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[00:02]
Vanessa
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an Internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new Crime House original with Sabrina, Diana Roga and Alexis Linklater. Every week one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2am that starts with you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe@c Crimesofreddit pod on YouTube.
[00:45]
Heidi Wong
This is crime house, A children's show that aired on a tiny local station for a couple of months in the early 70s and then vanished. A cowardly pirate, a living ship with a grinning wooden face and a skeleton in a top hat who tells a little girl exactly what he does with the skin he takes. A whole generation swears they watched it cross legged on the living room floor, 4 o', clock, right after the news. There's just one problem. There's no record it ever existed. Today I'm telling you the story of Candle Cove. The creepypasta that doesn't haunt a house or a camera or a video game. It haunts the one place you can never lock the door. Your own memory. Welcome to Twisted A Crime House Original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week I'll take you deep into humanity's darkest stories and the creepiest corners of the Internet. If you've ever had a haunted moment or a twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments. The creepier the better. Crime House exists because of listeners like you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free. Subscribe subscribe to Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. We're also on YouTube with full video episodes. Just search and subscribe to Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong so you can watch the horror come to life. Today I'm telling you the story of Candle Cove. It's about a children's television show, one that a handful of strangers slowly remember together in real time on an Internet forum. And the more they remember, the worse it gets.
[02:30]
Josh Mankiewicz
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[03:26]
Heidi Wong
What makes this one special Right out of the gate Most creepypastas out there are anonymous. But not this one, and its author plays a big role in what's about to play out. This might be the single most meta horror story ever written. It's a creepypasta about the way creepypastas get made. And then it went out into the world and became the exact thing that it was imitating. The story basically predicted its own future. It weaponizes nostalgia. And we're not talking about a haunted house you've never set foot in. We're talking about the kids show that you watched in your pajamas. The safest, warmest memories that most of us have. And fair warning, by the end of this episode, you're gonna want to call your mom and ask her what you actually watched when you were little. Let me set the the year is 2009. A web cartoonist named Chris Schraub, a guy who built up a following making comics online, is running a horror fiction website called Icore Falls. It's a place where he posts original, creepy short stories. And a lot of them are set in one fictional, cursed little American town. And in 2009 he posts one called Candle Cove. But he doesn't write it like a story. Instead, Chris writes the whole thing as a thread on a made up website called the Net Nostalgia Forum. The kind of place where adults go to reminisce about the pop culture of their childhood. Think old commercials, forgotten toys, discontinued cereals, things like that. It starts with a user called skyshale033. They post a question that probably feels similar to anyone who's fallen down a late night Internet rabbit hole asking, does anyone else remember this kids show? It was called Candle Cove. Skyshale would have been about six or seven when it came out. They Lived in a town called Ironton at the time, which for context is a real place right on the Ohio river where Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia all bump into each other. The kind of place where you could see anything on local TV and it would surprise you. But Skyshill says they've never been able to find a single reference to Candle Cove anywhere. No listing, no clips, nothing. So they figured it must be some kind of tiny local station around the 1971 or 72, in a weird late afternoon timeslot, like 4 o'. Clock. Now, in the moment that doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Old local TV barely gets documented, so of course there's no record. But almost immediately, other people start chiming in because that's what happens in threads like these. The Internet is undefeated. A user named mikepainter65 says, yeah, that does sound familiar. He grew up nearby and he'd have been about nine in 72. Was it about pirates? He thinks he remembers a pirate puppet at the mouth of the cave talking to a little girl. And that's the moment Skyshield lights up. Yes, other people remember it too. They're not crazy. And from there, piece by piece, post by post, this group of strangers starts rebuilding the show from the ground up. According to their memories. Candle Cove was a low budget local kids show. It followed a little girl named Janice who imagines that she's friends with a crew of pirates. The pirate ship is called the Laughingstock and the whole thing is stitched together with cheap marionettes and puppets. The kind of homemade, slightly off arts and crafts look that a lot of local 70s television had. The main pirate's name is Percy and he's not a very good pirate because he gets scared too easily. He's the comic relief, by the way the people on the forum describe him is where the fragments first little chill creeps in. One of them remembers that Percy looked like he'd been built out of parts of other dolls. Specifically, his head was an old porcelain baby doll, an antique that didn't quite match the rest of the body. So you've got this cobbled together pirate with a creepy little vintage baby face. And as a kid, Skyshill says Percy always kind of scared them. And then there's the ship itself. The Laughingstock had a wooden smiling face carved across the bow with with its lower jaw down in the water so it always looked like it was swallowing the sea. And it talked in this jarring vaudeville style cackle. And the Neonostalgia users remembered something deeply weird about it, that sometimes the ship was a static wooden model, and then it would suddenly cut to a soft, flopping foam puppet version of the same face, with mismatched eyes and a jaw that worked open and closed on a piece of fishing line. They all remember that switch being unsettling, even though they couldn't tell you why. And the whole show is soaked in this constant looping calliope music. You know the sound that wheezy carnival, merry go round organ. To me, it's like the sound of fun that's been left running a little too long. And then there's the line, because the ship had a catchphrase. Whenever Percy had to go somewhere scary, into a cave, into a dark room, wherever the treasure was, the laughingstock would tell him, with the camera slowly pushing in on that wooden grin, one pause at a time. You have to go inside, don't forget. This is a group of grown adults scattered across the Internet who have never met. They started with nothing but a vague feeling, and within a handful of posts, they've collectively reconstructed an entire TV show. Characters, music, set, set pieces, a catchphrase in vivid, consistent detail. And it feels amazing. Like community. That warm rush you get when someone loves the thing that you thought only you knew about. But that's the trap, because that warm feeling is about to build into something monstrous. So what I really like about this story is the format. On the surface, it shouldn't work. It's just usernames and timestamps and people going, wait, do you remember that part? But because you've read a thousand threads exactly like it, your brain files it under real before it files it under scary. And once the scares do kick in, it's hard to forget that it's all made up and the puppet details are perfect. A baby doll head on a pirate's body, A foam jaw on a fishing line. Anyone who grew up watching a certain era of kids TV watched a local show held together with hot glue and good intentions. And some of those things were genuinely nightmarish. Here's the thing that gets me, though. Nothing scary has actually happened yet. Nobody's been chased, nobody's died. All that's happened is that a few people agreed about a TV show, and it's already creeping me out. So before this thread takes a dark turn, I want to pause and think about why Candle Cove works on you the way that it does. Because once you understand the mechanism, the whole thing gets so much scarier. I think Candle Cove hooks you in for three reasons. The first one, I already touched on, it hijacks Nostalgia. Most horror sends you somewhere unfamiliar. The abandoned asylum, the cabin in the woods, the cursed cartridge from the creepy old man. Candle Cove does the opposite. It sends you home to the floor of your childhood living room, to the safest, fuzziest, most comforting corners of your memory. And then it puts in a creepy, mismatched pirate doll in it, poisoning the memories that make you feel safest. The second reason is the big one. And it's the reason that this story is genuinely, deep down, unsettling. Instead of just creepy. Candle Cove is a horror about memory itself. We tend to think of memories like little video files saved in a hard drive of our heads. You press play and the past comes back exactly as it happened. But that's not how it works at all. Every time you remember something, your brain rebuilds it from fragments. And whenever there's a gap, your brain quietly fills it in with assumptions, with expectations, with stuff you heard earlier. Psychologists have a word for that gap filling. Confabulation. Your brain invents details to complete the picture. And you have no idea that it's happening, because the invented parts feel exactly as real as the true ones. Now layer in one more thing on top of that. Memory isn't unreliable on its own, it's contagious. When you sit in a group and everybody starts swapping memories, you reshape each other's. Somebody says, wasn't the ship's face foam? And suddenly, yeah, it was foam. You can see it now. Researchers call this social contagion of memory, or memory conformity. A false detail drops into the group and everyone agrees. And the agreement makes it true. And the more people confirm it, the realer it gets. And that's exactly what's happening in the Candle Cove thread. These people aren't recovering memories from a show, they're building one. Each post adds a detail, and the group nods and the detail hardens into fact. Here's the real world version that you might know. In 2009, the exact year Candle Cove was posted, a researcher named Fiona Broome was coined a term for the Mandela effect. She discovered that she and a huge number of other people vividly remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison back in the 1980s. They remembered the news coverage, the funeral, except it never happened. Mandela walked out of prison in 1990 and lived until 2013. A massive group of people shared a detailed, confident and completely false memory. And once they started talking to each other about it, it only got stronger. So while Chris Straub was writing a horror story about collective false memory, the real world was busy naming the exact same phenomenon. Candle Cove is just the Mandela effect with the lights turned off. And the third reason Candle Cove works is one that pushes it from clever into kind of brilliant. The form of the story is the fear of the story. Think about it. The thing that scares you is the idea that a group of people can construct a false memory together just by talking. The forum thread isn't just describing the horror, it's performing it. Most horror tells you about the monster. Candle Cove builds the monster in front of you out of nothing but a comment section, and it lets you feel how good and natural and communal it feels right up until the moment it doesn't.
[13:33]
Josh Mankiewicz
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[14:55]
Heidi Wong
unlock new episodes early.
[14:59]
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[15:32]
Heidi Wong
So far, the memories have been cute, creepy, a scaredy cat pirate, a talking ship, a little girl and her imaginary crew. Then someone in the thread asks the question that breaks it. Do you guys remember the villain? And one by one, the tone of every single post changes. The first thing they dredge up is a character with a face that was basically just a huge handlebar mustache sitting above a set of tall, narrow teeth. One poster was so frightened of this thing as a kid that he genuinely thought that it was Pirate Percy. Pure little kid nightmare logic. But somebody corrects him. That wasn't the villain. That was the villain's sidekick, a character named Horace Horrible, with a monocle perched on top of the mustache. The villain was something else, a marionette they called the skin taker. Here's where you can feel the whole thread go cold, because these adults aren't joking around anymore. They're describing him the way that you describe something you spent decades trying to forget. He'd come down from the top of the frame on his strings out of nowhere, a filthy skin skeleton wearing a brown top hat and a scattered cape with glass eyes set into the skull that were too big for it. And his clothes, the hat, the cloak, they were all sewn up, stitched together wrong in crazy uneven patches. And one of them types the question that's been sitting under the whole conversation. Wait, was it supposed to be children's skin? Then somebody remembers the worst part. The skin Taker's mouth didn't open and close like a normal puppet. The jaw just slid back and forth, side to side. And in one episode, little Janice asks him about it. He asks why his mouth moves like that and the skin Taker doesn't look at her when he answers. He turns and looks dead into the camera at you, and he says to grind your skin. That would be creepy enough for me to log off right there. But it's the next memory that's the real turning point. Because up until now, they've been remembering characters. Now they're starting to remember an episode. Skyshale brings up something that they'd always assumed was a nightmare, a bad dream they had as a kid over and over. Bad enough that they wet the bed. In this dream. The show's cheerful opening jingle ends. The picture fades up from black, and all the characters are just there with the camera, cutting from face to face to face. And Every single one of them is. Is screaming. The puppets are flailing on their strings, thrashing, all of them shrieking at once. And Janice, the little girl, isn't acting. She's moaning and sobbing like she's been doing it for hours. The way Skyshill remembers it, this was just a nightmare that they used to have. Another user, kevinheart, which is not the Kevin Hart that we all know, responds. And he says, I don't think that that was a dream. I remember that. I remember it being an episode. Skyshill pushes back, no, no, that's not possible. There was no plot. It was literally just screaming for 30 minutes. And Kevin admits, maybe I'm manufacturing the memory because you just described it, but I swear to God, I remember seeing exactly what you were describing. And then a third person, Jaron2005, confirms it too. He remembers Janice shaking. He remembers the skin taker's jaw whipping back and forth so hard that he thought that it would fly off of his hinges. He remembers turning the TV off and being too scared to ever turn it back on. So now you've got three different people who started out not being sure if this show even existed. And now all confirming the most disturbing, the least plausible memory of all. An entire episode that was nothing but. But children's puppets screaming. And then comes the last post. Mike, the same guy in the earlier thread who remembered the pirate at the cave, writes that he went to visit his mom. She's elderly, living in a nursing home, and he asks her if she remembers him watching a kids show called Candle Cove when he was little, back in the early 70s. And she said she's surprised that he remembers that at all, because she tells him what he actually used to do every time was announced that he was going to watch Candle Cove and then sit down in front of the television and turn it to static and watch Dead Air for half an hour. That's the end of the thread. That's the whole story. There was no show. There was no laughing stock, no pirate Percy, no skin taker, no screaming episode. There was a little boy sitting cross legged on the floor, perfectly content watching 30 minutes of snow and static. And somehow his developing brain built an entire pirate adventure out of noise. And he wasn't the only kid doing it. A whole scattered group of children in the same corner of the country, in the same window of time, all stared into the same nothing and all came away with the same, the same pirate, the same skeleton, the same, the same words to grind your skin. And then 35 years later, they found each other on the Internet and they reassembled it together, never realizing that they were describing a program that never broadcasted because it never existed. Now here's where Candle Cove does something that, as far as I know, no other creepypasta has ever pulled off. Candle Cove's writer Chris Straub said he got the idea after reading an old article in the Onion with a headline about a grown adult who had occasional nightmares about Lidsville, a real genuinely strange Puppet show from 1971, and that planted the seed, that specific dread of half remembered low budget kids TV of the 70s. So Strah writes this thing, and he did it to imitate how collaborative Internet folklore gets made a bunch of anonymous strangers building a myth together, post by post. And then the Internet took Candle Cove and did exactly that to it. Within months, people were treating it like it was a real folktale. YouTubers started uploading fake footage of the show. Grainy, screeching, fuzzed out clips claiming to be salvaged episodes. People wrote their own first person accounts of remembering Candle Cove as kids, extending the story as if it were a real shared memory. Fan artists drew the skin taker the Then the story spread to 4chan, to Reddit, to forum after forum getting copied, tweaked, added to the authorship, quietly falling away until for a lot of people, it just became another anonymous piece of Internet lore. In other words, a story about a false memory that a group builds together became a real myth that a group built together. And to his enormous credit, Chris Straub mostly let it happen. He didn't go full lawyer about people stealing his story. He basically said that letting it mutate and spread serves the myth way more than him clamping down on it ever could. Which is a pretty awesome thing for a creator to understand that the most powerful thing he made wasn't the story, it was what happened to the story once it's loose.
[22:48]
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[24:15]
Heidi Wong
Once Candle Cove got popular enough, it did what only the very biggest creepypastas do. It broke out of the Internet entirely. In 2016, the Syfy network launched a horror anthology series called Channel Zero, created by a writer named Nick Antoska. The whole concept of the show was that each season would adapt a different creepypasta into a full season of television, and the first one they picked was candle cove. The six episode season premiered in October of 2016. It's set in a small Ohio town where a child psychologist comes home to face a string of unsolved killings. And of course, Candle Cove is at the heart of it all. The characters from the show are there the pirates, the laughingstock, Horace Horrible, and the skin taker himself, although he gets reimagined as a monster literally made out of teeth. There's even a main character named Mike Painter, a direct nod to mikepainter65, one of the usernames from the original thread. It was a huge success. Channel Zero ran for four seasons on the strength of that first first one, including one on no End House, which I covered in an earlier episode. Interestingly, Chris Stroup himself wasn't involved in making the show. The rights went to the network and they ran with their own version. But good news for fans of his work. He took the same instincts that made Candle Cove so successful and created a YouTube horror series called Local 58. It's basically the godfather of an entire genre that people now call analog horror, a scary story told through the format of old TV broadcasts, emergency signals, and public service announcements. So one anonymous looking forum thread written by One guy in 2009 spun out into a hit cable series, a whole subgenre of Internet horror, and a permanent place in the creepypasta hall of Fame. Not bad for a story where technically nothing happens except some people misremembering a TV show. I think what really makes Candle Cove work is the fact that it's something that literally happens to all of us. We haven't all been in the woods late at night or found ourselves alone in a house that might be haunted. But every single person out there has memories, things we're positive we remember with perfect clarity. And Candle Cove forces us to admit that maybe our minds aren't that reliable after all. The haunted house is your memory, and there's no deadbolt for that. Every family has a story that's gotten a few new details with each retelling. Everybody's got that one childhood show or toy or place they can half see but can't quite prove. Candle Cove just takes that ordinary everyday experience and asks the one question that turns it into horror. What if you and everyone you knew remember something that that was never there at all? That is the oldest kind of storytelling there is, by the way. Somebody sees something in the dark, they tell it around a fire. The next person sees a detail, someone else swears they saw it too. And after enough time passes, nobody can find the line between what actually happened and what got added afterwards. And a legend is born that everyone remembers, but no one really knows. Picture that little boy one more time, sitting crisscross on the carpet. Late afternoon light streams through the window. He's completely happy, completely safe, staring into 30 minutes of static and watching a nightmare play out on screen. Now think about the shows you remember from when you were little, the ones you can almost hear the theme song to. The ones you've never gone back and checked. How sure are you really that they were ever on foreign. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a Crime House original. I'd love to hear from you. Is there a show, a toy, a place from your childhood that you remember vividly but can't find a single shred of proof that it ever existed? Or have you and a sibling ever remembered the exact same thing that turned out never to have happened? Leave a comment or a video you wherever you're tuning in. And if you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free, subscribe to crime house+go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page and be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another story guaranteed to keep you up at night. Until then, stay curious and remember there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it.
[28:51]
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[29:53]
Vanessa
Are you the type to fall down an Internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crime house original with Sabrina, Diana Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real, true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2am that starts with you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow CRIMESOFReddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe @CRIMESOFRedditpod on YouTube.

Summary6 min read

Candle Cove: The TV Show That Wasn’t There

Scams, Money, & Murder — Crime House, hosted by Heidi Wong
Release Date: August 9, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode of Twisted—a Crime House original hosted by Heidi Wong—dives into the mysterious and unnerving legend of "Candle Cove," a creepypasta about a children's television show that supposedly aired briefly in the early 1970s but has no records of ever existing. Through vivid storytelling and psychological insight, Wong unpacks how a chilling piece of internet fiction became an urban legend that blurred the lines between collective memory, nostalgia, and the horror of the unreliable mind.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Birth of “Candle Cove” and Its Format

Origins: The story was created in 2009 by web cartoonist Chris Straub on his site Icore Falls, crafted as a forum thread where adults reminisce about a peculiar local kids' show remembered from childhood.
Meta-Horror: Straub didn’t simply write a horror narrative; he constructed it as a collaborative act, mirroring how internet folklore organically develops—users sharing, revising, and confirming details in real-time.
- “This might be the single most meta horror story ever written. It's a creepypasta about the way creepypastas get made. And then it went out into the world and became the exact thing that it was imitating.” (Heidi Wong, 03:26)
Setting the Trap: The tale leverages nostalgia for old, slightly creepy local children’s programming, making it especially potent for listeners who grew up watching such shows.
- “We're not talking about a haunted house you've never set foot in. We're talking about the kids show that you watched in your pajamas.” (Heidi Wong, 03:41)

Details of the Fictional Show “Candle Cove”

Characters & Aesthetics:
- Main Characters: Janice (a little girl), Percy (a cowardly pirate with a baby-doll head), the Laughingstock (a talking ship with a carved wooden grin), and The Skin-Taker (a skeletal villain in a patchwork top hat and cloak).
- Atmosphere: Lo-fi puppetry, unsettling catchphrases, and ever-present calliope music give the show an authentically eerie 1970s vibe.
- Memorable Catchphrase: The ship’s menacing reminder to Percy: “You have to go inside, don’t forget.”
Nostalgic Structure: The narrative feels real because it mimics genuine conversations in online nostalgia forums.
- “Because you've read a thousand threads exactly like it, your brain files it under real before it files it under scary.” (Heidi Wong, 07:39)

The Psychology of False Memory & Social Contagion

Confabulation & Contagion: The story’s real terror lies in how memories are constructed and shared—through confabulation and “social contagion of memory.”
- “Every time you remember something, your brain rebuilds it from fragments… Memory isn’t unreliable on its own, it’s contagious.” (Heidi Wong, 10:00-10:40)
Mandela Effect: Parallels drawn to real phenomena where groups of people share false memories (e.g., many remembering Nelson Mandela dying in prison, which never happened).
- “Candle Cove is just the Mandela Effect with the lights turned off.” (Heidi Wong, 11:48)

The Turn to Horror—The Skin-Taker & The “Screaming Episode” (15:32-21:00)

Ratcheting Up the Fear:
- Once the group recalls the terrifying villain, The Skin-Taker—a filth-smudged, skeletal puppet that “grinds your skin”—the tone shifts from eerie nostalgia to real dread.
  - Memorable Quote: “He turns and looks dead into the camera at you, and he says to grind your skin.” (Heidi Wong, 17:10)
- Collective memory soon conjures an episode composed solely of puppets and the girl Janice, screaming—something so disturbing several forum users claim to have blocked it out as a childhood nightmare.
  - Notable Exchange:
    - “I remember it being an episode.”
    - “Maybe I'm manufacturing the memory because you just described it, but I swear to God, I remember seeing exactly what you were describing.” (Forum Recollection, retold by Heidi Wong, 18:45-19:35)
The Final “Reveal”:
- A user asks his mother about Candle Cove, and she recalls only her son watching static on TV for 30 minutes—never a show. The shared memory, it seems, was collectively invented.

“Candle Cove” Becomes a Living Legend

Viral Spread and Mutation:
- Candle Cove quickly escapes its fictional bounds, fueling videos, fake footage, artwork, and internet rumor—becoming a real piece of internet folklore.
- “A story about a false memory that a group builds together became a real myth that a group built together.” (Heidi Wong, 21:55)
- Straub, the creator, embraced this viral life of his narrative:
  - “He basically said that letting it mutate and spread serves the myth way more than him clamping down on it ever could.” (Heidi Wong, 22:30)

Adaptation and Legacy: Channel Zero & Analog Horror (24:14+)

On-Screen Adaptations: The Syfy series Channel Zero picked Candle Cove for its first season, reimagining the story as a mainstream horror plot centered on traumatic memory.
Analog Horror Influence: Straub later pioneered the “analog horror” genre with his series Local 58, expanding the style of horror via disturbing faux-broadcasts.
- “So one anonymous looking forum thread written by One guy in 2009 spun out into a hit cable series, a whole subgenre of Internet horror, and a permanent place in the creepypasta hall of Fame.” (Heidi Wong, 25:52)

The Deeper Horror: Memory and Storytelling

Universal Anxiety: The episode closes on the idea that “Candle Cove” weaponizes a universal experience—we all have memories we can’t confirm, stories woven from static and retellings, forever blending fact and fiction.
- Closing Reflection:
  - “Candle Cove forces us to admit that maybe our minds aren't that reliable after all. The haunted house is your memory, and there's no deadbolt for that.” (Heidi Wong, 26:52)
Storytelling as Mythmaking: The legend persists through the same mechanism that generates all folklore—shared stories, repeated until no one remembers their origin.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On nostalgia and horror:
- “Most horror sends you somewhere unfamiliar… Candle Cove does the opposite. It sends you home to the floor of your childhood living room... and then it puts in a creepy, mismatched pirate doll in it, poisoning the memories that make you feel safest.” (Heidi Wong, 08:22)
On the Skin-Taker’s terror:
- “He turns and looks dead into the camera at you, and he says to grind your skin.” (Heidi Wong, 17:10)
Revelation:
- “You used to watch Candle Cove? She said, surprised I remember… what you actually did was turn it to static and watch dead air for half an hour.” (Retelling the final post, Heidi Wong, 20:30)
On memory’s dangers:
- “Everybody's got that one childhood show or toy or place they can half see but can't quite prove. Candle Cove just takes that ordinary everyday experience and asks the one question that turns it into horror: What if you and everyone you knew remember something that was never there at all?” (Heidi Wong, 27:20)

Important Segments & Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic | |:--------------:|---------------------------------------------| | 03:26 | Creation and structure of Candle Cove | | 07:30 | The uncanny details: pirate, ship, catchphrase | | 10:00–13:00 | False memories & the Mandela Effect | | 15:32–21:00 | The Skin-Taker & collective nightmare | | 21:55–24:10 | Internet mythmaking—Candle Cove as folklore | | 24:14–25:52 | Channel Zero adaptation and analog horror | | 26:52–28:14 | Closing reflections on memory and myth |

Tone & Style Recap

Heidi Wong’s voice blends scholarly insight with inviting, campfire-style narration. She transforms an internet mystery into a chilling meditation on how memories and legends are made, striking a note of eerie intimacy: “The haunted house is your memory, and there’s no deadbolt for that.”
Listeners are prompted to self-examine: What childhood ‘facts’ are actually fiction, and how would you know?

Final Reflection

The Candle Cove episode leaves listeners haunted not by monsters, but by the terrifying blank spaces in their own minds. As Wong closes, she urges us to question the stories we remember, and consider what might be lurking in the static.

Have you ever shared a vivid memory with someone, only to discover there’s no proof it ever happened? Join the conversation—Heidi Wong wants your twisted tales.

Loading summary

Transcript12 lines

[00:02]
Vanessa
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an Internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new Crime House original with Sabrina, Diana Roga and Alexis Linklater. Every week one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2am that starts with you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe@c Crimesofreddit pod on YouTube.
[00:45]
Heidi Wong
This is crime house, A children's show that aired on a tiny local station for a couple of months in the early 70s and then vanished. A cowardly pirate, a living ship with a grinning wooden face and a skeleton in a top hat who tells a little girl exactly what he does with the skin he takes. A whole generation swears they watched it cross legged on the living room floor, 4 o', clock, right after the news. There's just one problem. There's no record it ever existed. Today I'm telling you the story of Candle Cove. The creepypasta that doesn't haunt a house or a camera or a video game. It haunts the one place you can never lock the door. Your own memory. Welcome to Twisted A Crime House Original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week I'll take you deep into humanity's darkest stories and the creepiest corners of the Internet. If you've ever had a haunted moment or a twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments. The creepier the better. Crime House exists because of listeners like you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free. Subscribe subscribe to Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. We're also on YouTube with full video episodes. Just search and subscribe to Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong so you can watch the horror come to life. Today I'm telling you the story of Candle Cove. It's about a children's television show, one that a handful of strangers slowly remember together in real time on an Internet forum. And the more they remember, the worse it gets.
[02:30]
Josh Mankiewicz
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[03:26]
Heidi Wong
What makes this one special Right out of the gate Most creepypastas out there are anonymous. But not this one, and its author plays a big role in what's about to play out. This might be the single most meta horror story ever written. It's a creepypasta about the way creepypastas get made. And then it went out into the world and became the exact thing that it was imitating. The story basically predicted its own future. It weaponizes nostalgia. And we're not talking about a haunted house you've never set foot in. We're talking about the kids show that you watched in your pajamas. The safest, warmest memories that most of us have. And fair warning, by the end of this episode, you're gonna want to call your mom and ask her what you actually watched when you were little. Let me set the the year is 2009. A web cartoonist named Chris Schraub, a guy who built up a following making comics online, is running a horror fiction website called Icore Falls. It's a place where he posts original, creepy short stories. And a lot of them are set in one fictional, cursed little American town. And in 2009 he posts one called Candle Cove. But he doesn't write it like a story. Instead, Chris writes the whole thing as a thread on a made up website called the Net Nostalgia Forum. The kind of place where adults go to reminisce about the pop culture of their childhood. Think old commercials, forgotten toys, discontinued cereals, things like that. It starts with a user called skyshale033. They post a question that probably feels similar to anyone who's fallen down a late night Internet rabbit hole asking, does anyone else remember this kids show? It was called Candle Cove. Skyshale would have been about six or seven when it came out. They Lived in a town called Ironton at the time, which for context is a real place right on the Ohio river where Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia all bump into each other. The kind of place where you could see anything on local TV and it would surprise you. But Skyshill says they've never been able to find a single reference to Candle Cove anywhere. No listing, no clips, nothing. So they figured it must be some kind of tiny local station around the 1971 or 72, in a weird late afternoon timeslot, like 4 o'. Clock. Now, in the moment that doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Old local TV barely gets documented, so of course there's no record. But almost immediately, other people start chiming in because that's what happens in threads like these. The Internet is undefeated. A user named mikepainter65 says, yeah, that does sound familiar. He grew up nearby and he'd have been about nine in 72. Was it about pirates? He thinks he remembers a pirate puppet at the mouth of the cave talking to a little girl. And that's the moment Skyshield lights up. Yes, other people remember it too. They're not crazy. And from there, piece by piece, post by post, this group of strangers starts rebuilding the show from the ground up. According to their memories. Candle Cove was a low budget local kids show. It followed a little girl named Janice who imagines that she's friends with a crew of pirates. The pirate ship is called the Laughingstock and the whole thing is stitched together with cheap marionettes and puppets. The kind of homemade, slightly off arts and crafts look that a lot of local 70s television had. The main pirate's name is Percy and he's not a very good pirate because he gets scared too easily. He's the comic relief, by the way the people on the forum describe him is where the fragments first little chill creeps in. One of them remembers that Percy looked like he'd been built out of parts of other dolls. Specifically, his head was an old porcelain baby doll, an antique that didn't quite match the rest of the body. So you've got this cobbled together pirate with a creepy little vintage baby face. And as a kid, Skyshill says Percy always kind of scared them. And then there's the ship itself. The Laughingstock had a wooden smiling face carved across the bow with with its lower jaw down in the water so it always looked like it was swallowing the sea. And it talked in this jarring vaudeville style cackle. And the Neonostalgia users remembered something deeply weird about it, that sometimes the ship was a static wooden model, and then it would suddenly cut to a soft, flopping foam puppet version of the same face, with mismatched eyes and a jaw that worked open and closed on a piece of fishing line. They all remember that switch being unsettling, even though they couldn't tell you why. And the whole show is soaked in this constant looping calliope music. You know the sound that wheezy carnival, merry go round organ. To me, it's like the sound of fun that's been left running a little too long. And then there's the line, because the ship had a catchphrase. Whenever Percy had to go somewhere scary, into a cave, into a dark room, wherever the treasure was, the laughingstock would tell him, with the camera slowly pushing in on that wooden grin, one pause at a time. You have to go inside, don't forget. This is a group of grown adults scattered across the Internet who have never met. They started with nothing but a vague feeling, and within a handful of posts, they've collectively reconstructed an entire TV show. Characters, music, set, set pieces, a catchphrase in vivid, consistent detail. And it feels amazing. Like community. That warm rush you get when someone loves the thing that you thought only you knew about. But that's the trap, because that warm feeling is about to build into something monstrous. So what I really like about this story is the format. On the surface, it shouldn't work. It's just usernames and timestamps and people going, wait, do you remember that part? But because you've read a thousand threads exactly like it, your brain files it under real before it files it under scary. And once the scares do kick in, it's hard to forget that it's all made up and the puppet details are perfect. A baby doll head on a pirate's body, A foam jaw on a fishing line. Anyone who grew up watching a certain era of kids TV watched a local show held together with hot glue and good intentions. And some of those things were genuinely nightmarish. Here's the thing that gets me, though. Nothing scary has actually happened yet. Nobody's been chased, nobody's died. All that's happened is that a few people agreed about a TV show, and it's already creeping me out. So before this thread takes a dark turn, I want to pause and think about why Candle Cove works on you the way that it does. Because once you understand the mechanism, the whole thing gets so much scarier. I think Candle Cove hooks you in for three reasons. The first one, I already touched on, it hijacks Nostalgia. Most horror sends you somewhere unfamiliar. The abandoned asylum, the cabin in the woods, the cursed cartridge from the creepy old man. Candle Cove does the opposite. It sends you home to the floor of your childhood living room, to the safest, fuzziest, most comforting corners of your memory. And then it puts in a creepy, mismatched pirate doll in it, poisoning the memories that make you feel safest. The second reason is the big one. And it's the reason that this story is genuinely, deep down, unsettling. Instead of just creepy. Candle Cove is a horror about memory itself. We tend to think of memories like little video files saved in a hard drive of our heads. You press play and the past comes back exactly as it happened. But that's not how it works at all. Every time you remember something, your brain rebuilds it from fragments. And whenever there's a gap, your brain quietly fills it in with assumptions, with expectations, with stuff you heard earlier. Psychologists have a word for that gap filling. Confabulation. Your brain invents details to complete the picture. And you have no idea that it's happening, because the invented parts feel exactly as real as the true ones. Now layer in one more thing on top of that. Memory isn't unreliable on its own, it's contagious. When you sit in a group and everybody starts swapping memories, you reshape each other's. Somebody says, wasn't the ship's face foam? And suddenly, yeah, it was foam. You can see it now. Researchers call this social contagion of memory, or memory conformity. A false detail drops into the group and everyone agrees. And the agreement makes it true. And the more people confirm it, the realer it gets. And that's exactly what's happening in the Candle Cove thread. These people aren't recovering memories from a show, they're building one. Each post adds a detail, and the group nods and the detail hardens into fact. Here's the real world version that you might know. In 2009, the exact year Candle Cove was posted, a researcher named Fiona Broome was coined a term for the Mandela effect. She discovered that she and a huge number of other people vividly remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison back in the 1980s. They remembered the news coverage, the funeral, except it never happened. Mandela walked out of prison in 1990 and lived until 2013. A massive group of people shared a detailed, confident and completely false memory. And once they started talking to each other about it, it only got stronger. So while Chris Straub was writing a horror story about collective false memory, the real world was busy naming the exact same phenomenon. Candle Cove is just the Mandela effect with the lights turned off. And the third reason Candle Cove works is one that pushes it from clever into kind of brilliant. The form of the story is the fear of the story. Think about it. The thing that scares you is the idea that a group of people can construct a false memory together just by talking. The forum thread isn't just describing the horror, it's performing it. Most horror tells you about the monster. Candle Cove builds the monster in front of you out of nothing but a comment section, and it lets you feel how good and natural and communal it feels right up until the moment it doesn't.
[13:33]
Josh Mankiewicz
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[14:55]
Heidi Wong
unlock new episodes early.
[14:59]
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[15:32]
Heidi Wong
So far, the memories have been cute, creepy, a scaredy cat pirate, a talking ship, a little girl and her imaginary crew. Then someone in the thread asks the question that breaks it. Do you guys remember the villain? And one by one, the tone of every single post changes. The first thing they dredge up is a character with a face that was basically just a huge handlebar mustache sitting above a set of tall, narrow teeth. One poster was so frightened of this thing as a kid that he genuinely thought that it was Pirate Percy. Pure little kid nightmare logic. But somebody corrects him. That wasn't the villain. That was the villain's sidekick, a character named Horace Horrible, with a monocle perched on top of the mustache. The villain was something else, a marionette they called the skin taker. Here's where you can feel the whole thread go cold, because these adults aren't joking around anymore. They're describing him the way that you describe something you spent decades trying to forget. He'd come down from the top of the frame on his strings out of nowhere, a filthy skin skeleton wearing a brown top hat and a scattered cape with glass eyes set into the skull that were too big for it. And his clothes, the hat, the cloak, they were all sewn up, stitched together wrong in crazy uneven patches. And one of them types the question that's been sitting under the whole conversation. Wait, was it supposed to be children's skin? Then somebody remembers the worst part. The skin Taker's mouth didn't open and close like a normal puppet. The jaw just slid back and forth, side to side. And in one episode, little Janice asks him about it. He asks why his mouth moves like that and the skin Taker doesn't look at her when he answers. He turns and looks dead into the camera at you, and he says to grind your skin. That would be creepy enough for me to log off right there. But it's the next memory that's the real turning point. Because up until now, they've been remembering characters. Now they're starting to remember an episode. Skyshale brings up something that they'd always assumed was a nightmare, a bad dream they had as a kid over and over. Bad enough that they wet the bed. In this dream. The show's cheerful opening jingle ends. The picture fades up from black, and all the characters are just there with the camera, cutting from face to face to face. And Every single one of them is. Is screaming. The puppets are flailing on their strings, thrashing, all of them shrieking at once. And Janice, the little girl, isn't acting. She's moaning and sobbing like she's been doing it for hours. The way Skyshill remembers it, this was just a nightmare that they used to have. Another user, kevinheart, which is not the Kevin Hart that we all know, responds. And he says, I don't think that that was a dream. I remember that. I remember it being an episode. Skyshill pushes back, no, no, that's not possible. There was no plot. It was literally just screaming for 30 minutes. And Kevin admits, maybe I'm manufacturing the memory because you just described it, but I swear to God, I remember seeing exactly what you were describing. And then a third person, Jaron2005, confirms it too. He remembers Janice shaking. He remembers the skin taker's jaw whipping back and forth so hard that he thought that it would fly off of his hinges. He remembers turning the TV off and being too scared to ever turn it back on. So now you've got three different people who started out not being sure if this show even existed. And now all confirming the most disturbing, the least plausible memory of all. An entire episode that was nothing but. But children's puppets screaming. And then comes the last post. Mike, the same guy in the earlier thread who remembered the pirate at the cave, writes that he went to visit his mom. She's elderly, living in a nursing home, and he asks her if she remembers him watching a kids show called Candle Cove when he was little, back in the early 70s. And she said she's surprised that he remembers that at all, because she tells him what he actually used to do every time was announced that he was going to watch Candle Cove and then sit down in front of the television and turn it to static and watch Dead Air for half an hour. That's the end of the thread. That's the whole story. There was no show. There was no laughing stock, no pirate Percy, no skin taker, no screaming episode. There was a little boy sitting cross legged on the floor, perfectly content watching 30 minutes of snow and static. And somehow his developing brain built an entire pirate adventure out of noise. And he wasn't the only kid doing it. A whole scattered group of children in the same corner of the country, in the same window of time, all stared into the same nothing and all came away with the same, the same pirate, the same skeleton, the same, the same words to grind your skin. And then 35 years later, they found each other on the Internet and they reassembled it together, never realizing that they were describing a program that never broadcasted because it never existed. Now here's where Candle Cove does something that, as far as I know, no other creepypasta has ever pulled off. Candle Cove's writer Chris Straub said he got the idea after reading an old article in the Onion with a headline about a grown adult who had occasional nightmares about Lidsville, a real genuinely strange Puppet show from 1971, and that planted the seed, that specific dread of half remembered low budget kids TV of the 70s. So Strah writes this thing, and he did it to imitate how collaborative Internet folklore gets made a bunch of anonymous strangers building a myth together, post by post. And then the Internet took Candle Cove and did exactly that to it. Within months, people were treating it like it was a real folktale. YouTubers started uploading fake footage of the show. Grainy, screeching, fuzzed out clips claiming to be salvaged episodes. People wrote their own first person accounts of remembering Candle Cove as kids, extending the story as if it were a real shared memory. Fan artists drew the skin taker the Then the story spread to 4chan, to Reddit, to forum after forum getting copied, tweaked, added to the authorship, quietly falling away until for a lot of people, it just became another anonymous piece of Internet lore. In other words, a story about a false memory that a group builds together became a real myth that a group built together. And to his enormous credit, Chris Straub mostly let it happen. He didn't go full lawyer about people stealing his story. He basically said that letting it mutate and spread serves the myth way more than him clamping down on it ever could. Which is a pretty awesome thing for a creator to understand that the most powerful thing he made wasn't the story, it was what happened to the story once it's loose.
[22:48]
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[24:15]
Heidi Wong
Once Candle Cove got popular enough, it did what only the very biggest creepypastas do. It broke out of the Internet entirely. In 2016, the Syfy network launched a horror anthology series called Channel Zero, created by a writer named Nick Antoska. The whole concept of the show was that each season would adapt a different creepypasta into a full season of television, and the first one they picked was candle cove. The six episode season premiered in October of 2016. It's set in a small Ohio town where a child psychologist comes home to face a string of unsolved killings. And of course, Candle Cove is at the heart of it all. The characters from the show are there the pirates, the laughingstock, Horace Horrible, and the skin taker himself, although he gets reimagined as a monster literally made out of teeth. There's even a main character named Mike Painter, a direct nod to mikepainter65, one of the usernames from the original thread. It was a huge success. Channel Zero ran for four seasons on the strength of that first first one, including one on no End House, which I covered in an earlier episode. Interestingly, Chris Stroup himself wasn't involved in making the show. The rights went to the network and they ran with their own version. But good news for fans of his work. He took the same instincts that made Candle Cove so successful and created a YouTube horror series called Local 58. It's basically the godfather of an entire genre that people now call analog horror, a scary story told through the format of old TV broadcasts, emergency signals, and public service announcements. So one anonymous looking forum thread written by One guy in 2009 spun out into a hit cable series, a whole subgenre of Internet horror, and a permanent place in the creepypasta hall of Fame. Not bad for a story where technically nothing happens except some people misremembering a TV show. I think what really makes Candle Cove work is the fact that it's something that literally happens to all of us. We haven't all been in the woods late at night or found ourselves alone in a house that might be haunted. But every single person out there has memories, things we're positive we remember with perfect clarity. And Candle Cove forces us to admit that maybe our minds aren't that reliable after all. The haunted house is your memory, and there's no deadbolt for that. Every family has a story that's gotten a few new details with each retelling. Everybody's got that one childhood show or toy or place they can half see but can't quite prove. Candle Cove just takes that ordinary everyday experience and asks the one question that turns it into horror. What if you and everyone you knew remember something that that was never there at all? That is the oldest kind of storytelling there is, by the way. Somebody sees something in the dark, they tell it around a fire. The next person sees a detail, someone else swears they saw it too. And after enough time passes, nobody can find the line between what actually happened and what got added afterwards. And a legend is born that everyone remembers, but no one really knows. Picture that little boy one more time, sitting crisscross on the carpet. Late afternoon light streams through the window. He's completely happy, completely safe, staring into 30 minutes of static and watching a nightmare play out on screen. Now think about the shows you remember from when you were little, the ones you can almost hear the theme song to. The ones you've never gone back and checked. How sure are you really that they were ever on foreign. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a Crime House original. I'd love to hear from you. Is there a show, a toy, a place from your childhood that you remember vividly but can't find a single shred of proof that it ever existed? Or have you and a sibling ever remembered the exact same thing that turned out never to have happened? Leave a comment or a video you wherever you're tuning in. And if you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free, subscribe to crime house+go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page and be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another story guaranteed to keep you up at night. Until then, stay curious and remember there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it.
[28:51]
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[29:53]
Vanessa
Are you the type to fall down an Internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crime house original with Sabrina, Diana Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real, true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2am that starts with you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow CRIMESOFReddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe @CRIMESOFRedditpod on YouTube.