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The Slender Man -

The Slender Man first appeared in a competition on a forum to photoshop the best spooky supernatural photo. One user came up with an out-of-focus image of a tall, slim figure standing close to a tree. It was accompanied by some text stating that the image was captured the day 14 children went missing. This gave birth to the legend of the Slender Man, or Slenderman.

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The Slender Man -

His story and appearance evolved as it was shared online and various users added new details. Today, Slenderman is an abnormally tall, thin figure who wears a dark suit. He has no facial features, just a smooth white head, and grotesquely long arms and fingers. He is said to lurk in abandoned buildings or deep in the woods. He stalks and abducts people, but also gets inside their heads and has them kill on his behalf.

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The Slender Man -

The tales of Slenderman were still popular a decade later. The character gained even more notoriety when a terrible murder occurred in Wisconsin in 2014. Two 12-year-old girls lured their classmate into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. Miraculously, she managed to survive. The two girls convicted of the crime said that they did it to appease the Slender Man. Both were found to have serious mental health conditions.

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Smile Dog -

Smile Dog is one of the earlier creepypastas to circulate the dark corners of the internet, and employs the popular theme of the cursed photo. The story tells of an image file entitled Smile.jpg that contained a photo of a demented-looking Siberian Husky with a wide unnatural grin.

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Smile Dog -

Those who open the file and look at the photo will start to see the image out of the corner of their eye as the entity draws closer, terrorizing the victim. Eventually, they will be found dead, torn to shreds as if by a vicious dog.

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Jeff the Killer -

Jeff the Killer is described as a serial killer, and while he's human, he's so much creepier than most of the supernatural horrors on this list. Jeff has a smooth face that is dramatically white, small lidless eyes, and a huge grin. According to his origin story, he suffered a chemical burn to his face, after which he lost his mind and murdered his parents.

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Jeff the Killer -

He disappeared after the murder, and according to the internet, has carried on killing. His trademark is to hide in a child or teenager's closet and whisper "Go to sleep" to them through the door before slaughtering the entire family.

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The Smiling Man -

The Smiling Man is a story told from the perspective of a young man who describes himself as a bit of a night owl. He lived in a city and would often go for walks late at night while his roommates were asleep. He was strolling along a deserted road one night when he looked up to see the silhouette of a man dancing on the sidewalk ahead of him. He appeared to be doing some kind of bizarre, exaggerated waltz, each box step ending with a dramatic step forward.

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The Smiling Man -

The hero (or victim) of the story got closer and felt a chill as the man stepped under a street light. The man's eyes were wide open and his face was constantly pointed towards the sky, never looking down. He had a painfully wide grin stretched across his face. The overall effect was extremely unnerving.

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The Smiling Man -

The Smiling Man continued to dance-walk forward, and as the hapless walker tried to avoid him by crossing the road, he kept casually following him, sometimes disappearing from sight, but always reappearing a little closer. At one point, the Smiling Man gives up his dancing and starts to run toward the protagonist at full speed, his face still turned up to the sky. His target decided to run too and sprinted to a busier road. He managed to lose the Smiling Man and never saw him again, possibly because he never went for a walk at night again.

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The Expressionless -

In this tale, a woman in a white gown covered in blood stumbles into a hospital one night. She's covered in blood because she has a kitten clamped between her teeth, but the most terrifying thing about her is that she appears to be a mannequin. She had a completely flawless face with no eyebrows, and the other features appeared to be painted on with smeared makeup. However, she moved with a human-like fluidity. She collapsed to the floor and was taken to a private room, but the doctors and nurses could barely look at her for more than a few seconds because her unnatural appearance made them so uncomfortable.

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The Expressionless -

She maintained a perfectly calm demeanor and her face remained expressionless the entire time, but when they tried to sedate her, she fought back with all of her strength. They couldn't restrain her, and when a security guard arrived she ripped his throat out with her teeth.

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The Expressionless -

A terrified doctor asked her what on earth she was, as he looked at the grizzly scene she had created. She gave a creaking smile and whispered in his ear, "I... am... God..."

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The Russian Sleep Experiment - In this story, a group of five political prisoners captured by the Russians during World War II become the subjects of a horrifying experiment. They are forced into an air-locked living space where they aren't allowed to sleep for 30 days straight. The scientists observe the effects on these test subjects whose lives hold no value to them.

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The Russian Sleep Experiment -

Not only are they deprived of sleep, an experimental gas is pumped into the rooms that causes further horrifying side effects. The subjects slowly lose their minds as they become something less than human.

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NoEnd House -

NoEnd House is the name of a supposed haunted house experience, which is appropriately named because no one has ever made it through all nine rooms. NoEnd House hit the internet through the story of a college student called David. He heard that anyone who made it through the whole house would win US$500 and thought it sounded like easy money. He was pleasantly surprised when he arrived to see that it looked like a basic hotel with extremely basic Halloween decorations.

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NoEnd House -

The first two rooms were laughable, with little more to offer than fog machines and fake spiders. However, when David approached the door to room three, he was overwhelmed by a sense of dread. He opened the door and stepped into a room that simply contained a single chair and an old lamp. What threw him was that there were more shadows in the room than there should have been. He tried to go back through the door but discovered that someone had locked it behind him. When he turned back, all the shadows in the room had disappeared, including his own. In the next room, he found a darkness unlike anything he had experienced before, as well as total silence. Not only was it quiet, but it was as if he had lost the ability to hear. He couldn't even hear his own breathing or movements. At this point, he still had five more rooms to go...

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NoEnd House -

As David progresses through the house he comes across a room where all the doors disappear, and a terrifying entity that morphs back and forth from the form of a small child to that of a hooven monster. At one point, he escapes the nightmare house and makes it home. However, he finds his parents lying murdered on the floor, and realizes that he's still trapped in the supernatural reality of the house. He has to kill a creature that is the mirror image of himself in order to truly complete the challenge and escape.

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Robert the Doll - Robert the Doll is a story based around a haunted doll that really exists and can be found in the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, Florida. It was apparently owned by a local artist named Robert Eugene Otto, who got it as a gift when he was a small child around the beginning of the 20th century.

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Robert the Doll -

The doll came to life and began to terrorize Otto and his family, exhibiting the ability to change its facial expressions and giggle. The doll would reportedly show up in places no one had put it, and was the source of terrible misfortunes that befell the family.

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Robert the Doll -

When Otto grew up and moved out of his family home, Robert the Doll stayed behind. When Otto and his wife returned to his family home to live there after the death of his parents, the doll became active again and drove his wife insane. The doll was passed along to the new owners of the house over the decades, some of whom also reported strange activity. It was donated to the museum in 1994 and has become a popular tourist attraction.

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The Left/Right Game -

Have you ever heard of the left/right game? It's an incredibly simple but interesting concept, the perfect idea for a viral challenge. The game simply requires you to get in your car and take the first available left turn, then the next right turn, then the next left turn, and so on and so forth. Legend has it that you will eventually end up somewhere you've never been before, in a place that isn't quite natural.

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The Left/Right Game -

The left/right game was popularized through the story of a journalist named Alice who decided to do a ride-along with some intrepid adventurers planning to try it out. The story is told through her notes, recovered after her disappearance.

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The Left/Right Game -

According to Alice's notes, the turns eventually took them further and further into a sense of disquiet. Things started to seem off about their surroundings, and Alice learns that the road starts trying to hide the turns so that you miss one. At this point, there's no turning back, and the consequences are deadly.

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My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me on Facebook -

This creepypasta went viral in 2014 when a user calling himself Nathan shared a story on Reddit. Nathan claimed that his girlfriend, Emily, had died in a car accident in 2014. Following her death, he had left her Facebook account active so he could hold onto memories of her. However, he starts to receive messages from her page from someone pretending to be her.

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My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me on Facebook - Nathan initially thinks it's a hacker, or perhaps even Emily's mother acting out of grief in a bizarre way. However, he sees that the messages are posted from locations like Emily's home and places where the two of them used to spend time. This 'Emily' even started to tag herself in his photos to harass him with further notifications.

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My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me on Facebook -

Nathan starts to notice that the fake Emily isn't coming up with any original text. All of her messages are like collages made by copying and pasting phrases from their message history, from when real Emily was still alive. Nathan claimed to be driven to the point of madness by the time he shared his story. The best part about it is that he includes screenshots of the conversations to add a chilling degree of realism.

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Psychosis -

Psychosis is a particularly scary tale because the source of the horror is ambiguous. Is this a tale of the supernatural, or simply a man who has lost touch with reality and is living in a paranoid fantasy? It’s up to you to decide. The story centers around a young man called John who has isolated himself in his apartment for a long time.

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Psychosis -

John has been working non-stop and hasn’t kept in touch with his friends who are getting worried about him. As they start to contact him and encourage him to get out, he starts to feel uneasy. He becomes suspicious of their intentions, and begins to question whether it’s really his friends who are texting and messaging him. Something about their messages seems a little off. What if there is another force out there trying to trick him into leaving the safety of his apartment?

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Psychosis -

John becomes more and more paranoid, and more and more convinced that something is wrong outside. There is a danger out there and some entity is contacting him through his phone and social media trying to lure him out. He barricades himself in, smashing all of his electronic devices so they can’t contact him anymore. The story ends with John in the padded room of a psychiatric hospital, describing the entities that disguise themselves as doctors and nurses.

Sources: (Grunge) (Mashable) (Inverse) 

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