Growing up in the early 2010s, the internet was a rapidly growing mystique that held a grasp on our friends and family. Within the internet, people formed communities. These are communities that shared interests and created some of the biggest and most iconic media characters. Anyone on the internet at a young age would remember the horrors they would stumble upon.
As the internet grew, a website by the name of 4chan came to be. 4chan is a website where anyone can anonymously post comments, pictures and threads all without having to create an account. Over the years 4chan became a controversial website due to the anonymity the website provided to its users. Upon these threads, a horror enthusiast community formed, these legends are called Creepypastas.
1. Herobrine
White eyes,a mysterious entity that looks familiar, but something is off. In 2010, 4chan bases Herobrine off of the video game Minecraft. Herobrine became an infamous mystery in Minecraft history not only because of the scare he caused among the Minecraft community, but also because of his easily recognizable features. Steve, the default character of Minecraft, is an avatar appearing almost identical to Herobrine. Herobrine looks almost identical to Steve. The only difference between Steve and Herobrine is that Herobrine has white eyes, becoming his iconic visual. The myth became that Herobrine would create creepy structures and remove leaves from trees in certain areas. All of this caused immense fear among Minecraft players, which later would cause Herobrine to become an infamous creepypasta.
2. Slenderman
If you were to bring up the name Slenderman to anyone born in the 2000s, they will get shivers running down their spine. He is a supernatural human-like creature. He has white skin, featureless face, tentacle limbs, stands around 10-15 feet tall and is in a black suit with a red tie. His story originated in 2009 when a photographer named Eric Knudsen edited a tall figure in the background of an image with children. In the year 2012, the game Slender: The Eight Pages released. Within the game, the player has to collect eight pages in a dark forest where the goal is to collect all eight without the Slenderman finding them. The video game became successful overnight as Slenderman’s story was still on the rise.
3. Jeff the Killer
Jeff the Killer is one of the most famous and feared creepypastas of all time. His origin story is heavily debated on what caused his destruction as well as if he is truly an evil character, or a broken boy bullied into a murder madness.
One origin story was that Jeff was bullied and beaten by his middle school bullies and later woke up in the hospital with a whole new disfigured face. In his madness, he cut off his eyelids as well as cutting his mouth into a wider smile after seeing his new face. His mother walked in during his self-inducing procedure. Jeff seeing his mother let his monsters loose. He went on a rampage and murdered his family, he started by murdering his parents and then he headed to kill his older brother, Liu. As he woke his older brother, he plunged his knife into his chest, whispering to Liu, “go to sleep.” Infamously, the picture of Jeff the Killer would strike fear among all of the younger generation. To this day, the younger Gen-Z have memories of seeing that familiar face that scarred them as children.
4. Carmen Windstead
The story of Carmen Winstead became an infamous story to share among friends to scare them. Carmen Winstead’s story originated on MySpace in 2006. The creator of Carmen Winstead wishes it would no longer be talked about. However, as of 2026, Carmen Winstead became an internet meme as people found her story humorous instead of scary.
Carmen was an ordinary 17 year old girl living in Indiana. During one of her school fire drills, five girls thought it would be funny to push her down the sewer she was standing next to. The skin on her face was scraped and her head was barely hanging on her body. The girls denied what they did to the police. The five girls mysteriously suffered the same fate as Carmen Winstead. Months later, messages on MySpace were shared around the students that Carmen’s death was not an accident. This is how the audio message of Carmen Winstead came to be. The voice message of Carmen threatened that the ghost of Carmen Winstead would haunt and attack those who did not spread the truth of Carmen’s death. Furthermore, Carmen’s story became a message on how the spread of internet stories created confusion and fear among people that believed her story to be a true event.
5. The Russian Sleep Experiment
In the 1940s, Russian researchers used five prisoners as test subjects for a new stimulant that makes the consumer stay awake for days. The prisoners were promised freedom after 30 days of experiment. This experiment went terribly wrong. The gas-based stimulant led the prisoners to lose their sanity. Within a few days, the prisoners started to damage their vocal cords and tear their skin and flesh off. After the damage was done, the researchers shot and killed the prisoners that were barely alive. The story of the Russian Sleep Experiment is similar to the SCP Foundation. The SCP Foundation was created to contain and experiment on supernatural and dangerous creatures. The SCP Foundation and Russian Sleep Experiment are both very famous in the horror community as well as the creepypasta community and both have a heavy fanart influence on the media.
