Haunted Cartridge
/Now that winter is taking us, and the night seems to creep further and further into what was once called afternoon, I like to curl up in the evenings and unwind in front of a screen. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask came out for the Nintendo 64 in 2000. While not a horror game, Majora’s Mask strays toward the creepy—especially for a Zelda game. We aren’t here to talk about just any old version of Majora’s Mask; we are here to talk about an old creepypasta commonly known as “BEN Drowned.”
Alex Hall, under the screen name Jadusable, first posted about his seemingly haunted copy of the game on September 7th, 2010. In this first post, Jadusable describes how he met a strange, old man at a bizarre garage sale. This man gave Jadusable the creeps and an extremely bootleg-looking copy of Majora’s Mask. The cartridge had no label, instead having just the game’s title scrawled over its front in black marker; it’s lonely save file was simply labelled “BEN”.
Back at home, Jadusable plugged the game in to his Nintendo 64 and began to play. Skipping over “BEN”, Jadusable started a new file and named himself “Link” instead, but the game seemed to take issue with his choice and referred to him as “BEN” anyway. He deleted the file labelled “BEN” and hoped that would be the end of it, but it was decidedly not.
Pictured: A busy city street?
The game began glitching out. Segments of data normally present in one part of the game would appear in the wrong place. Jadusable would get stuck in a town with all of the people normally there missing. Music would be warped, reversed, or play in the wrong places. Most disturbing were the text boxes. Text would appear on screen — never anything not already present inside the game — but in these new contexts, the words became frightening and strange.
Over the next couple of days Jadusable continued updating his progress. He determined that the game cartridge was haunted by a boy named Ben who had drowned some years before. Ben twisted and altered the game until Jadusable could no longer take it and he went more than a little mad. The game mocked him and it was too much.
Of course, this is all a creepypasta, just an internet urban legend. None of it really happened: how could it have? There never was a Ben, nor any haunted copy of Majora’s Mask. It was all just an elaborate, if entertaining, hoax. Hard to explain the videos, though . . .
Joseph Alexander
Joseph is a homonculus animated by a need to solve mysteries. When no mysteries abound, crude mexican cuisine will frequently suffice. He grew up in a small, Northern Ontario community and is still suffering the consequences. Also, he writes sometimes.
