Not Just an Urban Legend: What’s Behind the Red Room Curse and Livestreams?
The red room curse didn’t attract much attention until after a gruesome 2004 murder… Now it looms over us with the question: how close to reality is it?
It’s easy to stumble upon the dark side of the world wide web: from the outside, it’s our connector to friends and knowledge, but it can also get weird and scary. It only takes a click to find a library full of edited photos of gory creatures and unsettling movie records. We can easily get lost in the ocean of aesthetics, from cottagecore to liminal spaces. Scammers lure in every corner and try to get our money, but that’s just the mainstream.
There’s the weird side of YouTube and porn. Just like in everyday life, perpetrators are seemingly everywhere. Unlike real life, they have it easier to remain anonymous and keep their actual identities hidden.
And this leads to façets of the internet like torture and illicit selling of products like weaponry. This is the space where the red room curse fits in: but is it even real?
In the late ’90s, a story emerged in the form as an Adobe Flash animation on Yahoo! Geocities.
It told the story of a teenager who was told by a friend of a mysterious pop-up ad that claims lives.
After a while, when they almost forgot about the story again, they stumbled upon a strange pop-up while browsing through the internet. It was red and asked in black letters “Do you like-?”
They tried to close it, but it didn’t work. The text just continued to be on their screen. Eventually, the pop-up changed its text and asked “Do you like the red room?” In the background, an ominous voice repeated the question. By this point, there was no turning back anymore. The computer’s screen was turning all red, and a list of names appeared on screen.
At the bottom, the teenager found the name of the friend who told them about this story originally. Worry settled in, and this was justified. This was the list of the people who fell victim to the red room.
What that means came out when relatives found the teenager lying dead in their room, all surrounding walls covered in blood — a red room. The next day, news spread that two teenagers killed themselves, and that they were discovered decapitated.
Now, this legend received a lot of traction in 2004, when it became known that an 11-year-old girl who murdered her classmate in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan was a fan of the red room story. A link to the video was found bookmarked on her computer.
But it took a few more years until the red room curse spread internationally. This time, it emerged as the claim that a red room livestream is hosted somewhere in the depths of the dark web or deep web.
According to alleged witnesses, there are executions, rapes, children being assaulted and killed, snuff videos, and autopsies — all presented like a dinner meal. Viewers can allegedly participate by making requests and paying money.
However, this story doesn’t have enough ground to even exist as a mysterious urban legend that may or may not exist. Livestreams on the dark web are only a myth; they are impossible in reality, due to technical limits of Tor.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s inexistent. All these things that allegedly happen in the red room livestream exist in reality, even on the world wide web. From photos taken by murderers to medical autopsies, there’s no mystery about that.
Sure, the urban legend of the red room curse remains: the fact that it could, according to the story, happen to any internet user, and that it doesn’t even give an exact disclosure about what the victim’s fate will be makes it so mysterious.
That’s the fascinating part about urban legends and creepypastas — they don’t give us all the answers we seek.
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