The Legend of Zelda franchise has no shortage of creepy stories and scary urban legends.
While most of these arguably are fiction, some of them have just enough grain of truth
that makes you wonder if some have encountered strange events while playing some of the series’
titles.
Regardless, they’re good for a fun scare, even if they just make you a wee bit uneasy.
Some of these are popular urban legends concerning the Legend of Zelda that you’ve heard before.
Others are creepypastas that are equally as enticing.
So with that in mind, here’s our list of the top 10 scary Zelda urban legends.
10 The Hands This story tells of an adult who decides to
return to the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time; a game he loved as a child.
He buys a new copy of it, digs up his N64 from his attic, and begins to play.
He eventually gets to the Shadow Temple, remembering in dread that the boss is Dead Hand.
Right before the boss battle, he recalls an old glitch that his friend told him to try;
if you let all four of Dead Hand’s hands grab you at once, something ‘awesome’
will happen.
His friend, named Tyler, had since died a few years back in a car crash.
So he gives it a go, and nothing happens.
He defeats Dead Hand, and when the chest appears, he opens it, finding the Lens of Truth.
But the description for it is different; it reads, “Come back here 30 years in the past.
I’ll be waiting for you.”
Confused, he thinks about it for a moment, coming to the conclusion that it must mean
the old copy of his game from 30 years ago.
So he goes back up into the attic and finds his old Ocarina of Time cartridge, and pops
it in.
As he plays through the game, the only enemies he sees are hands, and all the buildings in
the game are in ruins.
Only the music from the Shadow Temple plays.
He gets to the temple.
Dead Hand is there, but this time, underneath its body are thousands of hands, chasing the
author out of the temple.
After running for a while, the author turns around and decides to face Dead Hand.
But this doesn’t go as planned; instead, Link is ripped in half.
So he shuts off the game.
That night, he sees Dead Hand’s face at his window.
He starts to notice he’s losing energy.
And that his hands are becoming white.
9 Zelda 64 Beta This creepypasta tells the story of an early
version of Ocarina of Time that was referred to as Zelda 3D in its early development stage;
it was very different from the final game, and was more so modeled after the original
Zelda rather than A Link to the Past.
The author tells of how his friend, who worked at a game shop, gave him a strange red cartridge
that was marked Zelda with a piece of tape.
According to his friend, it was brought to the shop by a man whose son had gone missing,
and was selling the games.
So the author goes home and gives the game a try.
The game starts off with a title that simply reads The Legend of Zelda.
When the author hit start, a blocky looking Link appears in a black space, with the only
thing in sight being a strange temple.
As he walks closer to the temple, the silence in the game is broken by strange noises.
Upon entering the temple, it looks different than any other Zelda temple, and it’s filled
with booby traps and dead adventurers.
Eventually he enters what can only be described as a boss room.
At the opposite end of the room is a giant face that looks as if it’s been stretched
over top of the wall, its eyes covered in moss.
He attacks it, and its pretty bloody and gruesome.
Eventually, it turns to flames and reveals a door.
Turns out all of that was the tutorial.
The screen turns white and then reveals an endless desert.
The next day, the author continues playing.
And playing.
He roams the desert for hours.
He finds ruins with indecipherable words written on them.
And every time he completes a dungeon, the screen flashes white and he reappears somewhere
in the desert again.
The pasta ends with him telling his readers that he continues to play, and that he knows
the game knows he’s playing it.
8 Happiness for Sale Happiness for Sale tells the tale of a strange
man who comes into the author’s town, who looks like he’s in his 30s, has thinning
red hair, tanned skin, a very think frame, is quite small, and is hunched over, carrying
a heavy load of items on his back.
The author, seated in the town square, notices that nearby children freeze and watch the
man as he passes, captivated.
The man passes him, and he freeze too, eventually watching the man walk away.
As the man turns away, he notices that the man has masks attached to the parcels on his
back.
The next day, at the town square again, the author notices a new shop has opened, called
HAPPY MASK SHOP.
He goes inside, and there are people in there, but none of them are talking, just staring
at the Happy Mask man.
He nods his head, and suddenly everyone leaves the shop, leaving the author alone with the
Happy Mask man.
A boy then walks into the shop and he and the boy stare at each other.
The Happy Mask man then grabs the boy by the throat, the child screaming.
The man then starts to smile sinisterly.
He then eats the boy whole.
In shock, the author runs for the door, but as he dashes out, he hears the Happy Mask
man say “do you want a mask, my boy?”
The author runs home.
When he returns to the town square the next day, the shop is gone.
No one in the town seems to remember it being there.
7 Wind Waker This one is about a player who decides to
download ROMS of all the Zelda games, playing through to Wind Waker.
Everything goes smoothly, but when they get to Wind Waker, the game doesn’t work.
So they try a bunch of different ROMs and programs.
Still no luck.
Eventually, 16 Google search pages in, they find a new link to try.
To their relief, this time, it works, despite the download page looking kind of sketchy.
Some of the textures were a bit distorted, but according to what they read online, that
was pretty normal for a ROM.
So they continue to play.
Everything is fine until they get to the end of the game.
Every time he gets to the Ganon cut scene, the game freezes and turns to black.
Wanting to finish the game, they keep trying and trying, and it keeps freezing.
On about the 20th attempt, as the game freezes, a text box appears.
It reads, “You’re a persistent one, aren’t you?”
They restart the emulation again.
Everything is red.
An image of Link hanging appears briefly on the screen.
So they close the emulation, freaked out.
The go back to the page they downloaded it from to see if its some kind of joke, but
the page they downloaded it from has disappeared; they can’t find it.
So they load up the emulation again.
This time, their saved file reads ‘TRY AGAIN’.
Despite being creeped out, they open the save file.
This time, the cut scene plays through, but in the battle, Link is trying to fire arrow
with an invisible bow.
Ganon kills Link, and it’s particularly bloody.
The player shuts it off.
Loads up the Try Again save file.
The cut scene this time shows Zelda lying on the ground, her eyes wide open, looking
deathly.
Weird things like this continue to happen time and time again, so they decide to delete
the emulator.
A week goes by.
The player is on YouTube late at night.
That’s when something weird happens.
The emulator window opens on their screen.
Wind Waker begins to load up.
Every time the player tries to quit, the same text appears on the screen.
You Failed.
6 Midna’s Sorrow A player buys a copy of Twilight Princess.
They play it, make a substantial amount of progress in the game, but eventually, as other
games are released, they stop playing it.
Two years pass.
The player, bored one day, decides to give the game another go.
When they start it up though, they immediately notice that a lot of the progress they made
in the game has been erased somehow; things are missing in their inventory that they recalled
getting.
Confused, they believe that maybe they remembered incorrectly, and decide to keep playing.
They encounter Midna, who begins to talk to them, and says “Link where were you all
this time?
You were gone for so long.
We lost everything.
I was so sad.
And Zelda…”
Confused, as Wolf Link, the player takes off.
But soon, the player realizes that they’re not in control of Link anymore.
A text box appears that reads “Don’t worry Midna, I’ll protect you.”
The screen turns black.
Eventually, it comes back on.
Link is human again, and inside the Twilight Realm.
They speak to an NPC.
The text box reads “They are inside.”
Every NPC they encounter says this.
So the player runs into the nearest building, only to find themselves inside Zant’s boss
chamber.
Midna is on the floor, and Ganondorf and Zant are also in the room.
As they player moves Link forward, the screen cuts to black and there’s a loud booming
noise.
The title screen appears.
The player hits start, and the music playing is Midna’s Lament.
They choose a file to start the game, but then a text box appears that reads, “You
did this to us.
Are you proud of what you’ve done?”
5 The Terrors of Twilight Princess This creepypasta is by a user name quil12.
The author comes home to discover that the game they ordered off of Amazon, Twilight
Princess, has finally arrived in the mail.
By this point, Twilight Princess was an older game, but they still really wanted to play
it.
When they start it, they see that all of the save files were already taken.
They delete the first one and start a new game.
The game immediately crashes.
So they restart it.
This time, all of the NPCs are missing, and their inventory is already full with various
items.
They decide to shut it off.
They forget about the game for a few weeks, but then, when one of their friends come over,
a girl named Randi, they decide to play it.
They get through to the part where Midna is taunting you about morphing into the village
children when Ganondorf appears.
Having seen let’s play videos of the game, they both know this isn’t right.
Ganondorf is pacing, and then looks directly at them, as if he can see them.
They shut off the game, freaked out.
A few hours pass, and curiousity gets the best of them, so they turn the game back on.
This time, wolf Link has become a shadow wolf link.
They keep playing.
Ganondorf keeps appearing on their screen.
Faron Woods gets darker and darker.
And next thing they know, the game glitches, and they’re at Hyrule Castle.
They go inside.
Drips of digital blood are on the floor.
They follow the trail, and see a figure lying on the floor with Ganondorf above it.
Ganondorf then turns to them, looks directly at the screen and a text box pops up that
reads “I’m sorry, but you were too slow.”
The two of them turn the Wii off and snapped the game disc in half, burying it in the backyard.
4 Majora’s Mask Remember GameShark?
It was a neat little tool you could pop onto a console and it allowed you to access a slew
of cheats.
This creepypasta is about a player who used his friend’s GameShark while playing Majora’s
Mask.
After trying out a bunch of cheats with his friend, they see a new cheat code appear out
of nowhere.
So they try it out.
It froze time outside of the snow temple, right before a couple of minutes to midnight.
Strange pixels appeared as they explored, and no enemies were around.
They reached the end of the game, but the final cut scene wasn’t triggered.
Instead, the moon kept getting closer and closer.
That’s when they realized that an image of Majora’s Mask was on the surface of the
moon, made of strange looking pixels.
The closer it got to them, they began to notice a flickering of images on their screen, all
of disturbing content.
A hand then appeared, pulling off the mask to reveal a face beneath it or a screaming
Skull Kid.
It spoke words, saying aloud, “You lost the game”.
The screen then went black.
According to his friend, it was an alternate ending that was hidden in the code of the
game, but it all seemed to strange and paranormal to really have been the case.
They haven’t tried playing it since.
3 The Glitch In this creepypasta, the author tells a tale
of how they decided to return to one of their favourite games, The Legend of Zelda, Majora’s
Mask.
They start a new game.
It’s exactly how they remember, except when Skull Kid appears to steal Epona, Link gets
dragged to the ground trying to hold onto the horse.
Game Over appears on the screen.
The author is shocked.
They hit continue.
The game picks up right before Skull Kid appears.
They go into their inventory to see that it’s now filled with Ocarinas.
They continue to play, feeling uneasy.
They get to the part where Link is transformed into a Deku Scrub.
Link then dies again.
Frustrated, they hit continue once more.
Link continues to die at strange points from then on; when meeting the Happy Mask Salesman,
when exploring Clock Town.
Link would die whenever a text box appeared.
Eventually, they reach the Great Fairy.
Her text box reads a series of zeros and scrambled words, glitching.
Link dies again.
They hit continue.
But this time, that scene happens again and again, with Link endlessly dying.
The author claims to have never found out why, and that their N64 and all other games
worked perfectly fine afterwards, but every time they played Majora’s Mask, the same
thing would happen again and again.
2 Zelda.exe Zelda.exe comes from Deviant Art, written
by a user named Sandvich33, who calls themselves Mikey in the story.
Mikey begins his story by telling us about his cousin Thomas, who played a copy of The
Legend of Zelda, and played it obsessively.
One day he disappeared, leaving his NES on, gone without a trace.
Years later, the family had come to terms with the belief that Thomas was likely dead.
Years later, Mikey decides to take a look at that copy of The Legend of Zelda.
The game and system doesn’t work, so Mikey calls up one of his pals who knows how to
extract files from cartridges.
The file they extract is titled Zelda.exe.
So Mikey loads it up with an emulator on his computer.
As he played the game, he noticed it would freeze and slow down often, with NPCs half
finishing their dialogue.
He continues to play.
He speaks to one elder NPC, and the text box reads “Dad?”
Mikey resets the game.
This time though, his new save file is replaced by Thomas’ old one.
Another NPC speaks to him, and says “Dad is that you?”
He continues to play.
Later in the game, another NPC says to him, “Wait, you’re not my dad,” The game
freezes, there’s a jumble of sound effects, and the game resets itself.
Mikey then swears he saw a flicker of an image that looked like Thomas.
That’s when Mikey notices that there’s now an AVI file that contains a video of his
gameplay.
Confused, Mikey shuts off the computer.
A year later, Mikey stumbles upon the BEN drowned Zelda creepypasta.
It gets him thinking.
So he revisits the game.
It continues where it last left off.
Except this time, more text appears as he plays through, and there’s a lot of glitches.
The text reads “They all perished”, “no one could save them”, and “the new dawn
will rise.”
Now, a new AVI file appears, titled New Dawn, after another image of what Mikey claims is
Thomas flashes on his screen.
That night, Mikey notices that the emulator file is now a .NES file.
The game is where he left off, except now, Mikey hears weird laughter.
He decides to drag the file into the bin.
But as he does, a new file appears that is titled PLAY ME.nes.
So Mikey does.
Another Link sprite appears on the screen in front of his own.
A caption appears that reads “It’s time.”
He tosses his sword at the sprite.
And the words, “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”
appear on his screen.
1 BEN Drowned So why is that last message in our previous
number creepy?
It’s because of this creepypasta, which is the most famous Zelda one of them all;
BEN drowned.
It’s the tale of a haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge; the game in the franchise that
is arguably the darkest and creepiest title that many speculate is about Link coming to
terms with his death, going through the five stages of grief.
The urban legend is about an American student who is given an N64 to play with in his dorm
room.
He eventually gets his hands on a copy of Majora’s Mask, a blank cartridge that has
the words Majora written on it.
Starting the game, there’s a save file on it under the name Ben.
Instead, the student starts his own file, calling it Link.
The game has a few glitches, and all of the NPCs call him Ben rather than Link.
The student decides to delete the Ben save file in an attempt to get rid of the glitching.
Restarting his game, there’s even more glitches this time, with music playing backwards, and
Link repeatedly catching fire or drowning.
The NPCs also keep talking about BEN and that BEN drowned.
The message, “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”
keeps appearing.
So the student decides to post about his progress with the game, keeping track of what’s happening,
keeping videos of his gameplay.
In his blog, he writes that he begins to see BEN in his sleep.
There’s different versions of how the story ends depending on the source you’re reading
it from.
Some say that the student destroyed the cartridge.
But the creepiest is one that tells of him mysterious disappearing, with his roommate
discovering all of the video files and his blog, responding to everyone online who was
questioning where the student had gone, and why he had stopped posting.
According to the roommate, he and all of his things just disappeared one day, out of the
blue, and he hasn’t heard from him since.
There we have it friends!
Which of these do you find the scariest?
Which ones do you believe in the most?
And are there other Zelda urban legends, myths or creepypastas you think we should know about?
Give us a shout in those comments below!
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