Zalgo: In 2004, a joke on a forum became the world's most famous "garbled ghost"

You might have seen text like this: a line of characters, with messy little symbols piled above and below, looking like they are melting, as if something is crawling out from within the letters. This is called "Zalgo text".

The name comes from a monster on the internet. Around 2004, on a major English-language forum, someone drew a few very crude comics featuring a monster. The text in the comics only had a few lines: "He is coming", "He is coming", "He cannot be stopped". The art style was rough, but for some reason, netizens found it funny and started editing the images, drawing this monster into other comics and other photos, one by one, swallowing up normal things.

This monster is called "Zalgo". Later, someone discovered that a certain function on computers could make text look like that melting, crawling effect, which matched this monster very well, so people called this kind of text "Zalgo text".

The principle is simple: among the characters on a computer, there is a type of symbol used specifically to be added on top of other characters, such as tones or accent marks. They do not occupy a position on their own, but are stacked on top of the preceding character. Normally, a character has at most one or two stacked. But the computer does not limit the quantity; you can stack dozens or hundreds. If enough are stacked, the characters get squeezed out of shape, the symbols on top push upward, and those on the bottom crawl downward, eventually turning into a black mass.

Over the years, it has become a kind of "evil" symbol on the internet, used to write curses, demonic lines, titles for horror novels and videos, and some people use it for pranks, leaving a string of garbled text on other people's webpages.

It is not some talisman, and no one will have something happen just from looking at it. Feeling dizzy after looking at it for a long time, however, is real.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #网络怪谈