Do you remember watching?
Syfy’s new anthology series “Channel Zero” just premiered this week, the six-episode debut season drawing inspiration from the “Candle Cove” Creepypasta. The season centers on a child psychologist who returns to his small town home to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his twin brother and a slough of other children in the 1980s, and uncover how the disappearances are connected to a bizarre local children’s television show that aired at the same time.
That television show, of course, is “Candle Cove.”
Penned by Kris Straub back in 2009, this particular Creepypasta was originally presented as a series of postings on a faux forum titled NetNostalgia, which saw several users having a back-and-forth discussion about their own fractured memories of a nightmarish children’s show they all seem to remember watching when they were kids. The show, they recall, aired on a local station back in the 1970s, and their chilling memories piece together the basic gist of the madness they were subjected to.
From what they remember, “Candle Cove” aired for just a few months and was about a little girl named Janice who imagined she was friends with pirates; the characters were all played by creepy marionette dolls. And there was a villain too: a skeleton named The Skin-Taker whose top hat and cloak appeared to be made of children’s skin. In one episode, which one of the people involved in the discussion misremembers as being a nightmare she had, the characters just screamed and flailed spastically for the entire duration.
The story ends with the reveal that “Candle Cove” either never actually existed or it was only visible to children; one of the commenters on the thread relays that he visited his mother in a nursing home and she told him that he used to sit around the TV and watch dead air for 30-minutes at a time.
Do you have chills? Are they multiplying?
Turn off the lights and listen to a reading of the full “Candle Cove” Creepypasta below.