Fictional

Candle Cove

added30 August 2026

Kris Straub's 2009 story, written entirely as a forum thread: several people reminisce about a children's puppet show a local station ran in the late sixties. The memories agree on the details, then get worse, and in the last post one participant's mother says there was no programme — the television showed static in those hours, and the child sat watching it. The form matters more than the plot: the text does not pretend to be a story, it pretends to be somebody else's conversation.

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38.53675, -82.68294

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Sources

List of creepypastas — Wikipedia

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Cryptid

Point Pleasant, Home of the Mothman

Between November 1966 and December 1967, people in this town at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha reported a winged figure some two metres tall with glowing red eyes — dozens of sightings. The first came from two couples driving past a disused explosives plant at night: the thing, they said, kept pace with their car at a hundred miles an hour. The reports stopped on 15 December 1967, when the Silver Bridge collapsed and forty-six people died — a coincidence that tied the Mothman to premonition for good. A steel statue of it stands downtown.

60 km away

Cryptid

Loveland and the Frogman

The Loveland Frog is a bipedal amphibious or reptilian creature with webbed digits, inhabiting the area around the city of Loveland, Ohio. It first appeared at 3:30 a.m. in May 1955. A businessman was driving along a rural road near the Little Miami River in Clermont County, close to Loveland, when he spotted three bipedal, wrinkled creatures under a bridge. They had webbed hands and feet, as well as no teeth. One of the frogs held up a stick that emitted sparks and gave off the scent of alfalfa and almonds. On August 25 of that same year, Mrs. Darwin Johnson and Mrs. Chris Lamble were swimming in the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana. Suddenly, Darwin Johnson began drowning and struggling for breath after a scaly hand grabbed her underwater and pulled her toward the bottom. When Chris Lamble swam closer, the mysterious attacker retreated, allowing Darwin Johnson to escape. Since the Ohio River flows through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Illinois, it stands to reason that the frogs could reach any of these states. In March 1972, police officer Ray Shockey was driving along East Kemper Road when he noticed a four-foot-tall, bipedal, leathery creature with a head and face like a frog or lizard. The creature leaped over the railroad tracks and apparently jumped into the Little Miami River. Scratches were found on the guardrails, though this is hardly proof of the Loveland Frog's existence, as a human would have left identical marks. Two weeks later, Officer Mark Matthews saw a similar frog on the road—four feet long, not counting its tail (which, notably, none of the other reported frogs had). The tailed body was lying on the road as if lifeless, but then stood up, crouched, and moved toward the guardrail. The officer fired a shot, but rather than killing the four-foot amphibian, he merely frightened it away. In 2016, Sam Jacobs was playing Pokémon GO behind the Beth Adam synagogue on Loveland-Madeira Road when he saw a large frog in the nearby river. Jacobs stated he wasn't sure if it was a frogman or just an extraordinarily large frog, but it walked out of the water on its hind legs. He added that he understood how crazy it sounded, but swore to its truth on his grandmother's grave.

159 km away

Cryptid

Flatwoods and the Braxton County Monster

On 12 September 1952 three boys watched something bright come down on the hill behind the Fisher farm. Going up with one boy's mother and a few neighbours, the group made out a figure some ten feet tall in a torchbeam: a dark pleated body like a skirt, and a red face shaped like the ace of spades, lit from within. It smelled, they said, of metal and burning, and half the party was vomiting by morning. The Air Force put it down to a meteor and an owl. The locals never did.

178 km away

More: Fictional

Fictional

The Black Hand and the Red Spot

Two stories from the same body, usually told back to back: the black hand that reaches out from under the bed or out of the wall, and the red spot on the ceiling that grows every night until it swallows the people living there. Both work the same way — the threat comes not from outside but from the flat itself, from the furniture and the walls, which is the one place a child cannot get away from. Folklorists have recorded them in many variants across the Soviet Union since the 1960s, and they remain the most durable layer of children's urban folklore.

Fictional

The Queen of Spades: calling her in the mirror

A Soviet children's ritual: in a dark bathroom you draw a staircase on the mirror in lipstick, light candles and call the Queen of Spades three times. If she comes she may grant a wish or she may strangle you — there are as many endings as there were courtyards where children played it. A direct relative of the English-speaking Bloody Mary and a dozen similar rites worldwide: always a mirror, darkness and a threefold call. The mechanism is the same everywhere because the job is the same — to turn fear into a game with rules.

Fictional

The Red Film

A late-Soviet legend: somewhere there is a special photographic film on which people come out undressed. It was usually attributed to a foreigner, a Japanese or a German, who asked to be photographed in front of a monument and then left with the film. The story rested on two things at once — on scarcity, under which any imported object was credited with impossible properties, and on adolescent curiosity, which had no other outlet in the country. No such film ever existed, of course.