Ted the Caver
One of the earliest examples of the form, and possibly the first that really worked. In 2001 a diary appeared on the free host Angelfire: a man and a friend clearing a narrow side passage in a cave. The entries are matter-of-fact, with photographs and measurements, page after page; the tone shifts slowly over several weeks, and the disaster arrives well after the reader has stopped expecting one. It works because until the very end it does not look like a story — it looks like somebody's abandoned website.
Polybius: the arcade cabinet that never was
The story says that in 1981 a cabinet called Polybius appeared in the arcades of Portland, Oregon: no manufacturer's name on it, no usual queue — only children who afterwards suffered insomnia, seizures and gaps in their memory, and men in black who came to take readings off the machine. Not one photograph, not one board and not one document exists. The earliest written trace dates not from 1981 but from 2000, a post on an arcade collectors' site written almost twenty years after the "events".
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