Creepypasta

The subjects of creepypasta vary widely and can include topics such as ghosts, cryptids, murder, suicide, zombies, aliens, rituals to summon supernatural entities, haunted television shows, and video games.

[1] Creepypastas range in length from a single paragraph to extended multi-part series that can span multiple media types, some lasting for years.

[1][5] After the murder attempt, some creepypasta website administrators made statements reminding readers of the "line between fiction and reality".

[8][9] Unlike copypastas, creepypastas are all horror fiction and also encompass multimedia stories, with creators using videos, images, hyperlinks and GIFs alongside text.

[9] Scholars and writers such as Time's Jessica Roy have seen similarities in the chain emails of the 1990s, which disseminated hoaxes and urban legends, for example, by promising a terrible fate for users who did not pass them along.

[1][9] Horror stories such as the Rake, a fictional monster created by 4chan users in 2005, have been retroactively considered creepypastas.

Many video game creepypastas reveal the conflict to be caused by malevolent entities such as ghosts or artificial intelligence.