In their posting guidelines, they define the standard thus:Īs a general rule, if a reader could look outside and disprove your story, it’s not going to work for nosleep. The moderators mostly select and discard stories along a standard they call “believability”. There are, as it turns out, a surprisingly sophisticated set of moderating principles that go into maintaining the immersive fictional powers of NoSleep. The moderators also deleted a couple of speculative stories posted about the fate of the doomed MH370 plane, on grounds that they were posted too close to the real events. “I just didn’t want the hassle of having abuse hurled at the sub,” Kerrima said, so she removed it. “Like, it’s a fictional solution to a real crime that happened.” The crime involved the disappearance of a woman, and someone who had known the victim wanted it removed. “There was someone who tried to write a story that solved a real crime,” said Kerrima. To a regular reader of NoSleep the thing was plainly fiction, but several websites used a headline that made it sound like fact: “This Guy’s Story About His Dead Girlfriend Facebooking Him Might Be The Scariest Thing On The Internet.” Both BuzzFeed and Jezebel, for example, republished a NoSleep story about a boyfriend who was receiving Facebook messages from his dead girlfriend. In fact, in an interview this week, NoSleep’s moderators seemed more irritated about the journalists who sometimes drive by and lift stories onto their own websites, misleading casual readers to believe they are true. Perhaps cynicism is an obvious byproduct of spending so much time in a state of suspense. To them, calling the police about a story posted on NoSleep is the decided mark of a rube. In fact, an audio recording of a call to a local store in Mammoth that one NoSleep reader made at the time, sees a clerk giggling about the fuss ginned up by a “damn website”.įor their part, NoSleep’s regular users were sharp on a separate thread about the “overly paranoid silly geese” who made the calls, writing that they deserved about “three years of time out”. Yet just as some historians contest that any “ mass panic” followed that broadcast at all, it’s not clear Mammoth residents were overly bothered by the confusion. They likened it to the famous hoax of the 1938 radio broadcast of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, long said in urban legend to have terrified a large swath of America. At that point, the media got involved.īoth the Arizona Republic and USA Today wrote stories about the incident. They called the Mammoth police department, and they called local businesses to ask if the online reports of the epidemic were true. But apparently a few casual readers, coming across the story (which was actually part of a series, but only the Arizona instalment took off), felt concerned. Pretty standard stuff for a horror story, not even particularly original. The post cut off with the writer pleading: “The sirens have me terrified and the sun is almost down here.” The CDC, the writer said, was ignoring her frantic calls, but some kind of authority seemed to be closing in. The mysterious disease was now afflicting the poster’s sister. The plague had then spread to the kids, and to their families. The elderly owner had collapsed and died after bleeding from the ears and screaming in a fit of rage – and the children had been with her at the time. The epidemic began at a daycare, the writer said. It described the outbreak of a mysterious disease in a small town called Mammoth, population 12,000. For example, just under a year ago a popular NoSleep writer posted an item titled WTF is going on in Pinal County, Arizona?. What many NoSleep stories have in common is that it's impossible to know exactly what happenedīut the indeterminacy of a NoSleep story can backfire. What both stories have in common is that it’s impossible to know exactly what happened the unsettled feeling they leave behind is wholly a function of the answers the authors never give. The story, which you could say is about demonic possession, is told in an epistolary mode, each episode proceeding by emails, texts and blog comments. Meanwhile, Khristopher Patten, another moderator who by day is a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience based in Arizona, said his favourite is a series called Correspondences, written by a user who goes only by the name “bloodstains”. Kerrima likes a story called Free Coffee with Order of Pie, which deposits the reader in a diner in the middle of nowhere that is visited by a mysterious, prescient stranger. Take, for example, the stories NoSleep’s moderators cite as their favourites. The best ones are rarely gory, a function of the fact that images are more or less banned – you can link to them, but only sparingly. The vague, unresolved nature of the stories are key to their appeal. ‘Everything is true here, even if it’s not.’ Photograph: Alamy
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