Creepypastas

The Curious Case of Smile.jpg

I first met in with Mary E. in the summer of 2007. I had arranged with her husband of fifteen years, Terence, to see her for an interview. Mary had initially agreed, since I was not a newsman but rather an amateur writer gathering information for a few early college assignments and, if all went according to plan, some pieces of fiction. We scheduled the interview for a particular weekend when I was in Chicago on unrelated business, but at the last moment Mary changed her mind and locked herself in the couple's bedroom, refusing to meet with me.

For half an hour, I sat with Terence as we camped outside the bedroom door, I was listening and taking notes while he attempted fruitlessly to calm his wife. The things Mary said made little sense, but fit into the pattern I was expecting: though I chould not see her, I could tell from her voice that she was crying, and more often than not her objections to speaking with me centered around an incoherent diatribe on her dreams - her nightmares.

Terence apologized profusely when we ceased the exercise, and I did my best to take it in stride; recall that I wasn't a reporter in search of a story, but merely a curious young man in search of information. Besides, I thought at the time, I could perhaps find another, simiular case if I put my mind and resources to it.

Mary E. was the sysop for a small Chicago-based Bulletin Board System in 1992 when she first encountered smile.jpg and her life changed forever. She and Terence had been marries for only five months. Mary was one of an estimated 400 people who was the image when it was posted as a hyperlink on the BBS, though she is the only one who has spoken openly about the experience. The rest have remained anonymous, or are perhaps dead.

In 2005, when I was only in tenth grade, smile.jpg was first brought to my attention by my burgeoning interest in web-based phenomena; Mary was the most often cited victim of what is sometimes referred to as "Smile Dog," the being smile.jpg is reputed to display.

What caught my interest (other than the obvious macabre elements of the cyber-legend and my proclivity toward such things) was the sheer lack of information, usually to the point that people don't believe it even exists other than as a sumor or hoax. It is unique because, though the entire phenomenon centers on a picture file, that file is no where to be found on the internet; certainly many photo-manipulated simulacra litter the web, showing up with the most frequency on sites such as the image-board 4chan, particularly the /x/-focused paranormal sub board.

It is suspected that these are fakes because they do not have the effect the true smile.jpg is believed to have, namely sudden onset temporal lobe epilepsy and acute anxiety. This purpoted reaction in the viewer is one of the reasons the phantom-like smile.jpg is regarded with such disdain, since it is patently absurd, though depending on whom you ask, the reluctance to acknowledge smile.jpg's existence might be just as much out of fear as it is out of disbelief.

Neither smile.jpg nor Smile.dog is mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia, though the website features articles on such other, perhaps more scandalous shocksites such as gotse (hello.jpg) or 2girls1cup; any attempt to create a page pertaining to smile.jpg is summarily deleted by any of the encyclopedia's many admins.

Encounters with smile.jpg are the stuff of internet legend. Mary E.'s story is not unique; there are unverified rumors of smile.jpg showing up in the early days of usenet and even one persistent tale that in 2002 a hacker flooded the forums of humor and satire website Something Awful with a deluge of Smile.dog pictures, rendering almost of the forum's users at the time epileptic. It is also said that in the mid-to-late 90s that smile.jpg circulated on Usenet and as an attachment of a chain email with the subject like "SMILE!! GOD LOVES YOU!"

Yet despite the huge exposure these stunts would generate, there are very few people who admit to having experienced any of them and no trace of the file or any link has ever been discovered. Those who claim to have seen smile.jpg often weakly joke that they were far too busy to save a copy of the picture to their hard drive.