Just a short drive from just about anywhere in the country is a cave waiting to be explored. Even a cave well known among the general public can be approached by someone for the first time as an adventure, something new, something to overcome. Because it’s there.
Ted, Ted’s Caving Page (2001)
Since the dawn of the internet, creepypasta has been a cornerstone of online horror. Urban legends of the modern era, these stories aren’t told round a campfire and are instead spread from user to user through links and forums. I formed my fondest (and earliest) memories of these tales on scaryforkids.com, which I’m honestly surprised is still around. I’d get home from school and pull up a new story on the (incredibly slow) internet as soon as I could, hunting for more evidence for the existence of the dreaded Rake whilst listening to the Lavender Town theme to scare myself silly.
I can bet that if you’re between the ages of about 16-25, you’ve probably encountered these stories in one form or another when you were a kid. Be it Jeff the Killer and his edgy fanbase, or the Russian Sleep Experiment you were convinced really happened. I mean, everyone’s heard of Slenderman. An unfortunate characteristic of these online horror stories is that the majority of them were, for the most part, pretty badly written and executed. Sure, they were pretty spooky reading them in your childhood and early teens – but if, like me, you’ve ever been on a nostalgia trip and reread any of these stories, you’ll soon discover that they just don’t withstand the tests of time – they aren’t believable anymore.
The best example of this genre, in my opinion, is Ted’s Caving Page, an ancient angelfire journal site documenting the experience of our titular Ted in exploring a newly-discovered cave. Everything about this site, from the technologically primitive, wall-of-text style of the early 2000s personal blog pages to the click-through images make this story feel downright uncomfortable, a relic of the internet annals that you’ve accidentally stumbled across and probably shouldn’t be looking at. It’s a meta, fourth-wall breaking fear that only internet horror stories and ARGs can really have – not only is this story pretty spooky, but the website itself also feels somewhat uncanny in it’s elementary technology.
Ted prefaces his story with three disclaimers, each working to dissuade the scepticism one approaches these sorts of stories with. It’s essentially the same as the worn out ‘this story is based on true events’ trope that’s become overused in modern horror, but being an online diary, Ted’s notes don’t feel the need to stress this. He states that his images aren’t doctored, and that he won’t reveal the names or locations involved in the story, because he doesn’t want to be held accountable for anybody’s life but his own. From the get-go, Ted’s Caving Page oozes a sense of mystery – after all, why would a personal caving journal potentially put someone in peril? You feel the sense that perhaps this opening page was written in retrospect of some awful event, urging your morbid curiosity to continue the read.
To summarize, Ted’s Caving Page follows our titular spelunker and his friend B in the ‘bizarre’, unexplored cave somewhere within the US. It’s a slow burner, the first few pages mostly spent describing their attempts to break through a wall in order to access the cave, all the while intermittently hearing a low, rumbling noise and a strange wind originating from within. In blue text, Ted provides us with retrospective notes, bemoaning his naivety in continuing pursuit of the cave. As they push deeper and deeper inside, Ted and B hear noises, ‘like a cross between a man screaming in fear, and a cougar screaming in pain’. Ignoring them, they decide to push on. Ted makes it into the cave alone, noticing odd, symbolic drawings engraved into the rock. Later, a friend joins Ted and manages to get separated, returning traumatised and refusing to explain what happened. During Ted’s final expedition within the cave, something appears to notice his presence, chasing him out of the passageway. The journal ends abruptly, following promises to return after one, final expedition. We, the readers, are left wondering just what happened down in the dank depths of the mystery cave.
Even before anything spooky happens in the story, Ted evokes an oppressive image of the cave itself. In order to fit through the initial crawlspace, the cavers need to chip away at a hole within the rock, which is, at first, about enough to fit a hand through. This is worsened by the fact that caving is, by all accounts, an incredibly dangerous hobby, even without unseen monsters lurking in the darkness. Images of people in tiny crawl spaces within maze-like cave systems are claustrophobia inducing – one can’t even begin to imagine the fear of being stuck in those dark depths. Ted himself nods to this, naming the tightest section of the passage ‘Floyd’s tomb’ after deceased caver Floyd Collins. In the 1900s, Floyd became trapped within a cave system, passing away after 14 days. This, alongside his graphic description of ‘the squeeze’ at the entrance of the cave emphasises the very real danger of Ted’s journey itself, outside of its supernatural elements. Reaching the end of the story, you start to wonder if this reference to Floyd is some morbid premonition, on Ted’s part.
As Ted and B continue to delve deeper into the cave, they choose to ignore all the warning signs. The wailing of the wind stops and starts in an otherworldly manner, their friend Joe returns from the cave bloodied and terrified, but this seems to spur them on even more. Almost in awe of the horrors they are discovering, Ted and B are blinded to the dangerous position they place themselves in with delusions of discovery and glory. At the end of the journals, the reader gets an eerie sense that the cave has truly overtaken Ted’s psyche, driving him on what is essentially a suicide mission in order to discover the true nature of what lies within the passageway they have discovered. Despite his multiple traumatic experiences inside the mysterious cave, he makes the choice to return.
In this sense, there’s something Lovecraftian about the horror in the Mystery Cave. It helps that we don’t see the unknown evil force, as our imagination can warp the thing into whatever it deems scariest. Once Ted makes his initial journey through the tight, inhospitable passageway of the squeeze, it’s as if something has awakened. He feels things watching him, moving around in the darkness just out of sight, not revealing itself to his presence as if it is part of something bigger. Strange etchings within the cave begin to glow. Rocks move around him, opening more passageways under the heart of the mountain, suggesting that this rabbit hole goes even deeper. Are things in the cave really moving by themselves, or is there something in the cave lurking in the shadows? Is this an Eldritch location, an Eldritch creature… or is it both? Even worse, with all the time taken by Ted and B to open up the passageway in the first place, does that mean that whatever’s inside can now escape, too? The ambiguity in Ted’s Caving Page doesn’t leave us enough room to determine answers to these overarching questions, leaving the mind to wander and create unimaginable horrors down in that cave.
Ted’s Journal reminds me a lot of Neil Marshall’s 2005 caving film, The Descent, except with a touch more otherworldliness. Ted’s descriptions of the cave slowly reveal its malevolence, conjuring imagery of vampire legend and sealed catacombs of bygone eras, but rather than a creature feature, you get the sense that Ted and B have instead awoken some ancient evil. Narrowly escaping the thing in the cave, Ted comments on its acrid smell, ‘damp, rotting, rancid, putrid, DEATH’. In my mind, this description drives home the being’s demonic origin.
While there may be something (or some things) in the cave, it feels as though the structure itself has awareness. Reaching the end of the story, you get the sense that the cave has been watching B and Ted through all their attempts to enter, beckoning them inside only to reveal its true nature at the last moment, like a giant, rocky venus flytrap. Furthering this notion, in his last update, Ted implies that whatever he found within the cave appears to have followed him out. He notices things moving out of the corner of his eye, and sounds like those heard within the cave follow him throughout his home. This compels him to return to the cave, whilst further evoking that sense of Lovecraftian madness and impulse in whatever he found inside.
Even aside from a ‘supernatural’ reading of this story, getting lost in the dark inside an unexplored cave system is a very real and very terrifying explanation for this kind of experience – panic and disorientation affect the brain in strange ways. Our bodies are not truly adapted for such an event, and as such, the ‘otherworldy’ nature of the cave could also be explained in the context of human delusion. I have fond memories of my first reading of Ted’s Caving Page, and I’m glad to say that when the boredom nostalgia hit during lockdown, my second reading 10 years later was just as enjoyable. Though I no longer approach these internet horror stories with the same suspension of disbelief as I did back in my early teens, Ted’s story holds up, specifically because the danger of the cave itself is somewhat plausible.
In many ways, this journal is like the Blair Witch Project of internet horror. My Mum always told me a story about that film – how when we were on holiday in Florida sometime in 1999, she went to the cinema late at night and caught an early viewing. She’d seen no adverts for it (there hadn’t been much publicity here in the UK) and as such, genuinely believed the events of the film were real. Stumbling across Ted’s Caving Page with no prior context or knowledge, I can see how someone could make a similar assumption, leaving them to speculate about exactly what Ted found down in those caves. Even more chilling, Ted reminds us that only a short while away from our homes, there might just be a cave waiting to be explored. If one were to assume the story’s truth, this also implies the existence of such Eldritch horror all over the world, just waiting to be discovered and unleashed.
Morbid Instinct 