4
Collective Storytelling
No matter who is holding the pen, aiming the camera, or striking the keys when telling a story, and no matter how audiences engage with these narratives – say by retelling a tale to a new group, or retelling a tale in a new way, or refusing to retell that tale at all – the stories we share are collective; audiences and tellers alike determine which narratives spread forth and which fade away.10 We will begin the chapter by exploring the fundamentally hybrid and heteroglossic nature of this storytelling process, arguing that, rather than reflecting a niche folkloric framing, all instances of storytelling are in fact collective. Each draws from a variety of cultural references, textual callbacks, and narrative motifs, and each influences further references, callbacks, and motifs. As evidence, we will present examples featuring Bigfoot and Martha Stewart (naturally). We will subsequently show that this fundamental collectivism is, in turn, fundamentally ambivalent: stories are the work of individual voices and also of the chorus; are self-contained and densely referential; and draw from stable cultural meanings while simultaneously creating novel meanings for novel audiences. In these ways, stories deconstruct the seemingly straightforward binary between the singular and the multiple.
As we'll see, the ambivalence of storytelling spans eras and degrees of mediation. We will chronicle these continuities with an exploration of urban legends, creepypasta, and other deadly tales, paying particular attention to the overlaps between stories then and stories now. Simultaneously, we will highlight how digital mediation ushers in a number of divergences. Not only do digital tools further exacerbate the already tenuous category of textual authorship, they hasten how collective stories are told and spread, and therefore facilitate what can only be described as runaway narratives – all shrouding digitally mediated storytelling in even more mystery, even more ambiguity, and even more ambivalence than in embodied contexts.
Stories, heteroglossia, and hybridity
As the bawdy campfire antics in Chapter 1 illustrate, Milner comes from a big, boisterous, storytelling family. When he was young, many of these stories centered on a Thanksgiving tradition known as Bigfoot Road. Each year, stomachs stuffed with turkey and pie, Milner and his gaggle of cousins would pile into Uncle Dave's van – seat-belt laws be damned – and sojourn down Bigfoot Road on the way to a sleepover. In reality, “Bigfoot Road” was one of many underdeveloped back roads in the northern suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. But in the minds of Milner and his cousins, as the sun dipped below the treeline on a cold fall night, it was a ritual in terror and joy. As they made the trek, Uncle Dave would regale the cousins about the Bigfoot monster that roamed those lands. The car would slow to a crawl, stretching the ten-minute drive into an hour. Here's where Bigfoot claimed his first victim. Here's the tree where he hanged an unfortunate hunter who got too close to his young.
And then things would really get dark. When the van's tank ran out of gas – and it always ran out of gas – Uncle Dave would direct the cousins to get out and push, promising not to drive off like he did last year. And when he inevitably would, the cousins would break into a Darwinistic sprint toward the disappearing van, hoping to be one of the lucky few who survived the night. Even after they were nestled safely back in the van (Uncle Dave always, eventually, stopped to let them catch up), the mere prospect of seeing the monster would send the cousins into a frenzy; one year, Milner's younger brother Eric struggled to contain himself as Uncle Dave swerved the van violently and banged his fist against the door (“I threw up in my mouth!” Eric howled). Another year, one of Uncle Dave's hirsute friends hid shirtless in the bushes, ready to tear out in front of the van at just the right moment (“We had a confirmed sighting!” Milner proudly told his mom). But regardless of how elaborate the ruse became, it always had a happy ending. The troops would arrive safe and sound at Uncle Dave's house, and would spend the rest of the night drinking root beer floats and watching Ren & Stimpy.
Bigfoot Road stories resonate with Milner's family at multiple levels. The original Bigfoot Road tales themselves – told first by Uncle Dave and then by others as they came of age – were cobbled together from existing urban legends, loose folk archetypes, and winking personal touches. At a layer above that, stories about specific Bigfoot Road experiences have been passed along in family legend; at some point during almost every family gathering, someone proclaims to Eric “I threw up in my mouth!”
Like Milner's bawdy and rough-hewn campfire tales, Bigfoot Road aligns with “traditional” folkloric storytelling: it's transmitted orally, spans generations, and centers on a legendary monster. But similar kinds of collective storytelling can unfold in hybrid, digital, and ostensibly non-traditional vernacular contexts. Further, when contrasted with more traditional tales, these tangled narratives reveal the wide variety of stories subsumed by the collective storytelling category. For instance, Phillips' favorite constellation of shared stories is a multimedia narrative doozy, revolving around her somewhat sideways love for beige-toned lifestyle guru and convicted felon Martha Stewart. Stewart's maybe inadvertent, maybe deliberate humor and overall camp sensibility have been delighting Phillips since she was a teenager. This is also where Katie, Phillips' childhood friend mentioned in Chapter 1 – previously “Bob,” now “Kato,” though neither can remember what precipitated the nickname shift – re-enters the narrative. Because in addition to raising various stripes of hell on the track team, followed by various stripes of hell in high school, then college, then life after, the two have been exchanging giddy collective Martha Stewart stories for nearly two decades.
These bits of vernacular detritus include Martha Stewart-themed fanfiction and – when it was still airing – dramatic Martha Stewart Living show re-enactments (her old Halloween specials were always the most hilarious; the sadistic undertones of the holiday fit the series nicely). The two have also told a variety of deranged visual stories via Martha Stewart collages, the largest of which featured an image of Stewart clutching a bucket of eggs, and a cutout of her head taped to the body of a naked lady sipping tea in a lawn chair. Phillips and Katie's ever-expanding collection of multimodal texts also includes Martha Stewart framed art, including one fashion magazine spread wherein Stewart smirks directly into the camera as the grabby silhouette of some unseen sex-person wiggles his hand down the collar of her shirt. (Upon discovery of this gem, Phillips immediately picked up her phone. “Martha,” she gasped into Katie's voicemail. “Trying to be sexy. Some guy – his hand. Kato his hand is down her shirt!” The next morning, Katie sent Phillips an email: “You should hang it above your bed,” she suggested, prompting Phillips to go buy a gilded frame.) As analog has given way to digital media, Phillips and Katie continue to send each other Martha Stewart articles, GIFs, and tweets, particularly when Stewart is throwing icy shade at her enemies (“She's a national treasure,” Katie recently mused via text).
Though Bigfoot legends and Martha Stewart fandom might seem to populate distinct narrative constellations, together they illustrate two foundational characteristics of the storytelling process. First, and most basically, they both demonstrate the collectiveness of storytelling; the existence of these stories depends on the audience as much as the teller. This claim might strike some readers as counterintuitive. Generally, the storyteller is regarded as the active narrative agent, while the audience is presumed to be more passive. The Bigfoot Road tradition, for example, wouldn't exist without Uncle Dave's initial Bigfoot stories, and Phillips and Katie's Martha Stewart play certainly wouldn't exist without Martha Stewart, whose decades of success have hinged on her ability to mold her domestic skills, business acumen, and upper crust white lady tastes into an aspirational lifestyle brand. But without active audiences – sideways or otherwise – to cast and recast those narrative seeds, neither constellation of stories could have resonated so powerfully. Uncle Dave's Bigfoot tales would have been shelved after they were told, and Martha Stewart wouldn't have had a fanbase for whom she could continue spinning her lifestyle yarns.
Second, both sets of stories fall squarely within the realm of contemporary vernacular expression, and are therefore a hybrid blend of media, meanings, and modes of participation. Even if Bigfoot Road tales seem “oral-traditional,” Milner's Uncle Dave borrowed from literary and popular sources as he was crafting their original iterations, incorporating bits of campy horror flicks and the pulp serials he read growing up. The subsequent retellings of these stories by Milner and his cousins augmented certain details and omitted others, divergences that would be integrated into future years' stories, as Uncle Dave's now latent popular source material blended seamlessly with oral adaptation. Similarly, Phillips and Katie's Martha Stewart metanarratives draw from commercial sources spanning the television, book, and magazine publishing industries. As these sources were produced by dozens, maybe hundreds, of others, Phillips and Katie's stories are nothing less than a tangled amalgam of countless voices with countless narrative intentions, ones they subsequently reappropriated toward new meanings and new ends. And so it goes with all collective stories, which weave a variety of voices, jokes, and experiences into an ever-evolving constellation of narratives.
Collectivism and vernacularity are equally essential to stories that don't seem obviously collective or vernacular. As literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin argues, even the most apparently tidy, self-contained texts are characterized by heteroglossia, a “multiplicity of social voices” ([1935] 1981, 263) evident within and between texts. Cultural critic and literary scholar Roland Barthes (1977) forwards a similar perspective in his critique of Authorship with a capital A. As Barthes insists, any attempt to reduce a work of literature to the voice of a single author overlooks the “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). Much more accurate, he argues, is the comparison of texts to textiles, “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). For Barthes, as well as for Bakhtin, creative expression is about weaving existing threads, not conjuring a tapestry ex nihilo.
Literature is overrun with implicit and explicit heteroglossia. Author Jonathan Lethem (2008) chronicles several examples, beginning with Vladimir Nabokov's infamous 1962 novel Lolita. As Lethem notes, Nabokov's work strongly echoes – maybe deliberately, maybe unconsciously – a similar novel written by a lesser known German author named Heinz von Lichberg. Lethem also calls attention to William Burroughs' 1959 Beat Generation novel Naked Lunch, which was written using what Burroughs called the “cut up method.” This was no figure of speech; a firm believer in collective storytelling, Burroughs quite literally “cut up,” with scissors, bits of other people's writing and integrated it into his own without attribution. In an essay published in 1963, Burroughs claims that this method is reflective of creativity more broadly, gesturing to Barthes' tissue of quotations. “All writing is in fact cut ups,” Burroughs explained, probably shrugging (347).
The same can be said of all mass media content; just as every work of literature is a tissue of quotations, every film, scripted television show, reality dating competition, streaming webisode, podcast, and any other piece of emergent media content is a narrative bricolage, drawing from a vast range of cultural sources. The heteroglossia of these already densely referential source texts is further augmented through vernacular creativity. For instance, although remix is most often associated with digital media, something created with Adobe and housed on YouTube, participants have long been tinkering with mass media, crafting collective narratives along the way. Activist and artist Jonathan McIntosh (2012) provides an overview of early twentieth-century remixes, tracing the practice to 1920s Russia, where Soviet filmmakers would recut Hollywood films in order to critique class distinctions (again, “cut” as in literally cut the actual film into pieces, rearrange scenes, then splice the reel back together). Using these same techniques, McIntosh explains, Charles A. Ridley of the British Ministry of Information re-edited Nazi propaganda film in 1941 to make it seem as if Hitler and his soldiers were dancing to a popular Jewish song. In that same spirit, Cliff Roth produced a 1988 remix that recut footage of First Lady Nancy Reagan's hard-line anti-drug address to suggest that she is instead an avid marijuana user.
In short, while it might initially seem like a fairly narrow category of expression, collective storytelling is everywhere, from purely folk contexts to purely pop contexts to every hybrid context in between. Regardless of whose story it is or how original it might seem, the presumed autonomy of a given narrative disintegrates under the weight of so much tissue, and so many quotations. Of course, more quotations means more voices. And more voices produce more ambivalence. Digital media, which allow countless participants to ceaselessly reappropriate, remix, and transform existing texts, are especially cacophonous. But this collective flurry shapes analog storytelling as well, as authors across media blend with audiences, text blends with context, and individual meaning blends with collective narrative precedent. The following section will explore the breakdown of these seemingly clear-cut lines, illustrating how this is fundamentally tangled with that.
Hitchhikers, hooks, and one more kidney claimed
The collectivism and vernacularity of shared stories results in a fundamental multiplicity of authors and texts, as narrative seeds are flung every which way. While these seeds might mean certain things to those who throw them, all bets are off once they hit the wind. This is as true of the Martha Stewart brand as it is of Bigfoot Road, as true of Three Wolf Moon reviews as it is of Dolan comics, and as true of the “Bed Intruder” meme as it is of The Room fandom. Here we'll delve into the narrative dimensions of collective expression, focusing specifically on urban legends, a particularly collective strand of vernacular storytelling. As we'll see, each iteration of an urban legend defies singular authorship, exists almost exclusively as a tissue of quotations, and can only “really” mean what its multiple audiences decide it means.
As urban legend expert Jan Harold Brunvand (2001) explains, the glory days of oral-traditional urban legends lasted from the 1960s through the 1980s, though the narrative form has taken on new dimensions with the rise of digital media. Sometimes referred to as contemporary legends or modern legends (a nod to the fact that “urban” is a bit of a misnomer – these are not stories confined specifically to cities, but rather refer to the immediate or very recent past), urban legends are allegedly true events featuring scary, shocking, or supernatural elements. According to Brunvand, urban legends can be classified into a number of general categories, including classic automobile legends, teenage horrors, dreadful contaminations, business rip-offs, bogus warnings, and others, and further classified into specific types or “cycles,” multiple versions of the same basic story underscored by a “somewhat stable underlying form” (1981, 2). These stable narrative elements are augmented and incrementally transformed by participants' dynamic retellings. Each time a tale teller uses existing elements to fill in the blanks of their version of a particular legend, they are drawing from a reservoir of cultural tradition. Brunvand refers to this process as “communal re-creation” (12), underscoring its collective, vernacular, and therefore heteroglossic nature.
As such, urban legends always imply an us who speak and an us who listen, even when participants aren't fully aware of this plurality. A classic urban legend cycle called “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” provides an example. Its basic narrative centers on a hitchhiker – often a pretty young woman but in some versions an old man or religious figure (i.e. a Mormon disciple of Christ, or even Jesus himself) – who catches a ride from a stranger. Sometimes the hitchhiker warns the driver of a dangerous curve ahead, or makes other odd, prophetic statements. The hitchhiker then disappears from the car (or, in some retellings, is dropped off and then disappears). Often, the hitchhiker leaves “proof” in the car, like a book or purse or sweater. After the encounter, the driver learns that someone looking very much like the hitchhiker died years earlier in the spot where they were picked up or dropped off and/or, upon attempting to return the forgotten item to the address given by the hitchhiker, discovers that the hitchhiker has been dead for many years.
Despite its vast and varied retellings, Milner didn't know “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” was an urban legend until he came across it in Brunvand's book. As he read Brunvand's account of the tale, Milner froze. He recalled one of his overnight shifts at Wal-Mart and a conversation he had with John, an off-duty police officer who moonlit at the store as a security guard. Because there often wasn't much happening (overnight shift at Wal-Mart and all), John would entertain Milner with stories about some of the crazy things he'd seen while on duty. That night, John shared an allegedly true first-person account of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” John swore he'd picked up a young female hitchhiker. John swore she had warned him of a curve. John swore the hitchhiker disappeared into the night after she was dropped off, and he swore that his subsequent investigation of incident reports revealed that a pretty young woman had died in a crash on that very curve years earlier.
At the time, Milner believed him, and over the next few days recounted John's story, wide-eyed, to various friends. In the process, he became part of a storytelling us he didn't even know existed: one more voice in the collective “Vanishing Hitchhiker” story. Milner's experiences illustrate that, while our stories – the ones we tell and the ones we hear and claim ownership over – are, unquestionably, ours, a reflection of our unique voices and life experiences, they also echo all the other voices that came before. This tension between mine and ours immediately complicates the question of what belongs to whom. After all, how could someone declare ownership over something that is, in the end, a patchwork of fragments? How do you claim strands in a tapestry, how do you lock down seeds in a breeze?
The communal re-creation and collective authorship evidenced by “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” are inextricably linked to the story's multiple, and often highly variable, iterations. A particularly hybrid and multimodal legend cycle, “The Kidney Heist,” further illustrates this interconnection. Although the specific narrative details can vary, the basic story describes a person, usually a man, on a trip away from home, usually for business, and usually to a city or country regarded as “unsafe.” At some point the individual gets drunk and, in most accounts, has sex with an anonymous stranger, usually a woman, in their hotel room. The next morning, the protagonist groggily awakens and realizes that one of their kidneys is missing, surprise! – the work, apparently, of black market organ farmers, who lure gullible people into compromising situations and then make with the quick extraction.
As Brunvand (2001) explains, this legend spans a wide variety of media. It served as the plot for a 1991 episode of Law and Order titled “Sonata for Solo Organ,” regularly appeared in 1990s newspaper columns, and made its way through a fair share of chat rooms. “The Kidney Heist” is also one of many urban legends cataloged on the venerable Snopes.com, which has been debunking, and sometimes confirming, a variety of suspect claims since 1995 (Mikkelson 2008). In 1998, the legend was even the pivotal climax of a horror film titled, appropriately enough, Urban Legend. By 2001, when Brunvand's Encyclopedia of Urban Legends was published, more recent versions of the legend began including the names of specific medical personnel or law enforcement agents, and also introduced an additional narrative detail: that the organ farmers placed their victim in an ice-filled bathtub, and included a note telling the man to call 911 (how thoughtful). This is the version Phillips remembers hearing (and giggling nervously at) as a kid, and is one that has persisted in its own constellation of folk and popular retellings in the decade and a half since Brunvand noted the ice bath addition. Milner's first exposure to this version of the tale, for instance, was in a 2004 episode of the animated series The Venture Bros. called “Dia de los Dangerous!” that not only included the ice bath motif, but also amplified the racist assumption that Mexico is a seedy destination, where no kidney is safe.
Whether told around a campfire, in a newspaper, on primetime TV, or over email, each iteration of “The Kidney Heist” is a present amalgam of past narrative participation, one that simultaneously primes its audience for their own future retellings. Further, the sheer number of iterations in such a wide variety of media complicates, even renders bizarre, the impulse to refer to “The Kidney Heist” in the singular (beyond ease of classification and analysis as a narrative cycle, of course). The specific version of the story an audience hears is the result of countless retellings, which themselves are the product of countless life experiences and cultural collisions, all fused into a seemingly singular, seemingly self-contained package that is, in the end, anything but singular.
And each time these multiple texts are reappropriated by new audiences, the basic idea of meaning is further muddled. A given iteration of a story might mean something specific to the teller, and might mean something specific to the listener, but it's not guaranteed that both teller and listener will be on the same page about that specific meaning, to say nothing of future tellers and future listeners, who reinterpret meaning as the story spreads. This is not a poststructuralist free-for-all, however. Resonant genres, iterations, and motifs – the conservative elements of collective storytelling, all drawn from a shared reservoir of cultural tradition – persist between stories and across eras. Simultaneously, dynamic personal meanings hinging on the dynamic contours of dynamic audiences flower in unique ways, as the needs of the individual intertwine with the traditions of the collective. In the context of collective storytelling, meaning exists at its destinations, not at its origins – echoing Barthes (1977) – and is embedded within persistent cultural resonance.
The dynamic variability of meaning within more conservative cultural strictures is illustrated by “The Hook,” an urban legend in which a young couple drives to some secluded location to do what young couples do. “The night is warm with promise,” winks one of Brunvand's collected examples (1981, 200). Suddenly, because these youths are apparently listening to the car radio, a newsflash blares from the speakers. A very crazy murderer just escaped from the local insane asylum – and he has a hook for a hand. Exclamation point! Realizing how far from the road they are, the girl asks to be taken home. The boy doesn't want to leave and throws some sort of penis tantrum (most iterations foreground the boy's sexual perseverations, then wounded protestations, which are sometimes followed by explicit anger; he expects the girl to have sex with him, and feels insulted when she doesn't). The girl hears a scratch at the door, and really lets the boy have it. He finally acquiesces, and they speed off. The boy drops the girl off at her house, and, although still an insensitive oaf, walks around to her side of the car so he can open her door. And there, dangling from the handle, is the hook, wrested from the arm of the murderer!!!
This basic story cycle has been in circulation in the US since the 1950s, and over the decades has grown increasingly multimodal. Iterations of “The Hook” have appeared across so many media – from comic books to television programs to email forwards – that, as Brunvand writes, “the very image of a hook dangling from a car-door handle is enough to suggest for most people the whole genre of urban legends” (200). Because there are so many recorded versions to analyze, Brunvand explains, the legend has also proven very popular with folklorists. But try as they might, no one can arrive at a consensus about what it all means. Alan Dundes (1971), for example, asserts that the murderer's hook is a phallic symbol, and – unsurprising to anyone who has ever read anything written by Dundes the Freudian – its amputation represents castration. Other scholars suggest that it is a warning about the dangers of youth sexuality; a reminder of stranger danger; or an expression of anxiety toward people with disabilities, among other explanations (Brunvand 1981).
As compelling as any of these arguments might be (or not), different audiences bring their own experiences and expectations to, and therefore extract their own personal meanings from, each iteration of each tale; analyses of specific tellers' motivations, the formal qualities of the text(s), and comparative overlap with similar legends might yield valuable localized insights, but no explanation will ever subsume every possible reaction in every possible moment. Depending on audience members' personal experiences, the unconsenting girlfriend could, for example, be decoded as a chaste Christian, an empowered feminist, a watchful citizen, or any combination thereof. Similarly, the couple's escape could be framed as an endorsement of sexual purity (“don't have sex before marriage, because if you do, you won't hear the warnings and the hook man will kill you”), lucky coincidence (“who the hook man kills is honestly just a coin toss”), or even an excuse to gather ye rosebuds while ye may (“we might as well have sex today, because who knows, maybe the hook man will get us tomorrow”).
Simultaneous to this personal dynamism, however, meanings also draw from a more conservative reservoir of cultural tradition. “The Hook,” for example, along with “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” and “The Kidney Heist,” are all underscored by motifs addressing female and male sexuality, and the fact that the former is often pathologized and fretted over while the latter is often taken as a given (i.e. for women, sexuality is dangerous, while for men, sexuality is expected). These narrative motifs draw from widely accepted cultural frameworks, and for that reason resonate with tellers and listeners – regardless of how novel or personally idiosyncratic the specific narrative combinations might be, and regardless of what a storyteller or hearer might personally feel about the traditions their narratives evince.
Coupled with the ambivalence of texts and authorship, ambivalent meanings challenge any presumption of singularity within a storytelling context. Stories often seem singular, i.e. the audience only sees one author, hears one story, and posits one meaning. But even then, these stories are heteroglossic, densely referential, and open to an endless tangle of personal and traditional interpretations, regardless of era and degree of mediation. The following section will continue exploring the continuities between stories now and then, digital and analog, always taking for granted the ambivalence inherent to all authors, all texts, and all meanings.
On continuity and creepypasta
Collectivism and vernacularity – along with the multiplicities of authors, texts, and meanings these characteristics engender – are essential to online storytelling. The resulting heteroglossia inspires the same ambivalence it has for ages, as long-told tales are repackaged, rehashed, and recirculated in digital formats. This overlap speaks to the most obvious point of continuity between stories then and stories now, stories online and stories offline: the narrative elements that are integrated into those stories, and more broadly, the shared cultural reservoir from which they emerge. Mediation doesn't reinvent, and doesn't need to reinvent, those narrative wheels. The kinds of stories that speak to people around campfires, in books, or at movie theatres are equally resonant in digitally mediated spaces.
To emphasize these points of connection, this section will analyze a prevalent genre of digitally mediated storytelling strikingly similar to urban legends: creepypasta. As it will show, the ambivalence of creepypasta – like the ambivalence of the oral-traditional urban legends that precede it – hinges on multiplicity, tangle, and overlap: the fact that authors are more we than me, texts are never self-contained, and meaning is tethered to the audiences listening.
A tissue of authors, texts, and quotations
Creepypasta labels a loose constellation of suspenseful, scary, and, well, creepy stories created, circulated, and transformed by online participants. Originating on (you guessed it) esoteric forums like 4chan, Something Awful, and BodyBuilding.com in the early–mid 2000s, creepypasta is currently housed across a number of online repositories, notably 4chan's “/x/” (“Paranormal”) board, but also on dedicated sites like Creepypasta.com, Creepypasta.org, and the Creepypasta Wikia. Reddit also features many subreddits – individual forums organized around a particular interest or theme, stylized with the prefix “/r/” – devoted to creepypasta narratives. In particular, /r/NoSleep and /r/LetsNotMeet archive dark tale after dark tale.
The name creepypasta is a derivation of copypasta, a playful shortening of “copy and paste.” Copypasta content is so called because participants, presumably, use copy and paste shortcuts to move memorable (and mostly humorous) narratives within and between threads, or to bring old narratives to a new conversation. Copypasta is, therefore, definitionally memetic; to even earn the label, content has to resonate with multiple participants, who apply it again and again in novel contexts. While creepypasta and copypasta share similar memetic dimensions, creepypasta is more frequently presented as earnest narrative. “True stories,” in other words, some quite fleshed-out, which seem more oriented toward eliciting a skin crawl than a belly laugh. As such, creepypasta stories are often framed as a single person's singularly terrifying experience, rather than playfully distributed copypasta. As my true story, not our inside joke – even if everyone participating is fully aware of the genre and fully aware of the “you spook, you lose” collective game being played.
This “everyone” is critical to creepypasta, which depends on countless tale tellers shaping countless existing narrative elements into new iterations, bridging the me telling the story to the us who came before. Sometimes this process is as easy as moving a chunk of text, unaltered, from one forum or thread to another, either by posting a hyperlink or by copying and pasting available content – not unlike borrowing a book of scary stories and then reading one aloud to an enraptured audience. Everyone knows full well that the story isn't “yours,” but by telling it that night, in that way, to that group, the story is made new again. Sometimes this process entails making slight variations to an existing story depending on the night, the mood, and the group listening, just as tellers of oral-traditional urban legends have done for decades. Sometimes this process is fragmented and destabilized further, as authors take small motifs such as a hook or a hitchhiker and recombine them with all the creative license of Phillips' (scary in their own way) Martha Stewart mashups.
The Slender Man, a tall, thin, supernatural menace, exemplifies fragmented narrative multiplicity, and also illustrates how distributed authorship facilitates this multiplicity. The character, now a creepypasta mainstay, was first introduced in 2009 to a “Create Paranormal Images” thread on Something Awful, a web forum and content aggregator with close ties to 4chan (particularly at the height of both sites' popularity in the mid- to late aughts). He was initially photoshopped, looming and ghostly, into the corner of two pictures featuring groups of children. The first photo captures a handful of young teens scrambling to escape their blurry antagonist. “We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time …” the caption reads, noting that the photographer was unknown but presumed dead. The second image captures children on a playground. Its short caption explains that all 14 of the children pictured vanished after a library fire in 1986, and suggests that the Slender Man was responsible for the attack. It also notes that the image was “confiscated as evidence,” and that the photographer, Mary Thomas, has been missing since June 13, 1986 (Surge 2009).
The following day, another Something Awful user uploaded an image of a burning building to the thread, along with additional Slender Man backstory. Further narratives and images followed, and were layered onto the original narrative kernel; the thread quickly ballooned to 46 pages, as the Slender Man took on a life of its own. While the Slender Man narrative proved to be especially resonant, its collective conjuring isn't unique; creepypasta commenters frequently add layers to an emerging narrative alongside a given source text, with additions, subtractions, suggestions, and proddings becoming essential to the collective story. In these cases, authorship is multiple from the very beginning.
And as such, the stories' texts are multiple from the very beginning. This was certainly the case with the Slender Man canon (if you can call it that), which spiraled out in countless directions after emerging on Something Awful. Beyond more traditional text- and image-based narratives, the stories span YouTube video series, podcasts, a range of fan art, and even alternate-reality games devoted to “Slendy,” as he is sometimes called by his more affectionate fans. This framing itself illustrates the variety of new meanings that new storytellers have infused into the character. As media scholars Shira Chess and Eric Newsom (2014) explain in their analysis of Slender Man stories, sometimes these iterative retellings portray the Slender Man as a malevolent predator, sometimes as a misunderstood anti-hero, sometimes as an object of desire (trust us, rule 34 applies to the Slender Man), and sometimes as a little of everything. The Slender Man is thus quintessentially a narrative belonging to me (i.e. individual storytellers) and belonging to us (a broader, amorphous collective of participants). Speaking to the continuity of this vibrancy, Chess and Newsom muse that “This is the way that ghost stories have always been told” (5).
More broadly, this is the way that all stories have always been told: multiple authors borrowing and contributing multiple narrative threads. Even if individual authors and audiences don't think they're retelling an existing story, they are, in fact, reliant on narrative precedent. For instance, as Chess and Newsom outline, the Slender Man's original Something Awful photoshops were crafted by their creator as an homage to the 1979 horror film Phantasm. That narrative trace lives on in every subsequent Slender Man iteration; even when people producing those iterations have never seen the film, they are reproducing an aesthetic that precipitated the character's inception.
The dense referentiality that characterizes creepypasta specifically, and collective storytelling more generally, is illustrated by one of the most popular stories housed on /r/NoSleep, posted under the heading “My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook. I've got the screenshots. I don't know what to do …” (we hope you'll forgive us if we shorten it to something more titular; say, “The Dead Girlfriend's Facebook”). This story is an allegedly true first-person account of a bereaved boyfriend receiving Facebook communication from his dead girlfriend. The post was prompted, poster Natesw (2014) explains, by an especially frightening communication sent the previous day, which convinced him that it was finally time to share his story. He then provides an overview of all the events leading up to that point, beginning with his girlfriend's death in 2012 and spanning the subsequent two years of intermittent ghostly contact. For each major event, he includes a series of Facebook screenshots as evidence.
Even in its apparent singularity, “The Dead Girlfriend's Facebook” echoes a number of existing narrative motifs, many similar to those present in “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” First, like the hitchhiker in many iterations of the urban legend, the girlfriend in “The Dead Girlfriend's Facebook” is a woman who died in a car crash far too young. Also, like the hitchhiker's unsettling lamentations, amorphous warnings, and cryptic prophecies, the girlfriend's communication from beyond the grave is fragmented and unnerving; she tags herself in photos of her boyfriend as if she's standing right beside him, and resends old messages over and over, cobbling bits together to spell messages like “cold FRE EZIN G I don't know what's happening.” Further, like the driver in many iterations of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” who initially maintains skepticism until a preponderance of evidence renders skepticism impossible (e.g. a left-behind artifact, a found police report, a discussion with the hitchhiker's surviving parents), the narrator in “The Dead Girlfriend's Facebook” initially discounts the messages, thinking they're being sent by some cruel antagonist logged on to his girlfriend's account. But then, just as in “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” a preponderance of evidence begins to erode his skepticism (e.g. denials from others who might know the password, jarringly specific communication, the revelation of details unknown to anyone else). To be sure, “The Dead Girlfriend's Facebook” and “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” contain vast differences. Even so, both draw from the same reservoir of cultural tradition, and as they do, are connected through common resonant motifs.
“The Dead Girlfriend's Facebook” thus provides another example of a storytelling me roped into a storytelling we. It further foregrounds the fact that the storyteller needn't be aware of this collective to be influenced by it, any more than Slender Man storytellers and audiences need to recognize the reference to Phantasm to collectively participate, or any more than Milner needed to know that “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” was an urban legend to connect with Officer John's apparently winking retelling. It is quite likely that few creating, circulating, and transforming collective content can accurately trace from whence particular narrative elements emerge. However, apparent to the audience or not, this overlap is present, and represents not just a tissue of quotations, but a tangle of one.
Indeed, beyond their connection to oral-traditional urban legends, the always macabre and sometimes disgusting dimensions of creepypasta stretch back centuries. The ATU (Aarne–Thompson–Uther; see Uther 2004) classification system catalogs these centuries of narrative overlap. Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne initially proposed this taxonomy of folk narratives in 1910, which he used to analyze and compare elements prominent in cross-cultural, inter-generational tales. American folklorist Stith Thompson expanded Aarne's index in 1928 and again in 1961. Pulling from an even deeper transglobal narrative reservoir, German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther expanded the index once more in 2004. The current ATU index contains thousands of narrative elements persistent across cultures and eras.
As it is reflective of vernacular communication, the ATU is brimming with content that would be right at home on 4chan or Something Awful. Many of these stories feature the paranormal, including narratives about vampires, witches, ghosts, demonic sex criminals, and various other malevolent nightstalkers. Sexism and racism abound, and murder, incest, and bestiality are common. Your fairly jaded authors have spent years probing the depths of the ambivalent internet, and on our solo and collective travels have encountered some of the most unsettling, offensive, and straight-up bizarre tales that digital participation has to offer. We are happy to announce that our ancestors could give even these stories a run for their WTF money. Here are a few of our favorite examples from the wonderful world of the ATU:
- “The Corpse Eater” (ATU 363): A newlywed man eats corpses in three different churches while his bride watches. To make sure she won't tattle, he appears to her in the form of her mother and asks if she's seen her husband do anything strange. When she replies, “no yeah he eats corpses,” he eats her too.
- “Making the Ogre Strong by Castration” (ATU 1133): A man tells an ogre his ox is strong because it's neutered. The ogre tells the man they should castrate each other and be strong too. The man agrees and says he'll come back tomorrow to complete the bargain. The man sends his wife, the ogre is castrated, and the wife already doesn't have a penis.
- “The Offended Skull” (ATU 470A): A drunken man finds a skull, kicks it, then invites it to dinner as an apology. The skull shows up to dinner, chastises the man for his bad behavior, then kills him.
As strange as many ATU tales might seem, they aren't a random litany of curios. The tale-types in the ATU represent, instead, the most successful narrative elements in the history of human storytelling (pretty much every Disney princess movie, for instance, has an ATU prototype). And as evidenced by this whole chapter, the paranormal elements on display in the ATU's pages have persisted, even thrived, across era, culture, and media.
Across lifespans as well; scary stories are and have remained just as popular with children as with adults. Alvin Schwartz' profoundly creepy 1981 children's classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark illustrates the intergenerational appeal of spooky-scary narrative elements. And not just their appeal, but the direct narrative continuity between the we of now and the we of then. As folkloric narratives (Schwartz notes in his introduction that he adapted his stories from American folktales), many even echo ATU entries. Schwartz' delightfully odd “May I Carry Your Basket?”, for example, loosely follows the “The Offended Skull” narrative, although the skull is an old woman's severed head that the rest of her body is carrying in a basket (…ok), which, when dropped, gnaws the legs off the man who offered to help bear her burden (“Or invaded her personal space,” Phillips mutters sympathetically).
Given its venerable lineage, it's no surprise that a number of creepypasta stories have integrated the sentient, assaultive severed head motif. One example housed on the Creepypasta Wikia is a 2012 post by the user RoboKy called “12 Minutes.” In this tale, a religiously themed television program hosted by a charismatic Reverend premieres on a local network. As more episodes air, a disturbing trend emerges: beginning at the 12-minute mark of the show, pregnant viewers begin feeling nauseous and dizzy. Going through footage for clues, an intern finds that, 12 minutes in, frames showing a severed head are invisibly intercut into the rest of the program. The intern begins comparing the 12-minute mark of multiple episodes. Across each set of frames, the head mouths unintelligible words as it continues decomposing. Eventually the Reverend's endgame is revealed, as all those nauseous viewers miscarry their unborn children, bewitched by the severed head's “words of light.”
Whether or not the author of “12 Minutes” ever encountered “May I Carry Your Basket?” – or any other iteration of “The Offended Skull” – is, to echo an earlier point about the connection between the Slender Man and Phantasm, irrelevant, just like Natesw's familiarity with “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” is irrelevant. Tellers and audiences of any given story may not know how and when – or even that – they have encountered existing narratives. They don't need to; the inclusion of these elements speaks, regardless, to all the stories that have come before, swept up again and again into countless tales based on countless tales. The differences between iterations might be slight, or might be significant, as a fundamental recombination of many narratives. In every case, storytelling is always as an act of borrowing from, and then feeding back into, a shared cultural tradition. In this way, the storytelling we functions as its own kind of phantom: an amorphous connection to an unseen past, which exerts its influence even on those who don't believe.
The multiple meanings of multiplicitous texts
The fact that prominent recurring motifs – for example, the “subliminal messaging on television” and “murderous zealots” motifs present in “12 Minutes” – have remained in circulation for so long hinges on the one characteristic that unifies even the most patchworked stories: storytellers include, and audiences share, content that resonates with them. This content must resonate, or else audience members wouldn't feel compelled to cast and recast those narrative seeds.
As straightforward as it might initially seem (“obviously people share the things they like”), the claim that resonance facilitates sharing explains how and why the ATU tale-type index contains the stories it contains. The ATU is not, as we've said, a random litany. Instead, it contains only the most memetically successful narrative elements: the stories people have shared the most, retold the most, and which were subsequently recorded by folklorists the most – all due to the fact that these were the references, conventions, and quotations that resonated most strongly, and which were, as a consequence, most frequently siphoned off from and returned to the collective cultural reservoir.
As evidenced by the preponderance of regressive narrative elements undergirding so many stories both within and outside the ATU, this collective reservoir is not always a source of purely nutritive water. That adds an additional layer of ambivalence to the already profoundly ambivalent collective storytelling process: the fact that these narrative building blocks contribute, implicitly or explicitly, to identity antagonisms and cultural boundary policing, even when the stories themselves don't seem politically prescriptive. In the context of urban legends, Brunvand (1981, 2001) notes that many stories are imbued with explicitly racist, classist, ableist, and sexist motifs. To this last point, and building on his analyses of gender stereotypes and “The Hook,” Brunvand chronicles a number of legends in which women are punished (or at least pathologized) for exploring their sexuality and rewarded for maintaining their chastity. Indeed, the implicit injunction present in many urban legends is that women who step out of line – a line that may vary from story to story, but which almost always posits a “right” and a “wrong” way to behave not equally applied to male protagonists – are asking for trouble. Asking for tragedy.
Some, particularly those individuals who don't encounter them in their everyday lives, might be tempted to frame such sexist motifs (to say nothing of the other regressive motifs on display) as relics of a less enlightened era, or at least as an unfortunate but ultimately contained minority opinion (“not all men”). But these motifs have stood the test of time online and off, evidencing their persistent memetic resonance. Natesw's (2014) “The Dead Girlfriend's Facebook” provides an example. In this story, the speaker (presumably Natesw himself, as the story is presented as a sincere first-person account) goes to great lengths to cast its deceased heroine as unaffectionate, unsubmissive, and, most damningly, uninterested in sex. In fact, Natesw explains, she resisted any form of intimacy unless he was drinking (curiously, Natesw makes no mention of whether or not the girlfriend also needed to drink). “I got fake-drunk a lot,” he explains, before recounting how he pretended to be drunk on Facebook chat to try and loosen up her ghost.
Even if these flourishes ostensibly add depth to the narrative, they also boil down to an implicit policing of the girlfriend's character and gendered communication style: while she rejected the gender norms that would have made her a “good” girlfriend (emotional warmth, sexual availability, general submissiveness), her unwanted photo tagging, constant cryptic messages, and simultaneous reticence to freely give her partner what he wanted marked her with a number of negative female stereotypes. Most conspicuously that, even after her death, she still wouldn't stop talking, specifically about things, and in ways, her boyfriend didn't like. Again, whether or not the author intended to rehash age-old sexist motifs, particularly the notions that “good girls” are quiet and sweet and carefully unobtrusive, their subtext and resonance persist. These motifs also persist in the vast corpus of urban legends that punish female protagonists for their talkativeness; as Brunvand (2001) catalogs, many a toddler has met a grotesque fate because the babysitter couldn't tear herself away from the telephone – a motif also implicit in the ATU's “The Corpse Eater”; when the bride was unable to keep her mouth shut, her husband literally ate her.
They may be strange; they may be creepy; they may even strike some readers as funny, if also pretty offensive. But these persistent regressive motifs cannot and should not be regarded as the fringe expression of fringe actors. If these kinds of narratives really were fringe, those seeds wouldn't have been continually cast and recast. They wouldn't have insinuated themselves into both vernacular and mass-market media. They wouldn't, as a result, have become ingrained in the broader culture. Not restricted to now, not restricted to then, but as an uncomfortable point of continuity spanning generation and degree of mediation. This is the crux of the ambivalence underscoring this whole book. Just as dirty or otherwise taboo cultural elements point to and often complicate that which is regarded as clean, ambivalence – that which is difficult to classify or is otherwise strange, creepy, or some combination of funny and offensive – has more to say about the center than it does about the periphery. In the case of collective storytelling, it illustrates the persistent cultural values on display when the same narrative seeds continue to be cast and recast. For better and for worse and for everything in between.
Digital divergences and runaway narratives
As we've seen throughout this book, digital media rarely, if ever, create wholly new categories of vernacular expression. Much more common is the process described by Henry Jenkins (2009) in his discussion of the origins of YouTube: new media, however emergent they might appear, are most successful when they provide people faster and easier ways of doing what they were already doing. In the case of collective storytelling online, people were, clearly, already telling plenty of stories. Online spaces have harnessed this existing narrative energy by allowing more participants to tell more stories. And thanks to the affordances of digital media, have punched the already blurred lines between individual creators and the collective chorus, self-contained texts and their infinite variations, and focused meanings and interpretive chaos, into hyperdrive. These shifts foreground the speciousness of referring to any aspect of any online story as singular. Even more so than in embodied spaces, stories online are never just one thing.
A tissue of (even more) authors, texts, and quotations
If the notion of singular authorship was untenable offline, online the very notion of specific, self-contained artifacts and specific, self-contained creators is thrown straight out the window. Millions and millions of Phillipses, remixing millions and millions of absurdist Martha Stewart collages, nodding to each other approvingly all the while. We've seen this process before, with a panoply of (childhood-ruining) memetic variations of cultural figures like Donald Duck, Peanuts and Looney Tunes characters, SpongeBob SquarePants, the Berenstain Bears – the list goes on.
In similar cases of analog “cut up,” texts are still marked by heteroglossia, and still densely referential. But no matter how many voices were implicitly contained in Lolita or Naked Lunch, or how many other texts they refer to or might influence, these novels can be attributed to what Barthes (1977) calls the scriptor, or “little a author.” The person whose name is on the byline; the person with whom the narrative buck ultimately stops. What distinguishes digitally mediated content is that the narrative buck often doesn't stop – often can't be stopped – with one little a author, much to the chagrin of the person who originally produced a given narrative.
One example, reported by Zachary Crockett (2015), is the erotic fan fiction surrounding “Erin Esurance,” the mid-2000s cartoon female spy mascot for the insurance company Esurance. The sexualized corpus devoted to Erin Esurance was so ubiquitous – and the character so fetishized, in so many different scenarios – that she had to be pulled from Esurance's marketing campaign. Erin Esurance's creator, Kristin Brewe, was mortified to learn that her character was being put to use for such explicit ends. A similar story, and similar mortification, unfolded in 2016 around the children's television program Arthur, which follows a cartoon aardvark as he navigates childhood. That summer, memetic images corrupting Arthur and his friends began to “take over the internet,” at least according to Paper's Sandra Song (2016). Many of these images followed the same trajectory as Dolan comics and Erin Esurance fan fiction, placing the otherwise innocent Arthur characters into a variety of compromising, and often explicitly sexual, scenarios. An untold number of participants had a field day remixing references to drug use, racist invectives, and incestuous couplings between Arthur and his younger sister into the source text (images redacted; we've put you through enough). So much so that the show's producers were forced to release a statement in July declaring that they were “disappointed” by the explicitness of the memetic play and urging participants to stop (which, of course, they did not).
What happened with Arthur, what happened with Erin Esurance, what happened with Dolan and the Berenstain Bears and SpongeBob SquarePants and Tommy Wiseau and Antoine Dodson and yes even Martha Stewart, God bless and keep her, all follow the pattern of identity hijacking described in Chapter 2. And they all follow the pattern of fetishistic, generative, and magnetic laughter described in Chapter 3. Each of these cases also highlights the ease with which producers big and small, both at the individual level and from the monochrome boardrooms of multinational corporations, can utterly, irreparably, lose control over their own narrative, thanks to collective vernacular expression online. This potential for amplified reappropriation lends even more salience to the age-old question: at what point does something of theirs become something of mine?
Beyond opening the chorus to every possible interested voice, digital media tools allow for an infinitely remixed and reappropriated textual cacophony. In the case of the Slender Man, countless narrative threads are woven into an ever-unfurling textual tapestry. Even when restricted to a single platform, it can be difficult, even dizzying, to keep track of the various narrative offshoots; on YouTube alone, there are millions of videos devoted to the collective Slender Man constellation. These videos represent a vast range of narrative content, from clips of broadcast news footage exploring the Slender Man phenomenon to purported “Slender Man in real life” found footage to shots of other people reacting in horror to the videos about the Slender Man that other YouTubers have posted. There are also short dramatic films, some of which boast sophisticated visual effects, as well as Slender Man music videos, operating under a range of production budgets. These clips may have been edited, recut, remixed, and uploaded by a single individual (though they might also represent a tweak on someone else's existing work), but once online, Slender Man participants across the globe are free to make this content their own by integrating existing clips into new narratives, integrating existing ideas into new narratives, or simply reacting, on camera, to other people's narratives.
As we've already seen, this visual heteroglossia has its roots in practices as old as cinema itself. But just as Xeroxlore is dwarfed by the deluge of memetic imagery ushered in by digital media, so too were early analog remix videos outside the skillsets and, quite literally, the toolsets, of most people. Digital technologies have narrowed that gap. Some digital remix videos require a good deal of technological skill, of course, or at least ample patience and time. Take, for example, YouTube user Metkuratsu Mizuiro's 2013 mashup called “SLENDER MAN visits the Krusty Krab,” which intercuts scenes from SpongeBob SquarePants with existing Slender Man imagery. Overlaid on a television backdrop “to avoid copyright,” as the description explains, this video opens in the Krusty Krab (SpongeBob's place of employment) as his cranky neighbor and co-worker Squidward grows increasingly frightened while reading a book. After falsely accusing SpongeBob of flickering the lights, the phone rings. It's SpongeBob's best friend Patrick, a starfish, who screams for protection against the Slender Man. “He's just standing there,” Patrick bellows. “Menacingly!” Sirens can be heard blaring in the background. Squidward looks up, terrified. And there, in the doorway, is the Slender Man himself. What will Squidward and SpongeBob do??
In order to tell its dark tale, “SLENDER MAN visits the Krusty Krab” required a careful search of available SpongeBob footage and then a laborious manipulation of that footage so that it coheres with a typical Slender Man narrative. But in other cases – say, for example, reaction shot Slender Man videos, in which a webcam is trained to the face of someone watching someone else's video and captures their fearful reaction (reactions that also often include a great deal of nervous laughter in addition to shrieks, wide eyes, and full-body wincing) – vast technical know-how is not a necessary requirement. And vast technical know-how is certainly not required to copy a link and paste a link, immediately intertwining one individual story with the stories of others.
Not every multimodal remix of an existing story is an obviously recognizable or traditional narrative – one with a clear protagonist, plot, and some form of resolution. However, each remix is cobbled together from existing stories, and each has the potential to shape subsequent understandings of existing narratives (that's the “ruined” in “you ruined my childhood,” Arthur). And as they spread, these novel (yet still cobbled together, still “old”) narrative threads may in turn influence countless other threads of countless other stories. In the process, one digital text can transform into thousands of digital texts for thousands of people overnight – say it with us, for better and for worse. Online, that makes all the difference.
The (even more) multiple meanings of (even more) multiplicitous texts
Each time these resonant seeds are gathered by a new audience and retrofitted to align with listeners' political or emotional needs, meaning becomes that much more ambivalent, even more markedly than in embodied environments.
One conspicuous source for this ambivalence hyperdrive is Poe's Law, which has haunted this book (it's always just standing there, menacingly). It's simply not possible to know – particularly when a poster is anonymous, but also when a poster is named but unfamiliar – why someone is posting, for example, a frightening narrative to /x/ or /r/NoSleep. Maybe that person really had an experience they can't explain. Maybe they didn't, but want to entertain their readers. Maybe they want to revel in their readers' gullibility. Maybe something else entirely; maybe there is no reason – not one the poster could consciously identify, anyway. Regardless of what kind of story is being presented, regardless of the collectives in question, these motives are often impossible to ascertain just by observing. So much so that in many cases, a poster's intended meaning is moot, or at least is a nonstarter: there's often no way to satisfactorily verify or refute one's suspicions.
In his analysis of the “bogus warnings” circulated on photocopied flyers, as well as other urban legends featuring dubious stories of crimes, scams, and health concerns, Brunvand (2001) provides an analog outcropping of Poe's Law. Whether or not a story is true, or at least is believed to be true by the teller, certainly isn't always clear offline. That said, most of the false (or at least probably false) narratives Brunvand describes are shared within the context of embodied relationships and spaces. This in turn influences how listeners evaluate the information. For example, if your co-worker, who you think is an idiot, shares a warning about cordless phones causing children's brains to overheat, you are much less likely to take the message seriously. Conversely, if a person you know and trust seems genuinely concerned about a particular crime statistic (or a murderous Bigfoot or a vanishing hitchhiker – Milner has been burned many times), you are more likely to give the warning credence, even if it turns out to be false.
On anonymous online message boards, however, it's not clear who is sharing what, for what purpose. 4chan's /b/ exemplifies how fraught the “bogus warning” narrative genre can be online. After all, while much of the content posted to /b/ is false, and aggressively so, some is true, complete with documentation. However, through the magic of photo manipulation, sometimes that documentation isn't authentic either. Often it's impossible to know what's play and what's truth and what's both, and therefore impossible to know whether /b/'s boilerplate disclaimer – “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact” – is itself a convenient lie. Nothing on /b/ is ever true; that is, until it is. 
. Good luck.
This ambivalence is reflected in the countless warnings, rumors, and life tips that are posted to the board. Some of them tried-and-true copypasta, these narratives often include images, annotated instructions, or other ostensibly helpful information. Sometimes they're very slick, and sometimes very amateur (depending on the context, either could communicate more authenticity). The most successful of these narratives – the most likely to be engaged with and reposted on the site and elsewhere – convey just enough context to make the ruse plausible. One classic copypasta example admonishes Windows users to delete their “System32” file, a move that would, if heeded, destroy one's operating system and completely brick their machine. This outcome is of course masked in the surrounding narrative, as this archetypical account – one collected by Milner on /b/ in 2011 – demonstrates:
When Microsoft was first getting started, they knew they wouldn't make enough money just from the profits of their operating system. Everybody knows people pirate Windows. So they had to get creative. A guy named Chris Liddel came up with the idea to put a folder called “System32” in the Windows folder that literally slows down your machine – on purpose. “System32” holds 32 GIGABYTES of deleted files, internet history, uninstalled programs, and other worthless crap that intentionally clogs up your machine. Why did they do it? Because Microsoft owns several PC “cleaning” tools, like TuneUp Utilities, Norton Antivirus, etc. More money for them. /b/ isn't cool with that, however. Here's how to out-smart those assholes once and for all:
Open Notepad
Type the following text:
@echo off
del c:\\WINDOWS\system32
Save as “speedup.bat” (select “all files” instead of “text document”)
Double-click the .bat file
Reboot, and your PC is twice as fast. (You didn't hear it from us)
The narrative elements of the disastrous advice lend plausibility to the prank. A justification for why this file needs to be deleted is provided (one that is both marginally believable and anti-elite). Specific names are dropped in to bolster credibility (from a supposed Microsoft employee to recognizable brands that Microsoft allegedly owns). Affiliation is created between the addressee and speaker (let's “out-smart those assholes once and for all”), who is doing the addressee a favor that they really don't have to or shouldn't be doing (“You didn't hear it from us”). Further, the first-person plural associated with /b/ signals that the advice comes from a member of the supportive ingroup. Even if audience members already know the game, or simply just know better, the narrative instills hope that others might follow the advice, and suffer the consequences.
Sometimes, responses to bad advice become legendary themselves (and are equally compelling in their “just might be true” claims to authenticity). For instance, the text below comes from a screen capture of a purported 2009 post to /b/, which Milner collected in 2015. Assuming the screen capture isn't itself photoshopped, the text furnishes an account of someone who followed – or claims to have followed – a posted (and highly dangerous) recipe for making “really cool crystals” at home:
WELL THANKS ALOT B.
I come every day on this site for like 2 months and I always participate in stuff this site says but this time is almost fucking killed me.
I am writing this shit from the hospital because I almost fucking died.
some shitface posted something to make crystals from some regular stuff everyone has. If I remember correctly it were: soda, salt, some pennies (the copper I needed), ammonia and a bit of laundry bleach.
I had to mix it and blow through a straw until I became dizzy because then there would be more CO2 in there so there would be nice colours in the crystal.
The docter said they found mustardgas or something in my body (WAT THE FUCK) and I was passed out for a few days.
Have to stay here for like 1 week more and my parants cut of the internet.
Thnx alot motherfuckers …hope everyone of you die
Picture related …it's the crystal he said I was going to get but instead I got something which almost killed me.
Produced by and for an environment where Poe's Law casts a long shadow, the implied authenticity of the text echoes the infamous Jenkem scare of 2007 (see Phillips 2015 for more on /b/'s supposed designer drug, concocted from fermented urine and feces). This apparent authenticity hinges on several communicative markers. The poster was patient; the response was posted a few days after the original recipe made its rounds on the site. It is formatted in the fractured style of 4chan narratives, containing site-specific vernacular grammar and spelling, and is tonally consistent with the site's typical post. Readers are given just enough context, and just enough confirmatory detail, to encourage suspension of their disbelief. Like when the man in the ATU tale-type tricks the ogre into self-castration, these texts revel in the possibility of harming those not smart enough to avoid harming themselves. Maybe this time the prank had worked; dare to dream.
The collective re-creation of these bogus warnings – accompanied by re-creations of their supposed effects – might be a halcyon delight to the ingroup, but echoing discussions of constitutive humor in Chapter 3, can be intensely marginalizing to those cast as outsiders – say those poor souls who do try to delete System32, or any other of the “life hacks” designed to actually ruin, or even snuff out, one's life. These tensions are hardly restricted to digitally mediated spaces, of course. Collective storytelling online is in many ways an extension of collective storytelling in embodied spaces: that is to say, full of texts and practices that straddle the line between community and divisiveness, enjoyment and critique, veracity and, frankly, bullshit. But things are faster online, and they are more tangled, and while one should always do one's best to look before one leaps, this reminder is even more pressing on the internet. And whatever you do, friends and neighbors, never inhale anything recommended on a message board.
Chapter overview and looking forward
Because they draw from hybrid vernacular sources and creatively reconfigure existing narrative tropes, all stories are collective, at least implicitly. And because these collective stories occupy both sides of the singular and multiple, fixed and dynamic, and old and new divides, they are definitionally ambivalent. And because they are definitionally ambivalent, they reveal that apparently straightforward demarcations between author and audience, between this text and that text, between universal meaning and audience-specific meaning, don't need much jostling before they start to crumble. Stories are many things, to many people; and so they signal and accomplish and complicate many things. They signal and accomplish and complicate even more things online, where the line between me and us, this and that, one and many, is even more blurred.
Things get fuzzier still when we push beyond the stories people tell to the values they hold dear. The following chapter will explore this most cacophonous chorus of voices, the chorus of public debate. Building on all the vernacular practices we have described thus far, the chapter will unpack the fundamental ambivalence of voice: that which can help, harm, build up, cut down, empower, marginalize, and everything in between, often all at once. A final nod to all that is new, and all that is not, about the ambivalent internet.