RottedRiley (Draft, Unreviewed)[]
I recently saw a video about a site called seemerot.com. Supposedly, on the site, you would see a real corpse rotting in the grave in real time. It was all fake (and might've been some ploy to make money through porn ads) but that video did remind me of something: RottedRiley. RottedRiley was a YouTube channel from around 2014 that basically did the same thing seemerot.com was supposed to do: show you a corpse rotting in real time. I forgot where I heard about it; possibly a friend? All I know was that I the premise sounded cool to an edgy teen, which I was at the time.
The channel had a ton of videos that were hours long, all showing a woman in a coffin. In the earliest uploads, you could see the woman pretty clearly. She was in her 20s, blond hair, wearing a necklace with an R on it, and had her eyes closed. Just by scrolling through the thumbnails, you could see her decomposing over the course of many videos.
I followed the channel for a few weeks. Sometimes I'd hop on a livestream. There'd usually be one or two people in chat. I think the most I saw was five. Chat usually had a couple of messages from people, but what I remembered was the pinned message made by the channel that appeared in every stream:
"Don’t wake up Riley. She’s sleeping."
Creepy, sure, but what do you expect from a channel livestreaming a decomposing corpse? I just figured it was part of the vibe.
I usually had the livestream on in the background while I was doing my edgy teen artwork. The channel just inspired the sort of morbid shit I drew as a teen. Plus, weirdly enough, it felt like I had company while I was drawing. Sure, that company was a decomposing corpse, but it's not like I was the kind of person with better options at the time. I'd sometimes take a look at the stream every so often, completely unfazed by the rotting, bug-eaten corpse.
One day, while I was drawing with the stream in the background, I heard a thump from the video. That was weird, since the livestream didn't have any sound. What would you hear from a corpse? I checked the video. Riley was still in the same position she'd been in this entire time. She was still lying down with her eyes closed. Her skin was still gray and being chewed through by bugs. The normal shit for Riley. I was about to shrug it off when something changed.
Her eyes opened.
She started turning her head side to side, the skin on her neck ripping like paper. She thrashed about and let out the most harrowing scream I'd ever heard. Chat was exploding, with people losing their minds. The comment I remember most, though, was from the RottedRiley channel:
"SOMEONE WOKE HER UP!"
I liked creepy stuff, but this entire thing freaked me the hell out. I exited the livestream, and tried watching something else to take my mind off of whatever the hell I just saw. The next day, I worked up the nerve to try going to the channel again, only to see that it had been taken down. There wasn't a trace of this channel left on YouTube.
Over time, I ended up forgetting about the channel. I think part of it was just me trying to repress what I saw. But then I saw that video on seemerot.com, and this entire thing exploded back into my head. After remembering all of this, I decided to try and look back into it. I couldn't find any archives of the videos or images from the stream. I found vague mentions here and there, but nothing concrete. Most everyone figured this was a hoax or creepypasta.
I was about to dismiss this as some weird false memory or Mandela effect thing when I came across something: a missing person report. The missing person was woman who disappeared around 2014. She was in her mid 20s, had blond hair, and wore a necklace with an R on it.
Her name was Riley Ashcroft.
She is still missing to this day.
Leave Feedback[]
Close the space between the four tildes in the box and hit the "Leave Feedback" button to begin your comment.
Cheeselover405 08:02, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[]
Hello Dorkpool,
Glad to see your draft for this creepypasta, and for the most part you've avoided many of the cliches you were supposed to avoid. It's a good first attempt, but it is missing a few extra things to really sell itself as scary. First, let's just get a few syntax errors out of the way (good job on keeping it mostly error-free):
- "I forgot where I heard about it; possibly a friend?" (change semicolon to parentheses around "possibly a friend?")
- "All I know was that I the premise sounded cool to an edgy teen, (...)" (Extra "I" here between "that" and "the.")
- Change "blond hair" to "blonde hair," since it is a female's hair.
As for the story itself, it's missing a way to horrify the audience. It definitely contains horror elements (a gross-out description of a decomposing body, a jumpscare-esque moment, supernatural elements), but almost no background information is given about what happened to Riley and how she ended up in a coffin. Is there some predator out there hunting down helpless women like her? If there is, what are they trying to accomplish? By not exploring the monster or killer, you're making a very flat, one-dimensional character, which ultimately does not make a provide a very unique or successful scare. If the true nature of the threat is meant to be a mystery, you could take the same route as The Ring or Sinister; the protagonists of these movies investigate their respective monsters and discover more and more about their backgrounds as the story progresses.
Another reason this story falls flat is that the protagonist doesn't actually interact with the danger in the story. At no point in the story is the protagonist ever in threat of any harm. If the protagonist isn't scared, then why should the reader be? There are lots of directions you can take to actually present a threat to the protagonist; perhaps the predator could be a serial killer preying on multiple victims, or he could be tracking down all people who watch his content, which places the protagonist in trouble.
There's also a lack of setting in the story. You may think it's insignificant to the story since the story takes place online, but it might help more with immersion to describe who this person was, how/where he lived, or how YouTube existed back then vs. today.
Lastly, I just think it's a very weird choice to make the protagonist tell the story many years after the main events. It also doesn't make sense for a missing person report to be made several years after the person went missing; if she went missing, she would have been reported as such immediately after. That seems to be the only connection between 2014 and the present day; there's no significance of seemerot.com later in the story, and the protagonist doesn't try to track down RottedRiley in the present day. Personally, I would simply remove the "flashback" aspect of the story and just set the story in 2014.
Overall, it's a nice attempt, but in terms of actual horror it kind of misses the mark. It uses purely gross-out/shock factors to shock the audience, which is not as effective. If you really wanted to make your story truly scary, try to add depth or exploration into the characters that other stories haven't done before; figure out exactly what the monster or killer is, then figure out how the protagonist should interact with it to actually present a threat.