The Elder Scrolls is one of the longest running complex RPG video game series to date.
With the release of their fifth major title, Skyrim, even more gamers hopped on the Elder
scrolls bandwagon, devoting hours and hours to playing the fantasy title.
It was just so damn good, and it’s open world was utterly compelling.
At points, when exploring dungeons or tombs, the game can feel downright terrifying.
It’s not easy to get a little scared when facing Draugr (draw-gur) or Falmer, leaving
players ripe with inspiration for Skyrim themed creepy pastas and urban legends.
So today, we’re counting down a select few of those, with our list of the Scariest skyrim
Creepy Pastas.
Let’s get to it.
Beta Disc This story begins with our narrator’s uncle
Jerry passing away.
After his death, he was cleaning out Jerry’s old house, and discovered some interesting
objects in his attic.
Jerry had worked previously for Bethesda as a PR guy for the last 8 years of his life,
and this box was marked with the company’s name on it.
Our narrator found an unmarked disc inside of it, with a note that had been crudely written
that said “Jerry, this thing has got to be destroyed.
Make sure nobody finds out about this Skyrim Beta, the controversy could ruin us.”
Curious, our narrator, filled with questions, decided to pocket the disc, and when he got
home, popped it into his PC.
He decided that it would be cool to journal his experience with the Beta and see what
this note was all about.
On Day 1, our narrator wrote that the game ran pretty smoothly at first.
It also lacked the long prisoner introduction sequence; instead, you were just dropped into
the game, starting with the character creation screen.
Something was slightly off about the models though; he couldn’t help but notice that
their eyes seemed different than what he remembered from the released Skyrim game.
He chose to play as an Argonian, his favourite, and began the game.
At this point, Helgen had already been devasted by a dragon attack, with bodies littered everywhere.
As he explored, he noticed the corpse of Ulfric Stormcloak, the rebel leader in Skyrim that
you don’t encounter until much later in the title.
He also spotted General Tullius, the imperial leader in Skyrim.
Strange.
This meant that the plot of the game must have been very different than the released
one.
On the second day, he continued to explore Helgen, scavenging for whatever useful items
he could find.
He noticed that the mountains in the distance looked fairly unrendered, and that all of
the wildlife he encountered was violent, even peaceful creatures like deer.
He raided a few mines, all of which lacked bandits, which felt strange.
On the third day, he went to Riverwood.
Even from a distance, he could tell something was off, and swore he heard some sort of laughter
faintly.
Riverwood had been completely destroyed; had a dragon attacked here, too?
All of the NPCs were dead.
That’s when he noticed something strange; a figure in the distance, with an axe in his
hand.
When he approached the NPC they started to ramble, saying “took it all away from me,
killed my wife and my boy, but you won’t get me….”
Then as if the NPC noticed he was standing there, they started to shout “never should
have come here!”
They lunged at his character, swinging wildly.
That’s when the player realized that it was Hod, the deranged lumberjack.
They attacked Hod back in self defense, killing him.
After, they explored the cellar that Hod was standing in front of.
Inside was a note that read “mad hunt, deadroth, dremora, blood moon, collapsed kingdoms, Nirn
forsaken and fallen.
Blackreach.
Daedra, daedra, daedra.”
What did it mean?
What was going on?
He turned off the game.
His journal resumed on Day 7, when the player finally made his way to Blackreach.
The closer he got to blackreach, the more he heard that same eerie laughter.
On the way, he saw giants on the roads, all impaled with massive stakes.
It filled him with dread.
Whoever took out those giants must be strong, and he’d need to level up his character
immensely.
By Day 13, after spending a few days leveling up, he reached Blackreach.
He noted that there were a lot of Falmer lurking around, and that the city looked as if it
was in the process of being reconstructed.
That’s when he noticed that the city was full Daedra, and it seemed as if they had
the Falmer under their control.
The next and final entry was on Day 18.
The player noted that Blackreach’s reconstruction was almost complete, and that the Falmer had
gathered towards the center of the city, doing something that appeared like praying.
Approaching the city gates, he found them to be locked, so he found a nearby house and
went to sleep in a bed, hoping a few in game hours passing may fix that problem.
But when he woke, the game was totally different.
He couldn’t move the game’s camera.
The room was pitch black, with only part of the floor visible.
Finally, something appeared.
It was Sheogorath, the Daedric prince.
He started to speak to the player, asking what he was doing here.
It wasn’t long before the player realized that this must be a game in which the Daedra
won in Oblivion, the previous Elder Scrolls major title.
The prince then attacked him, the screen went red, and the loading screen appeared.
After the game loaded, the player found himself in a clearing in the woods.
His character’s right arm had been ripped off.
It was gruesome, and the player almost felt sick at the sight of it.
Around him, creatures started to emerge from the woods.
They were NPCs, half human, half animal, all crying out in agony.
They closed in on his character, but before anything could happen, the player turned off
the game, never to resume it again.
Curse of the Sword This creepy pasta tells the tale of a gamer
who bought Skyrim on steam.
Before he even fully downloaded the game, he was already searching the web for mods,
having heard that there were some pretty good ones for the Elder Scrolls series.
He stumbled upon a website he had never visited before that had a mod called Curse of the
Sword.
There wasn’t any pictures or videos, only a text description that read “hope there’s
a toilet under you”.
He googled the name of the mod but nothing else came up on any of the Skyrim forums.
Curious, he decided to download it, thinking this was a joke of sorts.
After Skyrim had fully downloaded, he installed the mod, and to his surprise, on the game’s
main menu, there was an option with the title of the mod, and a distorted image of what
appeared to be a man’s head sliced into multiple pieces.
He selected it.
The loading screen featured an image of a sword with a red glow around it.
When the game loaded up, he looked into his inventory to discover a bunch of rare Daedric
items.
Neat.
So, he started to explore, and eventually found himself near a tomb with a sign outside
that read “do no enter or die”.
He entered.
The first thing he noticed was how silent the tomb was.
The second thing, after descending for what felt like several minutes, was that on the
stone path below him, there was a lot of dry blood and skeleton bones.
All of a sudden, a piercing noise blasted through his computer’s speakers.
It last for a split second, but was jarring nonetheless.
He looked around, nothing was nearby his character.
He eventually found a room with a chest in it.
Opening it, it contained an item named simply ‘Sword’.
As soon as he collected it, he was teleported elsewhere, to what can only be described as
a different dimension.
The loading screen read “why did you pick up the sword?”
Naturally, the player figured it was THE cursed sword, the namesake of the mod, and was curious
with where this was going.
Once the loading screen disappeared, everything was black, with the faintest glow in the distance
of a still figure, walking towards him.
He couldn’t describe it, but for whatever reason, terror and dread seeped into him,
and he began to uncontrollably shake in real life.
As the figure got closer, he could make out its details; a deformed face with eyes pulled
out of their sockets, a body with hundreds of slashes, bleeding, and in its legs were
swords, identical to the cursed sword he had picked up.
Text appeared on the screen that read “I told you”.
He was utterly terrified.
Before he could move or do anything though, his computer shut off.
He turned it back on, only to discover the mod was no where to be found, completely wiped
off his computer.
Dagon the Dark This creepy pasta begins by bringing the wait
feature in Skyrim to the readers’ attention.
In Skyrim, compared to earlier elder Scrolls games, you can choose to wait, anywhere between
an hour to 24 hours, and a time lapse occurs behind the waiting screen that depicts time
going by, from shadows moving rapidly to the sky changing colour.
The author notes that they didn’t think people or other living things were rendered
during the Wait time, but they were wrong.
While they were playing one day, they decided to wait from 3am in game time to 8am in order
to wait for a shop to open in Whiterun.
As he waited, he noticed something strange pass by him.
It was a shadowy figure that came up from the ground, and fell back within it, all within
the duration of about half a second.
It made the player jump, but he assumed it must have been a glitch of sorts, or something
flying overhead, like a dragon, or something that was missing texture, appearing only as
a black model.
Curious, he decided to go to the Bethesda forums, and wrote a post about it, but accidentally
misspelt dragon, calling it dagon in his post.
That led to a joke on the forum about this mysterious shadow being called Dagon the Dark.
But despite the comments the player received, they didn’t have a clue as to what it actually
was.
One guy suggested that if it were a dragon, and it was missing textures, it would just
be invisible, but he was curious too, so he said he’d go into the coding of the game
and see if there was anything for all-black dragon textures.
After that, the player returned to their game, only to discover that there were no dragons
in it at all anymore.
Strange.
They searched over 6 days in game for one, and none ever showed up.
They even tried summoning one, but nothing happened.
So, the player started a new game.
But that’s when things got weirder.
The game didn’t begin where it usually did, with the prisoner sequence and the Unbound
quest.
Instead, it began in Whiterun at Dragonsreach.
After a bit of exploring, the player realized that the jarl was no where to be found, which
made things even creepier when they started to hear the jarl’s voice say aloud “you
have to slay the beast”.
Assuming that the beast was the dragon from the Dragon Rising quest, the player continued
on their way outside of Dragonsreach, only to discover all of the guards and NPCs out
there were also repeating the same phrase, you have to slay the beast.
After checking out the tower where you fight the dragon in that mission, the player was
surprised to find no dragon, only more guards who said the same phrase.
That’s when it happened.
Dagon the Dark, an entirely black dragon without wings that matched the shadow they saw while
Waiting, appeared.
It slaughtered all of the guards nearby, with them screaming louder than the player had
ever heard in the game before.
It’s eyes were pitch black, and it faced the player, opening up its big black mouth.
Next thing they knew, their character was swallowed whole.
Their screen went white.
They looked around.
Finally, they directed their view to their feet.
There, staring back at them, was dagon’s model.
The player couldn’t look away, and after what felt like an eternity, they woke up on
the floor of their room, their computer turned off.
The player went onto the forum and their post to discover that the one guy who said he would
look into the code had responded.
He couldn’t find anything in the game, but asked for the player to send over a copy of
their game directory so he could patch his own game with the player’s buggy files.
Turns out something was there, but while he was in the middle of investigating it, his
messages to the player randomly halted.
As if something that happened to him.
There we have it friends!
A handful of Skyrim creepy pastas.
For the full versions, be sure to give the titles of each of these a google; they’re
great reads, and worth checking out on your own time.
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to top 10 gaming for more lists of game themed creepy pastas just like this one.
In the meantime though, thanks for watching!
I’ll catch you all in the next video.