A weird thing happened to me this month. A YouTube video I posted a couple of years ago suddenly started gaining a lot of traffic. Like, A LOT. Normally, if a video of mine does well, then it gets around 1000 views. This video is currently sitting at 29k views. That’s insane numbers for me. Too bad it isn’t for one of my books, just a quick short I did on a book I was reading at the time. 

The book in question is a fairly obscure horror classic called The King in Yellow written in 1895 by Robert W. Chambers. It’s more of a collection of short stories all revolving around a forbidden play that induces madness in those who read it. Now, as well as being seen over 29 thousand times, my silly little video has garnered over 400 comments, most saying simply; “don’t turn left at the crossroads” or some variation of that. At first, I thought it was a quote from the book, but I don’t remember any such thing. Then I googled the phrase. 

I guess you can file this under ‘me getting old’ and ‘just ask the kids’. Apparently, there is a creepy Minecraft video which is gaining popularity right now. As far as I can tell, it originated on a YouTube channel called AveryTheMayo where Avery claimed to have found a laptop in a storage locker and started playing Minecraft on it. Then, things got creepy. He found a mine in his world that he didn’t create, containing a chest. In the chest was a book that he did not write and the first line of the book is; “Whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.” Through a clever code revealed in the video, viewers were able to decipher a Google drive link which led them to a folder containing a couple of videos. The videos show somebody exploring a Minecraft ‘world that doesn’t exist’. 

As the explorer moves through this massive subterranean world, they start noticing creepy stuff like whispering voices, footsteps following them and torches going out behind them. They are obviously being pursued by something and eventually stumble on an abandoned city which contains signs that the entity inhabiting this world is none other than the titular King in Yellow from Robert W. Chambers’s book. 

There’s a lengthy video going into more detail on this here. I guess youngsters are searching YouTube for videos on ‘The King in Yellow’ and coming across my short which accounts for the massive amount of traffic I’m getting. I also like the idea that a Minecraft video is turning kids on to Robert W. Chambers 

I love this sort of thing. Along with creepypastas, its the sort of online urban legend that inspired my book Dial-Up and Die. I did a ton of research into creepy online mysteries for that one and remember well the early days of the internet when the technology itself seemed dangerous and suseptible to supernatural ‘viruses’. Remember all those creepypastas about haunted video games? This is kind of like that. 

Until next time… stay safe online