Fictional

Smile Dog

added30 August 2026

One of the first internet horror stories built around a file rather than a text. It appeared around 2008: a journalist visits a woman to ask about a picture called smile.jpg that drives mad everyone who sees it; the woman refuses to talk and eventually sends the file. The trick is that the file does not exist — every "original" circulating online appeared after the story did. The reader has to imagine the image, and imagination does the job better than any drawing.

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41.87556, -87.62442

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Sources

List of creepypastas — Wikipedia

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Ghost sighting

Resurrection Mary

America's best-known vanishing hitchhiker. Since the 1930s drivers on Archer Avenue outside Chicago have told the same story: a fair-haired girl in a white ball gown asks for a lift, says nothing the whole way, and disappears from the car opposite the gates of Resurrection Cemetery. Attempts have been made to attach the story to several real girls who died young, and none of the versions fits the details. The vanishing-passenger plot is older than the motor car — it is known from tales of horse-drawn carriages — but the Chicago version is fixed to one road and one gate.

23 km away

Cryptid

Bray Road and the Wisconsin Werewolf

On a country road outside Elkhorn, drivers have reported the same thing since the late 1980s: a large creature covered in fur, standing or running on two legs, with a dog-like muzzle. A local paper gathered the accounts in 1991 and the Beast of Bray Road went national. What sets it apart from the usual Bigfoot story is the face — witnesses insist on a wolf's, not an ape's, and hold to it under ridicule.

116 km away

Fictional

The Backrooms: where the photograph was actually taken

The internet's most famous nowhere turned out to be the second floor of a furniture shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The photograph of a yellow corridor under humming strip lights was posted to 4chan on 12 May 2019 in answer to a request for images that felt "a bit off", and the caption underneath it grew into thousands of stories, games and videos about endless empty rooms you fall into by taking a wrong turn. In 2024 internet researchers traced the picture to its source: a 2003 photograph of renovation work on the upper floor of the former Rohner's furniture store, taken for a local hobby shop's website. The building is still standing at 807 Oregon Street, and there is a model shop in it today.

249 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.