Previously: “Lake Of Pumpkins.”

You’re all wise enough not to entrust any of your valuable information to an odd and seemingly untraceable website, right? I certainly hope so — otherwise you might end up like the unnamed protagonist of the creepypasta “One Million Viewer.”

I’ll always have a soft spot for creepypastas that deal with oddities on the internet; given that creepypasta itself is an entirely internet-based form of horror, stories that do this ground themselves nicely in what makes the tales so deliciously frightening in the first place: We are, ourselves, so often in the same positions in which the narrators of these stories tend to find themselves — which makes it not so very difficult to imagine ourselves caught up at the center of a horror story of our own.

[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]

“One Million Viewer” was penned by someone going by the name ApeJazzPistol; they first published it to their DeviantArt page in August of 2013 before uploading it to the Creepypasta Wiki just a few months later, in November of that same year. They created some supplemental art to go with it — a handful of images — which, again, is a creepypasta convention I’ll always adore; since the idea of these stories, these digital urban legends, was originally for them to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, supplemental material always adds a nice little dose of reality to an otherwise fantastic premise.

Find a brief excerpt below, and read the full story over at the Creepypasta Wiki.

***

I believed myself to be very dull until I linked up my account on a website called, “<1>000000.icu”. I got a message in my inbox from some random user about this site, who said that if I wanted a million viewers, I should link my email address to the site. I put the site address in Google search to verify if it was spam; however, there was nothing. There were no articles or even a direct link to the site.

Curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked the link from the message.

Keep reading…

***

Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!

[Photo via cottonbro studio/Pexels]