Previously: Solving The Man From Taured Mystery.
Do you know the “Cameraheads” creepypasta? Often cited as one of the earliest examples of the internet-centric horror subgenre seen in the wild, this story has developed a reputation over the years that borders on infamous.
It was named for the creatures at the center of the tale: Humanoid beings equipped with cameras in a way that humans typically aren’t — cameras that were biologically part of these beings, not just peripheral equipment carried or attached by some other means — who were constantly recording their surroundings, surveilling and sometimes straight-up attacking people unfortunate enough to cross their paths.
Chilling stuff — and, according to some accounts, a tale that so elaborate, and involving so much supplemental media in the form of videos, images, and additional pieces of text seeded across forums and other online venues that some believed it to be not just a creepypasta, but a full-on ARG.
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But there’s also long been a mystery surrounding “Cameraheads.” For many years, it was considered a “lost” creepypasta — that is, loads of people remembered it, but neither the story itself, nor any of its other associated media, appeared to still be extant… if it had ever actually existed in the first place. Not everyone, you see, believed it did.
Here’s the really curious thing about the “Cameraheads” mystery, though: We know now that it existed; we’ve even recovered it, mostly — or at least, we think we have. But questions still remain about what the creepypasta actually consisted of. Was there really a whole host of additional material? Were there actually videos, images, forum posts, and other bits and pieces leading readers a merry dance across the wide reaches of the internet as they attempted to uncover the full narrative? Or was there just a brief story — a single piece of text so spare, it almost wasn’t a story at all?
Sure, there’s an accepted answer these days, and yes, that proposed answer does seem likely to be correct. But — maddeningly — there’s not quite enough solid evidence to confirm it conclusively.
The internet, alas, is not always forever — no matter how permanent it may sometimes seem.
That, however, is precisely why “Cameraheads” is worth looking at, despite its relative obscurity compared to some of the other, more well-known ur creepypastas that date back from its same era. What happens when a story is ostensibly lost, but people still remember it? What happens if those memories are… imperfect? And what happens when those imperfect memories start to color the story itself?
“Cameraheads” is what happens. So today, let’s take a look at the tale of this lost-and-found creepypasta — what we know about it; what we don’t know about it; what we thought we knew about it, but, it turns, really didn’t; and, perhaps most intriguing of all, what we might never know about it.
A Brief History Of Creepypasta In Three Eras
Before we can talk about “Cameraheads” itself, we need to talk a little bit about creepypasta history — the timeline, trajectory, and, crucially, what tended to characterize it particularly in its early years.
I talked a bit about the big picture of creepypasta history in the episode of the podcast Way Too Interested I appeared on along with Chuck Wendig back in 2022, so if you’ve listened to that, some of this is going to sound familiar. For those who haven’t, though — or if you just need a refresher — here are the broad strokes:
“Creepypasta” as a term has its roots in the word “copypasta,” which is itself a corruption of the phrase “copy-paste.” “Copypasta” refers to chunks of text that have been copied and pasted and copied and pasted over and over and over again across the internet — on Usenet groups, bulletin board systems and forums, by email, you name it. The term is understood to have been coined around 2006 on either 4chan or Usenet, depending on who you ask, although the kinds of texts we now refer to with it have been around since pretty much as long as the internet has been. What the text actually is could be a lot of things, but they’re often chain letters or apocryphal stories and anecdotes — the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe story comes to mind here, if you’re familiar with that oldy-but-goody.
(Notably, this piece of copypasta was originally a chain letter/urban legend — it’s been circulating in some form since the middle of the 20th century. Over the years, it’s featured a red velvet cake recipe from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookie, among others.)
Creepypasta, meanwhile, is — or, more accurately, was, at the time (things have a tendency to change as time passes) — a specific subgenre or variety of copypasta, which, similarly, has been around for basically as long as the internet has existed. The precise term is also, like “copypasta,” generally thought to have been coined on 4chan, this time around 2007. In its original form, it typically referred to short horror stories that, like their namesake, had been copied and pasted over and over and over again, all over the internet. They weren’t necessarily only text — sometimes, they were images or short videos accompanied by a piece of text — but there was usually at least a couple of written sentences involved. A key point here is that authorship was often unknown; lots of early creepypastas still don’t really have an identifiable author pinned to them.
As time went on, though, the nature of the content being referred to as creepypasta began to change — and these days, I would argue it’s better understood to be any kind of horror media with some kind of text-related component created for, and on, and spread via the internet.
Authorship is much more tangible now — we know who writes them, and the authors are rightfully protective of their work and like to make sure they’re credited for it — and the stories themselves usually no longer proliferate by copying and pasting the actual text, but by sharing the links to the stories (or, a little more recently, by YouTubers and TikTokkers summarizing them — although this practice is frequently understood to be ethically dubious, depending on how it’s done).
There are a number of repositories for this kind of horror media: The Creepypasta Wikia, the r/NoSleep subreddit, Creepypasta.com, tons of podcasts (the NoSleep Podcast, Pseudopod, and Nightlight are all excellent, for instance), and so on and so forth. The stories have also grown more complex, and of the ones that really make a mark on the world, the writing itself — the craft — is usually excellent.
I tend to think of creepypasta as existing in three different eras. The “Early Era” covers up to about 2010, and consists of pastas as previously defined — creepypastas in the “truest” or “classical” sense, in that they’re often by anonymous authors and comprise the same text or other media copied verbatim and spread widely on the internet through email, on forums, and other similar venues. Examples include “White With Red,” “Wake Up,” and the various incarnations of “The Woman In The Oven.”
The “Golden Age” covers roughly 2010 to 2015 or so, although it’s worth noting that there’s some overlap in the late 2000s and early 2010s between these two eras. This is when many of the heavy hitters — the true icons of this kind of storytelling — arrived, such as “Candle Cove,” “NoEnd House,” “Abandoned By Disney,” and the Ben DROWNED saga, among others. Typically, pastas from this era are characterized by having identifiable authorship; they’re also more complex pieces of storytelling and occasionally start to veer into ARG territory, as in the case of Ben DROWNED.
Then we have the “Modern Era” — that is, where we’re at now (although there may be a shift in the works at the present moment, too… but that’s perhaps a discussion for another day). Today, creepypasta is kind of what it became during the Golden Age, and then some. It exists in many different forms, from writing to art to video to podcasts; authors/creators are almost always known; and it’s become both more mainstream and, perhaps most notably, commercially viable — for example, the SyFy creepypasta series Channel Zero started airing in 2016; there’s a growing body of academic research in the field of folklore focused on some of this stuff; and numerous feature films have been produced based on some of the more well-known creepypastas — most recently The Elevator Game, which hit Shudder in 2023.
So where does “Cameraheads” fit into this timeline? There’s an easy answer — although precisely what that answer is ultimately makes the whole thing more complicated to tease out, too.
Cameraheads And Their Origin: The When, Where, And What Of The “Cameraheads” Story
The easy answer to the question of where “Cameraheads” sits in the history of creepypasta is this: The earliest extant pieces we have of the story date back to 2009, putting the tale firmly within the Early Era of creepypastas — which, again, I usually classify as encompassing the period up to about 2010.
In addition to falling precisely within that specific, pre-2010 timeframe, the pieces of “Cameraheads” that we do have cleave extremely closely to the definition of Early Era creepypasta as I’ve laid it out: The authorship remains unknown, and it spread widely on the internet through forums and other similar venues — in this case, 4chan’s /x/ board and a few other related sites. It perhaps doesn’t truly exemplify the bit about it comprising the same text or media copied verbatim and spread more or less in that exact form over and over again; however, one specific phrase from the story does satisfy this part of the definition: Most who remember the story also remember that it includes the sentence, “I killed a camerahead” — and are generally quick to share that sentence when asked about the story itself.
The Early Era classification, however, also presents a few complications when it comes to unraveling exactly what the nature of the story was when it first appeared. First, because authorship is unknown, we can’t just reach out to the original creator of “Cameraheads” and ask for answers about it; heck, we can’t even identify who the original creator allegedly was, let alone verify that the story originated with them.
And second, large swathes of the internet — particularly the very early years, although also some of the first few years of what’s usually referred to as the Web 2.0 era, which is where “Cameraheads” falls — haven’t been well-preserved. As a result, our pool of extant sources and resources concerning “Cameraheads” is much smaller than it would be had the story come along slightly later.
For reference: Although the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been available to the public since 2001, it didn’t begin to enter heavy usage until roughly 2013 (just take a look at the jump in pages archived between 2012 and 2013 here!) — four years after “Cameraheads” arrived, which is an eternity in internet time. So, it’s not surprising that we don’t have a lot of “Cameraheads” media, because if it existed in other places or in other forms than what we have managed to recover, it’s no longer accessible — or, put more bluntly, it effectively doesn’t exist anymore.
Which, of course, circles us back to one of the biggest questions about “Cameraheads”: What do we have of the story? What pieces are verifiably extant, versus what people think they remember about the story, or what’s been claimed to exist as part of the story, regardless as to whether there’s evidence in hand for it?
Here are all the known, recovered pieces of the tale — the bits of it we actually have, and can point to as proof of the story’s existence:
The Text:
The earliest known bit of the story — the first artifact we can point to as mentioning the cameraheads by name — is a piece of text that appeared on the /x/ paranormal board of 4chan on Aug. 8, 2009. It’s short — just a single paragraph — and rife with grammatical errors. It reads as follows (all sic — I haven’t cleaned up the errors at all):
“/x/ what’s a camerahead? I was walking home through a nearby gully and came across a weird stack of rocks and a torn envelope with some writing on it. It appeared to have been written in charcoal or ash. It said, ‘I KILLED A CAMERAHEAD’ on the next line ‘IT TOOK TREVOR’ and the last line ‘GET HELP IF I DON’T COME BACK’ and there was a miniDV nearby. this was all that was on it besides static, though i had to watch it a few times before i found this clip. Who took this video? A camerahead sounds really silly if it’s a monster with a camera for a head.”
It’s worth noting that the original thread containing this post has not been preserved; we have this text via a recovered entry from the now-defunct /x/ Wiki, /x/enopedia, which was an early wiki aimed at documenting notable content from /x/. It is also worth noting that the recovered /x/enopedia entry erroneously identified the date of this /x/ post as Aug. 8, 2008, rather than 2009.
The misidentified year is likely a typo made by a contributor to the /x/enopedia who either created or edited this entry. As Lost Media Wiki user SADLAD84 points out, the one other extant piece of the story we have (more on that in a moment) was uploaded on Aug. 8, 2009 — and since these two pieces were clearly paired together and meant to viewed as a whole, it doesn’t make much sense to wait an entire year before uploading the second piece.
Furthermore — and more concretely — the recreation of the “Cameraheads” text is prefaced in the /x/enopedia article with a note that it first appeared on a Saturday; however, as SADLAD84 also notes, Aug. 8, 2008 was not a Saturday, but Aug. 8, 2009 was.
That brings us to the second piece of the story that we have:
The Video:
Also on Aug. 8, 2009, a video was uploaded to YouTube by a user going by the name kotyakov. Titled “camerahead,” it’s about nine minutes long and features huge amounts of static interspersed with fuzzy, glitchy footage of… well, it’s not always clear what.
The most distinct scene kicks in at around the 3:46 mark; it seems to be footage of two people in the woods who initially don’t know they’re being observed — but, once they discover their sneaky videographer, they break up and run in separate directions, the camera in hot pursuit of one of them. The second most distinct moment — I’m not sure I’d call it a full scene — pops up at around the 8:32 mark, when an eerie, ghostly visage accompanied by some unsettling sounds appears within the static.
The video’s description reads only, “weird video i captured from a minidv i found in a gully near my house” (again, all sic) — which doesn’t tell us much on its own, but which, when taken in tandem with the 4chan post, confirms that the two are connected. First, there’s the mention of the gully found in both the 4chan text and the YouTube video’s description; and second, recall that the 4chan text notes that the original poster found “a miniDV nearby” before going on to say that “this was all that was on it besides static, although i had to watch it a few times before i found this clip.” This YouTube video is pretty clearly the clip referred to in the 4chan text.
And… that’s it. That’s all we have that we know for sure comprised the original story. These two pieces are why the “Cameraheads” creepypasta is — these days, at least — generally described as “found,” rather than “lost.” The wording of a later 4chan post about the story (although notably not featuring the text of the story itself) is often pointed to as concrete evidence that this is all there is — and although I’m not as convinced by this post as others may be, I do agree that, at least initially, the “Cameraheads” story as posted by its original created consisted only of these two pieces.
Credit where credit is due: The original “Cameraheads” text was recovered on Oct. 19, 2020 by Lost Media Wiki user Marnen005, who was able to dig up the code for the /x/enopedia entry on Cameraheads as it appeared on April 21, 2010. Marnen005 also went the extra mile and extracted the text of the page, cleaning it up and dropping it in a Google Doc for easy access. The video, meanwhile, is referenced in the 2010 /x/enopedia entry, although it is not linked; another 4chan user unearthed it not too long before Marnen005 recovered the /x/enopedia entry, though, and reposted it to 4chan in August of 2020.
So: How on earth did “Cameraheads” develop the reputation that it was long known for — that of an extensive ARG, full of odd tidbits seeded across the internet in a variety of forms of media, from images to videos to diary entries and other first-hand accounts? It seems like an awfully big jump — but then again, perhaps it’s best not to underestimate the power of infamy… and the imperfection of memory.
Here’s how it went down.
The Cameraheads And Their Origin (2009 – 2014)
Extant documentation of the spread of “Cameraheads” after its initial appearance in 2009 is slim; if there was more of it than what we can concretely track now, it’s been lost due to the ephemerality not just of the internet more broadly, but also of 4chan specifically.
But we do have some of it — and if we follow the trail left by it, it paints us a picture of how people’s ideas of what “Cameraheads” was evolved over time. In short: We can see people actively filling in the blanks — of which there were admittedly many — in order to construct a narrative that made sense to them, both with regards to what happened in the story and how that story was told. To sum up: The story of “Cameraheads” and its evolution is basically a decade-long game of Telephone.
The earliest tidbits were all were recovered from /x/enopedia. First, we have the appearance of “Cameraheads” classified under two category pages: “Stubs” and “Bullshit.” These two category pages were preserved via the Wayback Machine on Aug. 19, 2009, meaning “Cameraheads” made its way onto /x/enopedia within a week and a half following its original /x/ post — although not in a particularly complete form, and with a notably low opinion of the story itself.
Its classification as a stub meant that the entry dedicated to “Cameraheads” lacked sufficient content; meanwhile, the “Bullshit” category was dedicated to posts widely regarded as content folks viewed as dragging the /x/ board down — troll posts, overused memes, posts that were just sort of generally low quality, that kind of thing.
(Heads up that the language used on the “Bullshit” category page is… a little less delicate than that, including the kind of casual homophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ terminology that has often characterized certain areas of the internet. Just, y’know, a warning if you decide to head on over there. For that matter, the same goes for basically every other 4chan thread linked in this piece.)
Then we have the /x/enopedia entry on Cameraheads as it appeared on April 21, 2010, as recovered by Marnen005. In addition to containing a recreation of the original post, this page also has a short description of what a camerahead actually is, according to the story itself. For the curious, this description reads as follows:
“A possible creature or living thing called CAMERAHEAD, which is never shown, described, or referred to except in one letter, written in charcoal or ash on a torn envelope which was picked up or seen by a poster on /x/. The original poster describes his or her experience in encountering the artifacts (a miniDV tape and the letter) and then viewing the tape, which is implied to reveal more of itself on subsequent viewings.
‘Camerahead’ is a paranormal entity described in a single post on /x/ and in a subsequent YouTube video. Since its upload on YouTube, the video has been found to contain additional random clips of alleged spirits or ghosts observing the viewer. This strange appearance of seemingly random ‘ghost’ imagery is inconsistent with the original impression that a CAMERAHEAD is a living and mortal demon, forcing us to believe this video was created simply as a creep-tactic on part of the original poster who has not returned since the original posting.”
This description matches the original source material to a T. Although Marnen005 does note that there’s one intermediary edit to the page they weren’t able to access, it’s clear from this 2010 artifact that people’s recollections of the story did not begin to evolve until later — at least a year after the initial appearance of “Cameraheads.”
By late 2012, though? That’s a different story (har har).
In December of that year, another post about “Cameraheads” appeared on 4chan which both poked fun at the original source material’s sparsity and added a few new details to flesh it out a little. It reads as follows:
“In urban folklore, a ‘Camerahead’ represents a malevolent creature of human design.
Variously Gigeresque or ‘biotechnological’ descriptions accompany some first-hand accounts. The first /x/ thread on the subject that brought the subject to light was a barely coherent story about a boy finding a note saying, ‘I killed a camerahead.’ He took this to signify an actual slaying.
He was, in fact, unwillingly making a meta-textual reference to himself, as his post killed the cameraheads’ viability and popularity.
A photograph of a camerahead was in subsequent threads attested to by some. It apparently depicted an ‘organic camera’ for a head atop an alien-like figure, menacing over the red lit bed of some cowering elderly couple.”
Here, you’ll notice that the creatures themselves are described in a bit more detail — detail which either did not exist before this post, or which was initially proposed sometime in the three years following the 2009 origin post.
First, they’re said to be “malevolent creature[s] of human design”— meaning that cameraheads don’t exist naturally in the world; they’re made, altered, or otherwise manufactured by humans.
Second, they’re referred to as “Gigeresque” — that is, as resembling the subjects depicted in the works of 20th century Swiss artist H. R. Giger. Giger, who worked primarily in airbrush, frequently combined human physical forms with machines in his imagery, the result being a style usually referred to as biomechanical art. (The reference in this 4chan post to “‘biotechnological’ descriptions” is presumably a misidentification of the biomechanical style.) Notably, Giger was also in the art department for Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien; the iconic Xenomorph design was Giger’s. Giger died in 2014 at the age of 74.
Third, there’s that final pair of sentences: “A photograph of a camerahead was in subsequent threads attested to by some. It apparently depicted an ‘organic camera’ for a head atop an alien-like figure, menacing over the red lit bed of some cowering elderly couple.”
We unfortunately do not have this image; nor does the writer of this post appear to have seen it, based on their phrasing (to me, “apparently depicted” implies, “I have been told this is what it showed, though I have not seen it myself”). And, unfortunately, there’s no way to prove whether it actually existed — but if it did, it would seem that “Cameraheads” could briefly have been in a Slenderman-like situation: Following the immediate story, someone else may have come along and created and posted an image meant to further the mythology.
The next post we have in the “Cameraheads” chronology is notable not for any information it contains, but for having been screenshotted and attached to most subsequent discussion of the “Cameraheads” story: It’s post from 4chan dated February of 2014 that just reads, “Does anyone remember Cameraheads? Does anyone have the Cameraheads pasta? Thank you,” somewhat inexplicably accompanied by an image of the Neon Gang Leader from Batman Forever. (Odd choice, but hey, you do you, my guy.) The actual URL to this thread has not been located, but what this comment tells is that by this point, the creepypasta was well on its way to being “lost” — or could already have been as such.
“Cameraheads”: The Lost Years (2014 – 2019)
By 2018, the pasta had been lost, or at the very least misplaced. And, at the same time, readers’ unreliable memories of what “Cameraheads” had been before it vanished began to jump in to fill the empty space left by the source material’s absence.
For instance, in May of 2018, in response to an iceberg macro focused on old 4chan lore and conspiracy theories, one poster wrote the following (cleaned up a bit for typos and grammar):
“Camerahead is an old, old creepy pasta. A guy finds a note that says ‘I killed a camerahead,’ signs of a struggle, and a smashed camera. From there, it travels the by now rote storyline of descent-into-madness with these creatures, ‘the cameraheads,’ infesting his life. It was like SCP, Arizona, or the Cabin and the Dolls pasta. For a time, it was the only pasta on the /x/ wiki, and was a main tier cryptid/ghost character at the level of the Texas Stalkers. Both are now pretty much forgotten, and a few years ago, I noticed the camerahead story was removed. There were also some glitchy spooky photos. I always had a soft spot for the story because it took an intermediate approach with the guy investigating the films/photos on the camera and going through the dead guy’s files, but overall, nothing too memorable.”
This recollection starts the way the original “Cameraheads” post does, with a person finding a note including the phrase “I killed a camerahead” and video evidence — but then, it departs wildly from what was actually present in the original material, making much, much more of it than there really was.
The original post did not feature any “descent into madness” storylines, or discussion of the titular creatures intruding upon the poster’s life, or even any real investigation of the video evidence, let alone story beats of anyone “going through [a] dead guy’s files.” Going so far as to describe the story as SCP Foundation-like also seems a stretch, as the SCP Foundation is extraordinarily detailed, while the original “Cameraheads” story was barely a paragraph long. For something this poster sums up as “overall, nothing too memorable,” their memory certainly seems to have enthusiastically filled in the blanks.
(For the curious, I suspect “Arizona” might be referring to the r/NoSleep story “WTF Is Going On In Pinal County, Arizona?”, also known as the “Arizona Outbreak Scare” story; “The Cabin And The Dolls,” meanwhile, might be this story preserved from /x/ on a Blogspot blog circa 2012. I’m admittedly not sure what the Texas Stalkers are, although what the ObscUrban Legends Wiki calls the Texas Stiltwalkers seem like they might be a good candidate.)
Just a couple of weeks later, in June of 2018, another conspiracy theories/4chan lore iceberg image and thread showed up on 4chan, with a few additional mentions of “Cameraheads” scattered throughout. These mentions are brief, but they do demonstrate once more how much the story itself had fallen into legend at this point: The broad strokes are there, but the details are incorrect — again, indicative of the fact that at this point, people had heard of the story, but mostly hadn’t actually read it themselves.
Wrote one poster, “According to one anon, [‘Cameraheads’] was a creepypasta about people with camera heads. Main character kills a camera head and posts that there’s a tape inside the tape slot. Never posted anything of course.” You’ll recall that that’s not really the case; the “main character” (by which we can reasonably assume we mean the narrator, or the original writer of the post) didn’t kill a camerahead themself — they found a note from someone else who said they’d killed a camerahead. The video footage recovered from the scene, meanwhile, was more specific than just a “tape” (MiniDV is a very specific format); what’s more, it wasn’t found inside the slot of a camerahead’s camera — it was just… on the ground.
Again: The broad strokes are there, but the details are wrong.
Wrote another poster in that same thread:
“Camerahead was an early creepypasta back when the /x/ wiki was thriving. It had photos and different documents and was pretty expansive. Definitely styled after House Of Leaves. Unfortunately, the wiki stopped getting much notice and then there was a site overhaul and it became Akashic Records. A lot of stuff was just removed or deleted, including the camerahead pasta. Don’t know if the wiki is even around anymore now.
Anyway, that’s what it means.”
You’ll often see the “Cameraheads” story described these days as having been House Of Leaves-esque; as far as I can tell, this post might have been the first one to have made that comparison. (If there’s another that did it earlier, it’s been lost to time and the black hole that is the internet—or at least, I haven’t been able to find it.)
The idea is also presented yet again here that, rather than a single post and a single video, there was an “expansive” array of media associated with the story. With the distance of close to a decade and nothing concrete to refer back to, most people’s memories seem to have built “Cameraheads” up into far more than it originally was.
The text from the 2012 4chan post reappeared in a new thread in February of 2019 — and although much of this new thread is a recreation of the old one, there are some additions, too. One writer, for instance, deepened the mythology with the idea that “all Cameraheads are not created equal”; some, as this poster put it, are creatures you’re “meant to see,” while others are meant to escape notice.
This writer also chose to propose a reason behind the cameraheads’ supposed Gigeresque appearance:
“Why make observers that look like Giger nightmares? Efficacy. Human bodies, even the human shape, isn’t a great container for technology. There are benefits to slipping into crowds unseen, but there are benefits to letting the metal and wire breathe. It works best when it has the space it needs to operate, but that means it’s not going to look like a person anymore, at least not as much as it looks like a Camerahead.”
And, crucially, they ask this question:
“Why have all the archives containing information on the Cameraheads been lost? We are left with only the statement ‘I killed a Camerahead.’”
To me, this post stands out a little from the others; it’s a clear “Yes, and” based on everything that came before it — or everything that everyone thought came before it. It’s playful, acknowledging the limitations of what little exists of the story, and works both within the fictional framework of the story itself and within the framework of the legend of the story at the same time.
If you look at it one way, a post like this demonstrates what “Cameraheads” could have been — a big, expansive, and, most importantly, collaborative project along the lines of the SCP Foundation, or the Slenderman mythos, or the Backrooms. That is: What many seem to remember it as, even absent concrete evidence that any additional material existed.
Finding “Cameraheads” (2020 And Beyond)
Anyway, in December of 2019, a post on the blog Limitless Possibilities, which describes itself as “a place where we explore stories of monsters, mysteries, and conspiracies,” took a dive into the Cameraheads mystery not just as a lost creepypasta, but also as a larger conspiracy theory — that is, it considered the camerahead creatures themselves as a mystery, and examined and weighed a couple of possibilities of what they could have been.
I find this framing interesting, as it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it proposed that “cameraheads” could hypothetically be real. Note that Limitless Possibilities’ writer doesn’t subscribe to this theory themself; as they put it, “I’m highly skeptical that such a thing is even possible. Even then, I doubt that the government would be competent enough to turn unwilling people into soulless cyborgs.”
When discussing the origins of the term, though, there are also a handful of paragraphs that incorporate all of the bits and pieces we’ve seen so far — a sort of summation of what “Cameraheads” was meant to have been, before the creepypasta was lost. States the blog:
“Allegedly, Camerahead was a very old creepypasta that centered on a guy who discovered a backpack that held several documents, books, and photographs. There was also a note that read: ‘I killed a Camerahead.’ Nearby, there were signs of a struggle and a camera that had been destroyed. From here, the story tells of a man who descends into insanity thanks to these ‘Cameraheads’ that begin to seep into his life and stalk him.
The ARG angle to this story comes in the form of the various photographs and documents that were used. This allowed readers to partake in the adventure with the main character as he descends into madness as he researched these Cameraheads in an attempt to discover who — or what — they are.”
Limitless Possibilities’ take is ultimately that, out of all the possibilities, “Cameraheads” was likely a creepypasta that’s just been lost to the whims and waves of the internet, rather than a shady government program or any of the other possibilities considered — which is, in fact, correct, and is demonstrable based on all of the other discussion about it that took place primarily on /x/ over the previous decade.
What I think is really worth pointing out here, though, is that at this point in the timeline, we’re seeing doubts that “Cameraheads” existed at all — a notable development, especially as the next 4chan thread in the timeline isn’t sure “Cameraheads” existed, either.
That thread appeared on /x/ in March of 2020, and mostly consists of folks noting that they’ve found nothing about “Cameraheads” within a sizeable, 26 GB archive of pre-2010 4chan content.
One poster had some secondhand info, writing the following:
“From what I’ve gathered, [‘Cameraheads’ is] a creepypasta that floated around /x/ sometime between 2008 and 2009. It wasn’t all that popular and the word ‘camerahead’ or variations thereof might not even have been a part of it. It was intriguing enough to be remembered, though.
I’ve been on 4chan since 2006, but I only started coming around /x/ by 2010, so I completely missed it.”
Another, meanwhile, had recollections of it, but those recollections resemble very little of what had previously been seen, described, and built on:
“I’ve been here since ‘09, but I’m absolutely sure I’ve read about it as recently as ‘14 or ‘15, though it might be hard to find because that particular time I had found it as a jpg of a greentext in a thread for greentexts. I remember when I’d first heard of it, it described the camera heads as being something of a biomechanical creature with two different forms, I think it said they’d been witnessed as far back as the ‘50s and may have had some relation to UFO sightings, but that part I’m not positive on. Good luck searching — I know for a fact it’s out there somewhere, I’ll look through my jpgs and post a new thread if I find it.”
Wild stuff — and, I would argue, evidence of the imperfection of human memory contributing in large part to the erroneous beliefs about what the story actually was over the years.
One comment on this thread also features the screenshot of the 2014 post asking about the pasta with the image of the Neon Gang Leader, which, I would imagine, is likely the source for all the other reproductions of the screenshot that have appeared in relation to the “Cameraheads” mystery in the years since.
August of 2020 brings us the last notable 4chan thread discussing “Cameraheads” to appear before Marnen005’s recovery of the /x/enopedia article just a few months later. This thread seems to be the moment the video associated with the story was rediscovered — and, perhaps, shows another adjustment in how folks were thinking about the story.
Midway down, one poster asked, “Were videos indeed used in the creepypasta Cameraheads? We have statements that it had images and documents, since it had elements of an ARG.” Both this question and its wording are interesting to me; they acknowledge that “Cameraheads” was said to have lots of supplementary material, but also that we don’t have evidence of most of this hypothetical material.
But then, the poster dropped this: “I ask because I may have found something of extreme interest.”
That “something” turned out to be the video, which they posted in a subsequent comment, along with the observation, “The contents of the video [are] very ARG-like and it looks like it is part of something larger.”
And then, just two months later, Marnen005 made their discovery — and now, the mystery is considered solved, and the formerly lost “Cameraheads” creepypasta deemed found.
Missing Pieces: The Internet In A State Of Decay
I won’t lie, though: Despite the “Cameraheads” creepypasta having been “found,” and the likelihood being strong that, contrary to its long, legendary status, it consisted only of that small snippet of text and that odd video…
…I can’t help but think that we don’t have quite enough evidence to say, conclusively, that no other supplementary materials ever existed.
I know, I know — the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The thing that’s so infuriating about the “Cameraheads” mystery as a whole, though, stems from the point in time at which it first appeared: I made note of this fact up top, but the bottom line is that tools to archive the internet, while extant at the time, just hadn’t entered heavy enough usage yet. And, as such, we honestly might never know, definitively, whether there was or was not any other media created to go along with what those two pieces from 2009 started.
Very little of the early internet still exists today, which is, to put it mildly, a damn shame — and although we may not know what exactly we’re missing, we do still know that we’re missing it. We know, because we can quantify it by examining phenomena like link rot.
For instance, consider a 2022 study published by a team of researchers at Harvard Law School that took a look at how link rot had progressed over time, using the New York Times’ website as its lens. NYtimes.com launched in 1996; the data set for the study started there and included articles that were published up through mid-2019. 553,693 articles were analyzed for the study, which included a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks to content outside of the Times’ website. 72 percent of those links were what considered deep links — and a whopping 25 percent of those deep links (a full quarter of them!) were, at the time the study was conducted, completely inaccessible.
But that wasn’t all the study found. The link rot, predictably, got worse depending on how old the links in question were; the extent, however, is truly something. When it came to links from, say, 2018, about 6 percent of them had rotted—but for links from 1998? 72 percent of them had rotted. That’s almost three-quarters of them — all going to places that were no longer accessible.
2009 kind of falls right in the middle there — and according to the study, about 40 percent of links out from article published at the Times’ website around that time have rotted. That’s… still a lot.
And the remaining links? Well, they weren’t necessarily accessible either, due to content drift — that is, the links may have been followable, but they no longer pointed to what they originally had. (You know when you click on an old link on a newspaper’s website that’s supposed to go to a specific article, but instead it just redirects to the website’s home page? That’s what I’m talking about here.) These links haven’t always been preserved in their original form via tools like the Wayback Machine, either, making them well and truly lost.
Why is there so much link rot now? Why didn’t we realize earlier — and, crucially, start putting time and resources toward it — that the internet might be worth preserving?
Part of it is that the internet grew rapidly — much more rapidly than had hitherto been the case for other forms of mass media, communication, and expression. As journalist Stephen Dowling put it at BBC Future in 2019, it grew so rapidly that even national libraries and archives accustomed to preserving print media may have been “taken… by surprise”; as a result, writes Dowling, “The attempts to archive the internet have, in many areas, been playing catch-up ever since.”
This, combined with the fact that what’s online at any given time changes so quickly, and just the sheer volume of everything that’s there, has made preserving it more or less a losing battle.
In the case of “Cameraheads,” the problem is compounded by the fact that 4chan — like 2ch, which both preceded and inspired 4chan — is, itself, ephemeral by nature: Old threads are constantly deleted in order to make way for new threads. It’s designed that way. It was meant to be a feature, not a bug — which means that a lot of 4chan’s earlier history just… isn’t around anymore. And given that 4chan has been in use since 2003… well, you do the math.
As time has gone on, and users have realized the value of being able to access old threads, efforts have been made to archive 4chan; that’s the function /x/enopedia was originally intended to fill, for instance, although it was quickly discovered that wiki formats are among the least efficient ways to preserve material from sources this expansive. These days, other archival tools have been put into use, such as 4plebs, which has been working to preserve threads on a selection of 4chan boards since 2013.
But, just as Stephen Dowling put it with regards to the internet at large, trying to preserve 4chan was and remains like you’re playing a constant game of catch-up. Huge portions of it have been lost, and are unlikely ever to be recovered.
This, I think, is why the original thread containing the initial chunk of “Cameraheads” text has never been recovered; we only have it because it was put into /x/enopedia, which itself also had to be recovered in order for us to access it. It’s why I suspect we’ll never recover the original thread; it’s doubtful that it still exists at all.
And it’s also why a part of me thinks it’s still possible that there might once have been other, related “Cameraheads” media out there that we’ll also never see, read, watch, or know.
Like I said before: We don’t know exactly what we’re missing — but we still know we’re missing something.
Which brings us back to the world of possibilities lurking behind “Cameraheads” and the decaying state of the early-ish internet.
What If…?
The 2012 4chan comment we looked at earlier is often pointed to as “official” confirmation that there was nothing more to “Cameraheads” than the initial text and video — specifically, the portion that reads as follows:
“The first /x/ thread on the subject that brought the subject to light was a barely coherent story about a boy finding a note saying ‘I killed a camerahead.’ He took this to signify an actual slaying.
He was, in fact, unwillingly making a meta-textual reference to himself, as his post killed the cameraheads’ viability and popularity.”
The Lost Media Wiki’s stance is that this comment proves without a doubt that there was no additional material in existence at any point that padded out “Cameraheads.” To be perfectly honest, though, I’m not quite sure how we get from point A to point B with this comment. To me, it just sounds like a basic description of the initial “Cameraheads” post and an interesting interpretation of the original story, not any sort of “official” refutation that additional media existed.
Maybe I’m missing something. But regardless, I’d like to propose a “What if” scenario here:
Yes, I do think it’s likely that the original poster only ever came up with the initial /x/ post and the accompanying video. But, as I previously pointed out, I think it’s also worth noting that internet-based horror has often proven itself to be both expansive and — key point — collaborative, with a not-insignificant number of people who view the genesis of a creature or mythos going on to say, “Yes, and.” This, in turn, can result in some truly astonishing organic growth.
What if something like that had happened to “Cameraheads?”
That is, after all, exactly what happened with some of the notable creations to have come out of the world of creepypasta and internet horror. The expansive and multi-faceted Slenderman mythos rose out of this phenomenon, for example; so, too, did the SCP Foundation, which has always been built on the idea that creative people can and will come together to create something that is much more than the sum of its parts. Heck, even the Backrooms edges into this sort of territory, with loads of different and increasingly complex versions jumping off of the original image macro now available to consume in a wide variety of forms for anyone who might wish to look for it.
My point being, sure, the original poster may have just dropped these two short, compact pieces of media into the ether and then buggered off, never to be heard from again.
But what if others had taken up the mantle?
What if the handful of photographs or other materials — some of which are described in detail in subsequent posts — did exist at one point, but are simply no longer accessible?
And just to complicate things even more, what about this:
What if, again, we start with the original poster creating those first two pieces of media, and again, we have others adding onto the mythos. But it’s not that they were necessarily creating additional media that furthered the story begun in those original “Cameraheads” tidbits; we might view the recollections themselves about may or may not have encompassed the story as the expansion of the mythos — that is, the additional content makes the story about the search for the original story, not the story itself.
Think of it as a variation on the “creepypasta that’s about a piece of media, but is not the piece of media because that’s too dangerous to share” subgenre — what I’ve remarked before that I think of as the Tenacious D-style creepypasta: The pasta is about the scariest story in the world, but the pasta is not the scariest story in the world. It is just a tribute. (Or, more accurately, a warning.) Think Cow Head/Gozu, for example, or the missing incantation in the “Lights Out” ritual game.
If you look at it the right way, there is more to the “Cameraheads” story than that first /x/ post and YouTube video. It’s just that from there, the creepypasta becomes a story about the search for the “lost” creepypasta — not the text of the “lost” creepypasta itself.
I think what I’m getting at here is, there’s more than one way to think about stories and storytelling — something which is particularly true for internet-based stories and storytelling. Stories aren’t necessarily static; they can change over time, either because our understanding of them has evolved as we’ve gotten older and more experienced, or because the story itself is still in the process of being told.
That’s what’s exciting about creepypasta and internet horror to me: The stories happen in direct dialogue with the audience, often actively, with a variety of moving parts creating twisting, turning narratives that sometimes even each story’s originator can’t predict or control.
To be fair, there’s a dark side to that — but when it’s at its best, we get weird mysteries like “Cameraheads,” where the story becomes less about the original story and more about how people relate to it.
Remember, though:
A creature with a camera for a head might sound silly…
…but you’d be wise to treat it with care.
Not all of us are up the task of killing a camerahead, after all.
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photos via fancycrave1, anaterate, staffordgreen0, weera_20, SamuelFrancisJohnson, andreas160578 (remixed by Lucia Peters), Ronald Plett, gustavo_belemmi/Pixabay; mandyxclear/Flickr, available via a CC BY-ND 2.0 Creative Commons license; Peter Herrmann/Unsplash; kotyakov (4)/YouTube; Adrian Michael, Santeri Viinamäki/Wikimedia Commons, available via CC BY-SA 3 and CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons licenses]
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