BEN Drowned in Majora's Mask
BEN Drowned, also known as "Haunted Majora's Mask", is one of the most well-known creepypastas in Internet history. Alex Hall's original 2010 story was posted under the username "Jadusable", and told of a special Nintendo 64 cartridge of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask whose supernatural properties send its player down a spiral of madness over the course of five days.
The story starts out innocently enough; a college sophomore receives an old Nintendo 64 from his friend, and after exhausting the game it comes with, he drives to various yard sales and buys a cartridge with "Majora's Mask" scribbled on it from an old man whose right eye had that "glazed over look about it." When Jadusable fires up the game back home, there's still a save file named "BEN". He observes occasional glitches when he starts his own save file, but chalks it up to it being a "shady looking game cartridge" until NPCs (other non-player characters in the game) start calling him "BEN". He deletes BEN's save file, but now the NPCs won't call him anything at all.
From then on the game goes completely haywire: events occurring out of order, boss fights appearing where they shouldn't be, the inability to choose the "No" option, being teleported to a Clock Town void of everything but "the ominous feeling that there was something out there, in the same area as me and that it was watching me."
Jadusable recalls being struck with a wave of feeling on top of his fear and paranoia, a feeling that "I didn't even knew existed - it was such a twisted, powerful presence that seemed to wash over me." He walked through the ghost town, riddled with missing textures and once-peaceful music that has since been "butchered and distorted", and is so upset by his rebuffed efforts to leave the area that he runs into a pool to try and drown himself. Link (the player's character) grabs his head and the screen turns black. Jadusable is met with an image of Link's distorted Elegy Statue, an asset used in another part of the game that Link can summon with the song "Elegy of Emptiness" to weigh down buttons and switches in puzzles. Only now the Elegy Statue takes on an entirely different meaning; at random intervals throughout Jadusable's playthrough, the Statue teleports behind him, and Link's character either spasms or turns around to look out at the player through the screen.
In his next post, Jadusable writes of how he dreamed about the Elegy Statue following him. He returns to the neighborhood where he purchased the game cartridge, and is told that there was "an accident with a young boy named Ben" a couple years back. In-game, Link's horse is pointed towards the horizon. He swims in that direction, sees the Elegy Statue underwater, and drowns. The game continues to throw him around, one terror and game restart after another. Jadusable's roommate writes one of the posts for him, as he has moved back home. In his last post, Jadusable shares the notes he wrote over the past few days, which reveal that Ben's spirit has moved from the game to his computer via "cables and cords", and is able to communicate with him through the AI chat bot cleverbot.com. He even thinks that it's pushing further out -- "I'm beginning to feel something [...] there's something different about the air in my dorm room now." He discovers that Ben was just a previous victim of this "thing", which takes delight in manipulating him. Finally, Jadusable escapes to his school's library, and warns all readers not to download any of his videos, as all of the files from his laptop are corrupted with "him". He reflects on how he didn't really have any friends this semester, but he's grateful for the reader's support, for following him through to the end even if they didn't quite believe in him.
Jadusable pairs this riveting commentary with video excerpts of in-game footage posted to YouTube, showcasing visual "proof" of the glitch (or entity?) causing all the trouble.
"I just remember standing in the middle of South Clock Town realizing that I had never felt so alone in a video game before."
Herobrine in Minecraft
There is a similar folktale arising from the Minecraft community. Since its initial release in 2011, the sandbox video game has enjoyed immense popularity, despite what many describe as a pervasive feeling of loneliness that permeates the endless (yet incredibly self-rewarding) mining and crafting. Unless playing on a server with other players, you are spawned into a massive world, empty of life save for animals, monsters, and less-than-sentient villagers that you can trade with. A popular class of entertainers, "Minecraft YouTubers" usually take advantage of this empty space (both virtually and emotionally) by fabricating stories about exploitable glitches or unidentified entities that make the blissful routine of playing Minecraft a little more exciting. One such "community icon" is Herobrine, a corrupted version of the default player avatar ("Steve") who is said to be responsible for creating random constructions, long 2x2 tunnels (just big enough for a player to fit into), and cutting all the leaves off trees.
painting) in-game, and has a visceral reaction. It spreads, and other streamers report similar sightings. Herobrine is propelled to "meme status", and appears in many game modifications, fanart, and even jokes by the game developers. Fan-made stories describe being chased and killed by this figure. "Canon" theorizes that Herobrine is the brother of the game's creator, Notch, and was "embedded" into the game after an untimely death. He is also noted for showing many similar characteristics to a virus, due to his ability to manipulate the game world and send messages through its forums. There is also the distinct possibility that he is "simply a figment of the user's imagination" or a creation heavily inspired by Slenderman, who is already the source material for in-game monsters that do exist, Endermen.
After the Minecraft Wiki makes it abundantly clear that Herobrine is not real and has never appeared in Minecraft itself, it delves into his "canon": What started out as an obscure post containing a photoshopped screen capture to a 4Chan message board, a popular streamer named "Copeland" took an interest in the story and concocted a mass hoax that he passed off to his fans as real; twenty minutes into his stream, he "runs into" Herobrine (whose figure here is just a retextured
Even with 4.5 billion pages on the Internet, not a single one of them contains a definitive answer to the age-old question, “What happens when we die?” At best we get speculation and scattered anecdotes, and at worst we get stories like these. BEN Drowned and Herobrine are classic Millennial ghost stories. The utilize a widely-recognized cultural symbol – such as an existing videogame, which serves the dual function of providing an immersive world in which one can explore one’s own beliefs and problem-solving strategies, as well as providing the shared experience upon which an online community is founded to share these interior experiences – and invert it. A nostalgic, virtual home is corrupted into a strange, foreign thing that no longer follows the rules; seeing the game vulnerable and stripped down makes the reader in turn feel vulnerable. Once at college, a time in life commonly associated with homesickness and a yearning for a home that no longer exists, Jadusable reaches out for a nostalgia-inducing game from his childhood, only to be met with something completely unfamiliar to him. He retracts – “I’m just a kid, not even old enough to drink yet. It’s not fair, I want to go home, I want to see my parents again…” – and retreats. At the end of his story, he takes the next semester off so he can return home to recover from his experience with BEN.
It is easy to see how with emerging technology comes new modes of thinking about the most fundamental human dilemmas. BEN is the spirit of a deceased child haunting a game he once played, and Herobrine is the spirit of his host game’s developer’s brother (who, for the record, does not exist). In a virtual world where objects and strangers half a world away can be interacted with at the click of a button, we unconsciously demand that our ghost stories do the same. It doesn’t need to be real, and if it’s a creepypasta, it’s already guaranteed to be a fiction. So what elevates it from fiction to folklore?
For Malinowski, myths are etiological – their purpose is to explain why something exists or happens:
“Myths are stories which, however marvelous and improbable to us, are nevertheless related in all good faith, because they are intended, or believed by the teller, to explain by means of something concrete and intelligible an abstract idea or such vague and difficult conceptions as Creation, Death, distinctions of race or animal species.” (4:88)
Even in the late 19th century, James George Frazer believed that “the fear of the human dead” was “probably the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion” (1:vii). Death is too concrete, too real, so we want to remove its threat in order to deny it. It seems that the crime scene photos and black box videos to be found on Imgur and YouTube work only to desensitize us to the reality that is still just beyond our virtual grasp, so we turn instead to a rudimentary translation of this feeling – which Jadusable describes as that wave of feeling and presence – to the virtual world.
But that’s not all. Unique to this virtual world is the idea of unintentional glitching, and when you’re immersed in that world, no matter how shallow or deep, seeing the fabric of that temporary reality waver is always unsettling. In a massive randomly-generated world like Minecraft, glitches are bound to occur: odd tunnels with dead ends, biomes bleeding into each other, even trees without leaves. But humans and their fickle pattern recognition read a narrative into these more persistent glitches, so when someone gives them an archetype to localize the blame in, it takes off. “Herobrine Hysteria” is not unique, however: Even the Trobriand Islanders documented by Malinowski had their own subset of folk-tales which “justify and account for the anomalous state of affairs” (4:94), such as when new clans settle in another area. Other classes of myths include the kukwanebu (habitually recited to benefit the crops, though not necessarily believed to be true, and can only be told by an authorized “owner”), libwogwo (regarded as true and taken very seriously; these can be legends, historical accounts, or hearsay tales), and liliu (sacred tales that are venerated and acted out through ritual acts, considered the “backbone of primitive civilization”). Not all of them carry across to Internet folklore due to its net secular nature towards tales that would ever be considered the latter two, but there is something valuable about that; as noted by Herobrine's creator in an interview, “as soon as you implement him into the game you can’t make legends about him anymore.” These types of cyberlore depend on certain symbols with which to tell their tale, but taking the authority away from the community and making it “canon” erases its mythical quality. As demonstrated by Lévi-Strauss, the middle ground between “percepts and concepts”, both integral elements of mythical thought, is “characterized by signs, which link images and concepts – signs are concrete images, but their power lies in the concept they reference” (2:18). After countless iterations and retellings of stories such as BEN Drowned and Herobrine, the Elegy of Emptiness statue and the corrupted-Steve skin have become symbols in themselves, an embodied interpretation of death and explanation of binary chaos combined.