger DAHBOO7; he’s convinced, among other things, that military helicopters are watching his house, that aliens are waiting for us to “awaken” to their presence, and that the U.S. is currently waging a secret war against China with “exotic space weapons.” He’s not particularly fringe, either: His YouTube channel has more than 94 million views and 180,000 subscribers, and he’s a big figure in what I’d term the “truther Internet.” Once you start clicking into that, you’ll never come back. – Caitlin Dewey
Twitter dot com
I opened it up seven years ago and I haven’t been able to close it since. Please send help. – Mark Berman
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