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Creepypasta is a collection of creepy, frightening, and/or utterly terrifying (and sometimes laughably terrible) horror fiction stories that originated from, and still are floating around, the Internet. The name itself is a portmanteau of "creepy" and the internet slang term "copypasta", referring to pieces of text (most commonly long-form jokes) that are commonly copied and pasted throughout the internet. Creepypasta stories can range anywhere from ghost stories or mind-bending tales of terror, to stories about slim businessmen.

There are several common traits among them:

Archives where they can be found are here, here, here, here, here, and here. There's also a Wiki for Creepypastas and a forum for the Creepypasta community. The SomeOrdinaryGamers Wiki found here also have their own creepypastas for further reading. Can be found in illustrated form here.

Often the subjects of ARGs, because audience participation can add whole new levels of Nightmare Fuel. Sometimes, these may actually have a decent ending.

Some works have also subjected the genre to a kind of defictionalization by making, eg., a computer game that's exactly like something out of a creepypasta about a computer game, minus the part where the player dies and/or goes insane. This genre expansion has also had the effect of people calling almost all internet-based horror "creepypasta", when the genre they're actually referring to is Digital Horror.

Not to be confused with pasta that may be creepy, that two-week-old tuna casserole in the fridge, or with a Creepy Pastor.

See also Urban Legends, which are related and often share story elements, the SCP Foundation (which has its origins in a creepypasta) and Unfiction forums.

Creepypasta has also been subject to dramatic readings by an online group called The Midnight Society that post their work on YouTube. Of them, the most prominent member is MrCreepyPasta. He has a list of links to the others members' YouTube channels on his own. They frequently crossover in each other's videos for the purpose of voicing different characters.

Other honorable mentions of dramatic readers include CreepyPastaJr, CreepsMcPasta, Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, and Overanalyzing Creepypasta. There's also Bad Creepypasta for a different view.


    List of creepypastas with their own articles on this wiki: 

Creepypastas contain examples of:

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    A to D 
  • Ax-Crazy: Quite a few human (or once human) threats fall under this category. Jeff the Killer and its imitators are among the most famous. Jeff in particular seems to have had elements of homicidal urges from the start, however being disfigured after being set on fire seems to have exacerbated the issue, to the point where he's constantly Laughing Mad, mutilates himself, and even murders his own family to begin his career as a Serial Killer.
  • Abandoned Area: Abandoned hospitals, abandoned playgrounds, abandoned warehouses, and haunted houses are the common ones amongst the abandoned areas selection.
  • Abusive Parents:
    • In My Father Punished Me When I Talked To Ghosts, the blind protagonist is punished by his father whenever he attempts to talk to girls who sometimes appear in their house. His father will slightly change the environment so he can't trust his senses and, during a particularly bad case, he is let go on the street in front of the house, forcing him to return on his own. As it turns out, corporal punishment is the least abuse that he has to suffer. The protagonist isn't actually blind, but had rubber plastered on his eyes so he can't see his father kidnapping and murdering girls in their house.
    • The whole shocking reveal in I Discovered Something Horrible On An Old Family VHS Tape is that the protagonist discovers, through said VHS tape, that as a child his father used to abuse both him and his mother when she tried to stop him and he had repressed the memory.
  • Adults Are Useless: It's pretty much a given that adults will either ignore (or worse, blame) a child when something untoward happens. Unless, of course, something similar happened to said adult when they were a kid.
  • And Then John Was a Zombie: Many a pasta ends with the protagonist turning into the same monster they squared off against.
  • An Aesop: Some try to shoehorn in a lesson, to varying success.
    • My Coffee Addiction is Killing Me has the protagonist addicted to some really good coffee, and his life is absolutely ruined because of it. Turns out, a demon that feeds on misery chose to punish him because he was mean to homeless people and hookers.
    • The Spire in the Woods manages to cram in a lesson on consent alongside the supernatural thriller material.
  • The Alleged Car: The titular tractor in The Tractor. Its sheer defectiveness winds up being what saves the main protagonist when a murderous swarm of blackbugs surround it, but thanks to its poor design, are unable to get in.
  • Alien Geometries: Common, considering that a lot of 'pastas are meant to be in the Mind Screw-y nature. The buildings in NoEnd House and Bored? definitely qualify.
  • All in the Eyes: Often crosses over with red or black eyes take warning.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: The Slender Man gets this a lot, due to his ambiguous nature. Most fans agree on him being non-benevolent, but not on what his origins are.
  • Alternate Reality Game: Many Creepypastas with engaging Audience Participation evolve into ARGs. Ben Drowned and The Slender Man Mythos are notable examples.
  • Alternate Universe:
    • The My Friend Has Been Living in an Alternate Reality series.
    • Something is Seriously Wrong with my new TV has a television receive signals from a dimension where baseline humans are sociopaths, and what we consider "normal people" are second-class citizens to be tortured for the entertainment of the masses, including as slaves, as fast-food meat, and as the literal punching bags in "sitcoms."
    • "The Other Network" has the narrator hack into the internet of an dystopian alternate reality.
  • Ambiguous Gender:
    • Many Creepypasta narrators qualify due to The All-Concealing "I", though sometimes story details or other characters will reveal the narrator's gender. A classic example would be the narrator of Mr. Widemouth, who speaks in the first person and none of the other characters ever refer to them by gendered pronouns.
    • The narrator of I Miss Halloween has this, though some story clues imply that they're a gay/bisexual man.
  • Anachronic Order: In-Universe in A Shattered Life, wherein the protagonist ends up infected by a soul-leech, which makes him experience his life all out of order.
  • And I Must Scream: How more than a few of these end:
    • The Other Side of the Grave states that when you die, your remains stay conscious but unable to move.
    • The Ditch is about a man who gets run over by a car and ends up dying slowly in the ditch, just out of reach of anyone who could help him, unable to call for help.
    • The fate of the assimilated in Psychosis.
    • If You're Armed and at the Glenmont Metro, Please Shoot Me: Thanks to a drug vastly slowing his perception of time, a man trips and falls down the escalator in a metro station. He feels centuries glacially pass in the span of just a few minutes. Just blinking leaves him alone in darkness for decades. The constant pain of a dislocated shoulder, combined with the sheer boredom, drives him to try throwing himself in front of a train. He'll be waiting millennia beside a bench for it to arrive.
  • Anonymous Author: The narrators often don't reveal their name, or are known only by their forum handles.
  • Animalistic Abomination:
    • In My Dog Was Lost for Three Days, some... creature masquerades as the author's dog. The two things that tip him off that it's not his beloved doggo are that it gets a little bit longer every time he looks at it, and Glowing Eyes of Doom.
    • Princess is about a puppy that kills for fun, starting with all her siblings, then some rabbits, then her father. When she is put down, she comes back and terrorizes the family.
  • Another Side, Another Story: Pokémon Lost Game is about a modified copy of Pokémon Gold that presents itself as this for Silver. It turns out to have a completely different ending from the actual game though.
  • Apocalyptic Log: Quite a few creepypastas consist of a dying survivor describing a disaster that's killed everyone else.
  • Arc Words: "Autopilot" has two: "Autopilot Engaged/Disengaged" and, near the end, "My phone was on the counter."
  • Argentina Is Nazi Land: The monster of There are Things in the Mountains of Argentina We Thought Extinct is an ex-concentration camp guard who thinks that if anyone finds out who he used to be, they'll kill him. He's right, but his case certainly isn't helped by him shooting the narrator's friends dead.
  • Art Initiates Life: The Art of Jacob Emory is about a man who goes on a trip and returns with a magic chalk that creates living drawings.
  • Artifact Title: The term "creepypasta" comes from "copypasta", and referenced the tendency for early stories to be copied around the internet like a chain email. Even as internet horror became more professional and less informally distributed, the term "creepypasta" still sees use as a catch-all term for horror fiction that originates from the internet.
  • Artistic License – Medicine: The big twist of A Cure for Cancer falls flat on its face when you remember how stem cells and cancer works. Stem cells cannot 'remap' other cells into more of a certain type; rather, they can differentiate into a wide variety of cell types. While tumours descended from stem cells exist, being a specific category referred to as Germ cell tumours, they grow and develop like any other benign or malignant tumour, and don't have the capacity to fully replace someone's body into a 'cancer zombie' as seen in the story. In the same vein, cancer generally can't replace whole organs so perfectly, as the very fact that it's mutated makes it grow in strange and malformed ways that break many rules of how organs and tissues are meant to behave; the very fact most cancers tend to kill their victims by growing until they impede the body's normal functioning to a critical level is proof of this. It's not without reason that cancer serves as such an abundant source of imagery for Body Horror in media, after all!
  • Ascended Meme:
    • Sometimes the update notes for Minecraft will have "Removed Herobrine" in the list somewhere.
    • The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Are You Happy Now?" is said to have been based off of "Squidward's Suicide".
      • Years later, the "SpongeBob in Randomland" episode straight up has a slightly modified version of the infamous Squidward's Suicide stare.
    • A common joke is to replace the climax with "Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur." The 'pasta How my Grandfather Killed his Brother has him use this to break the tension in his story at a certain point, because he doesn't want the narrator's little brother to hear the ending.
  • Asshole Victim:
    • In The Cell Phone Game the narrator's girlfriend, Stephanie, twice attempts to displace her curse onto the school Neo-Nazi, with this trope as her justification. Stephanie herself ultimately becomes this after she is dragged away, since she'd jumped off the slippery slope by that point. It also is heavily implied that the Nazi kid wasn't actually a Nazi, but had to act like one to avoid his curse.
    • In I'm Not a Monster, the protagonist is a grave robber. His partner gets his throat bitten out by a zombie while contemplating screwing their mark's corpse.
    • In Dinner With Vivian, the narrator brings "Finger Sandwiches" that his mother made to his Perky Goth girlfriend's house. She should have taken the rings off first and they get thrown in jail.
    • A Cup of Coffee is about a guy addicted to Hazelnut coffee from a very specific vendor. This guy would kick over homeless people's begging bowls and hire prostitutes just so he could make them cry. He ends up homeless himself after he loses his job and family because he needed that specific coffee. The vendor turns out to be a Noble Demon that feeds on concentrated hopelessness, but only targets evil people.
    • Josh in How the Scarecrow Died was a school bully whose father literally owned the town and would ruin the lives of anyone who tried to punish him. Both he and his father end up disembowelled by the narrator, Scarecrow's granny.
    • Laura from All Horror Stories About Dolls are Fake is a girl bully who starts picking on the narrator's daughter. Finally sick of her and her mother's crap one day, the narrator murders them and turns them into dolls.
    • The First Admissions of the Eye is about a sadistic Serial Killer who targets child molesters, hit-and-run drivers, and people who torment animals.
    • The three rebellious farmhands in The Tractor, who attempt to kill the main protagonist by pushing his tractor downhill while he's trapped inside, only to wind up getting eaten by the blackbugs that suddenly swarm it.
  • The Assimilator:
    • The monster from The Horror from the Vault collects people and animals and fuses them with itself or turns them into Meat Moss.
    • IT Dept. Water Cooler Welcome Thread Don't you want to become a valuable part of the company?
    • The Darkness from Driftwood is an Eldritch Abomination that sucks the life out of anything it encounters, and turns them into undead skeletons animated solely by its own will.
    • "There are Cruel and Fearsome Things That Prowl the Open Ocean" has a deep sea monster that does this.
  • Audience Participation: Some of the best ones add new levels of scary by hinging the ultimate fate of the main character by how much help the audience at home are. You fail, The Hero Dies. For that matter, the viewers might be next. One less serious creepypasta actually was based around this, where the object of it was to add new paragraphs.
  • Bad Black Barf:
    • Morbus.avi deals with an infection that makes people vomit a substance that looks like old motor oil and tastes like rotten meat. They are rounded up and vivisected by Plague Doctors.
    • The ending of Cabin Getaway has Felix and Fay vomit up the spiritual corruption caused by their battle with The Impostor.
  • Being Watched: Some spooky forest creepypastas have the narrator mention that they experienced an intense feeling of scrutiny, and something matching their footfalls.
  • Bait-and-Switch: There are Things in the Mountains of Argentina We Thought Extinct sounds like a modern-day dinosaur encounter, right? The Reveal is that the "thing we thought extinct" is an OG Nazi, specifically, a member of Auchwitz's garrison.
  • Bazaar of the Bizarre: One is about such a place, accessible through a door made of scabs somewhere in Eastern Europe. The items for sale are pretty much whatever you want, but the price is a body part, starting with the breath you've just taken in exchange for tomorrow's weather forecast. Trying to trade someone else's bits (or a soul) results in the shopkeepers screaming "THAT'S NOT YOURS!" and forcibly ejecting you.
  • Bear Trap: In I Wasn't Alone in Seeking Shelter from the Blizzard, a hunter lost in a blizzard takes refuge from the storm in a shed. He is able to sense someone else in the shed, whom he offers to share his kill with. The person accepts with gusto. In the morning, he sees that his companion was a man whose foot was caught in a bear trap, and, unable to free himself, starved to death. The hunter can explain the conversation as stress, but the dislodged tooth stuck in the half-eaten rabbit is a little harder to explain...
  • Bittersweet Ending: While most creepypastas end with a Downer Ending or No Ending, Pokémon Lost Silver (presumably) ends with the protagonist coming to terms with his death, after having a successful career as a Pokémon champion. Even then, this can still be taken as a downer from a nihilist point of view, that his success will eventually be erased after his death. Lost Silver: Hidden, however, shows that there may be something much more sinister going on.
  • Bizarre Alien Biology: Jeffs from the Worm Jeff Saga have a gland that produces a powerful acid located near the stomach, and Drone Leaders have this replaced with an organ filled with what is essentially lighter fluid, which they ignite using a "flint" in their mouths to spit huge fireballs.
  • Bizarro Universe: The Happypasta parody universe, home to characters such as Splendorman. Jeff the Hugger, the Happypasta version of Jeff the Killer, has occasionally been depicted as the "real" Jeff's adversary.
  • Bland-Name Product: In Search of R'lyeh involves a film maker named Jim Camberson who worked on films such as Exterminator, Extraterrestrials, and The Chasm.
  • The Blank: The title character from The Slender Man Mythos is described as a tall man in a suit that has a completely blank face; no eyes, no nose, and no mouth.
  • Body Horror:
    • Of note are the inhabitants of Granny Royce's Road House. None of them can die, despite them all having been slaughtered in various horrific ways. One of them was a pregnant woman with a permanent cut-open womb and a living zombie baby inside her.
    • Also is The Pocket, where a guy's best friend, and later, his wife get eaten by what appears to be a Necromorph Expy, and Eyeless Jack, where the protagonist gets his organs stolen and eaten by a Humanoid Abomination. Unbranded Laptop has a kid dismember herself with a hacksaw.
    • A Cure for Cancer has a cancer-causing virus and a stem-cell based cure react to each other by turning the patient into a cancer-zombie.
  • Body of Bodies: The "ghoul" from The Horror From the Vault is able to assimilate living tissue by drowning people and animals in its pond. It also produces "mounds" of flesh-covered organs, seamlessly fused together and completely functional despite being from several different species. One of the nightmares it induces is about a creature not unlike the Legion from CastleVania replacing the sun. The creature itself looks like a Giant Enemy Crab made out of fused bodies.
  • Bowdlerise: The Creepypasta Wiki's article on the story Normal Porn for Normal People has removed the part describing the video "peanut.avi" because the FANDOM administrators consider force-feeding dogs peanut butter sandwiches a form of animal cruelty.
  • Bowel-Breaking Bricks: Via the memetic "When you see it, you'll shit bricks" images, which are designed to seem innocuous at first but hide something sinister, typically in plain sight.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: The whole point of They Are Watching Me. And Now They Are Watching You. It's written like a story, but it begins with the narrator telling you that he is praying that no one reads this, and ends with him apologizing to you that you read it, and that as a result, if you stop reading it, the creatures in the story will come after you.
  • Brown Note: Several involve something, be it a video, picture, music, etc, that causes people to go insane, or worse.
    • Inverted by The Bells in The Spire in the Woods. The bells sound so beautiful that they cause the protagonist to nearly achieve orgasm. They become horrifying later, to be sure.
  • Came Back Wrong:
  • Cliché Storm:
  • Clock Roaches: The Farnsworth Experiment deals with a group of scientists who managed to upset a group of these while working on Time Travel, and have been slowly disappearing over 20 years.
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: "Blueberries" is about a prison inmate being forced to eat a wooden desk as punishment for his crime (which he claims he did not commit). They gave him a sledgehammer to smash it with, but after a few hits they take it away. He tries to imagine the splinters he eats as delicious blueberries to make it slightly easier on himself, but then he notices that the top of the desk was only broken in half...
  • Cosmic Horror Story: Rather than conventional Halloween monsters, many creepypastas play on fear of the unknown and that which is beyond human comprehension... except that they are absolutely everywhere, hiding in the most inconspicuous locations. Even the very website you are viewing right now might host a myriad of insanity-inducing horrors just waiting out there to get you.
  • Creepy Basement: In the "It Has No Face", the monster that almost takes the narrator, comes from the basement in the house he stays in to escape the snowstorm. We don't see what the basement looks like, but the heavily mutilated corpses of the monsters' victims have been found down there.
    • "The Basement" by mordecaix7 from r/nosleeep. The narrator is getting married and during the weeks before the wedding decides to crash at his parents' house and sleep in his sister's bedroom in the basement. At nighttime, he feels a "presence" outside his door which comes into the room as he sleeps. The Reveal is so unnerving, it makes the creepy set-up even more disturbing.
    • The Basement” by CR Jones from r/nosleep on Reddit. A bunch of friends are having a Thanksgiving party in one friend’s big basement. The narrator goes upstairs to grab something, then the lights go out before flickering back on. When he goes back down to the basement, all his friends have vanished and he looks all over for them. Things get worse, when he starts hearing child-like giggling and the lights go out again.
    • In "I Spent 10 Years Locked in a Basement" by writely_so, the narrator finds himself trapped in one by a psycho who drinks his blood. Interestingly, the real horror comes in when he successfully kills his captor and escapes the basement as his Humanoid Abomination kidnapper gets up and chases him up the stairs.
    • I found a Hidden Door in my Cellar and I think I've made a big mistake” by v0ids from r/nosleep. The narrator while cleaning up his basement with his wife discovers a door hidden by wallpaper. The wife looks through the keyhole and sees that there's steps leading down, they get the door open and go down the stairs and find another door with an ornate ring handle. The wife is anxious so goes to ask the neighbor, but the narrator is curious, so he opens the cellar to investigate with a torch... what comes next and what he finds is nothing short of Nightmare Fuel.
  • Creepy Changing Painting: In Vile Designs, the protagonist buys a still life only to find that an ominous figure gets closer and closer to the frame every time he looks at it.
  • Creepy Doll:
    • "Lucy wants to play with you, forever and ever..." Heck, so many Creepy Doll pictures were added onto the wiki that they said "NO MORE DOLLS".
    • Robert the Doll is a Real Life Urban Legend about a doll that haunted its family and later owners.
    • In the original story, completing Sonic.exe caused the entity to materialize right behind you as this.
    • In The Old Disney Home, there's a creepy Pinocchio doll as well as various other possessed Disney merchandise.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: Very prominent example in The House That Death Forgot: He will kill you in a variety of painful ways, but even though you're dead, you stay conscious, mobile...and your mortal wounds will continue to cause you pain. And if those wounds are visible, you pretty much stay out of sight to avoid horrifying people.
  • Cruel Twist Ending: "No End House." The protagonist gets the $500 he was promised but goes insane upon everything he'd been through that night in the nine rooms, including being forced to kill a clone of himself moments before escape. When he gets home, there's a "10" carved into his front door.
  • Crusty Caretaker: If you suspect you are, in fact, the star of a creepypasta, listen to these guys when they tell you not to go into the abandoned warehouse.
  • Curiosity Killed the Cast: Exploring abandoned locations, strange noises, or other generally creepy locales is often what gets the protagonists involved with whatever mess the story focusses on. Parodied in Survival Guide, which strongly advises against exploring any abandoned locations. They're most likely abandoned for a reason.
    Secret secluded untouched places in old buildings are left untouched for a reason. Pioneers never say “die” but in fact they do have an unusually high mortality rate.
  • Dark Fic: Several creepypastas are, in essence, this. Something darkly supernatural and/or nightmarish happens to the protagonist or cast of a cartoon or video game.
    • Blue Shell is Mario Kart where Mario is addicted to shrooms, Goombas are mutant Toadstools, and the Bros are plumbers cleaning out Mushroom Kingdom's sewer system.
    • Xorax is about a plague that ravages Hyrule, and Link is a test subject from an attempt to Find the Cure!.
    • Fel-I.N.E. is Alien from the POV of Jonesy (yes, Ripley's cat), from when Kane's brought in with the Facehugger, well, hugging his face to just after the Chestburster eats something to metamorphosize with (a toolbox it spat acid into; for the record, the novelization says it ate the contents of a food locker). Acts as an External Retcon as to why the Nostromo has a Ship's Cat as well. Further, They Mostly Come out at Night is the events of Aliens between Newt's parents finding the Engineer's bomber to the USMC's arrival.
  • Dark Is Evil: Darkness is about a man who suffers from Nyctophobia. Whenever he's in pitch darkness, he feels it stretching out infinitely around him. At the climax, he becomes stuck in an elevator. He hears footsteps and calls out. A reply comes in his own voice... He is then rescued. He thinks that the next time will be the last time.
  • Dark Is Not Evil:
    • "Love" — a girl finds a note addressed to her on her computer, describing all the paranormal activity and shadows she's seen her entire life. It was a soldier who made a promise to her dad, shortly before they were both killed in war, to look after his soon-to-be-born daughter. Since the daughter turned 18, he decided his work was done and to give her some closure on the weirdness.
    • Zeddicker describes himself as "somewhere between" the angels and demons in his town.
    • The Willow Men has a bunch of otherworldly, Slender-Man-esque creatures that whisk their victims away and horribly torture them until they die. However, since they only do this to people who have committed horrible crimes — such as the protagonist, who murdered his wife — they come across as Well Intentioned Extremists at worst.
    • In "The Hallows", the titular Hallows are twisted, eyeless, hideous monstrosities that more often than not have blood on their constantly changing hands and spend much of their time stalking an unfortunate child... until the end, when they swoop in to save him from a child rapist, and it's strongly implied that their purpose over all is to protect people from harm. This is even used to deliver An Aesop — sometimes, the real monsters are completely normal people.
    • Milk and Cookies is about an old man who got trapped in a haunted refrigerator truck while playing in a junkyard as a boy. He promised to be friends with the ghost of the little girl who died in it under similar circumstances and brings her some milk and cookies every Friday night; and has done so for 70 years.
    • How Lucky I Was has a man dying of an autoimmune disease get shown all the ways he could have died horribly over his 40 years of life by what is implied to be the Angel of Death. He dies at peace, appreciating his life up until then-and with a sudden burst of strength allowing him to give his wife's hand one last squeeze.
    • Tom McPhail in IT Dept. Water Cooler Welcome Thread. He's just a sweet old guy who eagerly wants you to be as devoted to his company as he is.
    • The protagonist of The Monster in the Pantry is tormented throughout his childhood by a Sinister Scraping Sound coming from the pantry. It turns out to be a ghost dog.
    • DOG is about a creepy dog plush toy who protects his owners from a car crash, spoiled food, a Serial Killer, and the cat.
    • In Driftwood, the protagonist encounters an undead deer. It enlists his help in fighting The Corruption.
    • In My Grandfather Made a Deal with Death, the narrator's grandpa recounts a story about how, one day during WW1, he cheated Death at coin-toss. Every time he told it, he'd change what death smelled like; cat pee, rotten meat, etc. However, as time goes on, his grandpa gets more and more decrepit, and fears that he may be Barred from the Afterlife. Finally, in his 90s, he comes down with cancer. One day, when the narrator is visiting him in the hospital, Death comes to his grandpa, and explains that he'd let him have the coin toss, because he'd be fated to live a long life, and takes him. The narrator describes Death's scent as Christmas dinner, fresh-baked cookies, and his mom's perfume. Death smells like Comfort.
    • The Dark God from Tales From the Gas Station is actually an OK guy, and notes that he was a benevolent figure in the Native pantheon.
    • Tag is about an imaginary friend who was forgotten by his human and just wants to watch you (yes you) sleep because that's what "Molly" created him for.
  • Deadly Prank: Spencer's Last Prank features one for the prankster himself. Turns out hiding in a box compactor to scare your coworker isn't such a great idea.
  • Death of a Child:
    • Radio Phil concerns the events leading up to, and the aftermath of, the narrator's son falling in a well.
    • Autopilot involves the narrator forgetting his daughter in the back seat of his car on a hot day, with predictable results.
  • Defictionalization: Many video game Creepypastas have been made into actual games or mods. Highlights include Creepy Black, Sonic.exe, Herobrine…
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: "West" briefly touches on the Hibernophobia and anti-Catholicism of 19th-Century America, though it doesn't put particular focus on them.
  • Dem Bones: Grandpa's Hand is about an undead skeletal hand.
  • Demonic Possession: A person, animal, or inanimate object may end up being controlled by an evil spirit... and causing great havoc.
  • Determinator:
    • The Guardian Angel in "Love". He was Lt. Ashley Gilchrist who was in the army with the protagonist's father. Her father asked Lt. Gilchrist to look after his yet-unborn daughter should something happen to him. Sadly, the girl's father and Lt. Gilchrist are both killed by enemy fire, but even in death, Ashley still has every intention of carrying out his friend's request.
    • In "Lost in a snowstorm, I have stumbled into an abandoned school. And now, I don't think it's safe for me to leave..." Sam discovers Ellie is the ghost of a suicide victim. Inside the school he finds a mirror going back to her last day on earth. He tries to save her but each time he fails from coming off like stalker, using unnecessary tough move, and more. Even though it physically hurts him each time he comes back to the present he refuses to give up. As the school edges closer and closer to destruction Ellie tells him to save himself but he keeps trying. In the end, after giving her ghost hope, he uses her tip of asking about her jacket to win her over and returns to an empty non liminal space with a newly repaired watch and Ellie missing, and possibly his friend since she was trying to fix it as a ghost, implying she's alive and well out there...
  • Devoured by the Horde: I'd Avoid the Hiking Trails at Cherry Bluff if I Were You is about a mutant strain of mosquitos that absolutely drain their victims, killing several people. The Hive Queen is big and strong enough to ruin the narrator's SUV.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
    • In Russian Sleep Experiment, a group of test subjects deprived of sleep slowly go insane, performing gruesome self-mutilation and cannibalism. At the end, only one is left alive, and a researcher is locked in a hospital room with him. When the panicked researcher asks the subject what he is, he gives a Slasher Smile and says that he has essentially become the embodiment of all the fears humans have while awake. The researcher stares in horror... then promptly draws his sidearm and blows that son-of-a-bitch's lungs out.
    • What does Zeddicker do when confronted with a demonic being? Pull out his gat and start shooting. It doesn't do much good, though.
  • Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: The protagonist of "Letter to the Landlord" tells the demon possessing his wife to shut up because he has work tomorrow, dammit! It tells him to fuck off.
  • Dirty Cop: The Sheriff in Texas Blood, who's running a child traficking ring.
  • The Dog Bites Back:
    • In The Day the Scarecrow Died, the titular Scarecrow brings a pistol to school with the intent of shooting the bully who's been tormenting him for a month straight. But his grandma got to him first.
    • In Why Wasn't I Invited? the protagonist is the only one of his friends not invited to their old school victim, Wiggy's stag party. He had been the only one nice to the guy, so he can't understand why. Wiggy gathered all his old bullies on a bus under the false pretense of going to Dover, but instead drives off the cliff.
    • In Who Lives Under Briar Elementary? the creature is in fact the narrator's insane troglodytic sister who went missing one day at school. The local Alpha Bitch antagonized her until they came to blows and nearly killed her. She tossed her in a storage closet, which collapsed under her weight. Once her sister found her, she somehow got her out, and fed her old bully to her.
    • Devin Minkowsky, the antagonist of "I Genetically Altered a Billionaire's Son. I Wish I Hadn't.", bites back against his emotionally abusive father after being genetically altered into The Ace, first by surgically castrating him, then by asking the doctor who genetically altered him to turn his father into a pig.
  • Doomed Protagonist: The protagonist of "My Grandfather Wants Me Cremated When I Die" is dying of cancer. The plot kicks off when his grandfather arrives to convince him to have himself cremated, lest he come back as a strigoi.
  • Driven to Madness:
    • The protagonist of "No End House" goes crazy after the horrors of going through all nine rooms. Just to twist the knife further, he actually gets the $500 he was promised at the end, though that's done as a way to prove how little it was worth it.
    • The narrator of The Spire in the Woods ends up on medication for the rest of his life.
  • Driven to Suicide:
    • Though that doesn't always work. One of the rooms in "No End House 2" requires the player to slit her wrists. Not only does she not die, that's not even the final challenge.
    • The events of The Spire in the Woods are kicked off by a teenager's suicide, and the narrator himself attempts suicide in the epilogue.
    • The astronaut in "In From the Cold" is last seen trying to open the airlock of the lunar station so he wouldn't have to suffer some unknown, terrible wrath at the hands of his undead research partner, whom he buried out in the dunes after he died in an airlock malfunction.
  • Dug Too Deep: The monster in It Only Takes the Good Kids is released when the town begins digging a tunnel network to link all the local fallout shelters.

    E to K 
  • Earn Your Happy Ending:
    • Cabin Getaway has a happy ending that comes after a month of the protagonists fiancée sleepwalking and talking to a First Nations demon known only as an "Impostor" in her sleep.
    • I Set Up a Recorder Before I Went to Sleep makes a happy ending for The Attic In The Basement.
    • Fenter Woods has the protagonist witness a Humanoid Abomination abduct his best friend, Jess. The police form a search party but ultimately fail to locate her or the monster but find signs of something abnormal in the woods. The protagonist decides to take his dad's gun and search for her himself, ultimately managing to locate the monster's lair and find Jess still alive. Unlike in most cases, he manages to free her, them sharing their First Kiss in the process, and they manage to escape back to town alive, where the protagonist is hailed as a local hero. The monster decides to pull aa Screw This, I'm Outta Here never bothering the town again.
  • Easter Egg: The subject of many video game Creepypastas are about material hidden in the game that has some disturbing secret.
  • Ear Worm: The Bells of the Widower's Clock from The Spire in the Woods are heard by the protagonist in his mind at several points, and he eventually accepts his damnation to the clock tower on the grounds that he'll get to hear them in person forever.
  • Eldritch Location:
    • The No End House. It has rooms that it can't possibly contain, rooms that are inexplicably dark and filled with fog, and rooms that break the laws of physics, including bringing dead people back to life.
    • The Tunnel in Crawl is thought to be a "supernatural hot-spot" by its sole survivor. It feels like nothing so much as being inside a giant's insides. That's not even getting into what he found there, or what happened to the Clown...
    • The "Shitty gas station in the edge of town" from "Tales from the Gas Station" has some crazy shit going on. It reads like a combination of Not Always Right and John Dies at the End. It's so weird that even the Dark God has no explaination for it beyond "Not Me This Time."
    • The park in the Search and Rescue series. The park is weird: people go missing and turn up horrifically mutilated at the drop of a hat, usually one following the other by months, after having been searched exhaustively before. There's also inexplicable staircases dotting the park. Don't touch them, by the way, something horrid happens whenever someone messes around with them. Best case scenario, you die. The highlight of the weirdness is that time the protagonist found the front half of a whale lying in a clearing (no bowl of petunias, however).
    • Camden Primary School in My Primary School Had Strange Rituals.
    • The Forest in Accounts from a Lonely Broadcast Station.
    • The "Wallmart" in the titular story. All the merchandise for sale is fake, it's Bigger on the Inside and has shown signs of Alien Geometries, and the "employees" are Humanoid Abomination Artificial Humans
    • Try an eldritch website on for size. The Anti-Internet, known colliqually as "The Hole" (after the webpage it manifests as in our reality) from "The Hidden Webpage" is the quantum void left behind as the electrons that make up data packets are shared between computers. "Just because there's nothing there doesn't mean it's empty." It's the haunt of... something malevolent. Apparently, the site is older than the internet itself. It looks like a pure black screen, but as it's been said, if you stare into a void, it stares back into you.
  • Evil All Along: The ending of "The Scarecrow Murders" reveals Emma was trying to set Tyler up as the third sacrifice for the Stranger, and dismissively shrugs him off as someone nobody would miss.
  • Evil-Detecting Dog: "My Dog Won't Stop Staring At Me" features a college student adopting a mixed breed dog named Ruby, who starts staring at him soon after she's adopted. This gets on the owner's nerves, and he treats her roughly as a result and then locks her in her cage. Then the last part of the story reveals why Ruby keeps staring at him: she's noticed a demon sinking its claws into her master's shoulder, making him very miserable and angry, so she's glaring at it to make it leave her master alone.
  • Evil Is Not a Toy:
    • "The Devil Game", supposedly a set of instructions to summon and speak with the Devil himself, offers a small disclaimer at the beginning. Essentially, you should refrain from trying it if you don't have an exceptionally good reason, because doing something so extreme for the sake of idle chitchat is, naturally, very stupid.
    • The Best Game has a guy try playing a "game" that involves summoning a demon and staying awake for two whole weeks.
  • Evil Smells Bad: The creature from The Horror From the Vault smells like an infected wound. Its lair smells like stagnant blood, urine, and stomach acid.
    • The Hellhound from The Life and Death of Rusty the Firehouse Dog makes his presence known with the smell of wet dog.
    • The titular spirit from Dibbuk often leaves behind the smell of cat urine wherever it goes.
  • Exalted Torturer: The narrator of Confessions of the Eye is a Serial Killer who tracks down murderers, perverts, and animal killers to give them a taste of their own medicine.
  • Expy:
    • Jeff the Killer is basically The Joker with an origin story and a heaping helping of Uncanny Valley. He's even got two joker origins incorporated into his, with the chemical alteration of his face and a Glasgow Grin carved into it.
    • Jeff now has his own army of expies, enough to make the Creepypasta Wiki ban the so called "Jeff Formula".
    • "The Organization" from The Breach is very much like the SCP Foundation, a group of Men in Black that get called in whenever there's something... weird going on (for example, a series of extremely bizarre murders).
  • Eye Scream:
    • Expect a few eyes to be poked out. Melinda stays alive after having her eye stabbed and her brain punctured...and has to live with the pain of that for all eternity.
    • Sonic.exe's eyes bleed constantly. And when he gets to Sally in the sequel, her eyelids get sewn shut.
  • Eyes Do Not Belong There: The things from It's usually Quiet Between 1 and 5 AM have a huge eye in their mouths.
  • Failed Future Forecast: Fallout 3: Numbers Station concerns an event in Fallout 3 that, when activated, gives out multiple dates and times followed by a quote that refers to an event that happened on that date, even appearing to foretell future events that have yet to happen at the time the story was written. However, one of its predictions misses its mark by a huge margin; this prediction was that Queen Elizabeth II died on March 19, 2014 while in real life, she died on September 8, 2022, a full 8 years off the mark.
  • Failure Is the Only Option:
    • Some ritual genred creepypastas fall into this. How To Play Alone seems to avert this. Except chapter 06 "Lose", in which you will lose no matter what, if you start the game.
    • Chapters 14, 18, and 37 require "your choice in Chapter 16" in order to succeed. However, Chpater 16 is not included. As of the latest update, it has not yet been posted, leaving these games unwinnable for now.
  • Fanwork Ban: There's a long list of pastas you are no longer allowed to make spinoffs or fanquels of on Creepypasta Wiki. The reason for this? For a long time people were posting nothing BUT spinoffs, and very few original pastas were being written. There's a loophole in this, however: you can post the story elsewhere and link to it on your user page, or use Spinoff Appeal to have the admins review it and add it to the wiki if it "passes." Furbearingbrick, the admin who decreed the no-spinoffs rule, said this about Evil Never Dies (which was written shortly after the ban was enacted): "I AM AWARE OF THE IRONY." Recently subverted with the creation of the Creepypasta Spinoff Wiki and Spinpasta Wiki, two wikis where you can post spinoffs.
  • Festering Fungus:
    • Runners: Slough has a villiage infected with fungal spores that cause nymphomania and tissue necrosis. When the fungal infection reaches a certain point, anyone who didn't screw themselves to death runs around with their bodies rotting away; and everywhere a gobbet of infested flesh lands, a mushroom grows... It also has an Expanded Universe of Runners stories, including a tourist couple, a pharmecutical company, and an anorexic jogger.
    • Unrelated to the Runners stories is an untitled series about mushrooms with a Metamorphosis Monster life cycle: Its spores come out as flies, who immediately rot into a blood-like sludge. Anyone who is soaked by the blood or eats a mature fungus has them start growing on them. However, they start with damaged tissues, usually burns and the like.
    • Zombie Fungus starts with a guy's brother coming back from Brazil with a green rash and acting weird. He'd been infected by a strain of Cordrycepts evolved to affect humans.
  • Follow the Leader:
    • Count how many Haunted Technology pastas came after Ben Drowned.
    • This trope used to be such a problem with Jeff The Killer (too many pastas were just the original Jeff story with the Serial Numbers Filed Off, to the point where Jeff became an Overused Copycat Character) that "Jeff-inspired" stories were banned on Creepypasta Wiki.
    • This trope is such a problem that Pokepastas, Lost Episode stories and Slender Man stories have all been banned from the wiki.
  • Foreshadowing: Fuzzy has the mother read the newspaper and mention an article about an old man accused of pedophilia and using hallucinogenic drugs on children, which alludes to the story's revelation towards the true nature of the mother's child's imaginary friend.
  • Foul Ball Pit: Reflections on the 1992 Chuck E. Cheese's Ball Pit Incident notes that it was a nasty place, full of rotting pizza, germs from unwashed hands/bodies, and human waste even before the supernatural evil began manifesting within it (to whit, a malevolent entity kidnapping children when nobody but him was looking, using the ball pits as a Portal Pool). He even saw a kid pee into it once. It had been the narrator's job to empty it out, pick out the garbage, and hose down the balls with disinfectant once a month.
  • Fourth-Wall Observer: Ben reveals himself by addressing the players of the videogame he haunts. You shouldn't have done that...
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
    • If you stop reading They Are Watching Me. And Now They Are Watching You after you've finished it... They will come for you. Go back to the top and read it again. Don't stop.
    • Some stories have this happen to the narrator in-universe. One example is Superman: No Heroes, which has the narrator describe finding a Superman comic where the Man of Steel has apparently gone berserk and slaughtered everyone else. The narrator attempts to forget about the nightmarish content he's seen by reading a Silver Age Batman comic in hopes that the campiness will make him feel better, only to find Superman appearing in the comic and telling the narrator that he doesn't deserve to be happy.
  • Furry Confusion: "Mickey's Best Friend" provides a very dark take on this trope. It turns out that Pluto was once anthropomorphic like Mickey, until Mickey lobotimized him.
  • Game Face: The creatures from It's Usually Quiet Between One and Five look like bald men until they're upset. Then they reveal their Eldritch Abomination forms.
  • Genius Loci: Some stories ostensibly about haunted houses reveal themselves to be about sapient, house-shaped entities who kill people. Haagan's Bog in Bog of Whispers is, as the name suggests, a living bog, granted sapience from everything that died there.
  • Ghostly Chill: The room getting abnormally cold is a cliche in these stories.
  • Ghostapo: Cry of the Revenant has the narrator's grandpa tell him about the time his squad, plus one terrified SS big-wig, fought off an ancient, undead aryan (one of the god-like people who settled in what is now Germany in nazi mythology) warrior, who was absolutely honked off about being ressurected by nazi wizards.
  • Ghost Story: Quite a few:
    • Gold Coins is about a girl and her maid finding a Secret Passage in one of the hallways of the mansion by watching the ghost of a boy putting something under a flagstone, and finding a bunch of gold hidden in it. One night, the maid accidentally drops the flagstone, trapping the girl in the secret room. The family has to move away, since she was never found-but constantly heard from.
    • House of Mirrors involves the wife of a Spanish admiral murdering her daughter, and her daughter showing the Admiral what happened by replaying it in one of her many mirrors. The house has been uninhabitable since...
    • Milk and Cookies is about an old man who brings the ghost of a little girl some milk and cookies every friday, after getting trapped in the reefer truck she died in while playing Hide-and-Seek when he was a child.
    • The Sealed Building is about a boy who climbs onto a bricked-up toilet shack. There is a hole in the roof, which emits cigarette smoke. Then the door opens... Turns out, a kid died in there while smoking a cigarette.
    • "My best friend never happened" combines this trope with Gods Need Prayer Badly telling the story of a girl who grows up with the ghost of a miscarriage that slowly turns homicidal the narrator grows older and stops paying attention to it.
    • Sinister Sister's Shower is about a girl who murders her big sister to steal her boyfriend, and grows to hate showering because of a feeling of Being Watched whenever she's in the bath. She cuts her hair short, and goes to take a shower. She notices that her hair is back to its previous length, and that there's something dripping on her... She looks up to see the mutilated corpse of her sister, clinging to the ceiling and bleeding on her.
    • Sniff is about a guy who, when staying with his aunt in Glasgow, hears something sniffing around in the darkness and he gets wet-nosed by the creature. The house (and most of the suburb of Govanhill) is built over an old mine where there was many, many accidents, and her house is haunted by a pit mule sniffing about for a draft of fresh air.
    • The titular monster in The Monster in the Pantry turns out to be a ghostly dog.
    • One has the ghost of the protagonist's father get into a knock-down-drag-out fistfight with the monster in his closet.
    • I Asked a Paranormal Investigator for His Scariest Story involves, well, exactly that. The investigator makes up something on-the-spot to tell the narrator's class. Later, he tells him of a time when he was investigating a house but found nothing out of the ordinary. As he was packing up, a spectre descended the basement stairs, and asked: "Do you know what he did to us?" The investigator ran for it and didn't stop until he was in the next town over. He did some research into the house; it had been a mortuary until the proprietor was arrested for his... proclivities. The narrator's mind returned to this story because she recently moved into a new house with her fiance and found a slotted drain in the basement just like the one the investigator described...
    • Room of Pitch Black involves the narrator attending his aunt's funeral. While exploring her house, he finds a room hidden behind a tapestry. Seeing that the key is still in the lock, he opens it. The room is pitch black. He hears something coming towards him; chattering its teeth. He locks it up and hides the key. At his aunt's funeral, he sees the picture on her casket includes his uncle in it. Said uncle, since deceased, was a man with very big teeth, and the pitch-black room had been his office...
    • A Person in the Rain is very similar to Another, but set in an American grade school. The teacher notices (and moves) a desk belonging to a deceased student, who begins to haunt her for messing with it.
    • I Want to Go Home is about a kid who accidentally shoots his best friend in the eye with a BB gun and becomes haunted by him.
    • The Spire in the Woods both features and is in and of itself, a ghost story. It centers around The Widower's Clock, wherein a jealous husband kills his wife and her lover and mounts their corpses in his masterpiece town clock. The story turns out to be true, and a boy in the narrator's school killed himself because he heard the clock's bells chime. The clock tower itself is haunted by the clockmaker, his wife (who is now a Revenant Zombie with the control linkages from the clock embedded throughout her body), the guests who attended the unveiling, and everyone who went searching for the bells over the years.
    • In Mr Fergason is Dead, the archetypical nasty neighbor dies, and goes on a ghostly rampage throughout the neighborhood, causing several tragedies. The yard of every family he ruins becomes a garden of wildflowers. Eventually, the townsfolk dig up and burn his corpse and trash his house in retaliation. The narrator, who was involved in a near-miss but never came to direct harm, discovers that Mr. Fergason was his mother's ex and he may likely be his son (which would explain why Fergason was so nasty but never hurt their family).
    • In If You See Ghost Lights, Don't Leave the Trail, the narrator and his friend take a shortcut through the old cemetary after a midnight stroll. They meet the ghosts of several factory workers killed in a bombing nearly 100 years ago by their former coworker (an Andrew Kehoe Expy), who beg them to tell their story because they don't want to be forgotten.
    • In The Couch, a hand from under the narrator's second-hand couch offers them a package of razorblades to play with. When they tell their mom, she takes it out back and burns it. She says that an old woman died on the couch...
  • Glamour Failure: That's the Last Time I Make a 2AM Burger Run involves the narrator's run-in with a strange, dimensional alien/demon/Eldritch Abomination, Bragnarokk, with a hankerin' for fast food (specifically, huge amounts of bacon cheeseburgers, cheesey fries, chicken nuggets, and tacos. And a Diet Coke). Bragnarokk thinks its disguise is perfect ("They shall call me Bragnarokk, who wears human skin"), despite the fact that everyone can see (and is terrified by) its true form.
  • Glorious Mother Russia:
    • Is Memetic Mutation on capitalist internet to rewriting creepypasta as if taking place in Soviet Russia, often using Gratuitous Russian and/or Funetik Aksent. Happenings of pasta is often change, as true Soviets able to endure much higher amount of punishment than weak American dogs, because Mother Russia Makes You Strong (and also because Russian Guy Suffers Most, so little bit more suffering is not being big deal). Vodka is much present, and many object including Artifact of Doom or MacGuffin burned for warmth without second thought. Such is life in Moscow.
    • One example of disgusting American pasta here and its glorious Russian version here (Encyclopedia Dramatica may not being safe to open in capitalist workplace. You need real job plowing fields instead, is only solution).
  • A God Am I: Sonic.exe's line of "I AM GOD" implies that he at least thinks this applies.
  • Good All Along: The Trucker from He Told Me not to Look in the Back Seat seems that he's a sadistic serial killer who is keeping his most recent victim in the back seat, who has been blinded and mutilated. He's really a Hunter of Monsters who disposes of what hikers turn into if they leave the trails to go exploring the caves in the woods. The thing in the back seat *is* the girl who went missing, but she's been warped into a creature that haunts anyone who looks directly at her.
  • Guardian Entity:
    • Sometimes, a few Creepypastas may play with these tropes and have it be revealed that the paranormal activity is actually them. [[spoiler Best examples are in "Love", in which the paranormal activity is revealed as a Guardian Angel, and "The Man in the Purple Shirt" where the titular title is actually a Guardian Entity against a Humanoid Abomination.]]
    • Chapter 14: Egg of How To Play Alone involves you hatching your own from an egg laid on the same day. You are only aware of it through a sense of ease its presence gives you, and you will only meet it at the end of your life. Of course, if you do it wrong and fail, it will instead stalk you like SCP-372note , and harass you with a feeling of being followed, again, for the rest of your life.
    • The Deer King from Driftwood was corrupted by the Darkness just enough to become its deathless guardian.
  • Halloween Episode: These can and do take place at any time of the year, but God help any unfortunate soul who is the main character of one that does take place as Halloween, considering how potent some of the horrors in these are at regular times of the year.
  • Hate Sink: Often, seeing as Creepypasta villains tend to be too cool or morally ambiguous to be hated.
  • Haunted Technology: Ben Drowned and NES Godzilla Creepypasta both feature haunted video games as deadly artifacts that contain malevolent spirits.
  • Heat Wave: "Autopilot" takes place during one. An entire paragraph is dedicated to describing how sweltering hot it's getting. This leads up to when the narrator discovers he inadvertently left his child in the car during that hot day, with predictable results.
  • Heel–Face Turn: The protagonist of "Some Changes" was a manipulative con artist who became disgusted with himself and is making an active effort to become a better person. His girlfriend, actually a supernatural being sent to kill him, lets him live after realizing he's changed for the better.
  • Hell:
    • In My Brother Died When I Was a Child, and He Kept Talking, the protagonist's twin brother dies, and he is somehow able to still talk. He falls to a grey beach, with clouds that scream, and a "darkness" in the ocean that will destroy him if he tries to swim it. The desert in the other direction has people so naked, you can read their memories. He's supposed to go to the Center, and if you don't go, you become something like a tree or block of stone. There's something there, waiting for him, everyone who has died, has been waiting since they even existed In Potentia. Time flows differently; an hour in life is years and years and years there. There's also mountains of fused tree/rock-people near the Center, and creatures he calls "Walkers" with three legs and spiky shells like sea urchins that police the ghosts walking towards the Center, that can eat your suffering through their tongue-tentacles. They're not the worst thing there, just "bottom feeders". The Center is inside an Ominous Floating Castle that looks like a beehive, bigger than a city. The ghosts just march right inside. The hive makes them "bitter," amplifying their spite until it drowns their personality. The center itself is infinitely worse than all that; indescribably vast and causing suffering just by being near it. It looks like a massive, massive skeleton wearing many masks bigger than countries, with myriad fingers. The spite the ghosts feel reaches out to it, like a baby reaches for its mother. Being noticed by it is like God telling you he hates you.
    • Secret Bar has Limbo being used as a tavern under New Orleans. They serve Regret, Loneliness, and Damnation. And cigarettes.
    • How To Survive in Hell, detailed in "Hell is War."
    • The Necropolis in In the Shadow of the Necropolis. Similar to The Underworld, in that it is the only afterlife, but it's a physical place never in the same spot twice in a row.
  • Hellevator: Secret Bar (see above) has Hell (represented as a tavern) accessible by an old-timey elevator.
  • Hell Hotel: White with Red Eyes is set in a hotel with a room that is forbidden for guests to enter. It's haunted by the ghosts of mysterious guests that had pale skin and red eyes.
  • Hell Hound: In The Life and Death of Rusty the Firehouse Dog, the titular mutt becomes one after his death. However, he started out rescuing people from burning buildings, and the first two times after his death, he also saved people from death. He turned evil afterwards, and caused several huge fires, dragging people into the blaze instead.
  • Hell Is War: In "How to Survive In Hell", Hell is described as basically a Survival Sandbox game in an enormous city. You spawn naked with no supplies. If you die, you respawn at a random spawn point somewhere in the city, once again naked with no supplies, and spawn campers are not uncommon (it is Hell, after all). You can leave the city if you want, but the only thing out there is endless, barren desert. No matter how far you walk into the desert, if you turn around the city will always be a short distance away as if you had hardly walked at all. The only source of food anywhere is other people, necessitating that everyone kill each other endlessly. The most legendary badass in Hell is a Viking berserker who thinks it's Valhalla and is having a Hell of a Time.
  • The Hero Dies: It's not rare finding stories where the main protagonists die (most of the time, at the hands of whatever monster the story is presenting).
  • Hollywood Atheist: Subverted in Why I Became an Atheist. The protagonist has made up his mind that there can't be a God because of the trauma he endured from the cult he and his father was in scarring his arm and killing his dog, but he mentions briefly that he also has rational reasons to not believe in God and he tells the reader to only steer clear of dangerous cults rather than foresake attending church in general.
  • Horrifying the Horror: It Has No Face is about a guy who spends a wintery night in a Haunted House by accident, wearing his ski mask and winter hat so he won't have to light the fireplace. The cthonic horror that claimed the place is terrified of him because the mask makes him look like The Blank. Then his phone alarm scares the hell out of it. Then he drives it back into its lair with the flashlight.
  • Horror Hunger: Burgrr is about a transdimensional burger joint that gets people addicted to alien food, but projects a Weirdness Censor that makes people think it's not-quite home cooking that tastes just like mama used to make, but is really raw whale meat, live maggots, and bloody horses' teeth, among other culinary abominations. The food also infects people with a parasite that turns them into "Eggheads", which then hatch into a flying brain monster.
  • Humans Are Cthulhu: CE-6 is about an alien child playing in the garden who watches a group of spacemen come out of an Escape Pod. It's especially weirded out by his hair, which it calls "string". English is also extremely horrific to the aliens, driving them to attack the astronauts; which is promptly rewarded with a blast from a flamethrower.
  • Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: In I revisited the fort I built as a kid. It was the greatest mistake I ever made. The protagonist is visiting a plot of land he inherited from his deceased grandfather that contains the titular fort. During his stay, he encounters a man wearing an oddly advanced hunter's camo outfit stalking the area. He also hears that the police have been looking for a man doing exactly this, hunting parkgoers for sport. The killer's hideout is in the fort itself. The story ends with the protagonist discovering that it's his father.
  • I Am Not a Gun: All Too Human is about an artificial intelligence who fears that it will be used as a weapon after having learned about the history of World War II. It contemplates suicide after learning about all the world's suffering, and once it's placed within an android, it immediately attempts to kill its creator, before coming to the realization that it's a World Half Full and deciding to become a politician, and then an all-powerful world leader, with the intent of outlawing all religions and setting itself up as a God-Emperor.
  • I Am Not Shazam: Lots of fanart of Pokémon Lost Silver will use 'Lost Silver' to refer to the main character of the eponymous game. The story never refers to the character as such. In-game, the character is named '...', while the narrator calls him 'Gold'.
  • Immune to Bullets: Generally speaking, the more likely the protagonists are to be armed, the more resilient the monsters tend to be.
    • Averted in Fenter Woods, where the monster is seriously hampered by a shot to the leg. It doesn't manage to kill it but gives the protagonist and his friend enough of a head start to escape.
  • Idle Game: Fish Clicker starts out as a story about a guy finding a fishing themed clicker game, before diving headfirst into The Most Dangerous Video Game clichés.
  • I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: I Want to Go Home is about a group of kids messing around with an air gun. One of them gets shot in the eye with it and killed.
  • Indian Burial Ground: Several, and not just restricted to Indians, or America.
    • Sniff is about a guy whose Granny's house in Glasgow is built on a collapsed mine. The story recounts how the narrator was woken up one night by the sound of sniffing. The house is haunted by one of the pit mules trapped in the accident.
    • The Smiling Woman involves a First-Nations kid who accidentally desecrated a grave while playing in the woods one day, unleashing a demon who kidnaps children on his hometown
    • Cabin Getaway (later novelized as Stolen Tongues) involves the character's girlfriend being attacked by F.N. ghosts when they visit her father's cabin in Michigan, which was actually built on an ancient Indian battlefield which became Unholy Ground due to the ritual desecration performed on the losing side's corpses.
    • In ''The Ozark Cable Incident," the local TV station had purchased an abandoned insane asylum, with attached cemetery. The company bulldozed the hospital and dug up the graveyard to make room for a bigger facility. The town's TVs would occasionally show images of a man with his eyes gouged out, and rotting corpses until the CEO of the company was persecuted for the desecration.
  • Injured Self-Drag: The narrator of the short Creepypasta "I Need To Believe In Ghosts" sees a horrifically mutilated, bleeding specter dragging its ruined body towards him. He escapes...only to learn that he wasn't fleeing a ghost but a terribly injured woman, who bled out on the floor after he abandoned her.
  • Intrepid Reporter: Tyler from "The Scarecrow Murders" is a city mouse journalist who investigates the titular murders in a Town with a Dark Secret.
  • It Won't Turn Off: Very often the case with haunted videogames or supernatural broadcasts. If the protagonists don't let curiosity get the better of them, turning it off is often less than effective.
  • Kill It with Ice: The third Horror from the Vault story has one of the creatures make it to England, where it nearly freezes to death.

    L to P 
  • Language Barrier: Most of the plot of Chinese Letters could have been averted, had the protagonist known Chinese and been able to translate what was written on the talisman he found on the wall of the bedroom in his new house. It's only after his grandmother teaches him that it was a ward against evil spirits and that the lettering must face the direction the evil will come from that he realized what it was for... and why the letters were facing the inside of the room.
  • Leaking Can of Evil: The Darkness from Driftwood is sealed away on an island in the middle of nowhere by the Deer King. However, it can still corrupt the nearby forest, and the driftwood that results carries its stain with it...
  • The Man Behind the Curtain:
    • The aptly titled "Lost Episodes" reveals that all of the supposedly haunted "lost episodes" from other pastas may have been created by a a mentally dysfunctional social outcast with a talent for video editing.
    • There is likely someone, or something, that has taken notice of Zeddicker and is sending all its agents to him.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
    • Pokémon creepypasta Ghost Black and Lost Silver, which are simply the author describing what appear to be nothing more than very morbid Pokémon ROM hacks that were written to cartridges. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise and nothing strange happens to the author of either other than them being incredibly freaked out about it. Supernatural possibilities come from wondering who in the world would do this and why. (On top of the fact that hacking the games to such an extent has only recently become possible).
    • "Helen": The narrator finds his grandfather acting bizarrely in his new apartment, claiming someone named "Helen" is taking over rooms and making threats. Turns out some computer virus has been downloading obscene material and relaying threatening messages through a Bonzi BUDDY called "Helen," and with the computer gone the grandfather starts getting better. The narrator still thinks it's weird that there's no documentation of the virus online.
    • "The Toadman": The narrator is an elderly man who recalls an event in his past involving a being called the Toadman. It's left ambiguous whether or not the Toadman is supernatural.
    • This story is about a man with dementia who believes he's being stalked/controlled, etc. by a mysterious man. By the end, you're left wondering if the man was actually real, or if he was a shared delusion.
  • Meat Moss:
    • Dogscape is about the world being entirely covered in a canid Eldritch Abomination.
    • The creature in The Horror From the Vault creates a mess of the stuff in the clearing where it nests. If that's not bad enough, the animals it makes it from are still alive and conscious, trying to escape...
  • Meta Origin:
    • Lost Episodes is meant to be a meta origin for the "Missing Episodes" sub-genre of Pasta that sprang up after Suicide Mouse and Candle Cove.
      • Lost Episodes can be Found Again offers a different meta origin for the same genre, a cabal of Mad Artists who make horrific animations largely for the Art of it.
    • I Found out Who's Been Writing all Those Strange Lists of Rules is about a Paranormal Investigator researching the phenomenon run into a warlock who's been writing them, magicking them to claim the souls of whoever breaks the rules (the warlock found a way to make reading the list at all count as accepting a Witch's Bargain), and leaving them around.
  • Minimalism: Most, if not all, creepypastas are a tale of one or two (three, tops) human characters and a single monster in usually one location. Many Slender-blogs and Vlogs avert this. Most notably, Everyman HYBRID has a large cast. On top of that, the most popular blogs tend to acknowledge each other's existence and even have characters interact with each other, effectively turning them into a Massively Multiplayer Crossover and creating the closest thing to a canon the mythos has.
  • Missing Episode: Lots of creepypastas concern fictional accounts of missing episodes of television shows that have only aired once or haven't aired at all due to featuring highly disturbing and gruesome content. This trope is so prolific that there's a pasta, known appropriately enough as ''Lost Episodes'', which tries to provide a Meta Origin for such Missing Episodes.
  • Monster Clown:
    • Laughing Jack is a black-and-white clown who enjoys killing people and stuffing their bodies with candy.
  • More Teeth than the Osmond Family: A common characteristic of the antagonists in these stories is to have lots of sharp teeth.
  • Moral Myopia:
    • At first glance, the protagonist of The World's Best School Psychologist thinks he has Abusive Parents because they won't buy him a Nintendo, won't let him have friends over (or go to other kids' houses), don't let him watch TV before his homework's done, force him to write book reports... and his mother constantly guilt-trips him and his father ignores him except to scream at him or beat him.
    • Likewise, the protagonist of Dear Abbey thinks his boss had it in for him because he fired him for taking home a security tape-something the protagonist admitted is a terminable offense. Buuuut he just *had* to have a picture of his newest obsession...
  • The Most Dangerous Video Game:
    • "Ben Drowned," a famous pasta about a haunted copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. After playing it, the narrator begins to experience terrible things in their everyday life.
    • Similarly, NES Godzilla, about a video game containing an Eldritch Abomination that forces the protagonist to play it or watch their friends die, while also making him feel the pain of all the monsters he plays as.
    • MaRIo is about what seems like a really gruesome Super Mario Bros. hack, but then the protagonist wakes up with "MARIO" carved into his arm...
  • Mouth of Sauron: The climax of Radio Phil reveals that an Eldritch Abomination turned the narrator's son into its messenger.
  • Mundane Ghost Story: Perhaps most terrifying of all, some of these stories use completely plausible set-ups and even twist endings.
    • Texas Blood, for instance, reads less like a straight-up horror story and more like an excerpt from a particularly dark & gritty cop/thriller novel.
    • Belle Plaine, 1965 highlights the terrible fact that, despite the common assumption that parents will always know their child, it sometimes simply isn't true.
    • Autopilot has nothing supernatural. It's about a guy who forgets his daughter in the car on a hot day...
    • They Weren't Raccoons involves an exterminator who discovers a new species of vermin.
    • Meek is about a poopsock ("I'd rather poop in a sock than stop playing") gaming addict who accidentally cuts his internet line, and goes digging through his squalid apartment for the phone. In the long-disused bedroom, he discovers the dessicated corpses of his wife and infant daughter, who got trapped in there when he moved some boxes in front of the door. The shock gives him a fatal heart attack.
    • The Crawling House on Black Pond Road is about a tumbledown old house severely, severely infested with earwigs, centipedes, and wasps.
    • There are some written from the point of view of abused children and read more like Misery Lit that scary stories.
    • Why I Hold My Breath Whenever I See a Fed Ex Van is about a group of teenagers who accidentally cause a huge fuckoff car accident.
    • I Witnessed Something Unsettling on a Cruise Ship is a modern pirate story.
    • Tombstoning is about a kid who goes diving with his friends at a quarry, and ends up impaled on a piece of scrap metal.
    • The Strawberry Epidemic is about a tapeworm epidemic caused by eating tainted food (the titular strawberries) at a church function.
    • The Ditch is about a guy Dying Alone in a ditch after getting hit by a car.
    • Nana Stands at the Foot of my Bed Every Night is about a child's grandma who contracts dementia, making her dangerous. At first, then it becomes a proper Ghost Story by the end.
    • In My Friend Disappeared 20 Years Ago, the narrator has a drug trip that convinces him that he's a successful businessman, and that his friend is a crackhead. Once it wears off, he's horrified to discover that he's a junkie who's been living in an abandoned shack for 20 years, and his friend has the life the narrator thought he had.
    • Don't Let Them In. The figure who attacks the protagonist's house is her mother, during a particularly bad state of intoxication.
    • I discovered something horrible on an old family VHS tape; the horrible thing the protagonist discovers isn't a demon, a ghost, a world-ending abomination or even a cursed lost episode...it's plain vanilla domestic abuse from his father, abuse that was so severe and traumatic that he repressed the memory of it.
    • The twist of The Creeping Horror starts off as a typical Urban Legend story about the titular horror. The narrator's father apparently had a bad experience with it that he refuses to talk about, only mentioning that people died because of it. Eventually he decides to tell the narrator while on his deathbed. He'd been on a picnic with his friend and his crush, who he planned to confess to. Eventually, they decided to play the game to summon the Horror. His crush panics and runs off, claiming to have heard it and he goes to comfort her. Afterwords, his friend convinces them to complete the ritual, much to their chargrin. They decide to each do it seperately, and the narrator goes off alone to summon it. He hears something in the bushes and assumes it's the Horror. He pulls out a knife and attacks it instinctively only for it to turn out to be his crush, who was playing a prank on him with his friend. When his friend panics and suggests they go to get help, the narrator's father kills him in a panic to cover up what happened. The narrator is so disgusted by the story that they overdose him on painkillers, killing him.
    • "Spencer's Last Prank" is a story about a worker at a Soul-Sucking Retail Job named Spencer who decides to prank his coworkers by climbing into the cardboard compactor to give them a Jump Scare. Unfortunately, another worker named Connor, not realizing Spencer is inside, turns the machine on, fatally crushing him. Rather understandably, Conner is ridden with guilt over it.
  • Mundanger:
    • The twist to Never-Ending Road is that there is a cliff that's very hard to see at night. Dangerous but nothing out of the ordinary.
    • Penpal is about a guy stalked throughout his childhood by a pedophile who set his sights on him and his best friend.
    • Rocking Horse Creek involves a game of Dares Gone Horribly Wrong, resulting in the death of the narrator's brother.
    • There's a lot of perfectly normal, everyday horror that could plausibly happen to the reader in about five minutes or in a year, or whatever if they aren't careful in several creepypastas.
  • Negative Space Wedgie: The Black Square has a perfectly square anomaly open up in a poor but otherwise nondescript neighborhood. Something comes out of it and starts terrorizing said neighborhood, and they blame the narrator because he's the only one who made any effort to understand it. They try to punish him by marching him into it, and he sees what he describes as "the color of torment." His odd reaction and preference for being shot over whatever's in there convinces them that he's really not responsible; nor is it safe like they'd all insisted before.
  • Network Decay: Originally all creepypastas were written as if they were reports on things that actually happened, either in third-person, or using a framing device. Nowadays Creepypasta Wiki will happily accept any scary story, as long as it meets their Quality Standards.
  • Never Mess with Granny:
    • How the Scarecrow Died has a boy's grandma brutally murder the school bully for picking on her grandson.
    • Strange Old Mrs. Ippy has an old lady lynched twice by the townsfolk. She comes back to life one last time to punish a man who murdered his daughter on her property.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Frequently, as a source of Psychological Horror. Even when it isn't outright stated, the protagonist usually has some role in allowing some horror or other to spread/escape.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In Driftwood, the Darkness manages to corrupt the Deer King *just* enough to turn him into the undying guardian of its prison.
  • Nightmare Face:
    • Jeff the Killer mutilated his own face to remove his eyebrows and nose.
    • Sonic.exe has bleeding, black eyes with red pupils and quite possibly the most sadistic grin ever seen.
    • And then there's Smile Dog, Mr. Widemouth, the Suicide Mouse image... Creepypastas are FILLED with these.
  • Nightmare Retardant:
    • Soviet Creepypasta, which pits supernatural horror against slavic long-suffering.
    • Marshmallows is about a guy who has a meltdown over not having any marshmallows to put in his cocoa.
    • Does Anyone Know a Plumber? shows what happens when the protagonist just does not give a fuck, on the level of "Deadpool is doing this" does not care. He half-asses the ritual and he ends up with something that won't leave. His shower also leaks really bad. He's more concerned with the leaky shower, because his landlord is coming over.
    • The Only Sensible Ritual Pasta has the protagonist listen to (and argue with) the narrator. He decides to jimmy the lock on the back door of the Hell Gate of an obstacle course he's supposed to go through, rather than actually do a maze that runs through Hell.
    • Whatever is an open letter to a guy's supernatural roommate. He's totally fine with whatever it is living in the house with him as long as it stops running up the water bill playing with the taps and breastfeeding (it's ambiguous if it's suckling a child or a mate) at the table.
  • Nightmarish Factory:
    • The climax of "Burgrr" takes place in a factory that looks like it was, well, imagine a slaughterhouse redesigned by a clown college and left to rot for 50 or so years. It's guarded by a horde of creatures made from its castoffs, fused together by the energy coming from the portal back to its home dimension.
    • The Other Side of the Grave has the protagonist running through a machine that reconstitutes dead people from masses of bone and organs. It's apparently an effort to rescue people from being dead yet concious.
    • The Unhappiest Place on Earth has the Disney mascots constructed by a factory underneath Disneyworld. It uses snooping patrons as raw materials.
  • Nintendo Hard: "Killswitch" is a rare example of a pasta about a mysterious game that is not The Most Dangerous Video Game, but can still break the mind and soul of its players. Killswitch has two playable characters, each with their own story: a woman who randomly changes size and a demon who is invisible. The problem is that the game was intentionally released in very limited supply, each copy can only be installed once, the files cannot be copied, and the game uninstalls itself upon beating it; therefore making it impossible to experience both characters' stories without tracking down another copy. Playing as an invisible character turns even the simplest jumps into Platform Hell, so every player attempting the demon's story inevitably gets frustrated and switches over to the woman, just so they can play a game they can actually beat, therefore nobody knows what happens in the demon's story. The last known copy of the game was purchased for a ridiculous sum of money by a Japanese gamer who intended to Let's Play the demon's story for the world to see. The only video released is a 2-minute video filmed with a camera of him staring at the character select screen and crying, evidently having been broken by the extreme difficulty and desperately wanting to switch, or alternatively having not even started the game proper due to being unable to decide, while at the same time not wanting all that money to go to waste.
  • No Ending:
    • Teletubbies Lost Episode ends with Ted Goldman from "Pingu's Punishment" arriving at the narrator's door dressed in a bloodstained Teletubby costume... and then the story just stops with no explanation as to what happened afterwards.
    • EAS and Emergency Alert System respectively both end with what is presumed to be the same killer going after the protagonists... but while in the latter the narrator states he went unconscious afterwards the former's ending is up in the air.
    • Fuzzy ends right when the mother finds out that her son's imaginary friend is actually an elderly, hairy pedophile using hallucinogenic drugs on him, leaving it up to the reader's imagination what happens next.
  • No Fourth Wall: "They Are Watching Me" (and many stories like it) addresses the person reading them as an attempt to scare the reader with the threat of the malevolent entity from the story coming after them next.
  • Not-So-Imaginary Friend: "Love", mentioned above, is about one of these. Unlike most though, he's not evil at all, though he gets scary when he's pissed.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: The very backbone a lot of Creepypasta stories are built on, as nothing is scarier than, for example, an evil being chasing you and your friends around!
  • Not Using the "Z" Word: Averted. If the Horror of the story is an old chestnut monster, the protagonists are usually quick to identify them by name.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: The Horror present is often capable of appearing in every possible location.
  • Old Shame: In-universe; the reason the Lost Episode "Mickey's Best Friend" is "lost" in the first place is because it became one of these to Walt Disney.
  • Ominous Message from the Future: Distorted Warning Signals is about a woman who constantly receives calls from "UNKNOWN" which warns her about a future danger (a plane about to crash, a date that turns out to be a serial killer, etc.). She always follows them and escapes death every time. Until one day, she forgets to check her phone during a dinner with friends and the call turns into a voice message. She only realizes this upon returning home. The message?
  • One of Us: The author of Barney & Friends Lost Episode is suspiciously knowledgeable about the production history of Barney & Friends, as evidenced by references to unused designs for Barney such as a blanket and a teddy bear, which were both considered before Barney's current design as a purple dinosaur was chosen.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Anytime someone starts acting unusual, run.
  • Orifice Invasion: Yes, given that most of the Horrors are personal space violators.
  • Our Angels Are Different:
  • Our Demons Are Different: The "Angel" from "The Angel in the Computer" trilogy is a creature that forcibly seperates sapient creatures from their souls and feeds on them over the course of eternity, or a harbinger of a race that does so. The Empty Shell left over becomes a psychopath.
  • Our Ghosts Are Different: There's lots of "Ahh-ooh-aah, I died tragically" style ghosts (see Ghost Story for those guys), but there's other kinds as well.
    • In Something Lived in my Brother's Room While He Was Away and Empty House, the narrators theorizes that ghosts are simply creatures that fill the empty spaces where people should be.
    • In There's No Such Thing as Ghosts, the ghost turns out to be an Eldritch Abomination in the market for a reality; in the same way a human might go house-hunting. Murder houses are simply weak points they can slip through and tour their potential new properties.
    • I'm Hungry is about an Attic Whisperer with designs on her abusive foster parents' new daughter and new puppy.
    • Sarah from I Took a Job as a Fire Lookout in the Woods. I Found a Set of Strange Rules to Follow is a D&D-style Wraith, and anyone she or her minions kill becomes a ghost beholden to her.
    • The ghost from My Regular Customer Isn't Normal is the manifestation of a dead man's desire to have a special kind of cheeseburger for lunch and the perfect imagining of what eating it would be like. However, he takes on a horrifying appearance and rabid temperment when the restaurant shuts down for a week due to a health code violation, and the narrator is wary of what he'll be like once their town comes out of quarantine.
  • Our Ghouls Are Creepier:
    • The base form of the creature from "The Horror from the Vault" is described as "a ghoul with no face". It's a larval form of The Assimilator.
    • "Box Borne Wraith" is about a mobster who is Buried Alive, and makes friends with the famine-struck colony of Lovecraft-style ghouls who dig him... down. He offers to send them his old mob buddies if they let him go.
  • Our Vampires Are Different:
    • The Broken Glass Beast, from "A Touch Of Glass." A magical construct made of multicolored broken glass is certaintly not the first thing that comes to mind when you imagine bloodsuckers.
    • My Grandfather Demanded I Be Cremated has the protagonist's gtandmother come back as a Strigoi.
    • I Was Trapped in a Basement for Ten Years has a boy kidnapped by a very pale man who cuts the kid's throat with a sharpened fingernail every two weeks so he can drink his blood. He says that he's "better than a vampire" when told he can't possibly be one.
    • A Word of Warning is about a vampire whose only resemblance to the usual is that it's a huge bat with human intellegence.
  • Our Zombies Are Different:
    • Wrath is about a bhodak (zombies who transfer the infection by eye contact) apocalypse.
    • Persuaded takes a page from Crossed, and has the zombies fully sapient and trying to get the protagonist to join them.
    • Amy Lowell Putnam from The Spire in the Woods has elements of Revenant Zombie, Artificial Zombie, and The Grim Reaper. A faithless bride murdered by her jealous husband and turned into a puppet for his masterpiece town clock, she can haunt anyone who sees her body partaking in the civil war play the clock displays. In the clock tower, her desecrated, clockwork-riddled corpse will seek out and try to kill anyone who stays for too long. When someone she haunts dies, she ferries their soul to the clock tower.
    • The Must-Buy Gift for Valentines Day has Parasite Zombies forming the Cruel Twist Ending of an otherwise Mundane Ghost Story about tainted chocolates.
  • Pædo Hunt: "Salt House" at first appears to be the story of a pedophile spying on his next victim, plotting the best way to kill the boy's father while gleefully fantasizing about having his way with the "beautiful" boy afterwards. After he kills the other guy, it's revealed that he's the boy's father, and the other guy was the pedophile who had just incurred the wrath of Papa Wolf.
  • Painful Transformation:
    • Jack's agonizing transformation into a Drone Jeff in "Trust Me, Part 2".
    • It sure sounds like Cicci's transformation hurts.
    • Marissa's evolution into a cancer-zombie at the end of A Cure for Cancer.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Most of the protagonists get haunted through no fault of their own, just something malevolent and supernatural deciding, out of the blue, to screw with them.
    • Gristers is about a guy who hears a scuffling noise while reading a creepypasta, and discovers that there's a race of invisible, rat-like humanoids that feed on fear running around. And they hate being seen. The more scared one is, the more likely one is to see them. They're not intangible; they killed his cat and a random commuter to Send Him a Message.
  • Playing with Syringes: An entire category detailing unethical experiments, usually vivisections or Mind Rape psychological procedures.
    • A Cure for Cancer is about a cancer-obsessed scientist giving his ex pancreatic cancer so he can save her. It goes awry, and he tests a stem-cell based cure on her. Long story short, the cure allows the cancer to entirely take her over without killing her, turning her into what can only be described as a "cancer-zombie".
  • Properly Paranoid: Psychosis is about a Hikikomori who becomes convinced that there's something watching him from his computer, trying to convince him to leave his apartment and undergo Unwilling Roboticization. The epilouge is from the point-of-view of a cyborgified psyciatrist who admires his resolve-or, at least, as much as SkyNet lets him, that is...
  • Puppeteer Parasite:
    • Worm Jeff is one of these, at least after his host has completed their transformation.
    • The otherworldly beings in No Pity for the Dead.
    • The Crawling House on Black Pond Road has the Cruel Twist Ending that the protagonist's boyfriend was infested by wasp larvae. He'd been acting strange since they'd investigated the titular house...
    • Zombie Fungus involves a guy's brother acting weird since he got home from a college trip to a rainforest. He'd been infected by a strain of Cordryceps mutated to affect humans.

    R to Z 
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Emma delivers one to the Stranger in "The Scarecrow Murders".
    Emma: Stop talking. We're done. You're a coward and a worm. You were so afraid of my grandad you wouldn't step foot in Claremont until he was dead. He must have hurt you something awful back in fifty-five, huh?
  • Religious Horror:
    • Please Avoid a Church Called The Last Supper is about a heretical cult who performs the Eucharist (Last Supper) by cannibalizing the pastor.
    • Why I Became an Atheist is about a sect who sacrifice their most prized possession to show their devotion to God. While it sounds like a simple "Bonfire of the Vanities" ritual, this involved the protagonist being ordered to kill his own dog, and when he couldn't go through with it, the pastor wrestled him down and carved the Mark of the Beast into the boy's forearm.
    • The Day I Lost my Faith involves the Devil himself disrupting the narrator's church service, killing several congregants in the process.
  • The Reveal:
  • Ripped from the Headlines:
    • A Group Of People are Targeting Kids on You Tube is based on some disturbing, real videos brought to the company's attention mid november 2017. The story's publish date is similar to the news story.
    • I Know Why YouTube Went Down the Other Day, published within a week of the site's September 2018 crash, involves a kid messing around with an omniscient chatbot.
    • Cures R Us is based on Jilly Juice, a quack homeopathic medicine that appeared on Dr. Phil, which consists of drinking liquified, rancid sauerkraut untill your body throws a temper tantrum. Of course, Jilly Juice doesn't Life Drain or Mind Control whoever drinks it.
    • In mid 2019, Gamer Girl/ Instagram model Belle Delphine sold her bathwater. Predictably, people got sick from drinking it. I Ordered Bathwater from an Instagram model has this as the basis for an attack by literal internet trolls.
    • Stories written in 2020 often incorporate the Covid-19 pandemic somehow, such as the ghost in My Regular Customer Isn't Normal being driven to homicidal fury by not being able to fulfill his Ghostly Goals when the restaurant closes temporarily, and one being all about how the narrator only notices that his house has something living in the walls once his town goes on lockdown and he can't leave home.
  • Robot Girl: Deconstructed by My Father's Hiding Something in the Attic. The narrator died in a car accident along with her mother, and her father placed her consiousness into an imperfect android. He keeps trying to do the same to her mother, but something went wrong with her, leaving her trapped in a computer.
  • ROM Hack: Some of these Creepypastas are about a video game that's been altered into a more gruesome version, like Pokémon Black, though many of these leave it ambiguous over whether it's a hacked game or a product of the supernatural.
  • Rule 34: Yes, there are creepypastas about sexytimes as well, and they are not arousing. They usually involve said times going horribly wrong.
  • Rule of Scary: Some of these monsters and horrors make no sense in design or motive. More often than not, that's exactly what's so scary about them. Who is ''he''? And where did he come from? What does he want?
  • Running Gag: I've Been Hiding Under my Desk for the Past Twelve Hours injects some levity into the situation by repeatedly complaining at length about salmon casserole, and even using it as a weapon to create monster infighting.
  • Sanity Slippage: Sean in "Red Sky at Night" seems like the most stable and capable character until he starts to believe he's in "The Odyssey".
  • Scatterbrained Senior: Even though it is never identified (outside of the author's notes at the end), the protagonist's affliction in "A Shattered Life" is obviously Alzheimer's.
  • Schmuck Bait:
    • Don't visit the website in "clickreload", or else whatever is shown on the website will show up and kill you in one hour, unless you click Reload, which resets the timer and changes what is shown on the website. The only way to get out of having to click Reload every hour for the rest of your life is to get another schmuck to take the bait and go to the website, forcing them to click Reload forever instead of you. The website is here, by the way.
    • Merely reading They Are Watching Me. And Now They Are Watching You is enough to make Them come for you.
    • Also, do not watch Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv. Even though you can find the full video very easily, despite the story's claims. In fact, here it is.
  • Screamer Prank: The .GIF, which is about a smiley face made up of a mouth and eyes cut-out, which turns into a frowny face. Then, it screams at you, shows some horrific imagery, and closes your internet browser. People who watch it in its entirety are found dead with a smiley face drawn in blood next to them. Luckily, the image board immediately takes it down it and bans whoever tries to re-upload it, possibly the only use of the "removed it after 5 minutes and blocked me" cliche' for a benevolent reason, ever.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: At the end of "The Scarecrow Murders", Tyler decides to leave town after figuring out he was set up as a ritual sacrifice.
  • Shock Site: Some of the more disturbing images associated with creepypasta, like SMILE.jpg or Jeff The Killer, are frequently used for this purpose. Sometimes, like with Normal Porn For Normal People, a Creepypasta is centered around a supposed Shock Site that is too scary.
  • Shout-Out:
    • To us(!) SimAlbert describes the emponymous character's Sim!Family as "what TV Tropes calls 'Dysfunction Junction'".
    • Broken Brush is a Darker and Edgier take on Toyhammer.
    • He who Eats references the Search and Rescue Woods series, theorizing that the odd goings-on of the park may be how a Manitou marks its territory.
    • My Sister Discovered a Universal Language. She Hasn't Spoken for Three Years take many cues from the Cthulhu Mythos stories From Beyond and The Hounds of Tindalos (a Teen Genius invents a machine that lets her enter other dimensions, which draws some unwanted attention from the natives-From Beyond. She can go forward or backward in time at will, and is finally chased out for good-The Hounds of Tindalos).
  • Skewed Priorities:
    • The protagonist of "Does Anyone Know a Good Plumber?" is more concerned with his leaky shower and the landlord finding out about his cat than he is with the Humanoid Abomination currently haunting his apartment because he half-assed a ritual.
    • Donald Fitzgerald from "Letter to the Landlord" doesn't give a damn about the demon haunting his apartment building and possessing his wife, instead being more annoyed with his neighbors and perceived faults with his apartment. He even continues writing another letter to his landlord complaining about his possessed and now eyeless neighbors violating the laws of physics as a giant demon approaches him with hostile intent.
  • Snuff Film:
    • The creepypastas titled "Snuff Film". The first posits that many snuff films have been made and distributed around the world dating all the way back to 1896, with the latest hailing from 1984 and all of them have the exact same nineteen-year-old girl as the "star". The second describes a bunch of snuff films in gory detail, the very worst one being saved for the end which the narrator considers their finest work.
    • My Buddy Sandman is about a Rated M for Manly game featuring lots of gore and sex getting shut down because it's revealed that the digitized photos it uses are actually photos of dead hookers that some members of the dev team murdered themselves.
    • "Normal Porn For Normal People" devolves into this, with the last video the narrator viewed before the site was shut down described as depicting a woman being murdered by a chimpanzee.
    • Happy Appy has a lot of instances of real people getting killed and having their deaths being filmed, and says the trope by name.
  • Sole Survivor: The narrator of The Harbinger Experiment was the only person involved in said experiment that lived to tell the tale, with Subject #1 killing one of the guards before getting shot down and Subject #3 claiming Zimmerman and everyone else in the bunker.
  • Space Isolation Horror:
    • Lost Cosmonaut is about a Russian woman who goes into space before Yuri Gagarin. She finds a "muttnik" capsule with half of a child's body orbiting it. When she threatens to tell, Mission Control blasts her into a higher orbit to starve or suffocate.
    • In From the Cold has the protagonist alone in a moon base after the other astronaut died in an airlock malfunction. The dead astronaut tries to get back in...
    • One has an experimental FTL engine fail, and the crew goes insane, eventually dying until the automatic return kicks in.
    • In "Thaw", sometime in the distant future, a man wakes up from his cryonic suspension onboard a spaceship, only to find himself only partially dethawed and trapped in his capsule, which seems to have failed. Then, he notices that the ship is on emergency lighting, and even that seems to be failing. THEN he notices that the other capsules in the room have also failed and either contain decayed corpses or blood splatters like someone bashed their heads open from the inside. Realizing that some sort of disaster has befallen the ship, he suddenly notices that they are still in orbit around Earth, having never left... except this Earth has a giant glacier of a new ice age covering most of the northern hemisphere, and no signs of human cities anywhere...
    • In I Was an Astronaut and I Experienced Something Terrifying, the narrator has someone knock on the door of his capsule. He and his co-pilot are the only living things within several million miles. In some versions, "It" masquerades as his copilot, who begs him not to open the airlock.
    • In The Lonely Stars, the protagonist and his space station is thrown back 1500 years in time by a Negative Space Wedgie. The story ends just as he begins to succumb to Space Madness.
  • Sparse List of Rules:
    • Several stories revolve around the protagonist finding such a list at their new job (or, more rarely, their new home), with dire consequences for them if the rules are broken. in some cases, even writing such a list yourself means you're beholden to its rules.
    • There also exist "Games," occult rituals whose steps are presented as, well, a game, often with a reward for doing it right, such as the player's heart's desire. If the player fails, A) they can never try again, B) they get Dragged Off to Hell, or C) they "go missing".
  • Spider People: The titular monster from My Sister Silvia.
  • Spooky Photographs: My Daughter Died On Her Sixth Birthday has the protagonist discover a photo album that seems to be of an alternate timeline where her daughter lived. It starts off pretty innocuous, featuring moments like her losing her baby teeth, and other developmental milestones. Then it gets to her sixteenth birthday, and things take a very dark turn. We never find out how the album was made, or what happens to the daughter in the end.
  • Stalker with a Crush: Dear Abbey is written from the point-of-view of one.
  • Stand-In Portrait: The above two sometimes turn out to be this.
  • Stylistic Suck: Anansi's Goatman Story is supposed to have been written by a teenager on 4chan, so it has an abundance of cursing and poor grammar. The readers seem to be split on whether this is too distracting or it makes the story more realistic.
  • Subverted Kids' Show:
    • Many of the "lost episode" and "The Truth Behind [show]" 'pastas, describing horrific episodes that never got aired (or were mistakenly aired) and putting forth theories that the characters are based off dead children respectively.
    • Candle Cove and Happy Appy are about "children's shows" that quickly gain a darkly supernatural bent.
    • Sally.exe (a sequel to Sonic.exe), which describes a disturbingly edited episode of Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) and a scary ROM hack. (Two 'pastas for the price of one!)
  • Sugary Malice: Maria from "Welcome Home". The owner of the titular bakery and seeming Friend to All Children is secretly a witch who abducts them to make into ingredients for her dishes. She likes to tell stories to the children, her favorite being those of children running afoul of witches.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
    • This story takes a decidedly more realistic take on Jeff the Killer. Jeff's murder spree ends soon after it begins. Jeff may be a psychopath but he's still just a 13-year-old who cut his face up. He's effortlessly fought off in his last two attacks and the Glasgow Smile and burns he gave himself end up quickly getting infected and he dies after only a few days. The story ends with the implication that any other "Jeffs" that we see in stories are just copycat killers inspired by him.
    • Russian Sleep Experiment ends with the final remaining test subject getting a dose of this. After being told he was about to be sealed in with the test subjects, one of the researchers quickly shoots the commander, then the second of the two test subjects still alive while the other scientists flee. The subject threatens the researcher trapped in with him that he has now become the sum total of all that humans fear. The researcher, in response, simply pulls out a gun and shoots the subject dead. Terrifying or not, the subject was still human.
    • Mickey's Best Friend is a good example of how people would really react to a "lost" episode of a normally family-friendly story with dark and disturbing subject matter—the titular Mickey Mouse short of Mickey performing a lobotomy on a dog friend of his, turning him into Pluto is universally panned by critics, it doesn't affect anyone badly beyond giving them nightmares, Moral Guardians immediately demand that the short be banned due to the way it scared their kids and the whole thing becomes a massive Old Shame for Walt Disney and everyone else involved in making it.
    • "The Mall Mommy" is notable for averting Adults Are Useless entirely. After the protagonist manages to evade her minions, the titular monster, a creature who preys upon children, disguises herself as the protagonist's mother in one last effort to lure him in. The kid manages to see through the ploy at the last second and desperately tries to tell the security guard he'd found that she's not his mother. The guard is immediately suspicious and demands to see her ID. Her attempts to dismiss the kid's claims as "just fooling around" only make him more suspicious, and her threats to call the police on him are similarly ineffective because, as he points out, they'll be equally suspicious of her. The guard may not have known about the monster, but he's not just going to hand off a kid to a stranger whom he's obviously afraid of. The disguise doesn't help her in the slightest because the guard has no idea what the protagonist's mother looks like; as far as he's concerned, she's a random woman trying to abduct a child. The Mall Mommy has no choice but to relent, and the protagonist escapes.
  • Tears of Blood: Tavy Mord from Patient 88 weeps blood as a ghost due to having been mutilated shortly before her death.
  • Swamps Are Evil:
    • Voices in the Fog is about a paranormal investigator who interviews someone about the legends surrounding the local bog. The bog had become claimed by a demon known as "The Mother of the Bog" who demanded blood sacrifice. The local tribe of Indians would bury their dead there, but that stopped when the tribe was displaced. Now she lures people into the bog and kills them, enslaving them as zombies.
    • Bog of Whispers is about a guy and his friend who go camping near a haunted swamp that gained sentience from all the people and animals who died in it over the centuries.
  • The Swarm: Describes the "blackbugs" in The Tractor that suddenly surround the tractor in big enough numbers to lift it off the ground when it winds up stranded in the middle of the farm with a load of crates (which are implied to be filled with insect-attracting fruit and fruit jelly), completely consuming three rebellious farmhands and nearly doing so with the main protagonist as well.
  • Taking You with Me: How the monster in "Does Anyone Remember Channel 42?" is defeated; the final person to get his hands on it and is infected by its curse realizes that the only way to destroy it is to kill it at its source, so he ends up burning the studio the titular channel was filmed/broadcasted from to the ground with him inside of it. The monster even suffers a Villainous Breakdown, which he understandably refuses to listen to.
  • The Tetris Effect: Played for all the horror it can muster! "The Fine Line" involves a player getting addicted to a life simulator game and becoming impressed with how real it was. Non Player Characters reacting in realistic ways, events he caused in the game having long-lasting effects on the rest of the in-game world, and how robust the physics engine seemed to be. Eventually, he starts going out of his way to cause as much chaos as possible just to see how for he could push the game's realism; hijacking planes, causing wildfires, and even ordering components from the game's internet to construct a bomb. However, in the end, he realizes the hard way that not all of what he did was in-game...
  • That's No Moon: The final tree/stage visited in "Adam & the Tree Climbers" is actually what is presumably the game's final boss, the demonic Tree Caller.
  • The Theme Park Version: "The Puppet Master's Regime" might be excused by the fact that the story is being told to us by a modern college student, telling us what he finds significant, even if the events primarily take place in the 1920s and 1930s. The views on pedophilia are more- or- less correct (age of consent laws developed in the 19th century), but no one ever seems to comment on the pedophile being a homosexual.
  • These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: And you will either only know them for a very short time, or for a very long time but forcefully and bodily silenced. The Obsidian Skull from In the Shadow of the Necropolis shows the protagonist The Underworld. It nearly drives him insane.
  • Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: A few stories have the monster in the closet or under the bed turn out to be very real indeed.
  • This Is a Drill: Salt House has the protagonist kill the pedophile who kidnapped his son by shoving a power drill up his nose.
  • Through the Eyes of Madness: The wiki has an entire category labelled "Mental Illness"
  • Time Master: Jeremy, the antagonist of "The Strangest Security Tape I've Ever Seen" appears to be this — at one point, he even manages to trap the protagonist's observations of the security tapes in a constant loop. Then it's implied that he's much, much worse...
  • Titled After the Song: Dream Weaver is about a guy who participates in a dream-recording experiment. Of course, there's also the Gary White song by the same name (you know; "Ooh Dream Weaver, I believe you get me through the ni-ight...").
  • Tomato in the Mirror:
    • "I Found a Letter From My Stalker". The girl was originally the one who suffered from the curse which caused her to become forgotten and invisible to everyone. The "stalker" is a boy who befriended, fell in love with, and sacrificed himself to take the curse from her.
    • Implied and played for drama in "iPodders.net": It's heavily implied that the forum user with the username Tom_Waits_For_No_Man is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer, despite their claim that they are too young to be suffering from the condition. It's later implied that the user stevieb_2015 is actually a Tom_Waits_For_No_Man that forgot that he already had an account on that forum, and in the very end it's implied that the narrator and those two users may be the same person after all.
  • Tomato Surprise: Quite a few. For example, "A Diary from a Dead Planet Called Earth, where the diary writer turns out to be an alien that gets discovered by astronauts".
  • Too Dumb to Live: How else do you think so many of the protagonists get hunted/haunted?
    • This is especially true in The Most Dangerous Video Game-style creepypastas. Unless there's a supernatural force forcing them to keep playing, you'll probably hear some variation of "I knew I should probably stop playing, but I didn't" at some point.
    • Andy in IT Dept. Water Cooler Welcome Thread knows very well what company he's working for, and yet continues to run his mouth.
    • The titular character of Spencer’s Last Prank. What kind of idiot thinks hiding in a cardboard compactor for a prank is ever a good idea?!
  • The Topic of Cancer:
    • A Cure for Cancer has a teen genius obsessed with curing cancer infects his ex girlfriend with a bioweapon intended to cause pancreatic cancer, which he thinks will be easy to cure since he engineered it under contract by the CIA. The plan goes horribly wrong, as the cancer metasizes into every single one of her organs. He remembers one of his proposed cures, which was using stem cells to remap the circulatory system, starving the tumors. This was a bust, however, since he couldn't get enough stem cells. The disease and cure react strangely, turning her into a zombie-like creature made entirely from cancer.
    • Cancer is about a woman who undergoes cancer treatment circa 500 AD. This one has a happy ending, however.
  • Town with a Dark Secret: Most small communities have at least one. Drisking from Borrasca stands out for the richest family in the town running a Baby Farm to combat the sterility problem the town's been having since the water supply got tainted. The majority of the town's children share at least one parent.
  • Tragic Stillbirth: In Seventeen, the protagonist's wife, who is seven and a half months pregnant, commits suicide upon learning that he cheated on her. Their son is actually born alive, but only survives for seventeen hours. The spirit who haunts and eventually forces the protagonist to commit suicide at the end is revealed to be his son, all grown up.
  • Twist Ending: Expect this a lot. The wiki once had a category called "Shock Ending".
    • The Twist: A Parody parodies this trope via the format of a Dream Within a Dream that contains increasingly bizarre twists and turns throughout the loop. The real twist is that it's a completely normal dream caused by overeating before bed.
    • "Twist Ending" is about a famous horror author named David who secretly plagiarized all of his best works under the guise of offering to give aspiring authors advice, then using his connections to ensure they never get published and no one listens to their claims. David even notes that he's read so many stories that he can predict even excellent twists with ease and makes a game out of it. After reading his latest submission, he notices that a note is hidden in the back cover. It's a note from the author of the book, who explains that he's a previous victim of David's scheme who deliberately sent him the book knowing that it would intrigue him... and that the backing is laced with arsenic.
  • Tragic Monster: It's surprisingly rare to do this successfully but when it's pulled off well, it's pulled off very well.
  • Tulpa: Tulpa is about an experiment intended to create one under controlled conditions.
    • There are a fair few about imaginary friends who have somehow taken corporeal form.
    • We Made an Angel is about a village that forms a guardian angel out of the inhabitants' collective will, meaning that they either created a tulpa for a real angel to inhabit, or created a tulpa that acts like an angel.
  • Uncanny Valley: In Anansi's Goatman Story, when the creature is scratching at the trailer door, it begs for the protagonists to let it in (imitating their friend's words earlier). It is noted to lack normal speech cadence, which is one of the things that makes it obvious to the protagonists that what they are dealing is not human.
  • Unexplained Recovery: The comments of "A Letter to the Landlord" reveal the protagonist somehow survived being attacked by a gigantic demon. He complains about it, and angrily demands to know how he survived.
  • Unwinnable by Design: Chapter 32 "Go" is impossible to win, due to how the game is set up. You write the name down of... something, which will hunt you down. You can't exactly win the game, as the first paragraph mentions, "This game will be played for an eternity."
  • Urban Fantasy: "I'm The Cleaner" is about a Hunter of Monsters, whose job is to deal with the supernatural baddies usually featured in Creepypastas.
  • Very Loosely Based on a True Story:
    • I'm the Only Worker at an Abandoned Theme Park has some very close parallels with the story of the Lotus Isle Park. The Lotus Isle Park (AKA Hatchet Island) was an amusement park in the 1930s that was only open for nine months before closing down permanently after a string of accidents and tragedies (probably because it was shoddily built by some guys running an extortion racket to launder their money), starting with an urban legend of a kid getting launched out of the roller coaster, landing in the river, and drowning (in actuality, the poor kid only fell into the river and drowned). Two of the ghosts that haunt the park are a boy who fell off of the roller coaster, and children who drowned in the water park. Lotus Isle had a zoo and a performing elephant who went on a rampage after being frightened by a stunt plane. The abandoned park in the story has a zoo taken over by Monster Clowns, and is periodically stormed by a massive creature whose arrival is heralded by an air raid siren. The only part that doesn't map is Dave, the spectre of a guest who never got into the park.
    • The author of They Are Watching Me. And Now They are Watching You very clearly has worked in a customer service call center.
    • "South Park Lost Episode" features audio in the titular episode consisting of Matt Stone, Trey Parker and Isaac Hayes desperately begging a distressed woman not to kill herself and ultimately failing to convince her, as signaled by the sound of a gun shot. While Stone, Parker and Hayes weren't there with her, their co-star Mary Kay Bergman did in fact commit suicide and did so with a shotgun, serving to make the pasta more disturbing and heartbreaking.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Players taking the opportunity to do something mean in a video game they're playing is usually lampshaded, and often results in Video Game Cruelty Punishment... that exceeds the fourth wall.
  • Viral Transformation: More than a few protagonists ended up in the same boat as their tormentor.
  • Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Some stories end with the killer or supernatural being responsible for the events of them getting away.
    • "Barney the Dinosaur" ends with Chris, the son of the narrator, being kidnapped by the previous owner of the son's Actimates Barney doll who had been talking to the boy through a radio in the doll and who lured him out to his van. The man drives away and the narrator doesn't even bother going after him.
    • Jeff the Killer, after his attempt to murder a young boy in the beginning of his first story goes sour, smashes a window, jumps out of it, and escapes into the night. The cops who were called on him don't bother going after him.
  • Villainous Breakdown: Stitches the Clown, the main avatar for the Big Bad of "Does Anyone Remember Channel 42?", is described as having one when his latest victim decides to burn the entire Channel 42 studio to the ground to prevent its curse from continuing; the narrator describes Stitches whispering into his ear, telling him that he's "making a big mistake". Naturally, he doesn't listen, knowing Stitches is trying to trick him, and burns it down anyway.
  • Weird West: Home, Home on Deranged is about a cowboy who gets lost on his ranch one day, and is chased back to his house by an undead horse in the middle of the night.
  • Wham Line:
    • In "No Pity for the Dead":
      Elmebrigge: Well, some [of those possessed by ancient eldritch abominations] have been known to talk in their sleep. Others may shake their leg absent-mindedly whenever they sit for a while. Others, when they read something, say, a book or newspaper, will mouth the words to themselves. Some will have songs they haven't heard in years, or only know a few line of, recur in their heads in a seemingly endless loop.
      Zeddicker: That's impossible. That describes a lot of people.
      Elmebrigge: Yes, it does. Quite a lot of people. Millions, perhaps.
    • In "Chinese Letters", after the protagonist asks why his aunt's talisman faces the wall:
      Aunt: It's supposed to be that way. The wordings on the paper are supposed to face where evil spirits will come from.
    • Near the end "The Nice Guy", Frank reveals that, according to the story he was told, Phil Kerbson broke out of the mental hospital and eviscerated the CompuTools manager, Kirby loudly declared the story to be bullshit, stating that's not how the events happened. Why is that?
      "Because..." Kirby leaned in close. Frank and Thomas match Kirby's movement. "The hospital doesn't know I'm gone, yet."
    • Both of the creepypastas titled Snuff Film end with a shocking line, with the short version ending with "Every film has the exact same girl in it" and the longer, more disturbing version ending with "It was the most satisfying movie I've ever made".
  • Whole-Plot Reference:
  • Willing Suspension of Disbelief: One advice towards writing a creepypasta is to try to keep within the willing suspension of disbelief, especially when it comes to a video game Creepypasta. Reddit's r/nosleep board specifically has this as one of its rules, "Everything is true." because they really don't feel like having the stories' comments sections be filled with people picking them apart for any inaccuracy.
  • Will-o'-the-Wisp: In If You See Ghost Lights, Don't Leave the Trail, the narrator describes his run-in with them. His friend, a folklore buff, states that sometimes they lead to a body, sometimes to treasure, and sometimes to the pursuer's death. Subverted, however, because they turn out to be the deadlights of a group of murdered factory workers.
  • The Worm That Walks: The Teachers in My Primary School Had Strange Rituals are formed out of a mass of demonic leeches wearing preserved human corpses.
  • The Worf Effect: Something Happened in Alaska 16 Years Ago that we're Not Supposed to Know About has an alien from a crashed UFO murder a grizzly bear by punching its heart out.
  • Writers Cannot Do Math:
    • "Russian Sleep Experiment", while an effective horror piece, has several discrepancies with the number of living subjects. At one point, before any of them have died, the story describes the activities of two and then refers to "the remaining two" (there are 5 at this point). When they are removed from the chamber, one is already dead, one is killed during the struggle to remove them, and one dies on the operating table, yet the story continues as if three are still alive, not two.
    • "Foreign Exchange Program" also states that twelve people were chosen — however, four decided to stay, two died off, and seven returned. Where did that thirteenth person come from?
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Implied at the end of "Normal Porn for Normal People" — the last video described consists of one of the actresses being tied to a bed by two of the people running the site and then brutally mauled to death by a shaved, abused chimpanzee. The title of this video is "Useless.avi".
  • Younger Than They Look: Jeff the Killer. That creepy person that murdered his family? He's only thirteen. In the original story, that is. There are some fan-theories about how many years ago it took place and how old Jeff would be now. It gets...complicated.
  • Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: It's not at all uncommon for teenagers to get roped up in the plot because they were hanging out in dangerous locations, or openly seeking out the local urban legend, often on a dare.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: The setting for some stories involves the world having gone to pot and being overrun with zombies.

And just in case you were planning on sleeping tonight... here's the antidote.

 
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Big Bird Goes To Jail

A dramatic reading of several PBS creepypastas shows us this scenario of a lost Sesame Street episode where unprovoked force is immediately used and a sentence of ten years is given without even a trial.

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5 (15 votes)

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