FictionalWhite

The Rake

added30 August 2026

A hairless creature on four limbs, sitting beside a sleeping person's bed. It appeared around 2005 as a collaborative forum project: several users agreed to invent a monster and supply it with "historical evidence" — extracts from a 1691 ship's log, Spanish chronicles, diaries. Every document is fictional and was written the same evening. The case is interesting as a rare documented example of folklore being manufactured deliberately and from nothing.

Getting thereDirections Flights Where to stay Tours

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

A legend about a whole area — the pin is approximate

40.71273, -74.00602

New York Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

List of creepypastas — Wikipedia

More in New York

DebunkedWhite

The Great Moon Hoax

From 25 August 1835 the New York Sun ran a series of six articles reporting that Sir John Herschel, from the Cape of Good Hope, had seen life on the Moon through a new telescope: forests, herds of bison, temples of sapphire and intelligent winged people four feet tall, which he called Vespertilio-homo. The material was presented as a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which had by then been out of print for years. The Sun's circulation rose to fifteen thousand, the largest in the world. The author was the reporter Richard Adams Locke, writing satire on the fashionable speculation about inhabitants of the planets; the paper never printed a retraction, and Herschel learned of his discovery by post.

DebunkedWhite

Eusapia Palladino at Columbia

For twenty years the Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino lifted tables and materialised hands in front of the best scientists in Europe, and some of them went home convinced. Her method never varied: in the dark she substituted one hand or foot for another among the people controlling her, freeing a limb. The Cambridge sittings of 1895 showed it, and the matter was closed in New York in 1910, when investigators from Columbia University hired two conjurors. They took turns lying under the table and watched, in the dark, her foot come out of its shoe and brace against the leg. The report was printed in full and the American tour ended there.

DebunkedWhite

Barnum's Feejee Mermaid

In the summer of 1842 New York read in the papers that an English naturalist, Dr Griffin, had arrived with a dried mermaid from the South Seas. There was no Dr Griffin — he was Barnum's employee Levi Lyman, and Barnum wrote the letters to the editors himself. The specimen, leased from the Boston showman Moses Kimball, was the upper half of a monkey sewn to the tail of a large fish, one of dozens made by Japanese or East Indian craftsmen in the nineteenth century. Takings at the American Museum tripled. The original most likely burned with the museum in 1865.

DebunkedWhite

Mumler and the First Spirit Photographs

In 1861 the Boston engraver William Mumler found a translucent figure on a self-portrait and announced he had photographed his dead cousin. For years afterwards he photographed Civil War widows beside their dead — his most famous print shows Mary Todd Lincoln with the hands of the murdered president on her shoulders. New York tried him for fraud in 1869: P. T. Barnum appeared for the prosecution and produced a spirit portrait of his own, made in an evening. Mumler was acquitted because the court could not prove the method, but several of his ghosts were recognised as living Bostonians he had photographed earlier.

Everything in New York →

Nearest on the map

DebunkedWhite

Barnum's Feejee Mermaid

0 km away

DebunkedWhite

Mumler and the First Spirit Photographs

0 km away

DebunkedWhite

The Great Moon Hoax

0 km away

More: Fictional

FictionalOrange

The "Blue Whale"

The "Blue Whale" phenomenon (also known as "Death Groups," "f57," "Quiet House," or "Wake Me Up at 4:20") is a viral digital urban legend, an international moral panic, and a destructive social-media alternate reality game (ARG) that originated within the Russian-speaking web (principally the VKontakte platform) in late 2015. Between 2016 and 2017, the narrative of a clandestine syndicate of online "curators" systematically coercing hundreds of teenagers into self-harm across a 50-day sequence triggered massive public panic, prompted reforms in Russian criminal law, and gained global infamy as a supposed worldwide cyber threat.

FictionalWhite

The Blue Hand

The Artek International Children's Center (formerly the All-Union Pioneer Camp Artek) on the southern coast of Crimea near Gurzuf. Covering over 200 hectares beneath the slopes of Bear Mountain (Ayu-Dag), the world's largest youth camp complex functioned as the primary creative incubator for Soviet children's oral folklore. Here, around evening campfires and along the Black Sea shore, the quintessential Soviet camp creepypasta—the tale of the "Blue Hand"—was honed and passed down across generations.

FictionalGreen

The Black Grand Piano

Children's music schools, assembly halls of Soviet pioneer camps, and youth pioneer palaces (anchored symbolically by the Moscow Pioneer Palace on Sparrow Hills). Within Soviet juvenile subculture of the 1970s and 1980s, the classical instrument of bourgeois prestige and musical education transformed into the central artifact of an iconic urban horror legend: the "Black Grand Piano" (or "Black Upright"), which secretly drained the blood of young musicians.