Before Creepypasta: Folklore, Newspapers, and the Weird Tale

This article explores the genesis of the nineteenth-century weird tale, a boundary genre between realism and romance, between folklore and newspaper story, as a kind of ancestor of creepypasta. Two features shared by creepypasta and the weird tale, the weirdness of the story told as true and the clipping and pasting mode of recirculation, played a central role in creating the weird-tale collections of both Charles Fort and, earlier, Ambrose Bierce.