Urban Legends and Myths

They Hurt Her

FACT: About two months later, 16-year-old David Gregory read this post and didn't repost it. When he went to take a shower, he heard laughter, started freaking out, and ran to his computer to repost it. He said goodnight to his mom and went to sleep, but five hours later, his mom woke up in the middle of the night from a loud noise and David was gone. A few hours later, the police found him in the sewer, with a broken neck and the skin on his face peeled off.
Even Google her name - you'll find this to be true.

If you don't repost this saying "They hurt her," then Carmen will get you, either from a sewer, the toilet, the shower, or when you go to sleep, you'll wake up in the sewer, in the dark, then Carmen will come and kill you.

Analysis: If it seems like there's something missing in the story above, that's because the text is a fragment of a longer story, "Carmen Winstead." Carmen, supposedly, was a 17-year-old girl who was bullied by a gang of students at her own school. They pushed her down a sewer drain, in fact, and she died, only to come back from the dead and kill not only her tormenters, but every hapless soul who reads her story and fails to share it, as well. It's a classic Internet chain letter.

It's also a perfect example, whether in long or in short form, of creepypasta, an Internet phenomenon defined as brief horror stories, videos, and creepy images shared in online forums and via social media (creepypasta is a subcategory of copypasta - as in "copy and paste").

There is, of course, no evidence that the story of Carmen Winstead is true, in whole or in part, nor that a teenager named David Gregory (or any other human being in the real world, for that matter) had his neck broken and skin peeled off as punishment for failing to repost a chain letter.