"The Rake": In a 2005 forum post, someone captured something hairless

Around 2005, on an anonymous English-language forum dedicated to strange stories, someone posted a thread titled something like: I may have seen something I wasn't supposed to see.

The poster said that one night, while sleeping at home, in a haze they saw something standing beside the bed: very thin, very tall, grayish-white skin, no hair, black eyes, long thin hands and feet, fingers like hooks. They wanted to scream, but couldn't; wanted to move, but couldn't. The thing stared at them for a while, then dropped down onto all fours and crawled away on its limbs, disappearing.

Below the post, soon people said they had seen it too. Someone said that as a child, they woke up at night to find such a thing crouching beside their bed; someone said they had seen it from afar in the forest.

Someone summarized these descriptions and gave it a name, calling it "The Rake," because the way it crawled on all fours, long and thin, looked very much like a rake.

The story was continuously added to by netizens: someone fabricated nineteenth-century diaries and old newspaper clippings, saying people had seen such a thing long ago; someone fabricated a police report; someone said this thing would come to people's homes at night, stand beside the bed and watch them sleep, and those seen by it would suffer mental breakdowns, commit suicide, or go missing.

Within a few years, "The Rake" became one of the most famous fictional monsters on the internet. Later, someone wrote novels, someone made short films, someone turned it into games.

None of these things is real. The source of the story was just a few posts in that forum, made up by a group of netizens together.

But below the post, even now, people still write: when I was a child, I really saw it beside the bed.

As for what they saw, researchers of sleep paralysis offer this explanation: in a state between dreaming and waking, the brain easily conjures up a tall, thin black shadow, and this shadow looks very much like "The Rake."

#Paranormal #网络转载 #网络怪谈