Verdict: Deliberately Created · 2010s
A landmark creepypasta about a haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge possessed by the ghost of a boy named Ben. Presented as a true account, it was in fact a meticulously crafted alternate-reality game.
Ben Drowned began in September 2010 as a series of posts on 4chan’s paranormal /x/ board under the handle "Jadusable," narrating a college student’s week with a second-hand Nintendo 64 Majora’s Mask cartridge that behaved impossibly — statues following the player, the haunting "Song of Healing" playing backwards, text reading "You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?" and an entity called BEN that seemed to be watching. Accompanied by genuinely eerie glitch videos, the story blurred fact and fiction well enough that many early readers believed it. Its author, Alexander D. Hall, later revealed it as an intentional multi-part alternate-reality game, extending the narrative across websites and puzzles. Ben Drowned is now recognised as one of the most influential works of internet horror ever written, credited with codifying the modern creepypasta form and inspiring countless "haunted game" imitators — a rare urban legend whose authorship and fictional status are fully documented, yet whose atmosphere still unsettles.
What set Ben Drowned apart from the flood of "haunted cartridge" stories was craft. The narrative unfolded in real time over days, was paced like a genuine diary of escalating dread, and was backed by convincing footage of corrupted Majora’s Mask gameplay — statues that shouldn’t move, reversed music, sudden fires. Because it lived on a board where people posted real paranormal experiences, and because the author never broke character early, readers had every reason to wonder if it was true.
The reveal that it was an authored alternate-reality game did not diminish its reputation; it enhanced it. Ben Drowned demonstrated that internet horror could be structured, serialised, and interactive rather than a single anonymous scare, and it handed the genre a template. Its DNA is visible in nearly every "haunted game" story and analog-horror project that followed, making it one of the few urban legends whose influence is measured less in belief than in imitation.