Okay, so apparently I’m crazy. It’s possible. And I don’t mean like the kind of crazy those dumb little twelve-year-old weeaboos on the Internet claim they are. No, I think I might actually be losing my mind. I just… I mean, sometimes my imagination gets the better of me. Was this ever real? Does anyone remember abistigmata besides me?
I’d like to make this short, but I can’t. This is big. This is… real. Or so I think. Is it? I was told to make it a creepypasta, but the story is so creepy it really doesn’t require much effort to make it into a pasta. If you want to know what this is about, it’s about a creepypasta reader who might have done more than just read creepypastas. But please read it.
Here’s what happened. It did happen. I know it did. It happened while I was watching one of theLittleFears’ videos on YouTube back in 2010, and I came across a similar video in the sidebar with an intriguing title. It was called “Don’t Walk Down Walnut Street.” Ordinary title for a creepypasta, but I live on a Walnut Street. So I clicked on it. The username was “abistigmata,” which I later learned was pronounced like “Abby Stigmata,” and the video had almost 200,000 views. The story was your average, run-of-the-mill creepypasta and it gave me nightmares for the next week.
The story wasn’t all that haunting beyond the usual “is-someone-watching-me” jitters that come with things like that. The scary part was the way abistigmata read it. He had the absolute perfect voice for reading creepypastas. It was this incredibly sexy and unsettling Eastern European accent, and he read the story as though he was the one there, but he wasn’t the victim—he was whatever was haunting the victim. That voice was what made him famous.
I soon learned that he had accounts on a few other websites besides YouTube—reddit and deviantart to name two—all with the username “abistigmata.” He was fairly popular for a creepypasta reader, with some of his videos getting around 150,000 hits, and I noticed that he had even done an Internet AMA on reddit at one point. I was enthralled by his voice, and I wasn’t the only one. Almost every single comment mentioned his smug, alluring accent, and I soon decided that I wanted to hear more of it.
As I worked through his videos, which started around 2005, I noticed periodically he would break character a bit and do an FAQ video—in his deliciously creepy accent, of course. There were five so far, from 2005 to 2010. I watched the first one, from 2005, and learned that his accent was Russian, where he had been raised before he moved to America. He was in his late twenties and lived alone. That was generally all he said about himself—the rest were about where he found the creepypastas, whether he wrote them himself, editing software and what have you. He was very conservative about his identity, which I admired, and made a point of never showing his face online.
abistigmata didn’t just read creepypastas. Sometimes he acted them out. Some were shot professionally, like a movie, but others were of the hand-held “Paranormal Activity” genre. There were only about twelve videos so far like that, and most of them only had one or two actors—never abistigmata himself, though. It seemed like they were collaborations from redditors or YouTubers or something, because in the credits, “special thanks” was always given to names like “annaxxholic” or “josho417” instead of people’s actual names. Also, notably, no same actor was in two different movies.
Listening to him read his creepypastas and answer FAQs, I started to feel a little odd about him. He acted almost smug, like he knew something we didn’t, and it bothered me. Instead of someone sharing the fear, it was like he was making it scarier.
Two things I noticed about abistigmata, however, are what sends this way farther into creepy territory, and they’re why I need help finding someone else who knows about this guy.
One was the way he dealt with haters… or, actually, the way I realized he dealt with haters.
Like all YouTube stars, especially cryptic, tongue-in-cheek ones, abistigmata had tons of haters. The petty comments from 12-year-old trolls he left alone. But every once in a while, somebody would make a really smart-assed, venomous comment about, say, his unoriginality or his perfectly creepy voice. Those he would respond to. Mostly the hater would leave, and wisely so. But sometimes they didn’t. And if they were persistent enough, regardless of the topic or argument, abistigmata would leave one last line:
“I think I’ll make a movie today.”
That comment would always get top-voted and, sure enough, he would always make one of his acted-out creepypastas that day. After a while, though, I started to notice something very, very off about that process.
It started about a month ago when I happened to stumble across a flame war still in its hottest stages. The argument this time was about, you guessed it, religion. Apparently, abistigmata was a Satanist or something of the sort and some kid named “TheJorMan,” also a fan of having the same name on many different websites, had taken issue. The argument itself was on YouTube, but when I clicked on TheJorMan’s channel I noticed that he had a reddit account as well. Being the petty-minded fangirl I was, I decided I would make a HUGE difference and downvote everything he’d ever posted. (I didn’t choose the thug life…)
I clicked on TheJorMan’s reddit account and did my duty, then returned to YouTube only to happily realize that abistigmata had posted his famous line. Feeling triumphant, I decided to cruise reddit for a while via TheJorMan’s account page. But when I clicked on it, I noticed something odd. It had changed. His comments were all erased, as well as his posts. When I refreshed the page, it gave me the broken reddit page a couple times before it brought me back to his user page, with his name listed as [deleted]. I found it a little strange, but I’d forgotten in about an hour.
That night, abistigmata made one of his acted-creepypasta videos. It wasn’t original, but it was creepy all the same. It was that old pasta about the hunter who finds a cabin filled with portraits that all turn out to be windows. Then abistigmata showed a part that wasn’t included in the original pasta. The hunter was running through the woods, panting so heavily it seemed like he was crying, occasionally glancing behind him. It was shaky camerawork and you could tell the actor was holding the camera. Then the hunter screamed, dropping the camera. It was angled in such a way that it caught his shocked, bloody face as if you were lying right next to him. Then the man was slowly dragged away, and the screen cut to static.
I was about to click to another one of his videos when I noticed the credits and felt my insides jump. The only line was in plain white text, and all it read was “Special thanks to TheJorMan.”
Those were all the credits. I checked the description and there was no mention of any other actors or cameramen besides abistigmata himself. Nobody in the comments seemed to realize the correlation.
I searched for TheJorMan’s YouTube channel, only to be told that it had been taken down, just the same as his reddit. It was obvious that I wasn’t going to glean anything from that side, so instead, I did some digging on abistigmata. I searched all of the twenty or so names given in the “special thanks” credits. Google, YouTube, even tumblr—all the accounts had existed in some place or another, but were now inactive.
I had been digging pretty deep back in the early 2000’s looking for clues and eventually wound up on abistigmata’s deviantart page. And that’s where, amongst his oldest drawings, I found the second thing that rattled me.
abistigmata had always posted really creepy drawings on his deviantart, and the early ones were no different. Then I stumbled upon a picture I wish for the life of me I had saved to my hard drive right then and there.
The title of the picture was “Dark Harbringer,” and it was the full version of abistigmata’s current deviant and YouTube profile pic. It was an original, heavily edited, black-and-white photograph of a shirtless man with long black hair taking a classic “mirror picture” with an iPhone in a filthy bathroom covered in blood. The man’s hair covered his eyes, but not his smug smirk, and behind him were a pair of sweeping, dark-feathered wings.
I was preparing to leave a comment when two things caught my attention. One was the date of the publication of the photograph, and the other was the fact that he was holding the iPhone.
It had been published in 2004, three years before the iPhone had ever been released.
I checked to see if the picture had been edited. It hadn’t been.
Then I did something that I never, ever should have done.
I messaged him.
I messaged abistigmata himself on every medium I could think of. I even made a tumblr to get to him there. Reddit, YouTube, deviantart, anything. I don’t even remember exactly what I said. It was something along the lines of “what happened to TheJorMan, and why is the Dark Harbringer holding an iPhone in 2004?”
I waited, but of course he didn’t message me back. I assumed he didn’t even check most of that kind of stuff.
After posting nothing for two weeks, abistigmata made another video. The normal kind, just a black screen with him reading a creepypasta aloud.
But it wasn’t a creepypasta. I don’t know how to describe it. It was weird. It was unnatural. It was downright wrong.
It makes me really fucking freaked out even now just thinking about it. I must have listened to the goddamn thing thirty times, and my heart jittered like I had just seen a shock image every time. It’s the only proof I have, and it’s barely even proof. I’ll explain, but first read the transcript. I wrote it all down. On paper, so he couldn’t get to me. And with the accent. I just can’t write abistigmata’s words using th’s…
“You are a young kid. Sixteen, hair still almost blond, don’t even have your license yet. You’re even trying to convince yourself zat you need to shave. But really, Jordan, you are only a child.
“You’re not a gullible person, Jordan. You’re hardened, jaded by ze Internet, you aren’t scared by creepypastas, and you look down on people who are. And people who read zhem aloud, apparently, Jordan. You sit at your desk, typing furiously on zat sleek vhite computer your mommy and daddy bought for you. You foam at ze lips. ‘Stop liking zis guy. He doesn’t put any effort into his videos. He just talks. In a probably fake accent, too. Zis guy sucks, and for all his faggot fans, grow a pair. zeLittleFears and Marble Hornets are much better.’
“Vell, Jordan. Zat’s just rude, now. And you von’t even catch my hints vhen I respond, Jordan. But vhen I come for you, you’ll know. You’ll feel woozy. Ze screen vill go dark. And ze next sing you know, you are being blinded by ze bright light of a camera. You relax. Don’t relax, Jordan. It isn’t your friends playing a trick on you. It’s me. Just me. Don’t vorry about anysing, Jordan. I’ll take care of everysing. You von’t even have to move. You can’t, anyvay.
“You cannot speak, for ze hunter never uttered a vord. You can’t control your movement, your actions, except for ze fear. Ze fear is all real, Jordan, as it vas for Michael and Joshua and Rumer and Anna and all ze vons before you who dared push me zis far. And ze pain, ze blood, ze darkness vill be real, Jordan.
“But not ze story. Because, as you know, creepypastas aren’t real. It’s all… just… an act.”
The reading was two minutes long, but the video lasted three minutes. I nervously scanned ahead to see if there was a screamer, but there wasn’t, so I sat through and watched thirty seconds of black screen before I heard abistigmata’s very distinctive voice again, even more smug than usual.
“Does zat answer your qvestion, Emily?”
He was talking to me. He was talking to me through my computer screen and I know it because my name is Emily and I’m scared.
And I can’t find anything about him. Anywhere. His FAQ videos had almost a million views each and I can’t find anyone who knows who he is. And he knows who I am.
That video had four tags. The first was “Emily.” The second was my age. The third was “Walnut Street.” The fourth was “Four thirty five,” which was the exact time I had clicked on the video. And at the very end of the video, one sentence flashed so fast that I had to pause the video to read it.
“Special thanks to hastalapasta666.”
—
Credits to: Hastalapasta666
Comments