Creepypasta al Dente: Letters from Candle Cove
Half-remembered dreams, half-written letters, and half-finished puppets; turn on, tune in, and drop out...
I’ve already touched on how unreliable one’s memory can be in the first installment of this series. This isn’t some grand revelation. Sometimes, we forget things. Big things, at that. It happens. The unreliable narrator is a common literary trope for a reason.
There’s really only so much bandwidth our brains have, and after a certain point, I feel as if it just starts deleting certain things, throwing them in a mental recycle bin the same way you might toss the file of an old first draft of your super cool creepypasta about your original character Malicious Marcelle-Antoinette the Murderous Mime (do not steal) into your PC’s recycle bin once you publish the final version. I mean, if you actually draft your work. Me? Buddy, you’re getting it straight from the source. I don’t even think before I talk; do you really think I’m gonna waste the time to edit before I publish. Can you tell?1
I think Spongebob Squarepants, of all things, conceptualized what I’m talking about quite well.
Usually, the older you get, the more those childhood memories begin to fade away into some vague recollection not unlike a hazy, half-remembered dream. As I also stated in my previous article (you did read it, didn’t you?), I have this weird quirk where I can very vividly recall childhood memories in greater detail than many memories that only happened about, oh, three or four years ago. That’s not to say I can’t recall anything, or that it’s all just some indistinct blur, but it feels as if my life post-high school has been some strange, waking dream, rather than my pre-college life being distant and hazy. Part of me thinks this is due to a combination of depression, stress, anxiety, and other modern malaises that most Millenneals use SSRI’s to mitigate. Not me, though - I’m a tough puppy, not a snowflake. I just raw-dog it all, baby. I take it as it comes. But I do drink. I drink a lot. That’s neither here nor there, though.
I also suspect it’s because the Mandela Effect is one-hundred percent real and that the world actually ended in 2012, right around the time I started college, and due to some sort of quantum immortality bullshit I ended up in this universe where the Fruit of the Loom logo doesn’t have the cornucopia on it, and everyone is fucking insane.
Whether it be trans-dimensional soul-shifting or just plain brain damage, it doesn’t really matter. The point is, I can tell you all about my first grade experience, but my third year of college? I’d have an easier time trying to put together two jigsaw puzzles dumped into one box than trying to sort the disjointed memories of that general time frame into a coherent narrative.
It’s every bit as annoying as it sounds.
But, for as clear as much of my childhood remains, there are… oddities. Weird bits and pieces that stand out in how peculiar they are. Sometimes, the colors I recall seem too bright, or the lighting is off, maybe the people involved act out of character. They just feel… off. The thing about child psychology that makes them particularly unreliable is that their brains are, quite literally, more malleable than those of adults, as they’re still developing. Add in a greater lack of context and understanding of the world around them - not that we mature folk really understand it as much as we like to think we do - and it’s very common for children to mix dreams and flights of fancy with memories. We all probably have a handful of memories that we think are solid, quantifiable events that took place in the past, but in reality, are just confabulations that we mistake as fact.
My generation has a particular phenomenon called Bionicle Dreams.
Bionicle, if you weren’t a child in the early Oughts, was a line of Lego build-your-own action figures that ran from 2000 to 2010, with a half-hearted and regrettably botched relaunch in 2016 that, with a little bit of effort, could have been the same success the original was, but the Danish bastards at Lego were too busy milking the Marvel and DC brands for everything they’re worth. Because who would bother with anything original or different when the good ol’ Spiderman tit can be squeezed for quick cash?
The line was accompanied by a series of chapter books that told a very compelling story and, quite frankly, it was the coolest shit a ten year old could get their hands on.
I can recall many, many nights I would dream of going to a store - sometimes a Target, sometimes a Toys R' Us, sometimes a mall, sometimes no extant store at all, but always off in a way - and searching aisles upon aisles of strange, unfamiliar toys until coming across the Lego section, where a new series of Bionicles I had never seen before waited for me to discover them. I’d buy them. I’d build them right there in the store. And they would always be, without fail, fucking awesome. Even better than the actual sets. And these dreams… they’d be so vivid that I would wake up and be so excited to play with my new, bad-ass toys… and equally as devastated when I realized -
It was basically torture.
You want to know the worst part? I still have these dreams. Very rarely, much less frequently than when I was a kid, maybe, like, once a year, but I still fucking have those dreams, and you know what? I still get excited about them, too. It’s partially sheer nostalgia, and partially due to the fact that I'd still get down on some Legos as an occasional indulgence, if they weren't all branded schlock. Also expensive as hell, because Legos target audience has shifted from children to adult collectors, like most toys. Sorry, kiddos - the Reddit-Americans need another variety of Funko Pop to burn disposable income on.
Unbeknownst to me until very recently, Mid-Millennials like myself that were invested in the Bionicle series have reported being haunted by strikingly similar dreams, many to this very day. While it is probably just explained by all of us being easily excited speds with a penchant for hyper-fixation, and the series being permanently etched into our minds… I also remember other children in the stores in these dreams - some looking and buying the Bionicles along with myself, if not just absently wandering through the aisles.
This little detail wouldn’t creep me out if I hadn’t read this wonderful short story - a creepypasta, perhaps - on the SCP Wiki2, in which children share similar nightmares concerning a strange background character in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, that doesn’t actually exist, and… you know what? I ain’t gonna spoil it for you.
Go on. Read it. Here’s another link if you think I’m joking. C’mon, now. This is next level blogging right here - you gotta do some homework. This is Substack, bitch, if you can’t read a little horror short story, take your lazy ass back to Wordpress, yeah? You’re gonna learn somethin’ today.
Listen - Professor Y. Ape, Ph.D., would not tell you to read something if it wasn’t worth your time. It’s short. It’s sweet. It’s creepy. It's well-written. You’ll like it, I promise. And, most importantly, it’s pertinent to the discussion at hand.
The story I linked is part of a smaller canon within the overall SCP lore called Parawatch, which, in the setting of the SCP mythos, is a forum that is equal parts 4chan’s /x/ board, the Coast to Coast AM discussion board, and the most backwater, schizo forum you ever accidentally stumbled upon at 3 AM on the forty-fifth page of Google Search Results, populated by raving lunatics that may not be as crazy as their stories may make them sound.
It’s really a clever conceit that adds a personal dimension and fun gimmick to what would otherwise just be another horror short story, as the Parawatch stories are all presented as if they are forum posts on the eponymous site.
This form of story telling is called epistolary fiction, which, in basic terms, is a fancy of way of saying that the narrative is presented in the context of letters, news articles, blog entries, or, in this case, forum posts. A good example of this form of storytelling is the colossus of internet fiction (and a personal favorite of mine), Homestuck, in which the dialogue is almost entirely presented as chatlogs between the various characters taking place on various instant messaging platforms.
Though the technique has definitely expanded in recent years, what with the internet offering so many new forms of written communication like blogs and social media posts, it is a method of storytelling that long predates the internet.
The infamous metatextual nightmare House of Leaves is, apparently, classified as ergodic literature. And, if you accept ergodic literature as an actual thing and not just some fart-huffing professor’s presumptious posturing to justify his own tenure -
Which I think it may be, House of Leaves still heavily feature epistolic elements, as the book is really a book… within a book… and… you know what, it’s not important right now, we’ll be coming back to it later.
A less mind-bending and head-hurting example would be this seminal classic, which, if you haven’t read, I can’t recommend highly enough.
And if you aren’t familiar with The Screwtape Letters, I’m assigning that as homework, too. Get reading.
The narrative of Bram Stoker’s seminal horror classic, Dracula, is relayed through a collection of journal entries, notes, and newspaper articles, all of which are strung together to fashion the story. Stoker no doubt took inspiration for Dracula in both content and style from his predecessor, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, who predated Stoker by almost twenty years with his novella, Carmilla. Not only is Carmilla one of, if not the earliest and most definitive piece of vampire horror, but it is also a the longest piece within a collection of short stories, all of which are presented to the reader as notes and first-hand accounts of occult encounters in the collection of a paranormal investigator - Dr. Hesselius - from which the narrator is reading.
To say Le Fanu was ahead of his time is an understatement. He is also responsible for kicking off the sexy vampire trend with Carmilla, so, if you ever got annoyed with all the paranormal romance novels a la Twilight and the Southern Vampire Mysteries series… well, you can probably blame Anne Rice, more than anyone, but LeStat de Lioncourt’s pale, fruity ass would have never seen the light of day - er, moonlight, I guess, if Le Fanu hadn’t first written about the eponymous blood-sucking lesbian of the night.
Though it might be a stretch, there are elements of the technique in the many sequels to The Wizard of Oz, where author L. Frank Baum posed as the Royal Historian of Oz, and was tasked by the authority of Princess Ozma to relate the histories and stories from that world to the people of ours, as, apparently, much of his young audience were under the impression that Dorothy’s adventures in Oz were factual accounts. I always thought it was a rather nice touch.
I believe, my dears, that I am the proudest story-teller that ever lived. Many a time tears of pride and joy have stood in my eyes while I read the tender, loving, appealing letters that came to me in almost every mail from my little readers. To have pleased you, to have interested you, to have won your friendship, and perhaps your love, through my stories, is to my mind as great an achievement as to become President of the United States. Indeed, I would much rather be your story-teller, under these conditions, than to be the President. So you have helped me to fulfill my life's ambition, and I am more grateful to you, my dears, than I can express in words.
This technique is so tried and true that even the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in 1774, is presented as letters between the townsfolk pertaining to the eponymous (and sorrowful) Werther.
This is all to say that the history of epistolary fiction is storied, and its effectiveness and appeal undeniable. You’ve probably enjoyed some if it yourself and just never knew the term. Bet yer English teacher never taught you that. I always did think I’d make a fine teacher, in another world where schools and universities hadn’t devolved into redoubts for the uncreative mediocrities of our world.
This form of storytelling is, at it’s root, one of the many reasons that creepypasta, as a format, is so successful and effective. I’d make the argument that the most effective creepypasta stories are epistolic in nature. When you find a random post on 4chan regaling a story that is presented as true - such as, say, the original Backrooms post on /x/:
This is epistolic in nature; a fictional narrative presented as a fact, via a form of communication between one party to another.
As is the subject of today’s article - yeah, this was all going somewhere, so I hope you read that short story I linked! - but, before I can tell you that story… I have to tell you this story…
I have no shortage of strange, subtly off-kilter memories I have from my childhood, the ones that were just… so wrong I can't help but think they were nightmares that my juvenile brain accidentally transposed as memories.
Maybe they’re part memory, part fantasy. I do know for a fact I went to a friend’s birthday at the rec center, once, where his parents had rented out the indoor pool that night so the dozen or so kids invited to the party could swim by ourselves. Perhaps the memories of the other children, adults, even the lifeguards, were all just erased, like photoshopping them out of the mental image to free up space, or delete extraneous details.
Who’s to say.
One of those dubious memories that bothers me is one in which I was in the living room of my grandparent's house. Using certain context clues I won't go into now, I had to be in second or third grade, so, I was eight, maybe nine years old. No older than ten. It was morning. Relatively early, back when I could wake up before 9 AM and still function like a normal person instead of a short-circuiting robot. Outside, the sky was a deep, angry gray and overcast, and drizzle pelts the window while thunder growls in the distance. No one is present but my grandmother, who was sitting in the straight-backed armchair that was her veritable throne. I don't exactly recall what she was doing, but whatever she was doing, she wasn't really paying attention to me, or the television. That's the key point - the television. Back when I was young, I loved my Saturday morning cartoons. I know that's a thing of the past, these days, but I'm old enough to be part of the last generation that had to get their happy asses out of bed at a decent hour on the weekends if they wanted to catch the new episode of Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh or whatever dubbed anime was the hot thing at the time.
Now, every room in my grandparent’s house had a television set. They still do, actually. They may not be the nicest television sets - some of them are cathode-ray, bubble-screen numbers - but, back in the day, those were still just kind of outdated rather than the genuine fossils they are today. This meant that my dad and my sisters could stay in their own respective rooms and watch whatever they wanted, if they wanted to get out of bed at all, which they probably didn’t. Only my mom and my grandmother would be awake, the former of which has never been big on television, and the latter of which would relinquish control of the living room television to me. My grandfather would usually be up and about around that time, too, but he was content to stay sequestered in his office, for the most part.
This was not an uncommon arrangement when my family came to my grandparent’s house for a weekend visit.
What is unusual, so far as I can recall, is whatever the hell I was watching. I distinctly, vividly remember that the television was playing this… block of programs I had never seen before, or since. The one I remember most is an animated program. It was British. I remember that much. All the characters spoke with British accents.
The characters in question were all anthropomorphic dogs. They lived in a sea-side village on cliffs, where the main character - an older male dog with a black coat, who appeared to be a Schnauzer, or some other bearded terrier, wearing a blue sweater, slacks, and a peaked captain's hat - worked at a lighthouse on the coast. In the episode I recall, this character went through town - which appeared as a stereotypical high-street you might find in any mid-size British city, which, I'd like to add, I would not have been educated enough at the time to identify as such - trying to convince other anthropomorphic dog people that they needed to prepare for a coming storm that was rolling in from the ocean. I remember the other townsfolk ranging from generic mutts to more identifiable breeds, including a female poodle who worked in a hair salon (of course), a female saluki or afghan or some such dog that owned or worked in a convenience store, and a male bulldog that was a local farmer at the edge of town, and, naturally, wouldn't hear any nonsense about a potentially dangerous storm. I remember that the sky, even before the storm arrived, was black in color with large, gray clouds, while most of the town and the character were rendered in shades of black, white, yellow, and red, with blue and green being almost negligible. Even the ocean water, rolling against the cliffs, was an imposing and unsettling black in color, rather than blue or green. The color scheme alone made the entire thing rather unsettling, due to the harshness of the sharp, hot red and yellow colors juxtaposed against the stark black of the sky and the white of the exteriors of the buildings in town. It only made the blue color of the schnauzer character's sweater and hat stand out all the more. I remember thinking that it all looked a bit unpleasant. Not so much the art style of the characters or setting, but just in the way it was all colored.
It was animated and drawn in what I can only describe as the Klasky-Csupo animation style. In the 90's, the animation studio Klasky-Csupo was a staple of children's animation. You may not recognize the name, but if you ever saw cartoons like the wildly popular Rugrats, The Wild Thornberries, or the more adult-oriented Duckman on the USA Network (when that was a thing), then you're familiar with their work. The unique art style Klasky-Csupo used in all their programs is easily recognizable. It is, for a lack of a better term, crude. The outlines are thick and shaky, as if drawn by an unsteady hand. Characters have large, white eyes with simple black dots for pupils, and nothing more. The shapes of the characters themselves are often lumpy and uneven.. This is the style I recall the characters being drawn in. The art style was basically unmistakable, given the popularity of Klasky-Csupo's other animated programs at the time.
I remember watching an episode of this mystery program. It was interspersed with the odd commercial break, in which the commercials were nothing out of the ordinary, but I do remember the bumpers leading in and out of the show were also animated in a similar style, featuring similar anthropomorphic characters of various animal species, with information about various shows and programs being delivered by a man with an English accent. Don't ask me to identify it as a West Country accent or Northern brogue or refined, proper Queen's English - I wouldn’t have been able to tell you at the time, and, even today, going off what I can recall, most of the characters spoke in the most bland, basic, regionally unspecific accent you can imagine.
Which doesn't make any god damn sense considering that my grandparents lived in Houston, and even though they did have an expansive cable package, I'm fairly certain they weren't picking up any British channels that broadcast strictly children’s animated programs.
For the sake of drama and entertainment, I want to tell you that there was some terrible revelation at the ending, some creepypasta-esque twist in which a violent storm destroys the town, or the lighthouse keeper is swept out to sea by a rogue wave, or he looks at the viewer and has blood pouring out of his eyes and says something like, Seven days…, but that’d be a lie.
I don’t remember how the episode ended, which is strange, because I do remember watching another episode, though, what the contents of that one was, I’m not so sure about. Something about a surprise party being set for the schnauzer dog, though, even the broad strokes of that are vague.
The memory comes to a hard stop when my father came downstairs and commandeered the television for himself, though, by that point, I also recall my mother finishing a tray of those oven-bake cinnamon rolls from Pillsbury that come from a tube, so, I went off to glut myself on those in the kitchen, and that was that.
I know it’s odd to think so much on a fuzzy childhood recollection that, ultimately, doesn’t really matter. Yet, still - it sticks in my craw, like a splinter lodged in the mind’s eye. I suppose it may be that natural human instinct to say, No, seriously, I saw this, I’m not crazy, I swear, whenever you see something strange that no one will believe you actually saw. Only, in this case, it’s just me, myself, and I, and I’m trying to tell myself that I really did see what I thought I saw.
Trust me - I’ve tried to find it. I’ve scoured and combed through Google and various other sites, spurred by some inexplicable yet insatiable need to discern whether or not this memory was something that happened, or just some silly dream. Believe me when I say that I’ve searched every single permutation of dog animated cartoon English British children’s show and similar descriptors possible, only to come up with nothing.
Over the past several years, lost media has been an increasingly popular subject on the internet. Several large YouTube channels dedicated to covering examples of and the subsequent hunts for various pieces of lost media have cropped up. There’s even a very active, very comprehensive wiki archiving examples of lost media with one of the most dedicated user bases I’ve ever seen on the internet. Though it seems a bit ridiculous to dedicate so much time and effort to searching for lost cartoons, forgotten pilot episodes of well-known shows, even commercials and toys, I have to say that the lost media community’s tenacity and organization is as admirable as it is impressive. Obscure animated shorts from a Canadian children’s variety show, home-made tapes with crude, amateur animations only ever distributed at local churches in Tennessee, even prototype video games used as demos at gaming expos in the early 2000’s - these people can take nothing but a vague Reddit post and find exactly what the person only half-remembers and poorly describes. I’m fairly certain that, if these guys really put their minds to it, they could probably find out what happened to D.B. Cooper, who really killed Kennedy, and the locate the hidden tomb of Genghis Khan.
And maybe they will… after they find that fraudulent Spongebob documentary. Priorities, guys. Priorities.
I’ve actually posted about the mystery show on lost media threads on 4chan, hoping that it would be some obscure English kid’s show, but, so far, no one has presented anything that resembles such a program, even in the broad strokes.
Now, I don’t say this to chide the seekers of lost knowledge. I quite enjoy keeping up with their exploits. I totally understand the appeal. Even if it is a search for a pilot of a show made for literal babies, there’s something weirdly uncanny about the entire affair.
There’s an air of mystery around all lost media by virtue of being… well, lost, forgotten, and obscure, but there’s also this degree of dream-like haziness to it all. So many lost media success stories begin with someone posting vague details about something they remember seeing on TV as a child when they were sick or late at night, unsure of whether or not it was a dream or reality. It’s very liminal - caught between the tangible and the surreal, the lines between the two blurred by the fallibility of our own minds, which is itself not a pleasant thing to ponder on. Outsiders often (good-naturedly) clown on the lost media community for taking the whole thing so seriously and speaking about lost episodes of children’s television as if they’re recounting some gravely serious tale of ghostly horror, but… I get why they do.
The uneasiness engendered by lost media is, I think, rooted in our fears of an unreliable mind. The fear of being mad, even. This fear that the one organ that is absolutely necessary for us to survive, the tool with which we use to perceive, process, and influence the world, which we think is firmly within our purview and control… isn’t.
We all have those hazy, half-remembered memories that feel more like dreams - or nightmares. We all have nightmares and dreams that feel more real than events that actually took place. We all have that creeping sense of unease when we begin to parse confabulation from fact, nightmare from reality. It’s a universal quirk of having an imperfect brain.
I reckon it was this exact phenomenon that made the subject of today one of the most popular - and genuinely unsettling - specimens of creepypasta:
I would highly suggest that, before continuing, you read Candle Cove. Yes, in it’s entirety. Look, I told you you’d be doing some reading today, didn’t I? Well, the good news is, Candle Cove is quite literally a five minute read. At most. When I said that good creepypasta is short and sweet, Candle Cove is quite possibly the best example. I don’t want to spoil the ending for you if you’ve never read it, so, go on. Read it. Don’t worry. I’ll be here when you get back in five minutes.
Back already? Did you read the story? Did you really? Don’t lie to me, now…
Published on June 5th, 2009 - only a scant few days before the birth of another notable creepypasta titan3 - Candle Cove was published by author and artist, Kris Straub, on the now defunct site Ichor Falls, which itself was place for Straub to dump pieces of multi-media horror relating to weird happenings the eponymous (and fictional) West Virginia town.
Yes - the infamous Candle Cove was originally one part of a much larger project. No other part of Ichor Falls ever attracted the attention or popularity that Candle Cove specifically did, which makes me wonder if that isn’t part of why Straub eventually abandoned the project to pursue other horror content, some of which have been largely successful in their own right. Still, for as much success as his other work may enjoy, Candle Cove will always be in a league of its own. Not only did was the story widely re-posted on 4chan’s /x/ board, the Creepypasta Wiki, and other sites, but it generated no shortage of fanart, and fan videos. This little piece of nightmare fuel was the one that I remember seeing most often, which purportedly depicted the infamous screaming episode. While internet sleuths have dissected this video, reassembled it, and analyzed it down to the second, identifying each and every video and audio clip used within it, here’s a fair warning - it’s both loud and unpleasant.
Candle Cove’s popularity granted it the dubious honor of being the first of several creepypastas to get picked up by the SyFy Channel as part of the series, Channel Zero. I’ve never seen the show, but I’ve heard conflicting reports about the quality of it. Apparently, the first season - Candle Cove’s season - is overall decent, albeit dogged by the same problem most of SyFy’s original programming is plagued by. This is to say, it’s cheesier than a Chicago deep-dish. Apparently, it also tries to create its own unique, overarching mythos with original monsters and ghoulies, too, and then tries to tie Candle Cove into it, which kind of defeats the entire one and done, short and sweet appeal of the thing to begin with.
The son of comedy legend John Landis - and notoriously unhinged, unstable sex pest - Max Landis, was the producer and driving force behind the first two seasons, before he was canned for accusations of sexual impropriety and lapsing into a drug-fueled and very public mental meltdown, so, make of that what you will.
If it says anything about the lasting impact and popularity of the story, it’s not so much a professional adaptation of the material was made, but rather, not even a year ago as of this writing, it looks like some intrepid YouTuber has taken it upon themselves to fashion their own take on what the show would have looked like. Amateur as it is, there’s a rough edge to it that makes it feel even more in-line with the original than Channel Zero’s interpretation. A polished, professional product trying to look old and low-budget just can’t match the authentic paucity of something someone probably made in their basement on a budget that wouldn’t even cover a decent steak dinner and cocktails.
The original story also generated a significant amount of fanfiction that expounded upon the lore, in much the same way Slenderman, the SCP Foundation, the Backrooms, and literally every other popular creepypasta has been and always will be. In my opinion, the ambiguity surrounding the show is what makes the original work so unnerving - fanfictions that create detailed casts and crew behind the series and flesh out a history for it only add unnecessary bloat to an already perfect and concise work.
Unlike so many creepypasta, which come from anonymous sources, Candle Cove is both copyrighted by Kris Straub and jealously defended by him. I can’t say I really blame him - I didn’t touch on the legal warfare that’s been waged of the intellectual property rights of Slenderman, and the headache it’s caused pretty much everyone involved, from creator Eric Knudson to the crew of Marble Hornets. When Marble Hornets was first slated for a DVD release, the crew was hit with a C&D order from a “company” that had copyrighted Slenderman… without ever actually doing anything with the character. They just found out about the character, slapped a formal copyright on it, and basically used it as a legal cudgel to try and extort money out of creators, kind of like some dickhead bully shaking down kids for spare change. Ultimately, the case was settled, Marble Hornets was allowed to be published formally and legally, but the copyright for Slenderman is still in limbo and being litigated to this day.
Given that Candle Cove was first published under Straub’s name on a website he owned, it’s pretty undeniable who owns the rights. In this interview on Kindertrauma, conducted well before Channel Zero was even a passing thought in Max Landis’ amphetamine-addled mind, Straub verbalizes his feelings on fan work here:
I find this insight into a creator who’s work was suddenly and inexplicably taking on a life of its own fascinating, if only because so many creators behind other creepypasta are and will most likely always be anonymous. Oh, and in the next paragraph, he also says that he’s seen Rule34 artwork of a sexy take on the Skintaker. What that looks like, I can only imagine.
One of the most fascinating things about the fallout from Candle Cove isn’t so much the extensive shelf life of the story, but the fact that nothing illustrates its main point better than the fact that people claimed to remember seeing the show themselves.
Now, this is patently ridiculous today, laughable, even, what with the notoriety behind it and the fact that it was demonstrably written and published by Kris Straub. It’s safe to say that, today, anyone who’d claim to have seen Candle Cove on television would be making a fool of themselves for attention. But back when the story was first released? Well… I’m sure most people making that claim were doing the same, or just LARPing to play along with the story. But I don’t think all of them were.
Let’s go back to the concept of epistolic fiction.
When Candle Cove was first published in 2009, Kris Straub was an unknown name. Ichor Falls never managed to pick up enough steam to really get off the ground like his future projects would. When Candle Cove was posted to the Creepypasta wiki, it was originally done so without credit to Straub. Though I have no evidence of this, given that the Creepypasta wiki was, at the time, created a sort of catalogue for creepypasta posted to 4chan’s /x/ board, I imagine it had to be posted on /x/ before it made its way to the wiki.
Now, imagine - you don’t know anything about Kris Straub or Candle Cove. Just pretend I haven’t said both a nauseating amount of times by now. It’s late at night. You’re bored. You’re scrolling through /x/, trying to alleviate your crushingly depressing existence as an avid 4chan user in 2009, when you suddenly come across a thread. The first post is this:
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.
The rest of the story is posted, bit by bit, reply by reply, looking for all the world as if a perfectly genuine conversation is being had between other anonymous users on the board. You don’t know that only one person is posting the story, and just replying to his own posts. You don’t need to, either. Even if, by the time you get to the end of the thread, and the infamous, spooky twist-ending gives you the feeling that this is all some sort of elaborate story… well, just given the way you found it, it doesn’t seem out of the realm of imagination that something like Candle Cove existed.
Candle Cove is, after all, inspired by low-budget children’s entertainment from the early 70’s, which clogged public access airwaves across the country. Straub points to an article on The Onion, of all things, as his chief inspiration.
The candy-colored, psychadelic, puppet-populated nightmares of Sid and Marty Krofft were a cultural artifact from my father’s generation, not mine. Though I can think of other shows featuring puppets that unnerved me, this one was not one I encountered until later. And, I have to say -
I totally get why a kid would feel uneasy watching something like this. I suspect it’s the same reason that even the Disney classic Alice in Wonderland felt less like a magical, whimsical adventure through a off-kilter fantasy land to me, and more like a visit to actual Hell. I never understood the appeal of Wonderland-esque stories when I as a kid. I do now, but more as a horror concept rather than a whimsical tale of light adventure and fun for children. Really think about it - being stuck and lost in some cartoonish, abstract world where up is down and down is up, in which the rules of reality are malleable, populated by a bright, colorful menagerie of all sorts of odd, sometimes frightening creatures that speak total nonsense and seem apathetic to your plight at best and actively sinister at worst, and just plain nothing at all makes any god damn sense.
Yeah - sounds like a gay old time.
The Krofft’s Lidsville and H.R. Pufnstuf both revolve around young boys being trapped in one of these psychadelic dreamscapes, surrounded by odd puppet creatures with large, vacant eyes, flapping mouths, and odd voices, where everything seems to be alive and the only other even remotely humanoid beings are an evil witch and a flamboyantly gay evil magician, both of whom want to kill the protagonists, for some reason.
Let’s just say, I don’t really get the appeal. But, the shows were popular in their time, widely syndicated, and spawned imitators that looked even cheaper, sketchier, and no doubt creepier - many of public access.
Also, before we move on - Sid and Marty Krofft were always adamant these programs were made while they were totally sober and no, er - mind-altering substances were involved in the creative process. And, y’know, usually, I’m the first person to say when someone claims, Wow, this person must have been on drugs when they made this! No, they weren’t, you’re just a fundamentally uncreative person. But, I mean… c’mon. It was the early 1970’s. And H.R. Puff and Stuff? Really?
Y’all ain’t that fuckin’ slick.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see how someone who was a child in this period might remember being spooked shitless by some weird Krofft Brother’s knock-off, read Candle Cove, and get the two mixed up. In the immediate aftermath of Candle Cove, there were YouTubers making videos debunking the whole thing as a fictional story, because so many people were actually, legitimately convinced that Candle Cove was an actual show. Maybe not some cursed piece of lost media, but real nonetheless. Like a creepypasta based on Lidsville or H.R. Pufnstuf.
Which, I guess it kind of was.
When it comes to Candle Cove, I’m not here to tell you that it’s part of some emergent egregore that’s taking the form of a creepy skeleton marionette with bulging glass eyes, or that there really was - or is, wo-o-o-o-ohh - some phantom children’s program manifesting on the airwaves in dark, depraved ways to haunt children unfortunate enough to watch public access. I don’t think Kris Staub was being manipulated by some cosmic evil when he wrote the story. I think it’s pretty much just a classic example of a great, spooky horror story that taps into primal fears of faulty memories, repressed childhood trauma, lost media, and creepy puppets.
Returning to Kris Straub, the author, would go on to continue creating horror content, and, along with the previously discussed Marble Hornets, would help codify the popular genre of horror fiction known as Analog Horror with his series of videos, Local 58 (which is also worth a watch, if you find yourself interested in this content).
Currently, it appears that Straub is working on a series of comic books called Broodhollow, which tie into the universe of Ichor Falls that most of his works have all played into, in one way or another. I haven’t read it yet, and, honestly, I probably won’t any time soon. The guy seems to be something of a trendsetter in the online horror space, and, for that, I give him both a thumb’s up for making some truly excellent content.
Ultimately, Candle Cove is just a damn fine work of fiction that tapped into the latent nightmares of one generation and fashioned brand new terrors for a new one. Nothing more. Nothing less. I think Candle Cove is one of the best examples of creepypasta, and just how effective it can be as a form of both storytelling and horror. An adaptation of a classic literary technique, retooled for the modern era, if you will. I wish I could tell you that there was something more sinister at play, or that this is a piece of some larger puzzle, if only for the sake of making things more interesting, but, honestly? The main purpose of this article is nothing more than -
I apologize if you were hoping for some grand revelation that amounted to more than, Sid and Marty Krofft were weird guys and their shows were scary. Honestly, it’s kind of nice to be positive for once, and write about something cool that I actually like instead of kvetching about something I don’t.
Don’t get used to it, though. I know how you get your bread buttered on the tubes. There’s a reason this guy may be the single most influential person in the history of YouTube, and he didn’t get that way by talking about what he liked. In fact, his schtick was pretty much the exact opposite.
But that’s neither here nor there. Maybe it’s just a little sneak peek at a future topic.
You needn’t worry, though. I’ve got several future ideas in mind for this series, and, soon enough, we’ll get back into more schizo, esoteric topics, as well to ripping into both bad content and bad people. And, trust me, when it comes to bad people in the creepypasta community…
Well, you’ve certainly got your pick of the litter to choose from…
Disclaimer: This is a joke.
And yes, we will be getting to the SCP Foundation.
Something had to be in the air in June of 2009, I tell ya.
"I ended up in this universe where the Fruit of the Loom logo doesn’t have the cornucopia on it"
I am right there with you. Either I've shifted universes, or the Philip K. Dick Demiurge is engaging in some time-fuckery, or this is a deep-background demoralization psyop. Or all three.
But I am getting pretty goddamned tired of assholes trying to undermine my memory.
I don’t know about the fruit logo, but I will go to my grave KNOWING that it was BerenstEIn Bears.
I very recently rediscovered a lost media from my youth. All I remembered was a short story in one of my middle school literature textbooks in which a boy puts his hands into a fire built of roses and gains the ability to feel which people are human and which are beasts on the inside.
I looked for the story for years, and even tried to find it when visiting my old school as an adult, but no luck.
Then, while reading George McDonald’s “The Princess and Curdie” to my own kids, I suddenly got an eerie feeling as the main character was brought into the room of the fairy queen and there was a fire built of roses…
It was a very cathartic experience, and a damn good story