Lurking in the Depths: Ted’s Caving Page
You know a horror story has done its job when it stays with its audience long after it has finished being told. There are few experiences you remember more clearly than the first time you read a scary story online. If done correctly, you’re usually at a computer or on your phone in your room. It’s nighttime, you should probably be asleep by now, and the lone source of light is coming from the screen in front of you. If you were to pay attention, the only things you’d hear are the sounds of crickets chirping outside, perhaps a distant car engine, but you’re not paying attention, you’ve been completely drawn in by the narrative before you. You finally reach the end of the story and you turn off the screen. You’re plunged into darkness as your eyes work to adjust to the lack of light, and as you’re sitting there, in a chair or on your bed, you think, “Ha, no way. It’s just a story on the internet, people post fake stuff all the time online”. But as you keep trying to convince yourself of that, you begin to notice how dark it really is in your room, and you notice that the crickets have stopped chirping, and you begin to wonder:
What if?
The first blog, “Links.net”, was created in 1994 by a college student named Justin Hall. The site was very simple, only containing a number of hyperlinks and photos Justin wanted to keep on hand. What he ended up doing, however, was creating an entire new facet of the internet. Many others began to follow Justin’s example and began even posting stories from their lives online, essentially publishing online diaries. These “weblogs”, as they began to be called in 1997, could be formatted in different ways, but a general rule of thumb was that it was always easy to tell when a particular weblog had most recently been updated. Over the years, blogs began to evolve to encompass more subjects such as opinion, news and politics among many others, but the personal blog was still used by many and remembered as one of the blog’s original uses. In a way, it was fascinating to be able to see what different elements of their lives people were willing to expose online. Blogs created a space of honesty and trust where people were free to write their stories and thoughts and have them potentially be read by anyone. It was this space and authenticity that Ted’s Caving Page invaded and used to create the most unnerving work of suspense and horror on the early internet.
Ted’s Caving Page, also known as Ted the Caver, was a story posted in blog format to an Angelfire site from March 23, 2001 to May 19, 2001. It was presented as if an individual named Ted was transcribing the three previous months of content from his caving journal, chronicling the bizarre and unsettling events that followed his and his friend’s discovery of a small hole in a purposefully unnamed cave that they became obsessed with exploring. The site was updated roughly every week or two and gradually caught up to “real time”. Ted would frequently include extra notes to his journals in a different color of text, adding unmentioned or relevant details to the story as well as commenting on his own writing. The blog posts also included pictures of the cave, providing visual references to the reader. The story famously ends on a cliffhanger where Ted decides to return to the cave one last time, promising to update the site soon with what he discovers. The site was never updated.
Today, Ted’s Caving Page is known as one of the first of a phenomenon known as “creepypastas”, a term that is the combination of the words “creepy” and “copypasta”. These are horror stories or images, sometimes both, that are quickly copied and pasted across numerous message boards and forums, quickly elevating them into internet legends. The most well known example of this is “The Slenderman”, a story spawned from a Photoshop contest. In a way, this acted very much as a digital version of kids sharing scary stories around a campfire at night, which likely led to their booming popularity.
Ted’s Caving Page is presented as complete truth, and there are quite a few careful and well-chosen elements that greatly add to its feeling of authenticity. To begin with the format itself, there is something very different that comes across when reading an account from a book versus reading a blog. With a book you always subconsciously know that the words you’re reading have been printed and reprinted thousands if not millions of times in other books. What you have does not feel unique, you know that it was created for the purpose of being sold to people and consumed. Personal blogs, on the other hand, have the possibility of making you feel like you’re reading passages from a person’s journal, like you’re gaining access to a space where that person has no reason to lie. Ted’s Caving Page has this as well as the pretext of being mostly the actual transcribed entrees from Ted’s own caving journal. People have a nose for insincerity, and this story’s presentation does an excellent job masking it.
The best element I believe this story has, however, are the pictures that are included with it. There are multiple throughout the story, mostly featured towards the beginning and middle to help the reader get a visual idea of what particular elements of the cave look like. What is most interesting about them, though, is that you can easily tell that it would take far too much effort and time to fake the pictures, which tells you something important. At least some of this story is based on truth.
From the pictures alone, the reader can clearly see that there really were two people who found a hole while caving, began drilling through it, and then proceeded to climb through the extremely narrow passage beyond. From then on, even if the reader knows that the story is ultimately fictional, they begin to wonder at what point it begins to cross that line. Did the two actually hear strange noises from the hole? Was there something on the other side? It gives the reader just enough evidence to make them speculate. Another detail is the presentation of the pictures, which is wonderfully eerie. There is never a large block of text followed by a picture showing what was just described, instead each picture is only reached by a hyperlink containing a brief description of what is to be seen. Anyone who has played a “scary maze game” knows the dreadful anticipation that comes with waiting for an image to appear on screen. Despite none of the pictures themselves containing anything obviously horrifying, each one might as well come with a jump-scare sting as the reader is waiting to see some sort of demonic face in the shadows at the edge of Ted’s flashlight.
Since the dawn of the digital age, the ways we tell stories has become nearly as important as the stories themselves. In the case of Ted’s Caving Page, I believe it is even more important. Ted’s Caving Page ultimately stands out as a work of fiction because of how it manipulates the reader by presenting itself in a medium that is largely focused in reality, or at least people’s perceptions of it. In many ways, I find it comparable to The Blair Witch Project (which coincidentally came out two years earlier). Both are horror stories presented in a format that implies authenticity, The Blair Witch Project with found-footage styled filmmaking and Ted’s Caving Page with its appearance as a blog site. They use the feelings and concepts we generally associate with their mediums — familiarity, legitimacy, autonomy, informality — and turn them on their heads by presenting us with narratives that are astonishing, extraordinary, and spine-chilling, but not entirely unbelievable, and that’s the whole point at the end of it. We, the audience, want to believe these stories, and they know that.
A horror story has done its job when it stays with its audience long after it has finished being told.
