Not too long ago, people shared jokes, stories, and lame inspirational messages by copy/pasting text into message board posts or email. On the message board 4chan, users started calling these text memes "copypasta," a catchy portmanteau of copy and paste. Among the copypasta lurked some seriously scary stories and urban legends, and by the mid-2000s, people were calling these stories "creepypasta."

Like spaghetti thrown at a wall, the name stuck. And certain creepypasta have carved out a place in the heart of internet culture (which was still beating! When the wind is right, you can still hear its screams).

The infamous Slender Man meme started out as a creepypasta that rapidly grew into an internet mythos as fans added their own stories and images to the canon. Other tales, like "The Rake" and "Candle Cove" also began as one-shot creepypasta but grew into urban legends, given life by communities like Something Awful, Reddit, and Tumblr.

While Slender Man has become so influential that it supposedly inspired a recent stabbing, many creepypasta posts are so hilariously terrible that they're more like in-jokes among fans.

Creepypasta fans agree on one simple, inviolable rule: assume that every story is true. In the fine tradition of urban legends and campfire tales, creepypasta are usually (but not always) first-person accounts of strange and spooky things that happened to the author or someone she knew.

And make no mistake–some of them are hair-raisingly scary. These recommendations should deprive you of a night or two of sound sleep.

Cre - Internet