Table of Contents

• The Rake: Internet Mystery or Forest Monster

• This Week in Weirdness

• Lore and Legends: The Pale Crawlers

• Reader Story: I Wasn’t Supposed to See That

The Rake: Internet Mystery or Forest Monster

The Rake first appeared on 4chan in 2005 when a user proposed inventing a new monster. The early description was: “Humanoid, about six feet tall when standing, but usually crouches and walks on all fours. It has very pale skin. The face is blank. As in, no nose, no mouth. However, it has three solid green eyes, one in the middle of its forehead, and the other two on either side of its head, towards the back… When it attacks, a mouth opens up, as if a hinged skull that opens at the chin. Reveals many tiny, but dull teeth”.

As more users chimed in, the creature’s form began to solidify into the Rake we now know: a gaunt, hairless, emaciated humanoid with large black eyes, a small mouth, elongated limbs, and a hunched, crawling gait. It was soon dubbed “The Rake“, and while its name suggested something simple, the monster’s lore grew increasingly complex and sinister.

Though it circulated quietly for a few years, the Rake resurfaced in 2008 on the Russian blogging site LiveJournal, and by 2009, it had returned to 4chan and crossed over to the SomethingAwful forums. It was there that it indirectly helped inspire the more famously viral creepypasta: Slenderman. Though the Rake retained its own devoted following. By 2010, the Rake had become a fixture in creepypasta culture, complete with fan fiction, artwork, and terrifying “encounter” stories.

A common motif in these stories is the Rake’s habit of simply observing. Appearing in the woods or along the tree line, silently watching the witness. Sometimes, it is said to whisper unintelligible words. Sometimes, it attacks. But always, it leaves a sense of deep dread and confusion, as if the witness has come face to face with something beyond explanation or sanity.

What makes the Rake particularly disturbing is not just its fictional presence, but the alleged real-life sightings that followed.

Beginning around 2012, people began describing encounters with a creature that closely resembled the Rake: gaunt, pale, naked, and crawling on all fours. Strangely, many of these reports came from individuals who had never heard of the term creepypasta, let alone the Rake itself. Some were rural residents, night-shift drivers, or campers who saw something they couldn't explain, and only later, after searching for similar stories online, stumbled across the Rake.

This phenomenon has led to two unsettling possibilities. The first is that the original 4chan user unconsciously invented a creature that already existed, tapping into some archetypal collective nightmare. The second is far more bizarre: that the internet, through shared belief and repetition, somehow willed the Rake into existence. A sort of tulpa or egrogore of the modern age (too much to explain here but I encourage you to go down those two rabbit holes). In both cases, the implication is disturbing. What if some monsters don’t predate the stories, but are born from them?

This Week in Weirdness

• Strange lights have been recorded by multiple witnesses over the South China Sea

• The mysterious hum is back in Scotland

• A father and son reported a “large dark furred primate” in Michigan

• Scientists in Antarctica detected “strange radio pulses” coming from beneath the ice

• Recently released military footage shows a large disk shaped UFO over the Afghan-Pakistan border

Lore and Legends: The Pale Crawlers

Across rural highways, wooded borders, and the dim edges of modern civilization, stories persist of lanky, pale figures spotted just beyond the reach of headlights. Known to online communities and modern folklore enthusiasts as “Pale Crawlers,” these entities defy classification: part cryptid, part horror, entirely unsettling.

Sightings tend to follow a familiar pattern: a witness encounters a tall, emaciated figure with smooth, grey-pink skin, long limbs, no visible ears or tail, sometimes no mouth, and large, dark eyes that seem to absorb rather than reflect light. Often spotted late at night near forests or on isolated backroads, the creature is almost always seen on all fours, moving with unnatural speed. These encounters are fleeting but deeply memorable, with many witnesses reporting a profound and lingering sense of dread.

While the term “Pale Crawler” originated in the 2010s across platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and creepypasta archives, the creature bears striking similarities to older traditions; forest spirits, changelings, and shapeshifting demons from global folklore that served as explanations for sightings and sensations that defied everyday logic. In Indigenous North American traditions, there are tales of wendigos and forest beings that often taking grotesque or altered human forms. Though not identical, pale crawlers echo these stories.

The physical descriptions also evoke comparisons to beings seen in sleep paralysis and other hallucinatory states. However, what separates pale crawler encounters from mere imagination is the consistency: from northern Ontario to rural Texas, from the UK countryside to the Pacific Northwest, unrelated individuals recount the same uncanny features, the same impossible movements, and the same gnawing feeling of dread.

Some theorists place pale crawlers within the framework of ultraterrestrials; beings that exist parallel to our dimension but occasionally intersect with ours. Others point to the possibility of unknown species: perhaps an evolved primate or mutated creature hiding in remote woodlands and caves. A less romantic, but still compelling theory, links them to chronic wasting disease in deer or sightings of ill animals in the final stages of neurological decay. Still, these explanations rarely account for the near-human silhouette, the unnatural movement, or the eyes.

Pale Crawlers, like the Night Hags of sleep paralysis lore, may ultimately reflect a deeper psychological pattern: the human mind’s tendency to project fear into the shadows, to give form to our most primal unease. But even if they are born from imagination, the effect they leave is real. Witnesses describe not just shock, but existential disturbance. A haunting suspicion that something unknown still watches from the tree line, waiting just beyond the light.

Reader Story: I Wasn’t Supposed to See That

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