X: Rake
It's time for a little Halloween in spring!
Good morning. Today is décadi, the 10th of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le râteau, a tool for clearing the junk off those garden beds.
While rakes are useful in the spring – I've definitely used mine – they're so associated with falling leaves that it's hard not have your mind cast back to autumn with this sudden appearance of the tool. So let's do a little Halloween, and take a look at the phenomenon of "creepypasta" through the personage of the crawling beastie, The Rake.
For those who don't know, creepypasta is campfire ghost stories for the internet. The phenomenon dates back to about 15 years ago, when the web was shifting from its Gen-X-driven age of DIY sites reflecting individual interests to its Millennial-driven age of congregation and socializing (eventually exploited by than subsumed into the social media corporatocracy).
The name is a play on "copypasta," a term for any post that is just copy-pasted over and over across multiple blogs or forums, sometimes by the original author, sometimes by people wanting to claim credit for the content ... just think text-based memes. Creepypasta was essentially this but for eerie, horrific, gruesome, or supernatural stories.
If you're looking for an origin story, the infamous 4chan site provides it with a specific sub-board that solicited a contest for new monsters to invent and spread into the world, reminiscent of the romantic goth teens who gathered in Lord Byron's villa and challenged each other to write scary stories, resulting in the first English-language vampire story and, of course, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In this case, the contest yielded The Rake and Slenderman.
Of the two, Slenderman has been more ultimately "successful" as a horror meme, attaching its properties to several works of art and, tragically, one teenaged murder case. But The Rake was more successful initially, spreading like wildfire across Live Journal, Something Awful, and 4chan itself in CCXVI (2008).
In appearance, The Rake is an animalistic humanoid who creeps around on all fours despite being built to walk upright. It is always hairless and bone-white, and usually has exaggerated black eyes and fangs. In stories, The Rake shows up at night where people are sleeping to menace them silently, then scuttle towards them, sometimes whispering something insanity-making in their ears, before clawing them to pieces and scurrying away.
The story that was copied the most was from Bryan Somerville, who borrowed a page from Bram Stoker by including fictional quotes from historical sources, claiming that Rake sightings have been common over the centuries if you know where to look, but the documentation is typically brief, since so many of the writers die soon after seeing The Rake.
There was an actual news story about a Berwick Monster that seemed to fit The Rake tale and lend it validity. Some deer hunters near Berwick, Louisiana, captured footage of a pale creature crawling quickly by in the background of grainy footage of a campfire. The footage made several newscasts and kicked of a brief bout of cryptid mania until it was revealed to have been a hoax filmed to promote JJ Abrams' film Super 8.
While creepypasta forums live on as a darker side of fanfiction, the innovators in the field of web-based ghost stories have largely moved into the realm of film, where YouTube memes like the backrooms, where supposed amateur filmmakers creating low-budget horror fall into a pit and find themselves in unexplained surroundings.
In a move that takes things full circle, a playable version of the backrooms has been built in Roblox in which The Rake appears to chase you, proving that creepypasta is alive and well in the new Gen-Z-driven era of metaversal experiences (which, sorry Mark Z, will have nothing to do with Meta's metaverse).
Someone did make a movie about The Rake, but the fact that I have to break that news to you (as well as that it's entirely available for free online) says a lot about its quality. Campfire ghost stories really only work when it's an atmospheric telling by a friend, and professionalizing them usually saps all the fun out of the slight thrills they can create.
If you're interested in exploring more creepypasta, this video gives a quick rundown in a helpful order from silly to scary:
Today's card: 2 of spades
In a result that will surprise nobody who's had a new baby or a new dependent or a new family member to take care, the result of all this extra work with new people in a new situation is that we're going to feel drained. There's not going to be much more of us to put into anything else for a while. The good news, though, is that this is not going to have the disastrous effect on our income that we feared. We'll be taken care of, just exhausted. Thanks for playing along with this reading. A new one starts tomorrow!
