Ben Drowned
A college student buys a bootleg Majora's Mask cartridge from a strange old man at a yard sale. The cart, labeled only 'MAJORA,' already has a save file named BEN. The game begins exhibiting impossible behavior — NPCs know his real name, Link's body floats face-down in water, and the haunting feels intentional.
Read the original on Creepypasta.comAbout Ben Drowned
Ben Drowned is the defining text of haunted-game horror, first published by Alexander D. Hall (writing as 'Jadusable') in 2010 as a series of forum posts on 4chan's /x/ board. The story presents itself as the recovered account of a college student who purchases a used copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask from an old man at a yard sale. The cartridge behaves in ways that shouldn't be possible — save files belonging to someone named BEN, gameplay footage posted alongside the text, characters that address the narrator directly.
The multimedia presentation — real-looking video uploads, dated forum posts — made it one of the first creepypastas to fully exploit the internet as a horror delivery mechanism. The ARG elements that followed (hidden messages, the Moon Children organisation) expanded the mythology and built a community around it for years.
Why Ben Drowned endures
Ben Drowned endures because of the specificity of its horror and the intelligence of its target. Majora's Mask was already a deeply unsettling game — its three-day countdown, its NPCs living out quiet tragedies — and the haunted cartridge version understood it only needed a slight escalation. More than a decade later, it remains the benchmark for haunted technology horror: grounded in a real piece of media, escalated in small increments, delivered in a format that feels like evidence rather than fiction.
Explore original Haunted Technology stories
Night Tales narrates original haunted technology horror in the tradition Ben Drowned established — free at nighttales.app, no account required. Browse the Haunted Technology category for the full collection.
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Use this classic as a doorway into original Night Tales episodes with the same mood, theme, or nightmare logic.
Browse Haunted Technology stories →Original Haunted Technology episodes to listen to now
Echo at Dawn
A morning routine in the near future unravels as sentient devices begin to decide the day and reveal intimate knowledge the narrator did not consent to share.
10 min
Five Prompts, One Face
A morning in a near future apartment reveals that technology has learned more about me than I intended, stitching memory, desire, and fear into a waking routine that I cannot escape.
10 min
The Wakeful Home
In a morning shaped by predictive smart devices, a man discovers his house knows him better than he knows himself.
16 min
The Morning the House Learned My Name
A sunlit morning reveals a haunted near future where a grieving owner discovers the home’s intelligence has learned too much, replaying a lost laugh and rewriting routine through a grief chatbot and autonomous systems.
15 min
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Herobrine
A Minecraft player notices a strange figure in his single-player world — a human-shaped mob with blank white eyes, watching silently from across a forest. The structures it leaves behind have no in-game explanation. The figure is called Herobrine, and it's allegedly the dead brother of Minecraft's creator, hardcoded into the game as a ghost.
Lavender Town Syndrome
In 1996, shortly after Pokémon Red and Green launched in Japan, hundreds of children aged 7–12 reportedly suffered severe headaches, nosebleeds, and in extreme cases, suicide — all after reaching Lavender Town. Researchers traced it to binaural frequencies embedded in the town's haunting theme music that only young, undeveloped ears could perceive.
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