25 Internet Addicts Talk About Their Creepiest Online Experience

1. A member on a forum I used killed their toddler

“Discovering that a long time forum member had killed their toddler. Literally left them in a hot apartment to die, while they went out to have fun. This person was beloved by everyone, was always sugar and rainbows. Last person you would have EVER suspected. In fact, they had multiple times talked about the loss of their child (made it seem like an unpreventable tragedy) to gain sympathy from mothers who had actually lost children through no fault of their own. It was all quite sick and horrible, especially their complete lack of sense of responsibility or regret when called out on it.” — goosiegirl

2. He sent me a photograph of my name written in blood

“I had befriended a guy from Florida (I’m in NYC) and I could tell he was starting to like me. I had just gotten out of a relationship, long distance no less, so I wasn’t interested in pursuing anything with this guy. One day he asked me to be his girlfriend and I said no without hesitation. He went kind of psycho and ended up writing my name on a piece of paper… in his blood… and sent me a picture of it.

Needless to say he creeps me the fuck out.” — kebekwaz

3. There was child porn all over the website

“The Pokemon room on Yahoo chat, packed to the brim with people trading/asking for child pornography, used to go in there and do the usual 12/f/NY thing and just watch them try and groom you.” — k1l2l3y

4. Someone set up an account to haunt an infamous killer

“Was on a birth board/forum for a long time. (Had our pregnancies and babies together.) Got to know a lot of wonderful people who legitimately are wonderful people in real life and they helped me through some really tough times.

Unfortunately, one of the people that I liked in the early days ended up turning out to be the killer Karla Homolka. (Of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.)

Then there was this whole thing where someone made up an account and made up a username using the name of a victim and proceeded to ‘haunt’ her. I shit you not. So yeah…” — iristhevirus

5. He disappeared after suffering from an early death

“A Turkish guy was teaching me Turkish, he was talking about there being much fighting and bombing in certain areas of his region (Istanbul) . He was typing to me one day, the next thing he went offline.. I never heard from him again.” — Blackstar5

6. Someone faked their suicide to hurt me

“Having someone fake their suicide and blame it on me for calling them out on something pointless.

Left me pretty shaken and creep-ed out.” — Atreides_Zero

7. She tried to convince me to kill myself

“My creepiest Internet experience was when a girl I found in an AOL chat room tried to convince me that the devil had raped me. And the devil raping wasn’t the creepiest part, she knew where I lived and my parents names and what I looked like. As I kept chatting with her she wanted me to join her in heaven by killing myself. When I explained to her that you don’t get into heaven by killing yourself she said that god had talked to her and had promised her this was the only official way to get into heaven and he only told the chosen people. She explained how and when she would off herself. She told me that she was living underground and working for the devil as a cover to get people to follow her but ultimately she was Gods. She made everything seem very strange and sexual. When I told her that I wasn’t going to kill myself because someone in a chat room told me to and I had better things to do she said to just think about it and she would be online one more night before she was going to off herself. The weird thing is I enjoyed our conversations because I simply thought she was just fucking with me. When I returned the next night she was gone. I had known her full name and when I checked the paper in her city her obituary was there and the little shit did exactly what she said she was going to do. She slit her wrists in the tub and let her parents clean up the mess. I was shocked. This girl had scared me into chatting with her and she was completely serious about her going to heaven to have sex with God. I stopped chatting online after that. I still think of her often.” — Kendallology

8. A complete stranger knew too much information about me

“I used to get IMs from someone named ‘Samthecook’ or something similar.

They knew a lot about me, more then my friends knew about normally. It was eerie. Then it stopped. Out of the blue.

Occasionally he’d just stop in to say ‘Hi.’

To this day I have no idea who it was, no one ever took credit for it.” — Muliciber

9. He harassed me and my family

“I beat a kid in a 1 vs 1 match on call of duty and uploaded it to my youtube channel. He ended up getting my ip address and harassing me and my family. He sent anal lube and all kinds of weird shit to my house, and told me he would come kill me if I didn’t remove the video.” — randomguy245

10. I used to chat online with a killer

“In the mid-90s I used to chat on Compuserve regularly with Sam Manzie. We’d exchanged full names, addresses, phone numbers. We chatted in teen rooms every day for a while and then lost touch. A few years later I heard his name on the news and found out he’d killed a kid.” — the_best_thing

11. I made an account on Silk Road

“I made an account to go on Silk Road and see what it was all about.

The casual-ness of it all was the strangest thing. There were reviews along the lines of ‘not the best heroin I’ve ever bought but it definitely did the trick’ and ‘this coke was definitely cut but it was still really good.’ The sellers seemed really professional as well- very discrete and secure.” — ox_

12. A man I’d spoken to had gotten killed in a car accident

“I am a part of the furry community (I expect and accept all teasing so by all means have at it) and I made a considerable amount of money doing commissions through college. I completed a drawing for a user with the name whitewolfy and sent them a link to the image when it was complete. For a month or two I heard nothing. I didn’t think too much of it because I had gotten the money anyway. But in one last attempt to send the artwork out I messaged him asking for his mailing address. The next day I recieved a reply from his girlfriend who had got into his account telling me he had gotten killed in truck accident (he was a trucker apparently). This was years ago but it still sort of creeps me out and makes me feel bad. I visited his furaffinity page a bit ago and it just seems so lonely.” — killedthespy

13. A threatening message appeared on my computer

“After leaving the funeral of a childhood friend I walked into my apartment and booted up my computer. As usual I opened my web browser, but instead of Google popping up it was was just a blank white page with the words DIE written in red. I flipped out jumped in my car drove to Dennys and waited for my brother to show up. Together we returned to my apartment and the DIE thing turned out to be a badly timed computer virus of some kind.” — Afnor

14. A strange man stalked me

“I was on some online chat forum at like 3 am and this guy told me he was my stalker. I was like yeah right prove it. So he immediately responded with my hometown and address. Scared the living fuck out of me. I was like 11 and almost shit my pants.” — pearadise

15. An older man tried to sexually abuse me

“When I was 13 I was always on the msn chat rooms. I was stupid enough to tell some guy what city I lived in, and he offered to take me to the mall and buy lingerie, then get a hotel room. He told me to tell my mom I was spending the night at a friend’s house and he could pretend to be my friend’s dad if my mom wanted to check up on me. At the time I was like whatever, no thanks, but looking back that guy was totally a pedophile and was probably trying this on every 13 year old he could find online. Who knows if some other girl fell for it.” — _procyon

16. Her profile picture was of slit wrists

“Back in the Myspace days I had over a few thousand friends from some random add website because a 15 year old me thought it was awesome to have that many friends..

All the interactions I really gained from having a large following was the multiple comments I received on my pictures and bulletins.. What I didn’t anticipate was that a ‘scene’ girl actually took the liberty to message me, requesting to webcam on MSN.

She looked pretty cute in her photos so I agreed. Built some rapport before webcamming and it was pretty cool – When I had finally turned the webcam on a slightly overweight girl appeared. Mind you, she did not fit the description of her photos. Me being overly shallow back then, I freaked out, turned off the webcam and blocked her. I decided to not pursue the whole popularity front on Myspace anymore.

Over a span of a few weeks, I deleted most of the random friends and made a bulletin asking my school friends to find me on Facebook. I didn’t realize my mistake until I received my first friend request.. It was the girl. Her display picture was of cut wrists (a google image search?) and my name written below it in what appeared to be ‘Birth Of A Hero’ font. I just declined the request and reported the account, and blocked everrrrythinnggggg in relation to that girl.” — [deleted] 

17. Someone stole my young niece’s photographs

“I used to host my photo gallery on my own web server. One day, I discovered in the server logs someone had been hotlinking my pics– basically having them display on their page, using my bandwidth. So I checked it out to see how they were using it.

It was a picture of my niece, 18 days old, wrapped in pink. It’s one of my favorite pictures of her.

Some psycho had posted it, along with a bunch of other pics, about ‘her’ baby and pregnancy belly pics, etc., obviously claiming that she had been pregnant and had this child.

It gave me chills. I took the photo down after that.” — mortaine

18. A complete stranger knew my name

“My friends and I decided to check out this new chat roulette thing when it first became popular. So we all gathered around the computer and logged in. I think it was like the 4th or 5th person we connected with was a black screen and a voice said ‘ALLAN?!’ My name is Allan… I thought it was pretty creepy.” — AllanBrunke

19. They knew everything about me

“I once started an Omegle conversation. The stranger immediately started posting details about myself, screwing with the formatting of the website when he typed. My name, my state, etc. I promptly disconnected.” — OstrichOuttaNowhere

20. They wanted everyone on earth to die

21. I searched through the deep web

“Discovering deep web for the first time a few years ago was pretty creepy…” — iwillgotohell

22. He created 20 different accounts to talk to me

“I’ve had somebody stalking me online for about 10 years. Started on UseNet, moved to LiveJournal, MySpace, attempts on FaceBook and now on Twitter. Since I have people I consider friends on these places, I add them and we talk to each other. If I use another name, he remembers details and starts again. He’ll occasionally impersonate me though this has died down in the past couple years. Right now on Twitter, he’s created probably 20 accounts that I end up blocking and reporting. If I don’t occasionally engage, then he starts shit with people I know IRL. It isn’t hard to see that the only other person he comments to is me. So I have to explain this constantly.” — lazypilgrim

23. Her mother photoshopped her face onto nude models

“So about 10 years ago, I used to chat with this girl who was about 6 years younger than me, and seemed like she needed a friend. She originally messaged me telling me that she had read my online journal (’cause that was a thing back then, before we had the word ‘blog’) for about 2 years before we ever talked, and that she really liked what I wrote, and that it helped her a lot through some of the things she went through. She was shy, and finally worked up the courage to message me. I found it to be flattering, and could tell she needed a friend. We would always chat, sometimes for a long time, when she was online and this went on for years.

She had such a kind heart, and I always saw a lot of potential in her. I tried to be a good influence on her, and listen to her if she needed a shoulder regarding a lot of the problems she had at home and school. We ended up becoming very close.

She was the type of person who was pretty naive regarding anything relating to sex or sexuality. We never talked about those kinds of things, but it’s clear that she had a very childlike view of human sexuality, and was very morally rigid. She also had a strained relationship with her mom… and while there was no sign that she was being openly abused that I could see from our conversations, some of the things she had said about her mom were odd and a little disturbing. I remember once she told me that her mom would walk around naked in front of her and her siblings, and that it was normal for her to see her family naked.

One day she messaged me and told me that she’d found some pictures on her mother’s computer… of her face photoshopped onto some nude models. Since she was underage, I encouraged her to tell her dad and go to the police. My heart breaks just thinking about it… I don’t think she realised the full ramifications of what she had uncovered. I did some independent searching and found that her OWN MOTHER had been posting photoshopped nudes of her teenage daughter using her REAL NAME on forums online… it was horrifying. You could literally search for this girl’s name and it was among the first things that popped up on a search engine. There was no indication that the model was underage, but her face was photoshopped onto it. I recognized the photo of her from her myspace page. Again, I don’t think she fully understood exactly what was happening at the time, but I realized that I had no choice but to tell her what I found…

She ended up telling her dad, and going to the police. Not long after that, her mother was arrested for manufacturing child pornography.

We stopped talking not long after, idk why, but I know that all of this was very hard on her. One day she just messaged me out of the blue and told me we couldn’t talk anymore. I understood, and I suspect that it has something to do with what happened with her mom…

I still think about her sometimes and hope that she’s doing okay in life.” — [deleted] 

24. A man kept tracking me down to talk to me

“I was in yahoo chat around 10 years ago and I kept getting dick pics spammed to me from a 35 year old man. Every time it would happen I’d block his name but he would just create a new username. Finally, I just deleted my account and made a new one with none of my info on it. I was 15 years old and I’m a dude.” — clearly_a_douche

25. Jumpscares scared the shit out of me

“Those damn jumpscares, which made you go close to the screen and then scare you. The time they were popular I was paranoid about every image or calm video I saw.” — CynicalFinn 

Holly Riordan is the author of Lifeless Souls, available here.