"YOU WILL SEE SUCH PRETTY THINGS"
The Wyoming Incident is an internet horror ARG and creepypasta that began in 2006. The Wyoming Incident originated as a tale about a video that purportedly drives viewers to madness. This video is the recording of a supposed signal broadcast interruption of a Wyoming news station that resulted in mass confusion and terror brought upon by the infrasonic frequencies contained within the hijacking.
From there, the ARG primarily revolves around a forum known as "The Happy Cube", where forum-goers come to share their experiences in "cubing". From then on, more and more dark things and revealed, and it turns out that this may be far more complicated than a simple signal hijacking.
Tropes:
- Artifact of Doom: If accounts are to be believed, the nine Wyoming Incident tapes have all brought death or worse to their owners.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: As of 2018, the ARG seems to be going in a narrative direction that suggests that The Wyoming Incident itself is an ARG-like pet project that blew out of proportion and ruined the lives of its orchestrators in varying degrees. Ironically enough, this is the most sensible development to come out of the whole thing.
- Brown Note: The videos themselves are rumored to have this effect on its viewers.
- Civil War: The Happy Cube had a brief one that resulted in the site being shut down by the authorities.
- Cosmic Horror Story: For a while, the ARG became a blog for a supernatural god who was apparently responsible for the original hijacking and its video, seeking to feast on the negative emotions that they both inspired in humans who viewed them. The exact nature of this being was never truly unveiled but it was certainly powerful enough to become a parasite on human cognition.
- Creepy Child: Black-eyed children purportedly stalked anyone who participated in the Happy Cube rituals.
- Dug Too Deep: In-lore, everything can be traced back to one person who just had to share his disturbing find on the internet.
- Kudzu Plot: The story is a long-running ARG that started out simple enough- with a creepy broadcast hijacking by some unknown group and a forum, the Happy Cube, with people engaged in and discussing the practice of "cubing". But as the forum grew, it introduced more and more threads like a malicious god that was responsible for the hijacking, black-eyed children stalking anyone who participated in a mysterious ritual in the forum, a power struggle among rotating moderators resulting in a forum Civil War at one point, and the Wyoming Incident itself becoming an in-universe ARG with its creators becoming major characters. Combine this with the thousands of threads on the forum, and it became more trouble to follow than it's worth. Night Mind attempted to explain it here
but eventually gave up after finding the whole thing too hard to follow. - Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: A frustrating example. The timeline of The Wyoming Incident has so many swerves in tone and presentation that it is hard to tell just what is the root cause for all of the insanity that happens, especially once the Happy Cube becomes the hub for the ARG's activity.
