Creepypasta

Creepypastas are horror-related legends or images that have been copy-and-pasted around the Internet. These Internet entries are often brief, user-generated paranormal stories intended to scare readers. They include gruesome tales of murder, suicide, and otherworldly occurrences. According to Time magazine, the genre had its peak audience in 2010 when it was covered by The New York Times.

In the mainstream media, creepypastas relating to the fictitious Slender Man character came to public attention after the 2014 "Slender Man stabbing", in which a twelve-year-old girl from Waukesha, Wisconsin, was stabbed by two of her friends; the perpetrators claimed they "wanted to prove the [Slender Man] skeptics" wrong. After the murder attempt, some creepypasta website administrators made statements reminding readers of the "line between fiction and reality".

Other notable creepypasta characters and stories include Jeff the Killer, Ted the Caver, and Psychosis. In May 2015, Machinima Inc. announced plans for a live action web series curated by Clive Barker, titled Clive Barker's Creepy Pasta.

The term is a portmanteau of the words "creepy" and "copypasta", a word used on 4chan in 2006 to describe viral copy-and-pasted text.

Slender Man is a thin, tall man with no distinguishable facial features that wears a black suit, and is said to stalk, and traumatize people. The character originated in a 2009 SomethingAwful Photoshop competition, and creepypastas were written shortly afterward. According to most stories, he targets children. The legend also caused a controversy with the Slender Man stabbing in 2014.

Ted the Caver began as an Angelfire website in early 2001 that documented the adventures of a man and his friends as they explored a local cave. The story is in the format of a series of blog posts. As the explorers move further into the cave, strange hieroglyphs and winds are encountered. In a final blog post, Ted writes that he and his companions would be bringing a gun into the cave after experiencing a series of nightmares and hallucinations. The blog has not been updated since the final post. In 2005, the author of Ted the Caver revealed that it was an original work of fiction partially inspired by true events.

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Wikipedia