“Ted the Caver” is a short horror story by Ted Hegemann, self-published in 2001 on a free Angelfire website. It takes the form of the online diary of a man excavating an unexplored cave with his friends; the first entry is dated 23 March 2001 and the last 19 May 2001. The narrator opens by refusing to give real names or locations, for the readers’ safety.
He and his friend “B” find a small hole in the local “Mystery Cave” and spend days widening it, despite hearing a scream and the sound of scraping rock from within. Further in they find strange hieroglyphs and a round rock formation that rolls aside to reveal a new passage. On the way out they feel their rope being pulled back into the cave. After nightmares and hallucinations, the narrator writes that they will go back in with a gun, among other supplies. The blog has not been updated since.
Its many photographs and technical details fueled message-board debate over whether it was true, to the point that cavers identified “Mystery Cave” as a real cave in Utah. Years later the author revealed it was based on real caving experiences with many fictional embellishments. One of the first internet horror stories to use hyperlinks and real-time updates as narrative devices, it is credited with carrying the found-document form into a digital context.