It's Creepypasta Time.

Scareh.

Halloween arrives in just four days. I've only just now started reading Creepypasta again, and I'm rather disappointed in myself. The month of October is, for me, completely void of sleep most years.

I don't know what it is about a good Creepypasta that is just so damn frightening. Perhaps it is how poorly written most of them tend to be, convincing you every time that a real person--not some college student who wants to be a journalist/philosopher--wrote it about something that actually happened to them (without saying in all caps that it did, of course). The conjured image of the last survivor of some disaster scribbling out a warning and plastering it on the Internet for someone to find is both ridiculous and wonderful.

In fact, that was why smile.jpg didn't scare me at all. I could tell from the constant Thesaurus rape that whoever was writing it was trying to be some bigshot writer. Remember, kids: create images with your words, not just jumbled sentences of ridiculously long synonyms that make you look smarter.

You can find Creepypastas here, of course, but I like to go to the Wiki when I'm in the mood for a good scare; new ones often pop up there. I've pretty much read them all, so I'm always looking for new stories.

But there are a few things that bother me about Creepypastas, including but not limited to:

1. Stories that begin with, "please don't read this", or "I beg you not to continue reading." If the story is really quite long, most of the time I'll think, "Alright, then ^-^" and just hit backspace.
2. The idiot main character who for some reason goes through with the ritual pasta even though he is promised to either be killed or stricken insane.
3. Stories that begin or end with, "This was my first time writing a Creepypasta, guys!" or, "This was written by me, -insert random forum username here-, because I love Creepypasta." It's much more fun when the story could have been written by anybody. I guess that's why horror fiction doesn't bother me. I'm much more unsettled by myths and legends and other 'could be true' stories.
4. Video game Creepypastas. I don't know why, but I rarely find them scary. They're mostly addressed to the game's fanbase, however, so I guess that's why certain people find them horrifying.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, cliches bother me. The writing world is full of them.

Anywho, if you're knew to Creepypasta just as I was at around this time two years ago, I would recommend starting out with Candle Cove. It's the first one I ever read, and since then I was hooked.

I also agree with every single one of the choices on this list.

And here's a Tumblr full of them. I swear, I seem to have an infinite amount of Creepypasta links. This post would probably require some major scrollage if I were to list them all.