Ben Drowned

• 1. Introduction

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  Ben Drowned began as eight sentences posted to 4chan's /x/ board on the 7th of September 2010. A college student calling himself Jadusable described buying a Nintendo 64 cartridge labeled "Majora" from a disconcerting old man at a garage sale. The save file on the cartridge still belonged to someone named Ben. Within two days, the post had drawn over 100,000 readers. Within weeks, it had gone viral across the internet.

  What followed was not a short story. Alexander D. Hall, writing under the pen name Jadusable, built a ten-year, three-arc multimedia project that eventually totaled 3,591,600 words and 382 minutes of footage. It drew real newspaper clippings mailed to readers, hidden websites that reset every three days, and audience votes that literally determined whether characters lived or died.

• 2. The Haunted Cartridge

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  Hall's opening gambit was radical in its simplicity. Jadusable posted on 4chan not as a storyteller but as a confused, frightened player asking strangers for help. He described loading the game to find a save file from a previous owner named Ben and noticing small, creeping inconsistencies in the game's behavior.

  The glitches escalated. Jadusable attempted a well-known exploit called the day four glitch, in which a player skips the third day's ending to explore the in-game world as shown in the credits sequence. Instead of the expected result, he found Clock Town emptied of all its inhabitants. The Happy Mask Salesman's laugh looped endlessly. When Jadusable forced his character Link to drown in a pond to trigger a game over, Link clutched his head and screamed. A statue of Link then appeared and followed his character through the town, always moving just outside the camera's edge. When Jadusable finally turned the camera to face it directly, the screen flashed to the Salesman and Link. All three figures locked in place, staring through the screen.

  Jadusable concluded that the cartridge was possessed by the spirit of its previous owner, a twelve-year-old boy who had drowned roughly eight years before he bought it. A figure calling itself BEN began contacting him beyond the game, changing his computer wallpaper to depict the Elegy of Emptiness statue and speaking through the online artificial intelligence Cleverbot.

  The first arc ends with a revelation that reframes everything the reader has witnessed. BEN had been hijacking Jadusable's account the entire time, feeding false accounts to 4chan and YouTube. The files Jadusable shared with readers to ask for help were, in fact, BEN's escape route. The entity declared, "Now I am everywhere." Jadusable was never heard from again. The cult whose ritual created BEN would not be revealed until two days later.

• 3. The Audience as Characters

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  A reader decoded a hidden cipher on Jadusable's YouTube channel on the 17th of September 2010, two days after the first arc ended. The cipher led to a private website, youshouldnthavedonethat.net, which looked like an ordinary mid-2000s Angelfire-style page. It was the home of a doomsday cult called the Moon Children.

  The website reset itself every three days, mirroring the three-day countdown mechanic at the center of Majora's Mask. On the third day, readers could upload YouTube video responses playing songs from Majora's Mask or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to influence what happened next. When one reader uploaded a video of the Song of Time, the same song Link uses in Majora's Mask to reset the three-day cycle, the website went offline. It returned the following day, glitching and unfinished, as if restored to the moment the readers first found it.

  This revealed the structure Hall had built. Readers were not observers. Their actions changed the course of the story, and those changes had consequences. Characters who survived one cycle were killed in the next because readers had altered the sequence of events. A moderator named Ifrit answered reader questions before disappearing and confirmed that the original Ben was sacrificed on the 23rd of April 2002.

  On the 8th of November 2010, a new video on Jadusable's channel signaled the arc's epilogue. On the 17th of February 2011, Hall launched a forum called Within Hubris to serve as a central hub. Within a week, certain readers began receiving physical newspaper clippings in the mail describing an apparent murder-suicide in New York. On the 27th of February, a video showed the interior of the house from those clippings. Then, on the 15th of July 2011, Hall announced an indefinite hiatus.

• 4. Nine Years of Silence

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  The hiatus lasted nearly nine years. Hall publicly expressed renewed interest in a third arc in October 2017, also revealing that he had anonymously created a second "popular" creepypasta series entirely separate from Ben Drowned, though he did not name it.

  During that hiatus, Ben Drowned did not fade. The BBC eventually described it as traumatizing a generation of young internet users. Hall himself acknowledged some guilt over its effects on younger readers, saying he wanted to tell a story but "didn't actually want to cause trauma." The series received renewed and sobering attention in 2016, when 12-year-old Katelyn Davis, who had recently died by suicide, was reported to have been catfished by a user embodying BEN's persona.

  By the time Awakening launched in March 2020, the first two arcs had accumulated over 2 million unique visitors in a single month, nearly eight years after their completion. Hall chose the 17th of March 2020 as the launch date, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. He used machine-learning programs to create artwork and music, and built the arc's central villain, The Father, entirely using Artbreeder, an artificial intelligence image generator. Hall expressed enthusiasm for these tools while warning that they could quickly render many independent artists obsolete.

  Awakening ran on a schedule of updates every three days before settling into weekly releases, and it closed on the 31st of October 2020.

• 5. The Eternity Project

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  Awakening split into two parts. The first, Methods of Revolution, followed a character called the Second Player who woke in a corrupted simulation named the Ethereal Hotel. Audience members voted on his decisions in a format similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The Second Player encountered a man named Baker, who gave a cryptic warning, and eventually learned that Jadusable had been consumed by The Father after venturing too deep into the glitched cartridge.

  The Second Player's death by audience misstep shifted the story to a new protagonist, Sarah, who also woke in the Ethereal Hotel. Her portion of the arc, The Last Hero, returned to modified gameplay footage from Majora's Mask. Abel, a figure encountered in the hotel, delivered a Nintendo 64 and the original Majora's Mask cartridge to Sarah's room. When she grabbed the controller, she was pulled into the game world and found it deeply corrupted. At the edge of that broken world, she found a fragmented spirit of Ben still imprisoned there.

  The arc's climax turned on a debate among dozens of digitized human souls. They argued over whether Sarah should let the moon crash and end their suffering, or attempt the fourth day glitch, the same exploit that had started everything in the original arc. The audience chose the glitch. The world fractured again into something worse before Sarah faced The Father directly.

  The resolution came through an object Sarah had collected after freeing Rosa from a time loop: the Pendant of Memories. The Father, persuaded by what it represented, agreed to remove all anomalies from the world, including Sarah herself, while restoring the cartridge to its original state. The series' final image shows Ben, inhabiting young Link's body, waving beside the now-purified Elegy statue.

• 6. Influence and Legacy

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  Kotaku writer Owen Good published a favorable review roughly two months into the original 2010 publication. Readership quadrupled. A 2017 followup from the same outlet, published during the hiatus, praised the series' biblical themes and its use of the five stages of grief and the "ghost within the machine" trope.

  Liam Conlon of Vice called Ben Drowned "a shining example of how Zelda fans have always been in lockstep with Nintendo's own experimentation with horror" and praised its take on found footage. Ryan Larson of Bloody Disgusting wrote that Hall used "the devices of our advanced time to make something that the kids of the nineties can latch onto." Kara Dennison of Fanbyte identified Ben Drowned as the primary inspiration cited by Tony Domenico for Petscop, and concluded it was "highly likely BEN Drowned will remain the best of its kind."

  In September 2014, concept art for the Gravity Falls episode "Soos and the Real Girl" confirmed Ben Drowned as a primary influence on the character GIFfany. GIFfany herself became an acknowledged inspiration for Monika in Doki Doki Literature Club. The series has been studied in academic contexts as an expression of digital anxiety about identity and the blurring line between user and machine. Media scholars cite it as foundational to video-game-themed horror, influencing later work including Herobrine from Minecraft.

  Clive Barker and Warner Brothers approached Hall about an adaptation. An independent film titled Darkland: Ben Drowned, produced by Mind's Eye Entertainment and starring Jonny Clarke, began filming in 2015 but was not completed. In 2025, Hall announced Dead Save, a new narrative series exploring alternate versions of classic video games, covered by the BBC in its 15-year retrospective on Ben Drowned.