Ghost in the machine? How a 'haunted' N64 video game cartridge terrified children around the world
5 hours ago
Chris Baraniuk
A second-hand Zelda cartridge. A cryptic forum thread. A generation of frightened children. This is the story of Ben Drowned – the internet's most infamous video game ghost.
It was Christmas Eve and 10-year-old Saarthak Johri couldn't sleep – but not because of excitement. He was shot through with fear. It was roughly a decade ago and Johri was a kid growing up in Saginaw, Michigan, in the US. He had spent the day slumped in an easy chair, staring at his phone, totally absorbed in an online urban myth. Johri knew it wasn't real, it couldn't be. And yet, he was powerless to get it out of his mind.
He had found a trail of old forum posts supposedly written by a college student. The student, who used the online pseudonym Jadusable, had bought a strange copy of a Nintendo 64 video game at a yard sale. It was The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a notoriously dark instalment in the Zelda franchise, released 25 years ago this week on 27 April 2000.
Majora's Mask is full of unnerving discussions about death, denial, fear, regret – and a looming apocalypse. But something was off about the cartridge Jadusable found. It had no label, just "Majora" scribbled on the plastic in marker. And something was seriously wrong with it.
Jadusable wrote that the game's familiar graphics were strange and distorted. Music played backwards in a spine-chilling loop. Worst of all, he was plagued by a terrifying statue of the main character, Link, with a petrified grimace on its face. It kept appearing in the game out of nowhere – like a digital ghost. On YouTube, Jadusable posted
video evidence of everything he had described. This game cartridge, it seemed, was haunted – inhabited by the spirit of its former owner, a child named Ben who had drowned in a tragic accident. Johri pored over every detail, rapt with morbid curiosity.
As the story unfolded through roughly 11,000-words of forum entries posted over the course of weeks, Jadusable described a haunting that soon extended beyond the game to other areas of his life. Eventually, after a series of increasingly disturbing experiences, the forum posts ceased, and Jadusable was never heard from again. This urban legend burst onto the web in 2010, traumatising a generation of young internet users. It became known as "
Ben Drowned".
Ben Drowned left an indelible mark on the web and continues to spawn
art and
fan fiction long after it emerged. Though lesser-known outside gaming circles, the story and its accompanying videos racked up millions of views and have inspired other narratives in a similar vein.
At its core, Ben Drowned is a story about a ghost in a machine – one that speaks to our deepest fears about new technology. But it's more than an effective urban legend. Ben Drowned is a myth born from a medium that shaped a generation. In an era when video games were still often seen as a frivolous pastime for children, Ben Drowned was early proof that society's relationship with video games goes beyond childhood nostalgia, tapping into our deepest emotions – and maybe even our souls.
By the time Johri stumbled on Ben Drowned in around 2015, it was already widely acknowledged as fiction. But that didn't matter. That night, on Christmas Eve, as Johri lay in bed wrestling with insomnia, he could see in his mind's eye that creepy statue's grimace projected onto the faces of his family members. Rumour had it that Ben, the ghost from the corrupted Majora's Mask cartridge, had gone on to torment other people besides Jadusable. That's what the adolescent Johri couldn't shake, however irrational it seemed. The idea that Ben's evil presence might be out there. That it could spread.
Continued at considerable length:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250501-the-haunted-video-game-that-traumatised-the-web
