Short Horror Stories and Urban Legends

Robert the Doll

Hey, Reddit. I'm fucked. Help. So a few months ago, me and a couple of uni friends were browsing the internet and heard about this 'Annora Petrova' creepypasta. We found it pretty weird that we hadn't read it because we spend most nights reading pastas or listening to them. So we read the pasta and found it so cool. Naturally, the first thing we did was Wikipedia ourselves. (I'll link the pasta for anybody that hasn't read it yet.) When we got no results, we thought of something genius. One of our friends was back home seeing family for the weekend. And we thought it would be the funniest thing ever to make him, we'll call him Robert, for privacy's sake, a Wikipedia page. Try and mirror the story, and find a way of getting him to Wikipedia himself without being too obvious about it.

We set up a page and copied the story completely. Posted good things at first, and said something simple would happen. We said he'd pass his exams and assessments after the weekend, all with firsts. When he found the page, he was sceptical. Exam results on a Wikipedia page? So he started pointing the finger. Accusing us of doing it. He was so stressed and all the work had gone to his head, fair assumption. Now Robert isn't the kind of guy to get a first, but he'd been revising an abnormal amount and, sure enough, his marks were insane. So we were kind of freaked out.

Next, we wrote something grim. We wrote that Robert would break his wrist during a show with his band. We obviously didn't want this to happen, but we were so curious. When he saw the page, he panicked and almost refused to play, but we talked him back in to it. Two days later, Robert's in hospital with a broken wrist. This terrified us. We didn't want to do it anymore, as you can imagine. I was the first to throw in the towel. The other two wanted to do one more. Just to see what happened. But I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. So they did something completely unlikely. Robert was set to find £5,000 in the street on our way to get some shopping for the week, just 5 days after coming out of hospital. None of us believed this would happen. Especially Robert, he kept refreshing the page on his phone and telling us how it was never going to happen. At least he didn't believe we'd set him up anymore...

When we saw the bag of money to the side of the pavement, we all noped the fuck out. Like, this was some weird shit right now. I almost started crying. We split the money and headed off home. It was that night we decided we'd stop doing this. We'd confess it was us that had made the page and just cut it out. This was going way too far. In the morning, we told Robert everything. We vowed to stop updating the page and delete our accounts. Just keep the page up, to remember it all. And that's what we did. He sat with us as we each deleted our Wikipedia accounts and promised to stop messing with it all. And that's when it got really weird. We sat in a circle with our money in front of us and talked about what we'd spend it on. Robert let us keep our shares because without us, he wouldn't have any of it. After we'd talked, he pulled out his phone and refreshed the page, from force of habit.

'Robert's friends are losers. Next time they want to mess with someone's life, maybe they should finish the job. Maybe I will.'

It was there. In writing. None of us could have done it, we all sat and watched each other delete our accounts, then sat in a circle and nobody even took their phones out of their pockets. And yet... Robert vomited there and then. It was all too much for him. We all slept in the same room that night, after struggling with the idea of sleeping for hours, and stayed together the next few days. The page was regularly updated with things such as 'Robert's life is ruined because of his silly friends.' and 'I can't wait to meet you all' But nothing too terrifying happened until today. We'd all got in to the paranoid habit of frequently refreshing the page, but had began going out alone again. I was heading down to the shop this morning while my girlfriend was sleeping, and refreshed the page in the lift. 'One of Robert's friends has a beautiful little girl in his bedroom. What a shame it'd be to see her bald.'

You can imagine my pure disbelief when I went straight back up to my room, to see all of her hair in a mess on the floor. She was absolutely terrified, me even more so. I explained everything to her, and informed the rest of the guys. We've been sat in Robert's room since, and it's been about an hour since the hair update. Seriously, don't even think about fucking with this stuff. I'll update as and when. Wish us luck.