Creepypasta

[Pumpkin_Man]

It's about midnight or a little after. Your are on a very lonely country road in a heavily wooded area. You are on a motorcycle, and there's a full moon. It's pitch black. Your engine starts to sputter and then quit. You remember that you forgot to gas up. You still have a reserve and you start to put the petcock into the reserve position. As you do you hear a low, rumbling growling, like the growling of a wearwolf. The growling seems to be getting closer and louder. You finaly ahve the petcock in the reserve position, but there isn't enough gas in the carburator so it takes you a little longer to get the bike started. You keep trying. Meanwhile your battery is getting weakf rom all the cranking. Then you hear rustling of foliage, and you feel a warm breath on the side of your face. It smells of rotting meat and of death.

Mike

[Rising Dead Man]

I want to try this next month.

There is a moment each leap year, at exactly three minutes past three on the morning of February 29th. If you possess the courage, await that moment in darkened room, with no other present. At that moment, the darkness will deepen. If you were to hold your hand directly before your face, you would not see a thing. But you must not do so. No, for that would be to waste the moment. Instead you must reach out, into that impenetrable darkness.

And it will reach out to you.

An unseen hand will grasp yours. You must not flinch away, nor tighten your grasp. To do so will only slough away more of the decrepit flesh that covers it, and anger its unseen owner. Remain perfectly still, as the withered fingers move over your palm, tracing unknown patterns. Do not move an inch as it crawls slowly up your arm. And most of all do not even breathe as it caresses your face, touching what cannot be seen.

Should you remain still through this, the hand will be withdrawn and a voice will speak, so close you can feel its breath on your face, smell the scent of decay it carries. It will ask you for one simple piece of information: your name. Answer truthfully. Answer truthfully, and the presence will retreat, leaving only a whisper in the air as the darkness lifts. "It is done."

From that day on, untold good fortune will be yours, and mysterious power. You will lack nothing, and have everything. But in a year, perhaps two, your eyes will sting in bright light, you will feel your skin begin to decay, and the sweet smell of death will be upon your breath...

[Li H'Sen Chang]

I never understand why the leap year has extra day on February 29 because if that was your birthday you only get to have it every 4th year.

[Pumpkin_Man]

The reason for the leap year is to keep the calender aligned with the seasons.

Mike

[Li H'Sen Chang]

How does the birthday work if you born on February 29?

[Rising Dead Man]

You just cant celebrate it that day.

[Murfreesboro]

Very few people celebrate their birthdays on the actual day, anyway. Most who celebrate do so on the nearest weekend. I think Leap-Year babies have fun with their occasional birthdays. I think 64-yr-olds get a kick out of saying they are 16!

[Rising Dead Man]

When thinking back to my earliest memories, nothing is concrete. A string of hazy images come to mind like random snapshots out of time, each one associated with certain feelings and emotions. They are imbued with a mystical dreamlike quality, a gift born of childhood naivety. The magic of every Christmas when Santa was still real, for example, is an experience of pure joy that is lost with maturity.

Many of these snapshots are impossible to place in any sort of context. They’re just…there, sunken in the crevices of the brain without rhyme or reason: playing with my dad’s beard in a wood-paneled room, him smiling down at me – comforting. Or discovering a long row of marching ants in someone’s wooded backyard, all by myself – exciting. Some of them don’t even seem real in hindsight. Did I actually fall from that tree by the lake, only to land on my feet without a scratch? Was it really a dream?

I don’t think so. Sure, I have memories of distant dreams, but there is a clear distinction between the dreams and reality of my past. I don’t know how I can tell, I just can. And for this reason one memory has always troubled me. The experience was so surreal, and yet certain details stand out with marked clarity.

I’m not exactly sure when it happened. I couldn’t have been older than five or six. My brother and I were sleeping in our bunk bed. Because he was older, he got the top bunk. I had just woken up, but it was still nighttime. Something felt different. I remember seeing and smelling the rain, but not hearing any. The window was open and it was very cold in the room. Why was the window open? The curtains were gently flapping but there was no breeze. The quiet was so intense it buzzed through my ears. I’d been lying on my side, with one arm dangling off the edge of the bed. Gradually I became aware that it was warmer near the floor. I felt some kind of heated breeze gently strike my hand, coming and going in short bursts. Finally I recognized it as someone’s breathing.

Then the woman slid out from under my bed. The nightlight showed that she had long blondish hair and wore a white nightgown, and in the dimness I thought it was my mother. I wasn’t at all scared. It’s funny how a child’s mind works. What’s mommy doing under the bed? Must be getting something, or checking for monsters. I was too tired to say anything and remained motionless, watching. The woman was on her back, but her face stayed in the shadows. She rolled over and crawled on all fours to the far end of the bed, then glided up the ladder to the top bunk. Her every movement was silky smooth and completely silent. She reminded me of a white ribbon dancing in the wind. I closed my eyes and fell back to sleep.

I also remember my brother telling me about a weird dream the next morning. He’d dreamt of a woman who lived “under the floor” and came out at night to play in the rain. When her clothes got soaked, she went back inside and would whisper things to anyone who was sleeping. It became a recurring dream for him until our family moved out of that house.

Strange, what the brain chooses to remember

[Rising Dead Man]

So just take a look at this picture and tell me how your dreams are.



Just spreading the word.

It's about time I explain this one. Here's the creepypasta.

I first met in person with Mary E. in the summer of 2007. I had arranged with her husband of fifteen years, Terence, to see her for an interview. Mary had initially agreed, since I was not a newsman but rather an amateur writer gathering information for a few early college assignments and, if all went according to plan, some pieces of fiction. We scheduled the interview for a particular weekend when I was in Chicago on unrelated business, but at the last moment Mary changed her mind and locked herself in the couple’s bedroom, refusing to meet with me.

For half an hour, I sat with Terence as we camped outside the bedroom door, I listening and taking notes while he attempted fruitlessly to calm his wife. The things Mary said made little sense, but fit into the pattern I was expecting: though I could not see her, I could tell from her voice that she was crying, and more often than not her objections to speaking with me centered around an incoherent diatribe on her dreams – her nightmares.

Terence apologized profusely when we ceased the exercise, and I did my best to take it in stride; recall that I wasn’t a reporter in search of a story, but merely a curious young man in search of information. Besides, I thought at the time, I could perhaps find another, similar case if I put my mind and resources to it.

Mare E. was the sysop for a small Chicago-based Bulletin Board System in 1992 when she first encountered smile.jpg and her life changed forever. She and Terence had been married for only five months. Mary was one of an estimated 400 people who saw the image when it was posted as a hyperlink on the BBS, though she is the only one who has spoken openly about the experience. The rest have remained anonymous, or are perhaps dead.

In 2005, when I was only in tenth grade, smile.jpg was first brought to my attention by my burgeoning interest in web-based phenomena; Mary was the most often cited victim of what is sometimes referred to as “Smile.dog,” the being smile.jpg is reputed to display.

What caught my interest (other than the obvious macabre elements of the cyber-legend and my proclivity toward such things) was the sheer lack of information, usually to the point that people don’t believe it even exists other than as a rumor or hoax. It is unique because, though the entire phenomenon centers on a picture file, that file is no where to be found on the internet; certainly many photo-manipulated simulacra litter the web, showing up with the most frequency on sites such as the image-board 4chan, particularly the /x/-focused paranormal sub board.

It is suspected that these are fakes because they do not have the effect the true smile.jpg is believed to have, namely sudden onset temporal lobe epilepsy and acute anxiety. This purpoted reaction in the viewer is one of the reasons the phantom-like smile.jpg is regarded with such disdain, since it is patently absurd, though depending on whom you ask, the reluctance to acknowledge smile.jpg’s existence might be just as much out of fear as it is out of disbelief.

Neither smile.jpg nor Smile.dog is mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia, though the website features articles on such other, perhaps more scandalous shocksites such as gotse (hello.jpg) or 2girls1cup; any attempt to create a page pertaining to smile.jpg is summarily deleted by any of the encyclopedia’s many admins.

Encounters with smile.jpg are the stuff of internet legend. Mary E.’s story is not unique; there are unverified rumors of smile.jpg showing up in the early days of usenet and even one persistent tale that in 2002 a hacker flooded the forums of humor and satire website Something Awful with a deluge of Smile.dog pictures, rendering almost of the forum’s users at the time epileptic. It is also said that in the mid-to-late 90s that smile.jpg circulated on Usenet and as an attachment of a chain email with the subject like “SMILE!! GOD LOVES YOU!”

Yet despite the huge exposure these stunts would generate, there are very few people who admit to having experienced any of them and no trace of the file or any link has ever been discovered. Those who claim to have seen smile.jpg often weakly joke that they were far too busy to save a copy of the picture to their hard drive.

However, all alleged victims offer the same description of the photo: a dog-like creature (usually described as appearing similar to a Siberian Husky), illuminated by the flash of the camera, sits in a dim room, the only background detail visible being a human hand extending from the darkness near the left side of the frame. The hand is empty, but is usually described as “beckoning.” Of course, most attention is given to the dog (or dog-creature, as some victims are more certain than others about what they claim to have seen). The muzzle of the beast is reputedly split in a wide grin, revealing two rows of very white, very straight, very sharp, and very human-looking teeth. This is, of course, not a description given immediately after viewing the picture, but rather a recollection of the victims, who claim to have seen the picture endlessly repeated in their mind’s eye during the time they are, in reality, having epileptic fits.

These fits are reported to continue indeterminably, often while the victims sleep, resulting in very vivid and disturbing nightmares. These may be treated with medication, though in some cases it is more effective than others. Mary E., I assumed, was not on effective medication.

That was why, after my visit to her apartment in 2007, I sent out feelers to several folklore- and urban legend-orientated newsgroups, websites, and mailing lists, hoping to find the name of a supposed victim of smile.jpg who felt more interested in talking about his experiences. For a time, nothing happened and at length I forgot completely about my pursuits, since I had begun my freshman year of college and was quite busy. Mary contacted me via email, however, near the beginning of March 2008.

To: jml@****.com
From marye@****.net
Subj: Last summer’s interview

Dear Mr. L.,

I am incredibly sorry about my behavior last summer when you came to interview me. I hope you understand that it was no fault of yours, but rather my own problems that led me to act out as I did. I realized that I could have handled the situation more decorously; however, I hope you will forgive me. At the time, I was afraid.

You see, for fifteen years I have been haunted by smile.jpg. Smile.dog comes to me in my sleep every night. I know that sounds silly, but it is true. There is an ineffable quality about my dreams, my nightmares, that makes them completely unlike any real dreams I have ever had. I do not move and do not speak. I simply look ahead, and the only thing ahead of me is the scene from that horrible picture. I see the beckoning hand, and I see Smile.dog. It talks to me.

I thought for a long time about my options. I could show it to a stranger, a coworker… I could even show it to Terence, as much as the idea disgusted me. And what would happen then? Well, if Smile.dog kept its word, I could sleep. Yet, if it lied, what would I do? And who was to say something worse would not come for me if I did as the creature asked?

So, I did nothing for fifteen years, though I kept the diskette hidden amongst my things. Every night for fifteen years Smile.dog has come to me in my sleep and demanded that I spread the word. For fifteen years I have stood strong, though there have been hard times. Many of my fellow victims on the BBS board where I first encountered smile.jpg stopped posting; I heard some of them committed suicide. Others remained completely silent, simply disappearing off the face of the web. They are the ones I worry about the most. I sincerely hope you will forgive me, Mr. L., but last summer when you contacted me and my husband about an interview I was near the breaking point. I did not care if Smile.dog was lying or not; I wanted it to end. You were a stranger, someone I had no connection with, and i thought I would not feel sorrow when you took the diskette as part of your research and sealed your fate. Before you arrived, I realized what I was doing: I was plotting to ruin your life.

I could not stand the thought, and in fact I still cannot. I am ashamed, Mr. L., and I hope that this warning will dissuade you from further investigation of smile.jpg. You may in time encounter someone who is, if not weaker than I, then wholly more depraved, someone who will not hesitate to follow Smile.dog’s orders. Stop while you are still whole.

Sincerely,
Mary E.

Terence contacted me later that month with the news that his wife had killed herself. While cleaning up the various things she’d left behind, closing email accounts and the like, he happened upon the above message. He was a man in shambles; he wept as he told me to listen to his wife’s advice. He’d found the diskette, he revealed, and burned it until it was nothing but a stinking pile of blackened plastic. The part that most disturbed him, however, was how the diskette had hissed as it melted. Like some sort of animal, he said.

I will admit that I was a little uncertain about how to respond to this. At first, I thought, perhaps it was a joke, with the couple belatedly playing with the situation in order to get a rise out of me, but a quick check of several Chicago newspapers’ online obituaries, however, proved that Mary E. was indeed dead. There was, of course, no mention of suicide in the article.

I decided that, for at least a time, I would not further pursue the subject of smile.jpg, especially since I had finals coming up at the end of May. But the world has odd ways of testing up. Almost a full year after I’d returned from my disastrous interview with Mary E., I received another email:

To: jml@****.com
From: elzahir82@****.com
Subj: smile

Hello
I found your e-mail address thru a mailing list your profile said you are interested in smiledog. I have saw it it is not as bad as every one says I have sent it to you here. Just spreading the word.



The final line chilled me to the bone. According to my email client there was one file attachment called, naturally, smile.jpg. I considered downloading it for some time. It was most likely a fake, I imagined, and even if it weren’t I was never wholly convinced of smile.jpg’s peculiar powers. Mary E.’s account had shaken me, yes, but she was probably mentally unbalanced anyway. After all, how could a single image do what smile.jpg was said to accomplish? What sort of creature was it that could break one’s mind with only the power of the eye?

And if such things were patently absurd, then why did the legend exist at all? If I downloaded the image, if I looked at it, and if Mary turned out to be correct, if Smile.dog came to me in my dreams demanding I spread the word, what would I do? Would I live my life as Mary had, fighting against the urge to give in until I died? Or would I simply spread the word, eager to be put to rest? And if I chose the latter route, how could I do it? Whom would I burden in turn? If I went through with my earlier intention to write a short article about smile.jpg, I decided, I could attach it as evidence, and anyone who read the article, anyone who took interest, would be affected. And, even assuming the smile.jpg attached to the email was genuine, would I be capricious enough to save myself in that manner?