Ted the Caver

Ted the Caver began as an Angelfire website in early 2001 that documented the adventures of a man and his friends as they explored a local cave. The story is in the format of a series of blog posts. As the explorers move further into the cave, strange hieroglyphs and winds are encountered. In a final blog post, Ted writes that he and his companions would be bringing a gun into the cave after experiencing a series of nightmares and hallucinations, as well as an encounter with what could be presumed as a supernatural being. The blog has not been updated since the final post.

Ted the Caver is referenced in scholarship on creepypasta and online horror stories as one of the first examples of the genre to gain broad popularity,[2][3] although Taylor gives Ted as an example of a story that has "meme status" within certain communities, but has "achieved little attention outside spaces dedicated to discussions of gothic experiences."[4]

Writing in the scholarly anthology Twenty-First Century Digital Gothic, Joseph Crawford notes that the presentation of Ted the Caver as an online diary written to mimic real websites about their creators' hobbies is a basic narrative structure well-established in the genre of "'found document' or 'found footage' horror narratives."[1] This is also similar to other contemporaneous web fictions, such as Online Caroline.

Crawford argues that the work "helped to pioneer two techniques that would become foundational to online horror fiction: the use of real-time updates and the use of hyperlinks."[1]

In 2013, an independent film adaptation of the story was released, called Living Dark: the Story of Ted the Caver. Screen Rant's reviewer wrote that it did not manage to recapture what made the original web version work.[5]