I recently saw a video about a site called seemerot.com. Supposedly, on the site, you would see a real corpse rotting in the grave in real time. It was all fake (and might’ve been some ploy to make money through porn ads) but that video did remind me of something: RottedRiley.
RottedRiley was a YouTube channel from around 2014 that basically did the same thing seemerot.com was supposed to do: show you a corpse rotting in real time. I forgot where I heard about it; possibly a friend? All I know was that I the premise sounded cool to an edgy teen, which I was at the time.
The channel had a ton of videos that were hours long, all showing a woman in a coffin. In the earliest upload, you could see the woman pretty clearly. She was in her 20s, blond hair, wearing a necklace with an R on it, and had her eyes closed. Just by scrolling through the thumbnails, you could see her decomposing over the course of many videos.
I followed the channel for a few weeks. Sometimes I’d hop on a livestream. There’d usually be one or two people in chat. I think the most I saw was five. Chat usually had a couple of messages from people, but what I remembered was the pinned message made by the channel that appeared in every stream:
“Don’t wake up Riley. She’s sleeping.”
Creepy, sure, but what do you expect from a channel livestreaming a decomposing corpse? I just figured it was part of the vibe.
I usually had the livestream on in the background while I was doing my edgy teen artwork. The channel just inspired the sort of morbid shit I drew as a teen. Plus, weirdly enough, it felt like I had company while I was drawing. Sure, that company was a decomposing corpse, but it’s not like I was the kind of person with better options at the time. I’d sometimes take a look at the stream every so often, completely unfazed by the rotting, bug-eaten corpse.
One day, while I was drawing with the stream in the background, I heard a thump from the video. That was weird, since the livestream didn’t have any sound. What would you hear from a corpse? I checked the video. Riley was still in the same position she’d been in this entire time. She was still lying down with her eyes closed. Her skin was still gray and being chewed through by bugs. The normal shit for Riley. I was about to shrug it off when something changed.
Her eyes opened.
She started turning her head side to side, the skin on her neck ripping like paper. She thrashed about and let out the most harrowing scream I’d ever heard. Chat was exploding, with people losing their minds. The comment I remember most, though, was from the RottedRiley channel:
“SOMEONE WOKE HER UP!”
I liked creepy stuff, but this entire thing freaked me the hell out. I exited the livestream, and tried watching something else to take my mind off of whatever the hell I just saw. The next day, I worked up the nerve to try going to the channel again, only to see that it had been taken down. There wasn’t a trace of this channel left on YouTube.
Over time, I ended up forgetting about the channel. I think part of it was just me trying to repress what I saw. But then I saw that video on seemerot.com, and this entire thing exploded back into my head. After remembering all of this, I decided to try and look back into it. I couldn’t find any archives of the videos or images from the stream. I found vague mentions here and there, but nothing concrete. Most everyone figured this was a hoax or creepypasta.
I was about to dismiss this as some weird false memory or Mandela effect thing when I came across something: a missing person report. The missing person was woman who disappeared around 2014. She was in her mid 20s, had blond hair, and wore a necklace with an R on it.
Her name was Riley Ashcroft.
She is still missing to this day.