I’m not an internet person. I never was. Sometimes I checked my Facebook account to see if I missed any birthdays or went on YouTube to listen to songs or podcasts.
A few weeks ago though, my good friend at work introduced me to Reddit. At first I wasn’t too interested, but after some time I followed a few animals and news related subreddits and occasionally checked them out. After about a week my home feed consisted mostly of cat and dog pics, people telling stories about their pets and sometimes information about what was going on around the world.
Wasn’t long before I started to get subreddit recommendations, and to no one’s surprise, most of them were animal related. I checked every single one of them, read the rules carefully and joined them because, why not. Can never have too many cute animal pics.
Most of the subreddit rules were fairly similar; no gore, animal abuse, bestiality, bla bla, all of that. But one of them struck me in particular. Outside of the casual rules that all of them had, one of the first rules was:
“DON’T REPLY TO ANYTHING FROM X/ILOVECATS”
I was weirded out at first, not going to lie, but brushed it off as an early Halloween joke. I thankfully quickly forgot about it and went on with my life, as anyone else would do.
Yesterday when scrolling after work I came across one of those “Help me identify this animal” posts. Nothing would be too weird about it, if it wasn’t for the insane amount of downvotes it had. No comments, no… nothing, only downvotes.
I checked to see if there was anything wrong with the post. It seemed fairly normal, a guy just asking for help with identifying a cat he found outside of his door. Since I had nothing better to do and it seemed like no one else wanted to help him, I started to google.
Took me about an hour, maybe even more, before I was safe to say that I found the breed. Wasn’t an easy task since I never really cared for breeds, only if the cat was fluffy and cute or not. I typed the name of the breed in the reply hoping that it would help the guy, and because of the late hour I turned my phone off and went to bed.
Around 3 AM I was awoken by constant ‘dings’ from my phone. I didn’t have a large family nor a huge group of friends, so I had absolutely no idea who would be texting me at this hour.
I grabbed my phone and was quickly met with over 2 thousand replies to my comment that I made on the cat subreddit before heading to bed. Wouldn’t be anything weird if I had said something controversial, but I just replied with the breed of the cat! Surely it wouldn’t have been that bad.
I looked over every single comment, and as much as I was tired before, I was suddenly as awake as ever.
“JESUS CHRIST HIDE “
” WHAT HAVE YOU DONE “
” SOMEONE HELP HIM “
” ARE YOU DUMB “
Those were only few of the replies that I got, but the more I read of them the more terrified I became. It couldn’t have been a Halloween prank, especially not this scale.
” USERNAME “
Reading the reply from an anonymous user, I quickly checked the username of the OP. My whole body turned white, and I froze in actual terror as I read it carefully a few times, trying to confirm that my eyes weren’t deceiving me.
x/ilovecats
The replies kept coming. People were asking for my safety, telling me to go somewhere safe, or begging me to call the police. It was a cat subreddit! A cat one! And yet I have never, ever seen something like this.
I turned my phone off. I couldn’t even gather my thoughts correctly. This was a joke right? A prank. Or a weird nightmare that I was going to wake up from soon.
I pinched myself a few times just to be sure that I wasn’t dreaming, but nothing happened. I didn’t wake up, I didn’t open my eyes. It had to be real. It was real.
As I reached for my phone again after a minute of cooling down, I heard a knock on my door. And with it, came a hundred new messages, all saying the same thing.
” DON’T OPEN YOUR DOOR “
I’ve been hiding in my bathroom for over an hour now and the knocks just keep getting stronger and louder. A few minutes ago I heard something loudly snap, and I’m afraid that it was one of the metal hinges of my front door. I have no idea what to do, I turned off my notifications a long time ago because they made me even more paranoid. I live alone, and there’s not a lot of houses nearby. My battery is also very quickly draining.
I’m afraid I’m actually going to die tonight.
Please help me.