Share Your Horror Stories in the Creepy Catalog
We were recently contacted by Alex Magnin, CRO/Partner of Thought Catalog, a platform for thought, expression, and a place for young writers to get noticed, because he thought our readers might be interested in their horror/thriller fiction section, Creepy Catalog. Of course we said yes so Alex hooked us up with the person at the center of it all, Chrissy Stockton, who provided us with a short origin story about who they are:
Growing up on the internet, I knew no greater pleasure than finding the creepiest, scariest story I could and becoming so immersed in reading it that even a sunny afternoon could feel terrifying. Before Buzzfeed and Facebook, there were just little forums scattered across the web where you could dig for a great story that might stick with you when computer time was over. This was the old school internet, rough around the edges and appealing to our most ubiquitous impulses, like the one to use our imaginations to scare ourselves silly.
Years later I was working on the internet and thought I had a grasp on the kinds of things our audience liked to read: relationship articles, confessional essays, 10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be. And then something unexpected happened. My co-worker Michael Koh published a list of people’s true scary stories he’d collected, and our readers couldn’t get enough. They requested more and more posts like this. A few months later over beers in Brooklyn, Creepy Catalog was born.
We learned very quickly that millennials love horror, even if very few big publishers are delivering it to them. We brought on Cliff Barlow from Reddit’s No Sleep community, and his story “I Always Thought Something Was Off About My Basement, But I Had No Idea How Terrifying The Truth Was” became one of our most popular stories of the year. Today, 4 million people have read this story.
Another writer, MJ Pack, had a big hit with “I’m On My Deathbed So I’m Coming Clean: Here’s The Gruesome Truth About What Happened To My First Wife,” which 2.5 million people have read now. We brought her on staff, and she works on Creepy Catalog full-time. We can give her a topic we think might be interesting, like “Tinder,” and she’ll write a custom horror story about it in a few days.
One of the coolest parts of Creepy Catalog is how much ownership our fans feel for the community. We’ll post a picture on Twitter, and they want to know where we are, if we’re doing an investigation like we did at the Villisca Axe Murder House, or what’s coming down the pipeline for them to read. We have hard-core horror nerds in our fanbase along with a lot of normal people who just want to be creeped out to add entertainment to their workday. Almost everyone loves horror to some degree, and we’re publishing stories for all of them.
Recent stories include Jim Goad’s “6 Hair-Raising Letters From Actual Stalkers” and Laura Jayne Martin’s “The Worst Kind Of Ghost Is The One You Let In.”
The Creepy Catalog Facebook page is where a lot of the action is with over 1.2 million fans and growing. If you’re a budding horror writer, you’ll want to check out Creepy Catalog; and if you do post something, be sure to share the link in the comments section below.
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