Crappy Pasta

you probably think you know elmo right? all sweet and innocent with his dumb little dances, well you're wrong. i saw the real elmo and hes evil on the niside.

this happened one stormy night when i was maybe 7 or 8 idk i don't really remember bc trauma lol my mom worked nights some weeks and would drop me off at my grandma's. she had one of those old clunky tvs that always hissed static until you hit it in the right spot. gran would put on sesame street reruns for me while she knit, but she'd always end up falling alseep so i'd be watching tv til like 3 am. this night, the intro started normal just like every other expisode, but when grover hit the sesame street sign, he just screamed "fuckkkk" really loudly and didnt get up, he just laid there twistching until the song ended and it cut to the show.

it was zoomed out, but elmo was in the street with this little girl, i think her name was katie or chloe or something idk, and his voice was really glitchy like 2 voices at once, his normal happy voice and this deeper grainy undercurrent.

"tickle me one more time and i'll shank you and your hole family"

the girl looked like she was about to cry. the camera zoomed in so they were in the center of the frame and he just smiled like nothing happened and said "it's important to be honest, isn't it katie?"

she jjust nodded alll shakily.

"you should always tell the truth even if you're scared it might get daddy in trouble."

katie started sobbing silently, shaking like she was trying to keep it inside her. and i swear, i know it's not possible, but elmo rolled his eyes.

the screen glitched froze and started getting all staticky for a few seconds before switching back to the show. elmo was wlaking down sesame street with a knife in his hand, and his fur looked all wet and sticky like it was covered in blood. there was no sound other than the blade dragging against the floor.

elmo went to oscar the crouch's trash can and banged on the lid. oscar popped out and started complaining about elmo waking him up.

"can i be honest oscar?" elmo asked

"yeah of course, even grouches need to know the truth"

"i don't like you very much" and then he just sliced off oscar's fucking head and it started spewing stuffing and even as the head it the ground his mouth was still moviing.

the camera panned to grover, who was walking down the street humming and he saw oscar's head sticking out of the trash can and went to say hi.

"you should have stayed home grover" said elmo in his best imppression of oscar's voice before he jumped out of the trashcan and tackled grover. he started strangling him and the sounds were so real like you could hear him fighting for breath and his bones cracking and the strangled gasping.

then the screen cut to big bird's birthday party.

everyone was there, all the muppets and the humans too like maria, gordon, alan and the rest. they were standing around this mouldy cake with "happy birthday" written in blood red icing in chiller font. they were singing happy birthday but it was backwards like reversed.

elmo walked in holding the knife but nobody moved, they just kept smiling and singing but you could see their eyes all scared starting to water evven the muppetts. and then elmo went up to each of the humans and just stabbed and stabbed and stabbed while they kept singing happy birthday and my older cousins had shown me liveleaks before so i knew this was real the way they screamed and the guts fell out you couldn't fake that all yellow and squelchy and gross covered in blood.

after everyone was dead, he turned to the camera and looked right at me.

"can i be honest op? i know where you live"

For years of my life, Michael Jackson haunted me. Yes, you heard that right. Michael Jackson, pop star extraordinaire. The Smooth Criminal himself. You may not believe me, but I know the truth. Others may have experienced this, I’m not sure. If you have, I’m sorry. I hope you find the freedom that I have. He died on my birthday. June 25, 2009. I didn’t know in the morning. I went into school, so excited, and people were crying. They were all crying. I didn’t understand, I didn’t know why, I didn’t care – it was my birthday! They should be caring about that! In a fit of rage, I cursed MJ. I said I didn’t care, that people shouldn’t be sad over him, they should be celebrating me. And then I moved on with my day. Things changed after that. It was subtle, at first. A general feeling of unease, like I was being watched. I developed a fear of the dark. I felt like I could sense something, standing outside my window. I used to like to listen to music in the shower. I was raised with my grandparents, and liked “older” music as a result. Queen, ACDC, Bowie…and Him. Any other music would be fine. But if I played His music in the shower, intentionally or not? The whole house would have a power cut. Without fail. And then the dreams started. I didn’t make the connection at first, and so I called him “The Drum Man”. They would happen every night. I was scared to go to sleep, because I knew He would be there. Every single night, when I managed to fall asleep, I would dream of the following: I was in bed, in my room. Everything looked exactly like it did in my waking nightmares. My curtains would be closed, but I would bolt up when I heard It. The light of the moon would be just enough to illuminate behind my curtains. It would all be fine, except for a Shadow in the middle of my window. Him. And I would hear that sound I came to dread: Three. Slow. Drumbeats. Then silence. Then Three. Slow. Drumbeats. He would do this, and he wouldn’t stop, and I knew it was Him after a while, and I would work myself up into a frenzy until I woke myself up. My grades suffered. I’d never slept particularly well as a child, but this made my insomnia so much worse. I struggled to stay awake in school, my teachers were worried, my friends and family more so. I couldn’t tell them what was happening. And then I started seeing him outside of my dreams. I would hear “hee hee” faintly, echoing across the park when I was alone. I would see flashes of glitter disappearing around corners. I knew it was Him. I knew He was watching me, always. I could feel it. I knew, somehow, innately, that if I left my bedroom past midnight, He would get in. He would drop that drum and find his way in to get me. I can’t talk about the night in which I decided to confront him. I cannot tell you the horrors that happened. I still have a scar down the back of my leg. It has never faded. It never will. But I’m free. I haven’t seen him or heard him since then. Please, for your sake, never curse MJ. I cannot warn you enough. He will follow you. He will find you. He will not stop unless you find a way to stop him. I cannot tell you how.

Submitted by Sanya

Have you ever heard of the Evil Afro Guy? I’m guessing you haven’t, and probably think that name is vaguely racist. But if you ever played Poptropica during the heyday of Flash, you might have seen him. Maybe you disregarded him as nothing but a glitch. For those of you who don’t know, Poptropica was a children’s online adventure game in the 2010s, in which players complete many quests on various “islands.” I loved getting lost in all those worlds, bouncing around every scene like a maniac. Out of curiosity, I looked it up again a few weeks ago, and it turns out most of the islands have been wiped. There’s only a couple on the map now, none of them from when I used to play. They say it’s because Flash died and they couldn’t port everything over, but I know better. I know it’s because of him

I was eight the first time I saw him. It was late, I was supposed to be asleep but I’d snuck onto the desktop computer in my room anyway once I was sure my parents wouldn’t check on me. I was in the Soda Pop Shop on Early Poptropica Island. Usually it was pretty busy, that commonroom with the checkerboard floor and neon signs laggy as hell and filled with dozens of avatars bouncing around playing mini-games. But that night, it was empty. Except for him. He was grinning with pure white skin, wearing a white vest and black pants. And of course, as the name suggests, he had a black afro. As far as the crazy character customisation on the game went, this was incredibly basic. Boring even. But something about it still gave me the creeps. 

Having nothing better to do, I decided to add him as a friend. It was odd, instead of the silly Poptropica character names like Zany Hamburger or Purple Foot, his showed up as UNDEFINED UNDEFINED. I disregarded it as a glitch. Great as the game was, it was famously riddled with them. I decided to challenge him to a game of Skydiving. I had a 5 star battle ranking and expected some easy wins, but he obliterated me. Every single time. Before I could even click to jump, it was over. My childish ego was bruised, and like any sore loser, after the 7th humiliation, I ended the minigame. Instead, I decided to use the in-game chat system to talk to him. 

“Who’s your favourite Poptropica character?” I picked from the canned list, expecting Black Widow or Dr. Hare. His answer appeared instantly.

“You are, [MY NAME].”

I froze. Not my username, not my character’s name. My real name. The one I knew I hadn’t entered anywhere. Poptropican eyes follow the player’s cursor, but his were staring into me, black pupils boring through the screen.

I tried to shut down the browser window, get away from him, but my mouse and keyboard weren’t working. I could hear my heart pound over my sister’s faint snoring and the whir of my computer fan.

My Poptropica character started crying. Her cartoon tears rained as she wailed with a silent mouth and I didn’t know what to do. Then he asked me a question. In the same style as the pre-scripted Poptropica bubbles, but I knew this was definitely not part of the game.

“How do you want to die?”

Above my character, still crying, were actual clickable answers.

• Drowning
• Suicide
• Car crash

My hand wasn’t on the mouse, I swear to God it wasn’t. But the cursor moved, gliding towards the options like some twisted planchette. I didn’t want to find out what it would select. Panicking, I yanked out the power cord straight from the back. The screen went black and I gasped out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding in relief. With trembling fingers, I slapped a random horse sticker from the drawer in my desk onto my webcam. I didn’t sleep that night. 

You’d think I’d never touch Poptropica again after that, but I was a dumb kind and it was a fun game. I figured it was just a hacker and I’d be fine if I avoided the common rooms. I deleted him from my friends list the next time I logged in, but when the page refreshed, he was still there. Only now his name wasn’t UNDEFINED UNDEFINED, it was Gentle Seal. That was my sister’s character. Her Poptropican, the one with the Viking helmet and twin braids, was gone. It had been replaced by him. I asked her about it, maybe she had changed her appearance as a sick joke – though there was no way she could have known – and she had no idea what I was talking about. She hadn’t played the game in months. We tried logging into her account but it just didn’t work. User not found. 

I ended up making a new account. If you’ve read my previous blog post, you’ll know that I switched my original account after a year. This was why. It was a completely different username, and I made sure my new Poptropican looked nothing alike the first. I didn’t go to common rooms anymore. I just stuck to the islands. The islands were safe.

Until he came back.

I was on Mythology Island, trying to costumise the rose crown from Aphrodite. But when I opened the costumiser, she wasn’t there. Evil Afro Guy was. His eyes flickered wildly as he grinned at me, bloody sockets flashing between cartoon frames. Even with my webcam covered, I knew he was watching me. Another time on Spy Island, Director D had been replaced by Evil Afro Guy. When I clicked him, instead of his usual mission, the text bubble overflowed with garbled unicode. I couldn’t make out any of it, but it filled me with a pit of dread. I refreshed the page and it returned to normal. Those things I could have dismissed as mere glitches, but I know there’s more to it. 

Do you remember the Goth Guy NPC on Reality TV Island? With the floppy hair and skull t-shirt? He wasn’t important to the plot or anything. If you played after 2013, you’ve probably never seen him and it’s all my fault. I had a bit of a crush on him as a kid even despite the goofy Poptropica art style and I wanted to take a screenshot of my Poptropican next to him. Just something silly. I clicked on him to initiate dialogue. He flickered. I blinked and he wasn’t himself anymore. It was Evil Afro Guy. I refreshed the page, and he was just…. Gone. No matter how many times I restarted the island, he just wasn’t there. I tried to ignore it, finish the rest of the island, but once I got to the Reality TV show aspect of the Island, instead of the usual variety of characters, all of the contestants were all identical. They were all him. They taunted me during the challenges. Not in the usual canned phrases. Real things. Awful, personal things. He knew things about me he shouldn’t, like what I really kept in the box under the bed, or why I’d burnt those journals. When I tried to vote any of them out, they spoke in unison, chat bubbles overlapping.

“You can’t get rid of me.”

I never finished that island.

I stopped playing for good after that. Years slipped by and I grew older, time hazing over any memory of Poptropica. I’d convinced myself it was just a bad dream I’d had and moved on with my life. Until a few weeks ago. I’d seen a post about Poptropica on one of those nostalgia-bait Instagram accounts, and something about it made me want to log in again, prove to myself how silly my childhood nightmare had been. My account was exactly the same 15 years later, but the game itself had been stripped down. The sprawling multi-page map had been gutted to just 3 and all the islands I remembered were gone. Early Poptropica, Spy, Mythology, Reality TV. They may as well have never existed. At first I believed the official story, the death of Flash and budget cuts. But the more I expired the overly simplistic and polished new islands, the more I was convinced otherwise. The removal of the costumiser feature really solidified it for me. They didn’t lose the islands, they quarantined them. Removed any feature that could have let him slip through. Sealed away childhood joy to stop him spreading. The new islands were sterile, purposefully dull. No more real interaction. Safe. 

Or so I thought. I saw a thread on Reddit (sue me, I know), discussing how to play the old islands. Flashpoint was heralded as a popular option. It’s a sort of digital archive that lets you play dead Flash games offline. Local copies, stored directly on your computer. No central servers, no web devs to monitor or patch any cracks. All the old islands, all the old code. Everything exactly as it was. Including him.

I doubt anyone will listen, but please, DO NOT DOWNLOAD FLASHPOINT. You aren’t just resurrecting the old islands, you’re resurrecting Evil Afro Guy too. And with every computer he has access to, he only grows stronger. They may have removed the common rooms, but he will find a way. And when he does, it will already be too late.