Creepypasta,‘Candle Cove’,and the digital gothic

Creepypasta, folklore and digital genres

Creepypasta derives from the term copypasta, a portmanteau of copy and paste that is believed to have first appeared on the Anon community of imageboard website 4chan, and refers to content with viral potential that is copied and pasted across numerous websites. In 2007, the term Creepypasta began to appear across 4chan’s boards, denoting horror and gothic content with similarly viral potentials (Considine, 2010; Henriksen, 2016: 408–409). Thus, while 4chan is certainly not the only site on which Creepypasta tales originate, Creepypasta is one of many contemporary vernacular digital forms to have been shaped by the boards of 4chan. ¹ As digital media scholar Lee Knuttila (2011) suggests, 4chan is ‘simultaneously a simple message board and a complex community. It is a group of individuals, but one that always lacks cohesion’. 4chan’s combination of simple message board functionality and complex circuits of collaboration have helped to position it as a contemporary ‘meme factory’ (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017: 487), a cultural role taken on quite consciously by the site’s users. As digital media scholars Asaf Nissenbaum and Limor Shifman explain in their examination of the mechanics of cultural capital that structure processes of meme creation on the site:

What makes the site different from most other forum websites is the absence of marked identity and history. There is no way to create a stable identity on 4chan: … As a result, the vast majority of participants use the default nickname on the site, ‘Anonymous.’ A further unusual quality of 4chan is that the site has no archive, limiting the amount of threads existing in each board and deleting those with the least activity (usually after no more than a few hours). As a result of these characteristics, 4chan’s discourse exists only in the present – there is no record of people or the past, just the current conversation. (p. 487, emphasis in the original)

Thus, 4chan’s ephemeral dynamics are well suited to the folkloric cycles of production that underpin Creepypasta, as a tale’s origins are anonymous and often quickly erased or obscured, extending the practices of oral folk culture into the digital age. Following on from the cultural conditions of folklore in which folklorists must create collections of tales out of the splintered textual remnants and fading echoes of popular stories, to create a permanent record of a Creepypasta tale, processes of archiving and collation external to the 4chan site (and thus the tale’s original context) must occur. Digital media scholars Shira Chess and Eric Newsom (2015: 102) explain that

because posts on 4chan are impermanent, creepypasta.com was founded to be a repository for texts copied and pasted from 4chan or elsewhere in the web. The primary forms of creepypastas, according to the web site, are anecdotes, ritual lists of instructions, or ‘lost episodes’ of a popular television show that take on a newer, creepier tone.

As suggested by the title used to describe and collate this content, Creepypasta self-reflexively constitutes a gothic horror genre specific to vernacular internet storytelling practices. In line with Shifman’s (2014) characterization of the development of what she calls the ‘digital genre’ of photo-based memes, Creepypasta’s formation as a genre has involved ‘constant interaction between texts, readers, and authors’, since ‘genres in digital environments’ are developed through a reciprocal process whereby the ‘communities that produce digital content are also often the ones that consume and interpret it’ (p. 342). Creepypasta stories deliberately embed such informal circuits of production, consumption and dissemination into their generic form as a marker of folkloric authenticity.

Initially, Creepypasta stories tended to constellate around particular images and consist of anecdotes or rituals with roots in pre-digital urban legends, echoing chain emails and early memes (see, for instance, one of the earliest Creepypasta tales, ‘Smile Dog’ [2008], which centres around an image of a Polaroid photo that is supposedly cursed, and encourages readers to pass the image on to circumvent the curse). They now tend to be more complex, often collaboratively authored narratives that resonate with some of the most significant cultural anxieties of the contemporary digital moment. Accordingly, the term Creepypasta has escaped the previously niche communities of 4chan to become embedded in the wider cultural lexicon, particularly in the wake of a disturbing crime in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2014, in which two tween girls attempted to kill one of their friends in the name of popular Creepypasta bogeyman ‘the Slenderman’. The two 12-year-old perpetrators claimed that they believed the Slenderman was a real creature, and attempted to kill their friend in a show of loyalty to the bogeyman. Both girls were sentenced to lengthy terms in state mental institutions in late 2017 and early 2018. The case sparked a global moral panic about not just the Slenderman but Creepypasta generally, and in particular the way Creepypasta stories draw upon the style and practices of vernacular digital communication to construct a veneer of authenticity. For instance, Waukesha Police Chief Russell Jack said that the case demonstrated that ‘the Internet is full of dark and wicked things’ (News.com.au, 2014), and in response to the extensive public outcry, the Creepypasta Wiki (2017) – an encyclopaedic collation of Creepypasta tales – released a statement on its homepage declaring in capitals that ‘ALL WORKS PRESENTED ON THIS WIKI … ARE FICTIONAL STORIES AND CHARACTERS’ (Plunkett, 2014). The statement has now been removed, presumably because it undercuts the uncertain relationships to authenticity that underpin these tales’ attempts to spark dread and fear: indeed, the quote displayed on the Wiki’s homepage at the time of writing was one attributed to Stephen King (2017) which read ‘Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live in us, and sometimes, they win.’ ²

Creepypasta stories usually have origin points in single-authored narratives, videos or images, as does the Slenderman, who emerged in 2009 in the form of a photograph posted by Victor Surge (a pseudonym) to the ‘Something Awful’ forum on a thread inviting users to ‘Create Paranormal Images’ (Balanzategui and Later, 2016: 72). Yet, locating these origin points often becomes very difficult once a Creepypasta story becomes viral, in part because the original creator was either pseudonymous or anonymous (an anonymity often coupled with the ephemerality built into the technical infrastructure of 4chan). The concealing of origins is also facilitated by the dynamics of both viral sharing and vernacular digital creativity, which tend to involve a rapid and multi-directional distancing from original contexts as the story is disseminated and expanded upon across numerous different sites. ³ Indeed in the case of the Slenderman, journalists reporting on the case often struggled to pinpoint and contextualize the origins of the digital bogeyman, instead resting on vague references to Creepypasta (p. 72), when in fact Creepypasta represents a narrative form rather than any particular website. This obscuring of origins in turn is often built into the form of Creepypasta tales, which self-reflexively incorporate folkloric devices to engineer authenticity and a folk-cultural sense of anonymity: for instance, the extensive material that constitutes the Slenderman mythos includes a faux woodcut featuring the bogeyman from the 16th century. ⁴

As a result, while these stories cannot be aligned unproblematically with established definitions of folklore – which is characterized in part by its obscured origins among the informal circuits of folk culture (Ben-Amos, 1983) – they continue folkloric traditions of, to use folklore and popular media scholar Bruce McClelland’s (2000) definition, ‘communicative behaviour whose primary characteristics … are that it doesn’t “belong” to an individual or group’, that is therefore ‘transmitted spontaneously, from one individual (or group of individuals) to another … frequently without regard for remuneration or return benefit’ (p. 184). Creepypasta’s folkloric forms of cultural production self-consciously augment the mechanics of vernacular internet discourse more generally, both to construct continuity with pre-digital scary story traditions and to render these anonymous, informal forms of communication a source of horror. As internet law scholar Jonathan Zittrain (2014: 393) articulates in his reflection on internet culture, a key element of the ‘modern networked sphere’ is its facilitation of groups which form ‘around shared ideas, expressed in common forms owned by no one and everyone’. The aesthetics, production conditions, and formal properties of Creepypasta thus harness the mechanics of networked communication to simulate folklore, however because these tales tend to be carefully calibrated simulacra of folkloric forms and echo oral folk culture to construct authenticity, they can be regarded as a postmodern bricolage of pre-digital, folk narrative forms rather than a fluid continuation of such modes.

Complicating this process, Creepypastas ⁵ combine such nebulously collaborative, vernacular practices with the formal and aesthetic devices of popular horror and Gothic genres (both literary and those of entertainment media) in an intentional effort to incite fear and dread in readers. The narrative dynamics of Creepypasta thus accord with internet folklorist Russell Frank’s (2015) suggestion that the ‘folk’ sector of cyberspace be conceived as ‘a communication underground that runs parallel to and often comments on the “above-ground” communication of the mass media’ (p. 316). In line with this characterization, Shifman describes vernacular digital genres as ‘a new amalgamation between top-down mass-mediated genres and bottom-up mundane types of rhetorical actions’ (p. 342). Creepypastas draw from the iconography and devices of the official horror and Gothic genres of literature and entertainment media, while being constituted of a bricolage of both pre-digital folkloric practices and vernacular modes of digital expression such as memes. Indeed, the unstable border between above-ground Gothic horror fiction and folk storytelling undergirds Creepypasta’s uncanny play with the boundaries between authenticity and artifice, reality and fiction, folk and mass culture, and the everyday and the sublime. Creepypasta thus aligns with heritage and museum studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (1998) characterization of folklore as a narrative mode that channels ‘the everyday in largely aesthetic terms’ (p. 307). This description accords with Shifman’s definition of memes as a form of ‘vernacular creativity’ that combines innovative ‘artistic practices’ with ‘simple means of production’ in ‘domestic settings’ (p. 342). Refracting such combinations of everyday, vernacular simplicity with aesthetic complexity, Creepypasta stories tend to negotiate widely shared cultural anxieties via narratives that combine conversational, unadorned language with multilayered aesthetics.

The digital gothic

The gothic mode that has crystallized out of the initially sprawling landscape of Creepypasta epitomizes such communication of everyday preoccupations via a combination of vernacular storytelling and complex aesthetics. The folkloric storytelling practices and viral dynamics of Creepypasta extend the long-standing Gothic tradition of crafting a troubling, ambiguous impression of authenticity out of spurious origin claims. For instance, the uncanny mystery of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) – commonly accepted as the ‘father of the Gothic novel’ (Hogle, 1994: 23) – rests on the conceit that the tale is a translation of a medieval Italian manuscript with an unknown author. As Gothic scholar Michael Angelo Rumore (2016: 3) suggests, this device set the template for ‘the Gothic strategy of importing historicity through the “found document” trope’. Botting (2014) explains that The Castle of Otranto established ‘the significance of anonymous publication’ and ‘pretensions to historical authenticity and veracity’ as key elements of Gothic fiction, strategies that serve to simulate a sense of authenticity built upon an ‘uncomfortable interplay between past and present’ (pp. 45–46). Creepypasta entails the contemporary resituation of these strategies to accord with the storytelling devices of vernacular digital creativity.

More precisely, the digital gothic mode that has emerged out of the broad terrain of Creepypasta also embeds a troubling of authenticity, authorship and linear temporality into the story’s narrative, themes and aesthetics. The digital gothic deploys a consideration of processes of nostalgia, troubled memory and the uncanny to interrogate the dialectic tensions between childhood and adulthood, and between current and obsolete media technologies. The ambivalent psychic boundaries between childhood and adulthood – and attendant anxieties surrounding the shifting status of memory and trauma in the adult psyche – have also long been a central preoccupation of above-ground Gothic fiction, as has been pointed out by numerous Gothic and childhood scholars including Steven Bruhm (2006), Margarita Georgieva (2013) and James Kincaid (1998). In particular, the cinematic horror genre in the late 1990s and early 2000s was dominated by films with Gothic aesthetics and themes that circulate around uncanny child characters (Balanzategui, 2018; Bruhm, 2006).

Aligning such well-established themes and iconography of above-ground Gothic fiction with key anxieties of digital culture, the gothic mode that pervades contemporary Creepypasta suggests that the subjective, interior relations between one’s adulthood and childhood selves are inextricably intertwined with broader cultural relations between current and obsolete or residual media technologies. This thematic fixation entails an examination across the digital gothic of the fraught interplay between digital and analogue aesthetics, narrative traditions, and communicative modes. Indeed, for many Creepypasta authors and readers, childhood was aligned with a pre- or early digital culture in which analogue media was still present or even predominant. As music and media scholar Simon Reynolds (2012: 331) suggests, ‘our cultural memories are shaped not just by the production qualities of an era … but by subtle properties of the recording media themselves’. To articulate such preoccupations, the digital gothic deploys the formal and aesthetic practices of Creepypasta – such as layered combinations of blogs, message boards, gifs and videos – to stimulate eerie frissons out of collisions between vernacular digital discourse and dead or residual media.

Creepypasta and ‘Candle Cove’

To explore these aesthetic and thematic processes, this article focuses on the story ‘Candle Cove’, a characteristic and particularly successful example of the digital gothic. The tale was originally published under a Creative Commons licence by Kris Straub on his website ichorfalls.com in 2009, and, following the viral dynamics of Creepypasta, was quickly copied and pasted across numerous websites and message boards, often without reference to the original source and author, including the two largest collations of Creepypasta – Creepypasta.com and the Creepypasta Wiki – as well as 4chan, Reddit, IGN, TVForum.co.uk, Horror.com, and YouTube. While ‘Candle Cove’ is one of the rare instances of Creepypasta in which both the tale’s author and source are quite readily identifiable, the story’s rapid dissemination across numerous websites after its initial publication aligns with the indiscriminate ‘copy/paste’ circulation of Creepypasta, as the story quickly became a part of internet folk culture rather than being identified as a fictional, single-authored narrative. Encouraging this sense of anonymity and folk collaboration, the collective storytelling practices of Creepypasta are built into the form and aesthetics of the story, as will be seen. The tale has in turn sparked numerous anonymous augmentations, adaptations and revisions, as well as discussions about the story that do not directly add to or revise its content. In fact, ‘Candle Cove’ has become such a well-known example of Creepypasta that it was the first such tale to be adapted for a Creepypasta-themed anthology television series, Syfy’s Channel Zero (Antosca and Macneill, 2016). This anthology series features a different Creepypasta story each season, with the first season adapting and expanding upon ‘Candle Cove’. The tale has thus come to epitomize Creepypasta’s characteristic interplay between above-ground Gothic horror media and underground collaborative folk culture on the internet. While prior to the release of Channel Zero, ‘Candle Cove’ often appeared across the web divorced from its original context and author, it is now relatively widely known that the tale was authored by Straub: the story now even has its own Wikipedia page detailing the contexts of its creation.

As is typical of the digital gothic, ‘Candle Cove’ pivots on a process of uncanny nostalgia. In the story, the participants of an online forum fondly recount their childhood experiences of viewing a previously long-forgotten, analogue television programme, only to belatedly recall a sinister underside to the show which contaminates their nostalgia for this supposedly innocent childhood entertainment. The story thus formally replicates the conditions out of which Creepypasta tales often emerge – the 4Chan message boards – in a particularly multilayered construction of false origins. Via this format, ‘Candle Cove’ aestheticizes a gradual deconstruction of warm nostalgia for an adult’s lost childhood in simultaneity with a deconstruction of nostalgia for a now lost media technology: analogue television. The story is a manifestation of the kind of cultural expression to which media scholar Dominik Schrey (2014) refers in his identification of ‘a general trend of nostalgia: the longing for what is assumed to be lost in the continuing process of digitisation that accounts for contemporary media culture’s widespread romanticising and fetishizing of analogue media’ (pp. 27–28). Because the digital gothic harnesses vernacular digital communication to simulate both pre-digital folkloric and Gothic narrative forms, this mode is a particularly complex and participatory contribution to this ‘golden age of nostalgia’ (p. 27) for ‘“dead media” that, in fact, continue to haunt a popular culture obsessed with its own past’ (p. 29). Digital gothic tales like ‘Candle Cove’ both fetishize the aesthetics associated with analogue media’s indexicality, materiality and physical degradation, and unsettle cultural and personal nostalgia for these supposedly lost qualities in the ephemeral digital present. The digital gothic thus extends in complex ways Creepypasta’s overarching fixation with the continuation of pre-digital types of cultural production – such as folklore and urban legends – into the digital age.

The digital/analogue dialectic and the deconstruction of nostalgia

A foundational example of one of the most popular types of Creepypasta, the lost television episode or program, ⁶ ‘Candle Cove’ is presented as a discussion of a real analogue television programme, yet the programme that is the subject of the story – the eponymous ‘Candle Cove’ – never really existed. As the story progresses, the programme’s existence becomes increasingly uncertain even within the diegetic realm of the narrative. The uncanny potency of the tale hinges on its convincing suggestion that the programme under discussion may once have been real on some level, but is unattainable in the digital present, just as one’s childhood cannot be recaptured in adulthood. Extending this anxious nostalgia to the reader through aesthetics and form, the short tale places readers in a state of unsettling hesitation between acceptance of the television show’s basis in reality, and interpreting the show as a fictional conceit of the diegesis. This hesitation as to where the boundaries of the diegesis lie is augmented by the way the story’s form obscures its authorship and origins, embedding anxieties about the informal circuits of digital culture into the story’s mode of address. As will be illuminated in the analysis that follows, the vague but convincing first-person descriptions of the television show throughout the story position the reader in an unsettled slip-zone between factual and fictional possibilities in a way that recalls structuralist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov’s (2004: 136) definition of the ‘fantastic’, in which the reader is suspended between realist and fantastic narrative explanations. As a result, the shadowy ontological status of the television programme at the centre of the tale thematizes the fractured, insecure processes of nostalgia: through its confessional narrative mode and fragmented, discussion-board presentation, ‘Candle Cove’ is structured by a process of gradual recollection that investigates how nostalgia is bound up with repression and the troubled recall of traumatic memory.

Such intermingling of childhood traumas with childhood television programmes is characteristic of the digital gothic’s postmodern consideration of memory and nostalgia. In its troubled nostalgia for analogue media, the digital gothic tends to be driven by an impulse contrary to that of ‘nostalgia films’, Fredric Jameson’s (1991) term for films of the 1970s and 1980s that desperately ‘attempt to appropriate a missing past’ (p. 19) by revelling ‘in mesmerized fascination [with] lavish images’ of pastness (p. 296). Digital gothic stories like ‘Candle Cove’ unsettle such nostalgic longings for indeterminate pasts, deconstructing nostalgia by approaching its uncanny kernel. Progressing from a nostalgic origin, these tales tend to gradually suffuse their sentimental (re)constructions of lost childhood and technological pasts with an increasingly sinister undertone, as the first-person narration shifts from a nostalgic mode into one of belated traumatic recollection.

It is important to note at this juncture that Jameson contends that ‘memory seems to play no role in television … nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film’ (pp. 70–71). Yet as ‘Candle Cove’ and many other stories of the digital gothic indicate – such as the numerous tales that circulate around real television programmes – in fact, television has come to represent an important receptacle of, and nexus between, cultural and personal memory. ⁷ In contemporary culture, analogue television has become at once a cherished relic of the past in resonance with the romanticized subjects of Jameson’s ‘nostalgia films’, and an eerie vessel of uncanny materiality which strains against the ephemeral digital present (as in the now iconic The Ring (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2001), a film that uneasily traversed the analogue–digital divide). Television-centred digital gothic stories like ‘Candle Cove’ consider both of these cultural functions and the dialectic tensions between them. These stories thus tend to work through the cultural anxiety that Amy Holdsworth (2011) gestures to in her book Television, Memory and Nostalgia: a growing ‘fear that television … will itself inevitably disappear [and an] increased obsession with television memory and the nostalgia for television past’ (p. 4). As Holdsworth suggests, ‘anxieties about television … might be seen to run parallel to present anxieties regarding history and memory in general’ (p. 4). The digital gothic’s pronounced interest in television – and in particular, analogue television – thus points to the way this digital genre aligns longstanding Gothic preoccupations with the uneasy intersections of history and memory with cultural tensions emergent from paradigmatic shifts in audio-visual media technologies. By expressing conflicted nostalgia for a fading analogue media form, digital gothic narratives like ‘Candle Cove’ play upon Gothic interests in the uncanny interplay between past and present to explore how media technology forms complex circuits between personal and cultural memory, a process troubled by rapid technological change.

‘Candle Cove’ situates the lost analogue television programme of the collective storytellers’ childhoods as the receptacle for both their nostalgia and for their impalpable childhood trauma, condensing the cultural dichotomy between television as a site of romanticized nostalgia and as a source of the uncanny. In ‘Candle Cove’, the inaccessibility of an analogue children’s television show in the digital present facilitates the storytellers’ realizations that nostalgia represents not just a comforting excavation and re-narrativization of the past, but is the product of the faults and gaps of present memory. Through this technological disjuncture, the story reveals how nostalgia’s attempt to negotiate the temporal gulf between the child and the adult subject – that between who we are and who we once were – exposes the self as ‘doubled, divided and interchanged’ in the manner of Sigmund Freud’s (2003: 141) uncanny. As a result, while the story initially constructs nostalgia as reassuring, it gradually exposes it as deeply estranging: as phenomenological philosopher Dylan Trigg (2006: 245) suggests, ‘nostalgic memory is necessarily untimely and uncanny.’ As the storytellers discuss their slowly re-surfacing memories of the long-forgotten childhood television programme, the uncanniness ever-present in nostalgia also surfaces, revealing how nostalgic reverie entangles the homely with the unhomely. The technological divide between the digital present and the analogue past both thematizes and aestheticizes the temporal and subjective splitting of this unsettling nostalgia. Through establishing an uncanny dialectic between digital and analogue media, ‘Candle Cove’ thus examines the corrosion of treasured childhood pasts in a way that accords with childhood and queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton’s (2009: 5) observation that ‘the child is precisely who we are not and, in fact, never were. It is the act of adults looking back. It is a ghostly, unreachable fancy.’ In ‘Candle Cove’, the nostalgic, seemingly materially grounded entities of the analogue past are exposed to be eerily devoid of material and psychic substance in the digital present, becoming impalpable phantasms just as the narrators grasp hold of them through collective nostalgia.

‘Candle Cove’

Across all its copy/pasted incarnations, ‘Candle Cove’ is presented on a fictional discussion board exchange on the ‘NetNostalgia Forum’, with the discussion board organized under the interpellational subject heading ‘Candle Cove local kid’s show?’ The whole story unfolds via this forum conversation between various users, which is typically simply presented in white Verdana font against a black background. Across its various manifestations, the forum conversation tends to appear as though it has either been copied from ‘NetNostalgia’ and pasted directly into another website (as it appears on the Creepypasta Wiki), or the story is accessed via hyperlink as though it has been archived from the ‘NetNostalgia’ website (as is the case in one of the most widely read Reddit appearances of the story, a discussion board titled ‘Surely You Remember Candle Cove? –NetNostalgia Forum Archive’).

The story commences with a post by a user called Skyshale033, who invites other forum users to help them firm up their recollection of a hazily remembered television show:

Does anyone remember this kid’s show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been 6 or 7. I never found reference to it anywhere so I think it was on a local station around 1971 or 1972. I lived in Ironton at the time. I don’t remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a weird time, like 4:00 PM. [sic]

In response, another forum user, mikepainter65, posts:

It seems really familiar to me. . . ..i grew up outside of ashland and was 9 yrs old in 72. candle cove…was it about pirates? i remember a pirate marionete at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl. [sic]

In the next post, Skyshale033 responds, ‘YES! Okay I’m not crazy!’, before proceeding to fill in some of the previous gaps in their memory of the show, their recollection sparked by mikepainter65’s mention of pirates:

I remember Pirate Percy. I was always kind of scared of him. He looked like he was built from parts of other dolls, real low budget. His head was an old porcelain baby doll, looked like an antique that didn’t belong on the body. I don’t remember what station this was! I don’t think it was WTSF though.

According to Todorov’s (2004) structuralist definition of fantastic literature, the intensive affects of what he categorizes as ‘the fantastic’ occur when the fictional protagonist and reader are simultaneously placed into a position of eerie hesitation between two possibilities: ‘either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination … or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality’ (p. 136). It is important to note that, while in translations of Todorov’s work this ‘fantastic’ textual constellation is defined as a separate category of narrative to what Todorov calls the ‘uncanny’, subsequent scholars have pointed out that this experience of ontological hesitation is in fact aligned with the Freudian uncanny (Gunning, 2008: 71; Sandner, 2011: 24). As Gunning (2008: 71) suggests, ‘the genre of the Fantastic is closer to the uncanny as understood by Freud and Jentsch and the critics who have followed in their wake.’ From the opening few posts of ‘Candle Cove’, the reader is placed into a state of uncanny hesitation by this digital exchange on a number of different levels, in ways that mirror the hesitation of the fictional discussion board contributors within the diegetic realm of the narrative.

This uncanny hesitation positions a meditation on the ephemeral, ungrounded nature of vernacular online discourse as central to the reader’s cognitive and affectual engagement with the story’s aesthetics. By adopting the form of a real discussion board exchange on a forum called ‘NetNostalgia’, the story immediately positions the reader in parallel with the diegetic initial poster’s own uncertainty about whether their memory about this strange television show emerges from a real past. This uncertainty is both evidenced and reinforced by the voluminous internet commentary about the story, such as queries on question-and-answer websites including Quora and Yahoo Answers about whether or not the television show really existed (for instance, ‘Was Candle Cove a real kid’s show in the 70s?’ [Yahoo Answers] and ‘Was the children’s TV show ‘Candle Cove’ real? Was it actually aired during the seventies?’ [Quora]). The ephemerality of internet fora and message boards makes it difficult to be certain that the ‘NetNostalgia Forum’ never really existed. In fact, there are genuine websites which bear very similar titles (such as ‘Nostalgia.net’ and ‘Netnostalgia.forumotion.net’), confounding the reader’s ability to discern whether the forum upon which the story unfolds is itself a fiction, or did once exist on the web. Exacerbating this invited uncertainty about the nature of the story’s origins, there are numerous copy-cat versions of ‘Candle Cove’ across the web in which contributors to discussion boards suggest that they have seen the programme or ask other users if they recall it (for instance, see ‘Candle Cove Thread’ [Bungie]). The story thus positions the reader in an uneasy relationship with the boundaries of the diegesis from the start, impelling consideration of a range of narrative possibilities in a way that strikes at the heart of the anxieties about authenticity and authorship that permeate contemporary digital cultures.

This uncertainty about the story’s source, origins and authorship is augmented by its performative, conversational style. The original poster’s question – ‘does anyone remember this kid’s show?’ – echoes a familiar question posted across countless question-and-answer sites, discussion boards and fora, from Reddit, to MetaFilter, to Yahoo Answers, as users approach the anonymous internet hive-mind to counteract the failings of their own memories. In fact, this is such a widespread phenomenon that there now exists a section on the popular website, ‘tvtopes.org’, designed to help people remember half-forgotten television shows: as the webpage’s introductory blurb, ‘You Know That Show …’, explains, ‘when you find yourself trying to remember a show … that’s on the tip of your tongue but just out of reach, come here – the collective brain of the TVTropes community can probably help’ (TVTropes.org, 2017). The familiarity of ‘Candle Cove’s’ opening line – in addition to its invitation to the reader to participate in the conversation – mimics such discourse. The second poster’s reply, ‘it seems really familiar to me’, and the subsequent emergence of a sprinkling of details – vague enough to seem familiar to the reader, yet specific enough to add a sense of authenticity to the conversation – deepen the position of hesitation incited by the story’s opening. The original poster’s response to the second poster, ‘YES! Ok I’m not crazy!’, parallels the reader’s own invited insecurity about the trustworthiness of their own memory and perception. Just as we start the story in a place of hesitation as to the diegetic status of the exchange, Skyshale033 is unsure about whether their own memory has simply been operating under an ‘illusion of the senses’, to use Todorov’s (2004) terms, or if it emerges from a real, external childhood experience.

Analogue ghosts in the nursery

The story continues in this vein, with other forum users entering the conversation to share their foggy memories of the programme and thus to confirm its existence. The conversation progresses via a process of question and answer, as users post questions to receive external confirmation from other users that their hazy memories are indeed accurate. More detail gradually emerges via this mundane process of questioning, confirmation, correction and expansion, as the conversation morphs into a warm-hearted sharing of childhood memories about the programme. For instance, when a new poster, Jaren_2005, describes the programme in more precise detail than has been achieved by the other posters, Skyshale033 enthusiastically replies ‘Thank you Jaren!!! Memories flooded back when you mentioned the Laughingstock and channel 58,’ and mike_painter65 responds ‘ha ha I remember now too. ;)’. Yet just as this tonal shift towards collective nostalgia occurs, the nature of the children’s show is gradually revealed to be more sinister and eerie:

kevin_hart

jesus h. christ, the skin taker. what kind of a kids show were we watching? i seriously could not look at the screen when the skin taker showed up. he just descended out of nowhere on his strings, just a dirty skeleton wearing that brown top hat and cape. and his glass eyes that were too big for his skull. christ almighty.

Skyshale033

Wasn’t his top hat and cloak all sewn up crazily? Was that supposed to be children’s skin??

mike_painter65

yeah i think so. remember his mouth didn’t open and close, his jaw just slid back and foth. i remember the little girl said “why does your mouth move like that” and the skin-taker didn’t look at the girl but at the camera and said “TO GRIND YOUR SKIN”

Skyshale033

I’m so relieved that other people remember this terrible show!

While the descriptions of the show shift from a warmly nostalgic mode – in the manner of Jameson’s mesmerized fascination with a lost past – to an increasingly uncanny one, the conversation remains familiar and authentic, sustaining the sense of Todorovian hesitation by echoing many similar online discussions, articles and listicles. The details of ‘Candle Cove’ recall many real children’s programmes from the 1970s and 1980s, such as pirate programmes ‘Captain Pugwash’ (BBC, 1957; 1974–1975; 1988) and ‘I-Land Treasure’ (PBS, 1982), as well as the numerous programmes featuring patchwork combinations of strange or crudely made puppets, live-action and cartoons, such as ‘Vegetable Soup’ (PBS, 1975–1978) and the creations of Sid and Marty Krofft, particularly ‘Lidsville’ (ABC, 1971–1973). ⁸ Notably, a (presumably) genuine message forum exchange that is very similar to the story ‘Candle Cove’ appears on the website inthe00s.com, titled ‘help me remember the name of an ‘80s pbs show’ (2008), in which an anonymous poster asks other users to help them to remember more details of a show about pirates that they vaguely recall from their childhood. As this initial poster explains, ‘it was horrible but the theme song still gets stuck in my head (the broken pieces i recall at least …).’ The programme under discussion is eventually revealed to be the real, but now almost untraceable, ‘I-Land Treasure’: at the time of writing, virtually the only evidence in the digital present of this analogue programme’s past existence is this discussion board conversation and a single YouTube video.

Furthermore, internet listicles and articles highlighting the belatedly recognized strangeness of various children’s shows from the 1970s and 1980s have become a pervasive element of digital culture. Numerous online articles centre around the author’s realization in adulthood that their favourite childhood television programmes are unsettling upon reflection in adulthood (see, for instance, ‘15 Creepy Kids’ TV Shows You Forgot Existed’ [Casalena, 2017]; ‘8 Forgotten Kids Shows Sure to Give you Nightmares’ [Riggs, 2008]). Popular examples across such pieces are childhood characters Noseybonk from ‘Jigsaw’ (BBC, 1979–1984) – a silent character played by a man wearing a dinner suit and strange white mask with an elongated nose – and MOID from ‘Terrahawks’ (ITV, 1983–1986), a puppet with a skeletal face who bears a striking resemblance to the descriptions of the ‘skin taker’ in ‘Candle Cove’. Characteristic of this kind of commentary is an article about Noseybonk by Michael Murchie (2017) on the website ReelRundown.com, titled ‘Mr Noseybonk: A Childhood Nightmare’. Murchie describes Noseybonk as a ‘nightmare [creature] that some of us still find traumatic to this very day’, who ‘disappeared from our collective subconsciousness’ when ‘Jigsaw’ was discontinued, but who ‘is firmly established once again in our nightmares’ through his resurrection on the internet.

These popular ruminations on the creepiness that lurks within warm childhood memories – expressed through unsettling, yet simultaneously nostalgic, reminiscences about once familiar childhood television programmes – use a digital meditation on analogue television to articulate the psychic dialectic between childhood and adulthood. Like ‘Candle Cove’, these pieces suggest that the darker elements of childhood experience are only fully activated in adulthood. Such belatedness is central to Freudian definitions of trauma, which have become the foundation of subsequent seminal theorizations of trauma by Jean Laplanche (1999) and Cathy Caruth (1996). Stockton (2009: 14) points out that Freud’s foundational model of trauma represents:

a ‘deferred action,’ whereby events from the past acquire meaning only when read through their future consequences. Freud developed this view – sometimes called ‘the ghost in the nursery’ – as a way to explain how a trauma encountered in childhood – more precisely, received as an impression – might become operative as a trauma, never mind consciously grasped as such, only later in life through deferred effect and belated understanding, which retroactively cause the trauma, putting past and present ego-structures side-by-side, almost cubistically, in lateral spread.

Online articles about the hidden darkness lurking within childhood television programmes reveal such a ‘ghost in the nursery’. The entrance of this unsettling belatedness into nostalgic remembrances of childhood television exposes how nostalgia is undergirded by psychic estrangement, as the adult psyche perceives new, darker elements buried within the now distant mental life of their childhood. In parallel, this process is culturally embedded in the gulf between analogue television – which, with the passing of time, has gradually become distant, other and unfamiliar – and the web, the contemporary space in which this lost analogue pastness can be belatedly re-mediated and infused with new meaning.

Notably, a significant element of these digital re-examinations of analogue children’s television – including Murchie’s (2017) piece on Noseybonk – is a fixation with the physical, indexical, and material qualities of these programmes, such as puppets, toys, and actors dressed in strange costumes. Such material properties contrast with the aesthetic tendencies of contemporary children’s programming, which relies heavily on digital animation: for instance, even long-standing children’s programmes that were previously created using stop-motion animation or puppetry now tend to be digitally animated, such as ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ (ITV, 1984–present) and ‘Postman Pat’ (BBC, 1981–present). The contemporary interest in the previously materially grounded aesthetic properties of children’s television is often, as in ‘Candle Cove’, accompanied by an uncanny defamiliarization of the grainy, washed-out aesthetic of analogue media: a defamiliarization which associates analogue grain with the fading and distortion of adult memories of childhood, and accentuates the latently apparent eeriness of these programmes from the vantage of the crisp, binary code of the digital present.

Thus, the indexicality that underlies analogue aesthetics – coupled with the audio-visual tangibility of analogue media’s physical degradation over time – further enhances the ambivalently felt temporal distance between the digital present and this decaying analogue past. This technologically-driven temporal division between aesthetic regimes underwrites the mix of warm nostalgia and uncomfortable recognition of a ‘ghost in the nursery’ embedded in online pieces on children’s television programmes from the past. Further contributing to this combination of homely and unhomely associations is the fact that while many analogue childhood television programmes are archived on the web and can thus be re-experienced in the digital present, this tends to create a false sense of archival plenitude that deepens the feelings of uncertainty and estrangement when hazily remembered children’s programmes cannot be traced or resurrected online, as a brief visit to tvtropes.org and the above cited discussion on inthe00s.com evidences. Many analogue children’s programmes, such as the aforementioned ‘I-Land Treasure’, remain largely outside the extensive yet ephemeral archives of the digital present, and are thus lost with the passage of time, their existence only recorded in one’s personal memories.

Harnessing the themes of internet articles and listicles about the hidden creepiness of analogue children’s television, as the forum participants’ memories of the programme ‘Candle Cove’ come into sharper focus, it steadily becomes clear that the show is not the site of warm nostalgia it initially seems to be. The dark and troubling nature of the programme is gradually exposed in parallel to its traumatic effects upon the psyches of the forum’s participants:

Skyshale033

I’m so relieved that other people remember this terrible show!

I used to have this awful memory, a bad dream I had where the opening jingle ended, the show faded in from black, and all the characters were there, but the camera was just cutting to each of their faces, and they were just screaming, and the puppets and marionettes were flailing spastically, and just all screaming, screaming. The girl was just moaning and crying like she had been through hours of this. I woke up many times from that nightmare. I used to wet the bed when I had it.

kevin_hart

i don’t think that was a dream. i remember that. i remember that was an episode.

Skyshale033

No no no, not possible. There was no plot or anything, I mean literally just standing in place crying and screaming for the whole show.

kevin_hart

maybe i’m manufacturing the memory because you said that, but i swear to god i remember seeing what you described. they just screamed.

Jaren_2005

Oh God. Yes. The little girl, Janice, I remember seeing her shake. And the Skin-Taker screaming through his gnashing teeth, his jaw careening so wildly I thought it would come off its wire hinges. I turned it off and it was the last time I watched. I ran to tell my brother and we didn’t have the courage to turn it back on.

mike_painter65

i visited my mom today at the nursing home. i asked her about when i was littel in the early 70s, when i was 8 or 9 and if she remebered a kid’s show, candle cove. she said she was suprised i could remember that and i asked why, and she said “because i used to think it was so strange that you said ‘i’m gona go watch candle cove now mom’ and then you would tune the tv to static and juts watch dead air for 30 minutes. you had a big imagination with your little pirate show.”

The above post concludes both the story and the discussion board exchange, which is typically punctuated at the bottom of the webpage by a gif or image of analogue television static. ‘Candle Cove’ ends with a plurality of suggested possibilities that further unsettle the reader’s grasp on the story’s temporal logic and authorial conditions: the TV programme fondly - and subsequently traumatically - remembered by the message board participants may have been a communal delusion projected onto empty static, the product of mysterious technological or supernatural forces, or a false memory borne of anonymous vernacular communication in the present. The story thus does not resolve the sense of uncanny hesitation, instead completely collapsing the distinctions between both personal and collective, and genuine and – as kevin_hart describes – ‘manufactured’ memories, ontological uncertainty characteristic of the digital gothic mode. Propelled by a vacillation between the boundaries between memory, fiction and reality, and between television programmes and our deepest interior psychic lives, the story closes with the intrusion of the lost analogue past – grainy, flickering television snow – into the communicative and aesthetic regimes of the digital present.

Conclusion

Through an online discussion board detailing the gradual re-emergence of the participants’ previously submerged memories of a lost television programme – one that, according to the diegesis, may not have really existed – ‘Candle Cove’ positions analogue nostalgia as intertwined with the eerie resurfacing of long-repressed childhood traumas. The gradual revelation of the sinister underside to childhood experience exposes the uncanniness inherent in nostalgia, by suggesting that lurking within fondly recalled childhood pasts are technological ghosts in the nursery that only fully reveal themselves to conscious thought in adulthood. The belated recognition that all of the forum’s participants are remembering a television show that may never have existed augments the estranging qualities always present within nostalgic reverie. In tandem, the story reflects upon how online, vernacular discourse unsettles the distinctions between the personal and the collective unconscious, in turn casting a shadow over distinctions between ‘illusion[s] of the senses’ and ‘integral part[s] of reality’, to return to Todorov’s terms. In so doing, the story regenerates for the digital age longstanding Gothic preoccupations with the fluid, shifting boundaries between memory and history, the past and the present, thematic interests that tend to be formally expressed in Gothic fiction through spurious origin claims and resultant ambiguous relationships to authenticity and reality. In the case of ‘Candle Cove’, just as the forum contributors remain unsure as to what extent their nostalgic/traumatic memories have been manufactured through anonymous – possibly spurious – corroboration in the digital present, the reader remains unsure about where to situate the boundaries of this story’s diegesis.

As a foundational and influential example of the genre, ‘Candle Cove’ highlights how the digital gothic uses online narrative forms and aesthetics to ruminate upon how obsolete and residual media continue to haunt vernacular digital cultures. In the course of the story, the previously quotidian elements of analogue television – an object and medium materially grounded in the domestic space, its schedules woven into the fabric and rhythm of children’s everyday lives – are suddenly exposed as unfamiliar and untimely, just like the lost psychic realm of childhood itself. The qualities that demarcate television’s definition as both an object and a medium are rapidly becoming obsolete as television’s form and function rapidly shift with the rise of subscription video on-demand streaming services. As a result, television has swiftly moved from being a fixed unification of media technology and media form, to a groundless media form that can in fact be experienced on a range of digital devices that are not televisions. This rapid shift in definition and cultural function contributes to the uncanny sense of defamiliarization charted in ‘Candle Cove’, which in part accounts for the tale’s popularity and ongoing cultural potency. Embedded within the story is a burgeoning recognition that television – like the forum participants’ childhood selves – is no longer what it once was. Holdsworth (2011: 27), echoing Jeffrey Sconce (2000), suggests that the television has always been an apt vessel for the uncanny, for ‘it is evocative of the potential threat posed by the merging of the private and the public, interior and exterior, and expressive of a dynamic of closeness and distance, which includes the recognition of, and estrangement from, the self.’ The defamiliarization of television’s relationship with the present in ‘Candle Cove’ draws to the surface not just the uncanny elements long ingrained beneath television’s intimate negotiations with viewers’ everyday lives, but the extent to which interior memories and structures of consciousness are impacted by shifts in media technologies and the forms and aesthetics associated with them.

Ultimately, ‘Candle Cove’ digitally expresses an unsettling nostalgia for analogue childhood television to explore how audio-visual media interface with our own memories and consciousness in complex ways. In particular, the story – like much digital gothic content – suggests that the web reinvigorates both the Gothic’s and analogue television’s ability to transverse private/public, memory/history, interior/exterior boundaries along new axes. As ‘Candle Cove’ expresses, the already tangled relationship between our interior lives and external visual media; the personal and the collective; and history and memory becomes further complicated as new media technologies evolve and previously familiar ones fade, resulting in shifting aesthetic regimes over time that contribute to the personal self-estrangement inherent to the movement from childhood to adulthood. The folkloric terrain of the digital gothic highlights how the 21st-century dialectic between childhood and adulthood, the past and the present, has become bound up with that between the analogue and the digital, in ways that have become particularly difficult to comfortably disentangle in a digital present characterized by convergence, remediation, anonymous collaboration and ephemerality.