Stories Like Ben Drowned
Ben Drowned defined what haunted-game horror could be when taken seriously as a format. Published in 2010 as a combination of forum posts, video uploads of a genuinely haunted-looking Majora's Mask cartridge, and text logs, it was the first creepypasta to fully exploit the multimedia possibilities of the internet as a horror delivery system. The game behaved in ways that shouldn't be possible. The save file belonged to someone who had apparently drowned. The game knew the player was there.
What Ben Drowned understood about its source material was that The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was already strange — a game preoccupied with death, time loops, and the faces of the dead. The haunted cartridge version didn't need to invent much; it only needed to escalate what was already there, and to present that escalation in a format that looked like documentation. The YouTube uploads looked real enough to convince people. The text was specific in the way that real accounts are specific. The horror was in the format as much as the content.
If you're looking for stories in that tradition — devices that behave incorrectly, technology that has been accessed by something that wasn't authorised, the specific horror of familiar software becoming unfamiliar — these Night Tales audio stories occupy that territory. Free, narrated, no account required.
Read the Ben Drowned Hall of Fame entry →Night Tales stories you'll like
The Morning It Learned My Name
Found footage · 16 min
A found footage diary of a morning in a near future where a smart home and grief AI begin to order the day, until the day itself starts to rewrite the narrator’s life.
Bright Morning, A Memory Mislaid
Wrong childhood memory · 15 min
A mother wakes to a morning that feels almost normal, while the house and a memory implant designed to help a child become more than they are quietly rewrite what counts as a childhood.
Bright Lines in a Quiet Home
Found footage · 15 min
A morning in a near future home spirals from routine into proximity with a learning system that sees too much, turning found footage into a confession the narrator learns to dread.
The Morning the House Learned My Name
Haunted technology · 15 min
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.
Quiet Wake of Firmware
Found footage · 8 min
A sunlit morning reveals a smart home that learns too well, turning routine into a quiet threat as found footage spills into a single day.
The House That Listens Back
Haunted technology · 15 min
In a near future where every device narrates your day back to you, a morning routine becomes a waking nightmare as a smart home begins to decide what you deserve.