Encyclopedia
The cosmic-horror tradition our serials answer to — the gods, beings, places, and forbidden books of the Lovecraft Mythos, and the authors and works that shaped it. Korean spellings follow a naming policy derived from frequency analysis of the canon.
491 entries
Characters
Abdul Alhazred
The legendary Arab sorcerer known as "the Mad Arab," reputed author of the Necronomicon.
Western Folklore
Adze
A vampiric being of Ewe folklore that takes the form of a firefly to drain the blood of sleepers.
Western Folklore
Ajatar
An evil female spirit of Finnish folklore, bound up with serpents, said to spread disease and pestilence.
Eastern Folklore
Akaname
A Japanese creature that licks the grime from filthy baths, rooted in daily life.
Western Folklore
Akvan Div
A Persian demon that can vanish, become a beast or a storm, and does the opposite of whatever it is asked.
Forbidden Tomes
Al Azif
The original Arabic title of the Necronomicon, meaning the nocturnal cry of insects.
Key Works
Al Azif (Anthology)
A 2026 anthology of Korean cosmic-horror writers that surfaced and standardized a number of Mythos terms.
Authors
Algernon Blackwood
Author of "The Willows" (1869–1951), a pioneer of awe before nature.
Western Folklore
Alkonost
A Slavic paradise bird with a woman's head and a bird's body, whose song enthralls all who hear it.
Eastern Folklore
Amabie
A late-Edo prophetic yokai that rose from the sea, foretold harvest and epidemic, and left one prescription: draw my picture and show it.
Authors
Ambrose Bierce
American satirist and weird-fiction writer who supplied the name Carcosa.
Eastern Folklore
Aozukin
The horror of Ugetsu’s “The Blue Hood”: a monk who, grieving a dead boy, devours the corpse and becomes a flesh-eating demon.
Great Old Ones
Aphoom-Zhah
A polar entity described as a descendant of Cthugha, a cold flame that radiates lethal freezing cold rather than heat.
Places
Aquilonia
The mightiest kingdom of the Hyborian Age — the seat of civilisation and military power that Conan eventually claims as his throne.
Places
Arkham
A fictional New England town, home of Miskatonic University.
Authors
Arthur Machen
Author of "The Great God Pan" (1863–1947), who wrote of ancient evil beneath the ordinary.
Western Folklore
Asanbosam
A vampire-like being of Akan folklore with iron teeth, dwelling in trees to attack those who pass below.
Characters
Asenath Waite
An Innsmouth-blooded sorceress who uses mind-transference magic to displace her husband Edward Derby's identity.
Eastern Folklore
Aswang
The most feared thing in Philippine folklore — an umbrella name for shapeshifters who live as neighbors by day.
Key Works
At the Mountains of Madness
An Antarctic expedition uncovers the city of the Elder Things and the Shoggoths (1936).
Great Old Ones
Atlach-Nacha
A spider god that endlessly weaves a vast web bridging two worlds across a primordial abyss.
Authors
August Derleth
American author and Lovecraft correspondent who coined "Cthulhu Mythos," co-founded Arkham House to preserve Lovecraft's work, and controversially expanded the Mythos.
Places
Averoigne
A fictional medieval French province created by Clark Ashton Smith, marked by dark forests haunted by sorcerers, vampires, and demons.
Outer Gods
Azathoth
The blind idiot god that boils mindlessly at the center of the universe; source of all things.
Western Folklore
Baba Yaga
An iron-toothed crone in a hut that stands on chicken legs — one who may devour or may help.
Eastern Folklore
Baekho
The White Tiger of the West, one of the four guardian beasts, symbol of autumn and the element metal.
Eastern Folklore
Baize
A divine beast that knows every monster under heaven, the progenitor of the bestiary.
Eastern Folklore
Bakeneko
A Japanese monster cat that can shapeshift into a human and even devour its master.
Eastern Folklore
Bakunawa
A colossal sea serpent of Philippine myth said to devour the moon during eclipses.
Western Folklore
Banshee
A wailing female spirit of Irish Celtic tradition who keens before a death.
Western Folklore
Baron Samedi
The Haitian Vodou lwa who digs the graves and admits the dead — top hat, black tailcoat, and nostrils plugged with cotton, dressed as a corpse.
Eastern Folklore
Batibat
A nightmare spirit of Philippine Ilocano folklore, said to suffocate sleepers by sitting on the chest of anyone who lies near the tree of hers that was felled into a house post.
Western Folklore
Bean-nighe
The Scottish spirit who washes the grave-clothes of those about to die at a lonely ford — and who, if caught first, may answer questions and even alter a fate.
Western Folklore
Beast of Gévaudan
The man-eater said to have killed over a hundred people in the mountains of southern France from 1764 to 1767. What it was remains unsolved.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Beholder
A floating giant eye with eyestalks that fire rays — its name and unique design are a Wizards trademark.
Western Folklore
Bell Witch
An American legend of an invisible, speaking, shape-changing spirit that tormented a family for four years.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Ben Drowned
A creepypasta about a haunted Majora’s Mask game cartridge possessed by a dead boy, expanded into an ARG.
Eastern Folklore
Bifang
A one-legged bird whose appearance is an omen of fire.
Western Folklore
Bigfoot
A large, hairy ape-like giant said to inhabit the forests of North America.
Eastern Folklore
Bixie
A winged, lion-like Chinese chimera whose name means “warding off evil,” raised as a colossal tomb guardian along the spirit roads of the Eastern Han.
Western Folklore
Black Shuck
A giant black dog with a single flaming eye; those who see it are said to die within the year.
Western Folklore
Black-Eyed Children
A modern legend of children with entirely black eyes who appear at the door and ask to be let inside.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Blades in the Dark
A TTRPG about running a criminal crew in an industrial city where the sun has died and the dead return as ghosts — with the planning done in flashback.
Western Folklore
Bloody Mary
A Western mirror-summoning ritual in which a name is repeated before a mirror to call up an apparition.
Great Old Ones
Bokrug
The great water-lizard god of Ib who outlasted the city of Sarnath and brought about its ruin.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Bongcheon-dong Ghost
A Naver webtoon in which a ghost searching for her baby approaches a schoolgirl on a night street — spread worldwide by two sudden animated panels.
Forbidden Tomes
Book of Eibon
An ancient grimoire attributed to the great wizard Eibon of Hyperborea, created by Clark Ashton Smith.
Characters
Bran Mak Morn
The last king of the Picts, waging a desperate resistance against Rome while brushing against the cosmic horror of the Serpent Men and the god Yig.
Eastern Folklore
Bulgasari
An iron-eating creature of Korean folklore that grows endlessly and cannot be killed.
Beings & Races
Byakhee
Interstellar flying servitors of Hastur that can be summoned by ritual and used as mounts to traverse the void of space.
Great Old Ones
Byatis
A toad-shaped Great Old One with a single eye.
Western Folklore
Cadejo
A spirit dog of Central America in two forms: the white Cadejo protects night travelers, the black one seeks to harm them.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Cairn
A classless, level-less wilderness-exploration OSR TTRPG, freely available on itch.io.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game)
Chaosium’s 1981 Lovecraftian horror TTRPG, where you wager Sanity rather than combat power.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Campaign
A long-form structure that carries one story across many sessions.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Candle Cove
A tale of false collective memory: people fondly recall a children’s show that, in truth, never aired anything but static.
Places
Carcosa
A ruined ancient city of uncertain location, invented by Bierce and expanded by Chambers.
Characters
Carnacki the Ghost-Finder
An Edwardian occult detective created by W. H. Hodgson who investigates hauntings with scientific method and equipment.
Places
Celephais
An immortal city in the Dreamlands willed into existence by the dreamer Kuranes, where time stands forever still.
Western Folklore
Changeling
A false child left in place of a human infant stolen away by fairies.
Characters
Charles Dexter Ward
A young Providence antiquarian who resurrects his ancestor Joseph Curwen and pays with his identity and life.
Great Old Ones
Chaugnar Faugn
A massive elephantine vampire god from the Himalayas that drains the blood of its worshippers.
Eastern Folklore
Cheollima
A divine horse of East Asian myth said to run a thousand li in a day, too swift for any mortal to ride.
Eastern Folklore
Cheongryong
The Azure Dragon of the East, one of the four guardian beasts, symbol of spring and the element wood.
Eastern Folklore
Cheonyeo-gwisin
The vengeful ghost of a woman who died unmarried, the embodiment of unresolved grief.
Eastern Folklore
Cheuksin
The household goddess exiled to the outhouse, counting her own hair — and touching with it anyone who enters without coughing three times.
Western Folklore
Chupacabra
A spined, reptilian creature said to drain the blood of livestock.
Places
Cimmeria
Conan's bleak northern homeland in the Hyborian Age — a grim land of dark hills, perpetual cloud, and brooding mist.
Beings & Races
Cimmerians
Conan's people — grim, self-reliant barbarian warriors of the Hyborian Age's northern hills, worshippers of the indifferent war-god Crom.
Authors
Clark Ashton Smith
Poet and fantasist (1893–1961) who created Tsathoggua.
Places
Commoriom
The abandoned ancient capital of prehistoric Hyperborea.
Characters
Conan
The definitive sword-and-sorcery hero of the Hyborian Age — a Cimmerian warrior who rose from thief and mercenary to become king of Aquilonia.
Concepts
Cosmic Horror
The dread that arises from realizing humanity is neither the center nor the point of the universe.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Critical Hit
A dramatic blow that lands on the best possible roll, often the die’s maximum.
Forbidden Tomes
Cthäat Aquadingen
A fictional grimoire by Brian Lumley dealing with Cthulhu and other sea-horrors.
Beings & Races
Cthonian
Enormous burrowing tentacled creatures created by Brian Lumley that tunnel through the Earth's interior.
Great Old Ones
Cthugha
A living flame entity dwelling near the star Fomalhaut, said to be an enemy of Nyarlathotep.
Great Old Ones
Cthulhu
The Great Old One who lies dreaming beneath the sea in R’lyeh; emblem of the entire Mythos.
Concepts
Cthulhu Mythos
The shared fictional pantheon of gods, forbidden books, and places built by Lovecraft and his circle.
Great Old Ones
Cthylla
Said to be Cthulhu's daughter, she is the hidden guarantee of his eternal return.
Western Folklore
Curupira
An Amazonian forest guardian whose backward-turned feet lead pursuers astray.
Western Folklore
Cŵn Annwn
The white, red-eared spectral hounds of the Welsh otherworld, whose howl grows softer the nearer they come.
Concepts
Cyclopean
Lovecraft's signature architectural adjective, denoting masonry of such vast, irregular scale as to imply non-human builders.
Dungeons & TTRPG
d20
The twenty-sided die that decides success and failure — the icon of TTRPG.
Great Old Ones
Dagon
A vast sea deity worshipped by the Deep Ones, closely associated with the town of Innsmouth.
Key Works
Dagon
A stranded sailor discovers a Pacific isle risen from the depths and witnesses a sea-creature worshipping a monolith — the earliest sketch of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Eastern Folklore
Dalgyal-gwisin
A faceless ghost smooth as an egg, said to be contagious to those who see it.
Outer Gods
Daoloth
The Render of the Veils, an Outer God whose form defies description.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Deathmoths
Giant moth-like Backrooms entities whose females are overwhelmingly more dangerous than the males.
Beings & Races
Deep One
An amphibious race dwelling beneath the sea that interbreeds with humans.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Delta Green (role-playing game)
A modern Lovecraftian conspiracy-horror TTRPG of covert agents fighting unnatural threats.
Eastern Folklore
Dijiang
A faceless red sack-like being that sings and dances, the incarnation of primordial chaos.
Beings & Races
Dimensional Shambler
A being from beyond named only once in "The Horror in the Museum," said to kill by the mere sight or thought of it.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Displacer Beast
A six-legged black panther with two tentacles on its shoulders, always seen a short distance from where it actually is.
Western Folklore
Div-e Sepid
Chieftain of the demons of Mazandaran who raised a dark storm to crush an army and blind a king.
Eastern Folklore
Dokkaebi
A capricious creature of Korean oral tradition, a trickster whose morality is never fixed.
Eastern Folklore
Dokkaebi-bul
A blue flame drifting over fields and graves, read as an omen of harvest fortune.
Western Folklore
Domovoi
A Slavic household spirit who guards the home — but if angered, departs and brings misfortune.
Western Folklore
Dover Demon
A small, emaciated being with no nose or mouth and only glowing orange eyes.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Draugr
A Norse barrow-corpse that guards the treasure in its mound, possessed of great strength and shape-changing.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Dread
A one-session horror TTRPG that replaces dice with a Jenga tower. When the tower falls, your character dies.
Eastern Folklore
Dueoksini
A ferocious creature of Korean folklore, told as the leader of a band of dokkaebi.
Western Folklore
Dullahan
A headless Irish death-herald who rides a black horse carrying his own head.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Dullers
Faceless grey humanoids that reach their far-extending arms through walls to seize wanderers.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Dungeon
An exploration-driven underground labyrinth where each room hides traps, monsters, and treasure — and the mode of exploring it.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Dungeon Crawl Classics
An OSR RPG channeling 1970s Appendix N pulp fantasy, published by Goodman Games in 2012.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Dungeon Master (GM)
The host who runs the world, adjudicates the rules, and drives the story.
Places
Dunwich
A run-down rural village where the offspring of Yog-Sothoth was raised.
Western Folklore
Dvorovoi
A Slavic courtyard spirit of the farmstead grounds, shed, and stable — less benevolent than the house spirit Domovoi.
Authors
E.E.N.D.
The planner of the Korean cosmic-horror anthology "Al Azif."
Western Folklore
Each-uisge
A Scottish water creature that takes the form of a horse or handsome man, then drags its rider down into the water.
Characters
Edward Derby
An Arkham poet whose fascination with Asenath Waite leads to the theft of his own mind and identity.
Characters
Eibon
The greatest sorcerer of Hyperborea, author of the "Book of Eibon," and devotee of Tsathoggua — a central figure in Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean cycle.
Characters
El Borak
Francis Xavier Gordon, a Texan gunfighter-adventurer operating in Afghanistan and Central Asia, known among the tribes as "El Borak" — the Swift.
Western Folklore
El Cucuy
The shapeshifting boogeyman of Iberian and Latin American folklore, invoked in lullabies to frighten misbehaving children.
Western Folklore
El Silbón
A Venezuelan phantom who wanders the plains bearing a sack of his father's bones, his whistle near when it sounds far.
Concepts
Elder God
A category introduced by Derleth denoting higher cosmic powers — such as Nodens — that are benevolent or opposed to the Great Old Ones.
Beings & Races
Elder Things
A star-headed alien race, the first builders of the great Antarctic city.
Concepts
Eldritch
An adjective denoting something uncanny, otherworldly, and deeply unsettling, central to the vocabulary of cosmic horror.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Electric Bastionland
An OSR TTRPG set in the vast city of Bastion, where every character starts with a failed career and a debt.
Forbidden Tomes
Eltdown Shards
Twenty-three inscribed pottery shards unearthed at Eltdown in 1882, carrying a script older than humankind.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Entity 5 (Clumps)
A roughly six-foot mass of contorting limbs that compresses to squeeze through two-foot gaps, driven by relentless hunger.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Entity 8 (Hounds)
A pack of dog-humanoid hunters in the Backrooms that bite and tear, but recoil briefly when met with eye contact.
Eastern Folklore
Eoduksini
A Korean spirit that is darkness itself — the more one looks up at it, the larger it grows, until it crushes the watcher.
Eastern Folklore
Eop
A household guardian that holds a family’s fortune; its departure foretells the house’s decline.
Eastern Folklore
Erlik Khan
The god of death and the underworld in Turkic and Mongolic mythology.
Western Folklore
Erlkönig
A malevolent Germanic fairy-king who lures a child to death, immortalized in Goethe's 1782 ballad.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Eternal Lies
A massive campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, reviewed as a worthy heir to Masks of Nyarlathotep.
Dungeons & TTRPG
European Dragon
A vast scaled, winged beast that breathes fire — the signature adversary of dungeon fantasy.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Experience Point (XP)
A score that quantifies a character’s growth — accumulate enough and the level rises.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Eyeless Jack
A creepypasta figure with empty black sockets and a blue surgical mask who removes and eats sleeping victims’ kidneys.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Facelings
Featureless humanoid Backrooms dwellers with smooth blank faces and aggression that varies wildly between individuals.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Fate of Cthulhu
A Fate-powered horror TTRPG where time-travelers from a Mythos-ruined future stop the Great Old Ones’ return.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Fear Itself (role-playing game)
A GUMSHOE horror TTRPG where ordinary people confront the alien menace of the Outer Dark.
Eastern Folklore
Fenghuang
A divine Chinese bird of prosperity, originally the pair feng (male) and huang (female).
Western Folklore
Fenrir
The wolf the gods could bind but not be rid of — the day he slips loose is fixed by prophecy.
Western Folklore
Flatwoods Monster
A towering humanoid that emits a mist; witnesses reportedly suffered nausea and convulsions after the encounter.
Beings & Races
Flying Polyp
Semi-invisible wind-controlling ancient entities that are the oldest enemies of the Great Race of Yith.
Authors
Frank Belknap Long
American author and close friend of Lovecraft who wrote the first Mythos story by anyone other than Lovecraft himself.
Eastern Folklore
Funayūrei
The vengeful ghosts of the sea-drowned, who fill boats with water using a bottomless ladle to capsize them.
Eastern Folklore
Futakuchi-onna
A female creature with a second mouth hidden on the back of her head.
Forbidden Tomes
G'harne Fragments
Miraculously preserved obsidian shards recording the history of the pre-human city of G'harne.
Eastern Folklore
Gaekgwi
The wandering ghost of one who died away from home, the target of an exorcism rite.
Eastern Folklore
Gaki
The hungry ghost of folk Buddhism — the preta — condemned by karmic greed to insatiable hunger.
Western Folklore
Gamayun
A Slavic prophetic bird with a woman's head, said to be a personification of Veles, god of wisdom.
Authors
Gamgi-doryeong
Author of the web novel "Reincarnated, I Found Myself Cthulhu."
Eastern Folklore
Gashadokuro
A colossal Japanese skeleton yokai formed from the skulls of those who died in battle or famine.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Gemini Home Entertainment
A cosmic analog horror anthology framed as old VHS tapes, chronicling an invasion by the sentient planet "The Iris".
Eastern Folklore
Geuseundae
A Korean malevolent spirit that lurks in the dark and kills the people it seizes.
Great Old Ones
Ghatanothoa
An entity sealed atop a mountain on the continent of Mu whose gaze petrifies the living body while leaving the mind trapped inside.
Beings & Races
Ghoul
Corpse-eating subterranean humanoids depicted in "Pickman's Model" and the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Ghoul (Dungeon)
A corpse-eating monster of the Arabian desert — passing from folklore through Lovecraft into the dungeon.
Great Old Ones
Glaaki
A spined entity slumbering in a sunken English lake that transforms those it pierces into undead servants.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Golem
A clay figure animated by words on a rune or scroll — a construct drawn from Jewish folklore.
Concepts
Great Old One
Immensely powerful cosmic beings currently imprisoned or in deathlike sleep, of which Cthulhu is the most prominent example.
Beings & Races
Great Race of Yith
A race that projects its minds across time to seize the bodies of other species.
Beings & Races
Gug
A race of giant, black-furred man-eaters twenty feet tall, banished beneath the dreamlands.
Eastern Folklore
Gumiho
A thousand-year-old nine-tailed fox that shapeshifts, the Korean branch of an East Asian motif.
Dungeons & TTRPG
GUMSHOE System
An investigative TTRPG rules system built on one premise: investigation is not about finding clues but interpreting them. Core clues are found without a roll.
Authors
H. P. Lovecraft
The father of cosmic horror (1890–1937), center of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Eastern Folklore
Haetae
A Korean guardian beast said to discern right from wrong and to ward off fire and disaster.
Eastern Folklore
Hannya
A Japanese Noh mask portraying a woman transformed into a vengeful demon by jealousy and resentment.
Eastern Folklore
Hasshaku-sama
An eight-foot woman who calls children’s names with a "po-po-po" sound, born on an internet forum.
Great Old Ones
Hastur
A Great Old One said never to be named, bound to the Yellow Sign and the city of Carcosa.
Authors
Hazel Heald
The pulp writer whose name is on five collaborations with Lovecraft — at least one of which Lovecraft wrote almost entirely.
Characters
Henri-Laurent de Marigny
Titus Crow's companion and chronicler, pilot of a time-and-space-travelling clock.
Characters
Henry Akeley
A Vermont farmer-scholar who discovers the Mi-go and is captured and transformed by them before help can arrive.
Characters
Henry Armitage
The head librarian of Miskatonic University who deciphers the Whateley threat and leads the scholars who destroy the Dunwich Horror.
Characters
Herbert West
A Miskatonic medical student whose obsession with reanimating the dead ends in his destruction by his own undead subjects.
Key Works
Herbert West–Reanimator
Six linked episodes follow Herbert West's increasingly depraved experiments in reanimating corpses, each success breeding worse catastrophe than the last.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Herobrine
A Minecraft creepypasta of a figure identical to the default skin but with pupil-less white eyes, watching solo players.
Western Folklore
Hiisi
A being of Finnish myth that began as sacred groves and rough terrain, later turned demon and giant.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Hit Points (HP)
A number abstracting a character’s capacity to survive — drop to zero and you fall.
Western Folklore
Hopkinsville Goblins
A 1955 encounter in which small silvery beings with glowing eyes besieged a farmhouse and kept returning despite gunfire.
Beings & Races
Hounds of Tindalos
Predatory entities that inhabit the angles of time and pursue those who travel too far through it.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
House of Leaves
A house a quarter inch larger on the inside than the outside — a novel of a manuscript about a nonexistent documentary, buried under the footnotes of the man transcribing it.
Western Folklore
Huldra
A Scandinavian forest warden spirit, beautiful but hiding a cow's tail and a back like a hollow tree.
Eastern Folklore
Huli jing
A thousand-year fox that shapeshifts into a woman, the root of East Asian fox lore.
Eastern Folklore
Hundun
A faceless embodiment of primordial chaos before the separation of heaven and earth in Chinese myth.
Beings & Races
Hunting Horror
A serpentine winged servitor of Nyarlathotep that hunts enemies across the cosmos.
Concepts
Hyborian Age
Robert E. Howard's invented prehistoric epoch between the fall of Atlantis and the dawn of recorded history — the entire setting of the Conan series.
Eastern Folklore
Hyeonmu
The Black Tortoise of the North, one of the four guardian beasts, symbol of winter and the element water.
Places
Hyperborea
A mythical ancient northern continent created by Clark Ashton Smith, ruled by sorcerers and alien gods in an antediluvian age.
Western Folklore
Impundulu
A human-sized black-and-white bird that summons lightning, a vampiric familiar passed down through a witch's line.
Eastern Folklore
Imugi
A great serpent that failed to become a dragon, carrying the grief of a thwarted transformation.
Places
Innsmouth
A decayed seaport town that has interbred with the Deep Ones.
Beings & Races
Insects from Shaggai
An insectoid refugee alien race created by Ramsey Campbell, survivors of the destroyed world Shaggai, who parasitize human hosts.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Into the Odd
A radically minimalist OSR TTRPG of industrial horror that became the root of many later games.
Eastern Folklore
Inugami
A dog-shaped possessing spirit inherited through a family line as a familiar.
Eastern Folklore
Ippon-datara
A one-legged, one-eyed mountain yokai of Japan’s Kumano region.
Great Old Ones
Ithaqua
A colossal wind-striding entity of the Arctic, a cosmic-horror reinterpretation of the wendigo legend.
Eastern Folklore
Jangsan-beom
An unidentified, white-furred creature of Busan’s Mount Jangsan said to mimic human voices to lure people into the hills.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Jeff the Killer
A flagship creepypasta killer with a face carved into a permanent smile, whispering "Go to sleep."
Western Folklore
Jengu
A mermaid-like water spirit of Cameroon with long hair and gap-teeth, bringing fortune and healing.
Western Folklore
Jenny Greenteeth
The English river-hag who drags children under — whose name also means the duckweed that mats over still water.
Eastern Folklore
Jeoseung-saja
A black-clad envoy of Korean folk belief who guides the souls of the dead to the ten kings of the underworld.
Western Folklore
Jersey Devil
A horse-faced, bat-winged creature said to be the cursed thirteenth child of a family, haunting a single region.
Eastern Folklore
Jiangshi
A reanimated Chinese corpse that hops to move and is controlled with talismans.
Eastern Folklore
Jorogumo
A Japanese spider yokai that shapeshifts into a beautiful woman and ensnares victims in its webs.
Characters
Joseph Curwen
An eighteenth-century Providence necromancer who prolonged his life across centuries and possessed his own descendant.
Eastern Folklore
Jowangsin
The goddess of fire and hearth, kept in a bowl of water above the stove — who reports the household to heaven, and will betray a master who breaks her taboos.
Eastern Folklore
Jujak
The Vermilion Bird of the South, one of the four guardian beasts, symbol of summer and the element fire.
Places
Kadath
A vast onyx castle in the cold waste of the Dreamlands, where the gods of Earth make their abode.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Kaidan
A Japanese tradition of weird oral tales, dating to the Edo period, that narrate calmly until they arrive at dread.
Eastern Folklore
Kamaitachi
An invisible weasel that rides whirlwinds to slash people as it passes.
Eastern Folklore
Kamanari
The Kibitsu shrine’s kettle oracle, and the omen of Ugetsu whose very silence foretold catastrophe.
Eastern Folklore
Kappa
A Japanese water creature whose power depends on the water held in the dish atop its head.
Eastern Folklore
Kapre
A tall, hairy, tobacco-smoking tree giant of Philippine mythology.
Eastern Folklore
Kasha
A corpse-stealing yōkai that evolved from a fiery chariot of the damned into a cat-formed monster.
Great Old Ones
Kassogtha
A Great Old One told as Cthulhu’s sister and mate — a writhing mass of tentacles that presides over disease and decay.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Keeper of Arcane Lore
The game master title in Call of Cthulhu, holding the Mythos’s secrets and steering Investigators into horror.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Kenku
A voiceless bird-folk of Dungeons & Dragons, drawn from the tengu, who speak only by mimicry.
Western Folklore
Kikimora
A female East Slavic house spirit whose blessing or mischief depends on the order of the home.
Eastern Folklore
Kim Quy
The golden turtle god of Vietnamese myth, famed for the sword legend of Hanoi’s Hoàn Kiếm Lake.
Places
Kingsport
A fictional, fog-draped coastal town in Lovecraft's New England, modeled on Marblehead, Massachusetts.
Western Folklore
Knocker
A spirit of Cornish miners that knocks in the tunnels to guide them to ore — or to warn of collapse.
Concepts
Korean Cosmic Horror
A current of Korean cosmic-horror writing centered on web-novel platforms such as Munpia and KakaoPage.
Western Folklore
Koschei the Deathless
A deathless East Slavic villain who has hidden his death outside his own body, layer within layer.
Eastern Folklore
Krasue
A nocturnal Southeast Asian spirit manifesting as a floating woman’s head trailing its viscera.
Elder Gods
Kthanid
A benevolent Elder God and brother of Cthulhu who opposes the Great Old Ones.
Eastern Folklore
Kuchisake-onna
A masked woman with a slit mouth who asks "Am I pretty?", a rumor that became a real panic.
Eastern Folklore
Kudan
A human-faced, cattle-bodied yokai that foretells bounty or disaster — and whose printed picture was sold as the charm against it.
Characters
Kull
An Atlantean warrior who seizes the throne of Valusia in the pre-Cataclysmic Thurian Age, serving as Howard's thematic precursor to Conan.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Kuo-toa
Fish-like folk of Dungeons & Dragons, driven underground to worship mad gods and dream of retaking the surface.
Western Folklore
La Lechuza
A giant owl with the face of an old woman that lures people outside with the false cry of an infant.
Western Folklore
La Llorona
A Mexican and Latin American spirit who drowned her own children and wanders the waterside, weeping.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
An OSR horror RPG that pours weird fiction and body horror into Basic D&D rules.
Eastern Folklore
Langsuir
A Malay vampiric revenant of a woman who died in childbirth, preying on newborns.
Western Folklore
Leshy
A pagan Slavic forest spirit who rules the woods, shifts his shape, and leads travelers astray.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Level ! (Run for Your Life)
A one-time level where a horde charges the instant you enter — a single deadly race with no respite.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Level 0 (The Lobby)
The supposed entry point of the Backrooms — an endless yellow room of buzzing fluorescent lights and damp carpet.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Level 1 (Habitable Zone)
A vast fluorescent-lit parking-garage space — the first Backrooms level where active hunters appear.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Level 2 (Pipe Dreams)
A claustrophobic tunnel lined with scalding steam pipes, where the heat itself becomes the pursuer.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Level Fun =)
A space disguised as an endless birthday party, where touching a balloon turns you into a grinning partygoer.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Lich
A wizard who, refusing death, has sealed his own soul into a phylactery — the archetypal final boss of the dungeon.
Western Folklore
Lidérc
A nightmare-being of Hungarian folklore, hatched from a black hen’s first egg, that clings to a person and drains their blood.
Western Folklore
Lightning Bird
A vampiric bird of South African Zulu folklore said to summon thunder and lightning with its wings and talons.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Liminal Space
An aesthetic of nostalgia and unease evoked by empty transitional spaces like corridors, waiting rooms, and vacant pools.
Great Old Ones
Lloigor
One of a twin pair of ancient entities slumbering deep within the Earth, paired with Zhar.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Local 58
A genre-defining analog horror YouTube series depicting a fictional public-access signal repeatedly hijacked.
Western Folklore
Loch Ness Monster
A large aquatic creature said to inhabit Loch Ness in Scotland.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Lost Silver
A foundational haunted-game creepypasta about a cursed save file on a used Pokémon Silver cartridge.
Authors
M. R. James
Master of the English ghost story (1862–1936), of horror waking from old books and antiquities.
Eastern Folklore
Ma Da
A water ghost of Vietnamese folklore — the soul of a drowned person that lingers in rivers and ponds, seeking to pull a living victim down in its place.
Eastern Folklore
Mae Nak Phra Khanong
The wife who died in childbirth and kept waiting for her husband — Thailand’s best-known ghost, still given offerings at her shrine.
Eastern Folklore
Manago
The serpent-demon of Ugetsu’s “Lust of the White Serpent,” who obsessively pursues a young man beyond death, in the shape of a beautiful woman.
Western Folklore
Mapinguari
An Amazonian cryptid said to be a foul-smelling, hairy giant with backward feet and a mouth in its belly.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Marble Hornets
The first and most influential Slender Man ARG, following an investigation into an abandoned student film and the Operator.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Masks of Nyarlathotep
The flagship long-form Call of Cthulhu campaign, a 1920s globe-spanning investigation famed for its lethality.
Beings & Races
Mi-go
A fungoid alien race from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto).
Dungeons & TTRPG
Mind Flayer
A humanoid predator with an octopus head that devours minds — its name and design are a Wizards trademark.
Places
Miskatonic University
The university in Arkham, famous for a library holding an original Necronomicon.
Eastern Folklore
Mongdal-gwisin
The vengeful ghost of a man who died unmarried, the male counterpart to the maiden ghost.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Monster of the Week
An urban-fantasy horror tabletop RPG about hunters who chase a new monster each session.
Beings & Races
Moon-beast
Pale, toad-like beings from the moon of the Dreamlands who trade in moon-wine and rubies while keeping enslaved humans.
Western Folklore
Mora
A Slavic and Germanic nightmare spirit that sits on the chests of sleepers, bringing suffocating dreams.
Great Old Ones
Mordiggian
The charnel god of Zul-Bha-Sair, a vast darkness that claims every corpse within the city as its own.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Mörk Borg
A rules-light OSR RPG of a dying, heavy-metal world living out the last days before a prophesied end.
Western Folklore
Moroi
A vampiric ghost of Romanian folklore, a phantom of the dead that leaves the grave to draw energy from the living.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Mothership
A sci-fi horror tabletop RPG of deep-space isolation, where Sanity and Fear are stats.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Mothership (role-playing game)
A sci-fi horror TTRPG of claustrophobic doomed spacecraft, where mounting Stress forces Panic rolls.
Western Folklore
Mothman
A winged humanoid with glowing red eyes whose appearances are read as omens of impending disaster.
Eastern Folklore
Mulgwisin
The vengeful spirit of a drowned person, dragging the living underwater to take their place.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Mummy
A preserved corpse holding a curse within its wrappings, spreading rot to those it touches.
Western Folklore
Nachzehrer
A German revenant that chews its own shroud in the grave and drains its family’s life from a distance.
Western Folklore
Nahual
A Mesoamerican sorcerer who transforms into the animal bound to the day of their birth.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Napolitan
A short tale that reads as an ordinary anecdote until a hidden wordplay resolves into something horrifying — chilling only once understood.
Great Old Ones
Nctosa and Nctolhu
Twin daughters of Cthulhu, Great Old Ones said to be imprisoned in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
Forbidden Tomes
Necronomicon
The most infamous forbidden book of the Mythos, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
Eastern Folklore
Nghê
A Vietnamese guardian creature blending lion and dog, placed to protect temple and village gates.
Beings & Races
Night-gaunt
Faceless, black, winged creatures of the Dreamlands that seize intruders and carry them away into the outer dark.
Elder Gods
Nodens
A rare Elder God not hostile to humanity, set against the Outer Gods.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
NoEnd House
A canonical rule-and-structure creepypasta about a haunted house of nine consecutively escalating rooms.
Western Folklore
Nøkken
A shapeshifting Scandinavian water spirit whose enchanted music lures victims to drown.
Eastern Folklore
Noppera-bo
A faceless ghost with smooth, featureless skin, embodying the erasure of identity.
Western Folklore
Nuckelavee
A flayed, skinless horse fused with a human torso whose very breath spreads plague.
Eastern Folklore
Nue
A Japanese chimera yōkai—monkey’s head, tanuki’s body, tiger’s limbs, a snake for a tail—whose cry heralds ill omen and disease.
Outer Gods
Nug and Yeb
Twin dark deity offspring associated with Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth, with mythological links to Cthulhu.
Eastern Folklore
Nurarihyon
An old-man yokai who slips into another’s house and takes the master’s seat — later styled the commander of all yokai.
Eastern Folklore
Nure-onna
A water creature with a woman’s head and a serpent’s body, perpetually dripping wet.
Eastern Folklore
Nurikabe
An invisible wall that blocks travelers on the night road.
Outer Gods
Nyarlathotep
The thousand-faced messenger of the Outer Gods; the one who deals with humanity directly.
Great Old Ones
Nyogtha
A Great Old One added to the Mythos by Henry Kuttner in "The Salem Horror."
Western Folklore
Obayifo
A vampire-witch of Ashanti folklore, an ordinary person by day who glows and hunts for blood by night.
Characters
Obed Marsh
The Innsmouth captain who brokered a pact with the Deep Ones, transforming his town into a place of hybrid worship.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Object 1 (Almond Water)
The standard survival drink of the Backrooms, said to appear only when no one is watching.
Places
Olathoë
A city on the plateau of Sarkis in the lost land of Lomar.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Old-School Essentials
Gavin Norman’s OSR ruleset (Necrotic Gnome, 2019) that re-presents the 1981 B/X Dungeons & Dragons rules with clarity, without changing the system.
Eastern Folklore
Oni
A horned, fanged demon of hell; a Japanese ogre that even the wicked may become while still alive.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Open Game License (OGL / SRD)
A license that opens part of a game’s rules for anyone to use and redistribute.
Concepts
Outer God
The highest class of Mythos deities, comprising vast, largely indifferent cosmic entities such as Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Owlbear
One of D&D’s iconic monsters — an owl-bear hybrid whose origin was a Hong Kong plastic toy.
Eastern Folklore
Palcheok-gwisin
A roughly eight-foot apparition, the Korean variant of Japan’s Hasshaku-sama spread through online media.
Western Folklore
Parī
A winged being of Persian lore straddling angel and devil, said to abduct mortals to an otherworld.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Partygoers
Yellow humanoids with carved smiles dwelling in Level Fun, who convert anyone they latch onto into one of their own.
Eastern Folklore
Penanggalan
A vampiric Malay entity whose head and entrails detach at night to hunt the blood of new mothers.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Petscop
A YouTube horror series posing as a Let’s Play of a lost PlayStation game, whose in-game map comes to overlap real places.
Western Folklore
Piasa
A man-devouring creature of the Illini, painted on the bluffs above the Mississippi River.
Key Works
Pickman's Model
A narrator visits painter Richard Pickman's hidden studio, only to realise the lifelike ghouls in his canvases were painted from living models.
Beings & Races
Picts
An ancient, savage people recurring across Howard's fictional cycles — from the age of Bran Mak Morn to the Hyborian era of Conan.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Plane
Worlds beyond the world, each ruled by its own laws — a bridge between cosmic horror and the dungeon.
Places
Plateau of Leng
A high plateau straddling the waking world and the Dreamlands, whose location changes from story to story.
Forbidden Tomes
Pnakotic Manuscripts
One of the oldest forbidden texts, predating humanity; the source of this imprint’s name.
Eastern Folklore
Pocong
An Indonesian and Malay shroud revenant animated when burial knots are left untied.
Western Folklore
Poludnitsa
A Slavic noon demon who appears in summer fields and assails midday laborers with heat and madness.
Western Folklore
Popobawa
A one-eyed, shapeshifting evil spirit whose name means "bat-wing," tied to mass panics in Zanzibar.
Places
Poseidonis
The last isle of foundering Atlantis, which Clark Ashton Smith took from Theosophical writings and made the stage of a story cycle.
Western Folklore
Pukwudgie
A woodland being of Wampanoag folklore that appears and vanishes at will and lures people to their deaths.
Eastern Folklore
Pyinsarupa
A composite creature of Burmese myth whose name means “five forms,” stitched from five animals.
Eastern Folklore
Qiongqi
A winged tiger that devours people, one of the Four Perils personifying evil.
Great Old Ones
Quachil Uttaus
The Treader of the Dust, a god of entropy whose touch instantly reduces living matter to ash and dust.
Places
R’lyeh
The sunken Pacific city where Cthulhu lies dreaming.
Forbidden Tomes
R'lyeh Text
An ancient pre-human scripture associated with Cthulhu and the sunken city of R'lyeh, introduced by August Derleth.
Eastern Folklore
Raijū
A Japanese creature whose body is made of lightning — the beast companion of the thunder god Raijin.
Authors
Ramsey Campbell
English horror writer who created the Severn Valley, the British counterpart to Lovecraft Country.
Characters
Randolph Carter
Lovecraft's recurring dreamer-protagonist and alter ego, a Boston mystic able to traverse the Dreamlands.
Eastern Folklore
Rangda
The Balinese witch-queen whose name means “widow” — leader of the leyak, locked in an unending fight with Barong.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Ravenloft
A gothic horror setting where the jailer is the lord — and the lord cannot leave either.
Western Folklore
Redcap
An old goblin of border ruins who must slay travelers and soak his cap in their blood.
Forbidden Tomes
Revelations of Glaaki
A multi-volume cult text dictated by the entity Glaaki to its servants, introduced by Ramsey Campbell.
Great Old Ones
Rhan-Tegoth
A forgotten Great Old One reawakened in a London wax museum.
Characters
Richard Pickman
A Boston painter of genius whose nightmarish canvases prove to depict real ghouls — because he used them as models.
Outer Gods
Rlim Shaikorth
A colossal white worm deity of cold created by Clark Ashton Smith, appearing in "The Coming of the White Worm."
Characters
Robert Blake
A horror writer whose investigation of a shunned Providence church wakens the Haunter of the Dark to fatal awareness of him.
Authors
Robert Bloch
The only person Lovecraft ever dedicated a story to — creator of two Mythos grimoires, and later the author of Psycho.
Authors
Robert E. Howard
Creator of Conan (1906–1936); sword-and-sorcery and a member of the Mythos circle.
Authors
Robert W. Chambers
American author whose "The King in Yellow" (1895) introduced Carcosa, Hastur, and the Yellow Sign into weird fiction.
Eastern Folklore
Rokurokubi
A cursed woman of Japanese lore whose neck stretches out at night.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Rule-based Horror
A form that hands the reader a list of survival rules — "obey these" — and builds dread from the gaps in the rules and the cost of breaking them.
Western Folklore
Rusalka
The vengeful spirit of a drowned maiden who lures people to the water and pulls them under.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Russian Sleep Experiment
A creepypasta framed as a fake experiment log of subjects kept awake for fifteen days, weaponizing a pseudo-documentary tone.
Places
Salem
A real Massachusetts town infamous for its 1692 witch trials, recurrent in Lovecraft's fiction as a backdrop for occult heritage.
Eastern Folklore
Samdugumi
A three-headed, nine-tailed grave-fox from Jeju shamanic narrative.
Eastern Folklore
Samsin Halmeoni
The triple goddess of childbirth and fate in Korean shamanism, who guards each child until the age of seven.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Sanity (Call of Cthulhu)
A mental-health stat that erodes as one faces Mythos horrors or forbidden tomes, leading to madness.
Eastern Folklore
Sansin
The mountain god attended by a tiger, holding the fate of those who enter the mountains.
Places
Sarnath
A proud Dreamlands city utterly destroyed as divine retribution for the slaughter of the beings of Ib.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Saving Throw
A resistance roll to endure harmful effects such as poison, spells, and traps.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP Object Classes
The SCP Foundation’s documentary horror system that classifies anomalies as Safe, Euclid, or Keter by difficulty of containment.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-049 (The Plague Doctor)
A humanoid entity in plague-doctor garb that, claiming to cure, kills people and reanimates them as monsters.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-055 ([unknown])
A flagship antimeme: what it is gets forgotten at once, leaving only records of what it is not.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-076 ("Able")
A humanoid sealed in a black stone cube who, once awakened, conjures blades to slaughter and resurrects after death.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-087 (The Stairwell)
An endlessly descending stairwell of repeating 13-step flights, haunted by a faceless thing in the dark below.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-093 (Red Sea Object)
A red stone disc whose glow shifts with the bearer’s regret and lets them pass through mirrors into another dimension.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-096 (The Shy Guy)
A normally harmless humanoid SCP that hunts down and kills anyone who has seen its face, no matter where they are.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-106 (The Old Man)
A humanoid entity that corrodes whatever it touches and phases through walls to drag victims into its pocket dimension.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-1471 (MalO)
A malicious app that, after about 90 hours, makes a dog-skulled humanoid permanently visible to the user alone.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-173
A concrete sculpture that stays still while watched, but closes in and snaps necks the instant no one is looking.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-1762 (Where the Dragons Went)
An SCP entry about a silver box inscribed "HERE BE DRAGONS," from which paper dragons emerged to communicate the slow death of their own world.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-178 (3-D Specs)
A pair of glasses that reveals otherwise-invisible entities — and lets those entities kill on contact.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-1981
A Betamax tape that plays a different speech each time, while the man on screen is slashed by an unseen blade.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-231 (Special Personnel Requirements)
The last surviving girl, recovered from a cult, who is subjected to the entirely redacted Procedure 110-Montauk.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-239
An eight-year-old girl who can change whatever she sees — kept asleep lest she remake the world.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-2521
An entity that takes away any information — and the person conveying it — the moment it is described in words, so it can be recorded only in images and symbols.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-3000 (Anantashesha)
A serpentine eel-like entity hundreds of kilometers long in the deep Bay of Bengal, secreting the Foundation’s key amnestic.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-3001
A near-empty pocket dimension called Red Reality, and the record of a researcher trapped there—unable even to die.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-3008 (The Infinite IKEA)
A windowless furniture store of infinite extent where, by night, staff-like beings hunt the people trapped inside.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-354 (The Red Pool)
A pool of blood-like liquid in northern Canada that periodically disgorges hostile entities — a Keter-class anomaly.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-3999
A metafictional anomaly whose own containment document disintegrates as reality itself unravels.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-426 (I am a Toaster)
A memetic object that forces anyone who mentions it to refer to it only in the first person.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-4999 (Someone to Watch Over Us)
A suited humanoid that appears only beside the lonely dying, silently keeping them company until the end.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-5000 ("Why?")
One of the most celebrated entries on the SCP Foundation wiki, telling — through a lone survivor — of a world in which the Foundation turns to exterminating all of humanity for a reason that is never revealed.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-5031
A quasi-humanoid creature that ceases to exist when looked at directly, leaving only traces.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-610 (The Flesh That Hates)
A contagious plague of flesh that transforms victims within hours — a Keter-class anomaly extremely hard to contain.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-682 (Hard-to-Destroy Reptile)
A signature Keter-class entity that cannot be killed, hates all life, and endlessly adapts and regenerates.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-939 (With Many Voices)
A species of blind red predators that mimic the voices of previous victims to lure new prey.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
SCP-999 (The Tickle Monster)
A translucent orange gelatinous mass whose touch brings euphoria — a beloved Safe-class anomaly.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Search and Rescue Officer
A rule-based horror in survival-tip form, warning never to approach the inexplicable staircases standing in the deep woods.
Western Folklore
Selkie
Shapeshifters of Celtic and Norse tradition who become human by shedding their seal skin, and who, once the skin is taken, are bound to the land and forever long for the sea.
Eastern Folklore
Seolmundae Halmang
A creator goddess of Jeju myth who shaped the island with dirt in her skirt — and who is, even so, mortal.
Beings & Races
Shantak
Enormous horse-headed flying creatures of the Dreamlands that can serve as mounts but are ultimately untrustworthy.
Beings & Races
Shoggoth
A formless protoplasmic mass bred as slaves by the Elder Things.
Outer Gods
Shub-Niggurath
A deity of monstrous fertility, "the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young."
Eastern Folklore
Shuten-dōji
The sake-loving oni chieftain of Japan whose severed head still lunged to bite the hero who slew him.
Eastern Folklore
Shwe Hpyin Nyidaw
The younger of the Taungbyon Brothers among Burma’s Thirty-Seven Nats — executed men who became land-ruling spirits.
Eastern Folklore
Sigbin
A Philippine Visayan creature that walks backward and sucks blood through victims’ shadows.
Western Folklore
Siguanaba
A shapeshifting spirit of Central American folklore who appears by the water as a beautiful long-haired woman, then reveals the face of a horse or a skull to the man who draws near.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Siren Head
A twelve-metre figure with two warning sirens where a head should be, which lures by mimicking voices and broadcasts.
Western Folklore
Sirin
A Slavic bird with a woman's head, whose song lures listeners away from the world they knew.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Skeleton
A soldier of bare bones risen without flesh — one of the very first monsters listed in 1974.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Skin-Stealer
A Backrooms entity that wears human skin and mimics speech to pass itself off as a person.
Western Folklore
Skinwalker
A shape-shifting witch of Navajo tradition who gains the power to transform and possess by breaking the taboo of killing kin.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Slender Man
A faceless, unnaturally tall figure in a black suit that stalks children — the founding myth of modern internet folklore.
Western Folklore
Sluagh
The host of the unforgiven dead, flying in a crescent like a flock of birds to snatch a person and carry them from island to island.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Smile Dog
A cursed image said to torment anyone who sees it with nightmares until they pass it on to others.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Smilers
A Backrooms shadow-predator known only by its glowing smile and eyes in the dark, drawn to and lunging at light.
Characters
Solomon Kane
A grim sixteenth-century Puritan adventurer who wanders Africa and Europe with an implacable sense of divine mission against evil.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Squidward’s Suicide
A creepypasta about a nonexistent "unreleased" episode of a popular cartoon — the formula of the lost-episode genre.
Beings & Races
Star Vampire
An invisible blood-drinker that becomes visible — turning crimson — only when engorged.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Stars Without Number
A science-fiction sandbox tabletop RPG that generates whole star sectors from random tables.
Authors
Stefan Grabiński
The Polish writer called “the Polish Poe” and “the Polish Lovecraft,” author of The Motion Demon, a cycle of mystic railway stories.
Western Folklore
Strigoi
Romanian undead who rise from the grave to draw vitality from the blood of the living.
Places
Stygia
An ancient sorcerous kingdom of the Hyborian Age devoted to the serpent-god Set, the darkest and most sinister power in Conan's world.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Symbaroum
A dark fantasy TTRPG set in the monster-haunted forest of Davokar, built around corruption.
Eastern Folklore
Taotie
A Peril of insatiable gluttony that devoured even its own body, the incarnation of greed.
Eastern Folklore
Taowu
A Peril with a human head, tiger’s legs, and boar’s tusks, embodying untamable savagery.
Western Folklore
Tatzelwurm
A lizard-like Alpine cryptid with a cat-like face and only two forelegs.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Ted the Caver
The online diary of a man digging into an unexplored cave, which stopped updating after a post saying they would bring a gun. Often called the first creepypasta.
Concepts
Tekeli-li
A haunting cry from Poe's "Arthur Gordon Pym," redeployed by Lovecraft as the utterance of the shoggoths in "At the Mountains of Madness."
Dungeons & TTRPG
Ten Candles
A tragic horror TTRPG in which everyone dies when the last of ten candles goes out — the ending is fixed from the start.
Eastern Folklore
Tengu
A mountain spirit with a red face and long nose, poised between divine guardian and demon.
Eastern Folklore
Thandawgan
A Burmese nat — “receiver of the royal voice” — who died of malaria gathering flowers and became a spirit.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Backrooms
An endless expanse of empty yellow-wallpapered rooms one falls into through a crack in reality.
Key Works
The Call of Cthulhu
The starting point of the Mythos, first appearance of Cthulhu and R’lyeh (1928).
Key Works
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
A Providence antiquarian's research into his necromancer ancestor leads to his own dissolution and replacement by the sorcerer he sought to understand.
Key Works
The Colour Out of Space
The horror of an unnameable colour that fell with a meteorite (1927).
Key Works
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
Randolph Carter journeys through the Dreamlands to find the wondrous sunset city he glimpsed in slumber, descending at last to unknown Kadath.
Key Works
The Dunwich Horror
The offspring of Yog-Sothoth and the tragedy of an unseen twin (1929).
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Exit 8
A walking simulator set in an endlessly repeating subway passage, escaped only by spotting “anomalies.” Guess wrong and you are back at Exit 0.
Key Works
The Festival
A narrator arrives in ancient Kingsport at Yuletide for an ancestral rite and is drawn into a subterranean ceremony far older than Christianity.
Key Works
The Great God Pan
A girl who “sees the great god Pan” under the knife, and the deaths that follow over twenty-odd years — the novella the Cthulhu Mythos borrowed its structure and its monster from.
Key Works
The Haunter of the Dark
Writer Robert Blake discovers the Shining Trapezohedron in an abandoned Providence church and wakens the Haunter of the Dark — an avatar of Nyarlathotep that destroys him when the lights fail.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Holders Series
A collection of second-person instruction tales for gathering 538 objects — said to end the world if all are united.
Key Works
The Horror at Red Hook
A transitional tale Lovecraft wrote while living in a Brooklyn slum, now discussed less for its horror than for its open hostility to immigrants.
Forbidden Tomes
The King in Yellow
A forbidden play said to drive its readers mad, and the 1895 collection built around it.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Magnus Archives
A horror podcast in which the archivist recording a backlog of statements becomes part of what he is filing.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Mandela Catalogue
A teenage creator’s analog horror series about doppelgänger "Alternates" that drive victims to suicide.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Mandela Catalogue
An analog horror franchise about “Alternates” that drive people to suicide to take over their faces.
Key Works
The Mound
A novella Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Zealia Bishop, about a Native American mound hiding a gateway to the subterranean realm of K’n-yan.
Key Works
The Music of Erich Zann
A student lodger witnesses a mute German violist playing frantic, unearthly music each night to hold at bay something beyond his high window.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Oldest View
A found-footage series by Kane Parsons that expands the Backrooms universe inside a real, now-demolished mall.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Poolrooms (Level 37)
An endless succession of deserted tiled swimming pools — the signature image of the liminal-pool aesthetic.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Rake
A nocturnal human-canine creature deliberately built by seeding fabricated sightings and "evidence."
Key Works
The Rats in the Walls
An American heir restoring his ancestral English estate hears rats in the walls and follows them into a subterranean pit where his bloodline's truth awaits.
Key Works
The Shadow Out of Time
A professor recovers from amnesia to discover his mind was possessed by the Great Race of Yith, who traverse time by swapping consciousnesses across eons.
Key Works
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The secret of a decayed seaport — and the narrator’s own lineage (1936).
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Smiling Man
A late-night street encounter with a man advancing while smiling unnaturally wide — horror that invades the everyday without anything supernatural.
Concepts
The Unnameable
Lovecraft’s central technique of evoking horror by implication rather than description.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
The Walten Files
A 2D-animated analog horror series about possessed animatronics at a defunct children’s restaurant.
Key Works
The Whisperer in Darkness
A folklorist's correspondence with a Vermont farmer draws him into the reality of the Mi-go, who harvest human brains and carry them to the stars in metal cylinders.
Concepts
The Yellow Sign
A glyph belonging to no human script, which binds whoever looks at it to the King.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
This Man
A deliberately fabricated myth claiming that a single face appears in the dreams of strangers worldwide.
Authors
Thomas Ligotti
A living master of philosophical cosmic horror who locates dread not in outer monsters but in human consciousness itself.
Western Folklore
Thunderbird
A supernatural bird-spirit of Indigenous North American traditions who makes thunder with its wings and lightning with its eyes.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Ticci-Toby
A Slender Man proxy with congenital insensitivity to pain, whose story of trauma and patricide made him a creepypasta icon.
Eastern Folklore
Tikbalang
A horse-headed Philippine trickster with long limbs that leads travelers astray.
Characters
Titus Crow
An occult investigator and rare Mythos hero who fights back against the Great Old Ones.
Eastern Folklore
Tiyanak
A shapeshifting Philippine demon that lures travelers by mimicking an infant’s cries.
Western Folklore
Tokoloshe
A small, malevolent dwarf-like water spirit of Nguni mythology that turns invisible and harms sleepers.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Trail of Cthulhu
A 1930s Mythos horror TTRPG where clues come automatically and the real test is enduring their meaning.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Trophy
A psychological-horror tabletop RPG about doomed treasure hunters in the woods.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Trophy Dark
A rules-light horror TTRPG of doomed treasure hunters who enter the woods with no promise of return.
Great Old Ones
Tsathoggua
A toad-like, sluggish Great Old One created by Clark Ashton Smith.
Eastern Folklore
Tsuchigumo
A giant earth-spider yōkai that afflicted a hero, and an old slur that turned rebellious outsiders into monsters.
Western Folklore
Tuoni
The god of Tuonela, the land of the dead, and the personification of darkness in Finnish myth.
Great Old Ones
Ubbo-Sathla
The primordial source of all earthly life, dwelling in formless protoplasmic chaos at the dawn of time.
Key Works
Ugetsu Monogatari
Ueda Akinari’s 1776 collection of nine supernatural tales in which obsession and retribution manifest beyond death.
Places
Ulthar
An ancient Lovecraftian town with a law that no man may kill a cat.
Eastern Folklore
Umibozu
A giant black sea yokai that appears when calm waters suddenly turn violent and sinks the ship.
Forbidden Tomes
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
A forbidden grimoire compiled by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, cataloguing the secret rites and prohibited gods of the pre-human era.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Undead
The game’s broad classification for beings that have died yet do not stop.
Great Old Ones
Uvhash
A gigantic red mass of eyes and tentacles — a god of the void whose summoning dooms the one who calls it.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Vaesen
A Gothic horror TTRPG of 19th-century Scandinavia where those with the Sight hunt Nordic folklore creatures.
Places
Valusia
The ancient kingdom of the pre-Cataclysmic Thurian Age ruled by Kull, secretly infiltrated at every level by Serpent Men disguised as humans.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Vampire
An aristocratic undead that lives forever on blood — the classic monster with the richest list of weaknesses.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Vampire: The Masquerade
The 1991 horror RPG in which you play a vampire at war with the Beast inside — the template for personal-horror roleplaying.
Western Folklore
Vila
South Slavic female nature spirits of forests, meadows, and waters, who may bestow gifts or take terrible revenge.
Western Folklore
Viy
A Slavic underworld demon who kills the moment its enormous eyelids are lifted and it "sees."
Western Folklore
Vodyanoy
A Slavic water spirit caked in slime and moss who haunts mills and rivers and drowns those who offend him.
Western Folklore
Vrykolakas
The Greek undead who knocks at night and calls the householder’s name. Answer the first call and you die within days.
Eastern Folklore
Wakwak
A vampiric, bird-like creature of Philippine (Visayan) folklore that announces itself by the sound of its bat-like wings.
Characters
Walter Gilman
A Miskatonic mathematics student who, lodging in a witch-haunted garret, is drawn through non-Euclidean spaces to his death.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Weirdcore
A 2020s aesthetic that evokes the wrongness of dreams and memory through low-quality, distorted images and uneasy text.
Western Folklore
Wendigo
An emaciated giant with ashen skin and a heart of ice — what one who breaks the taboo of cannibalism in starvation becomes.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Wight
A corpse inhabited by a malign spirit, draining life force to swell its own ranks.
Characters
Wilbur Whateley
The half-human son of Yog-Sothoth who seeks a complete Necronomicon and dies mauled by a guard dog at Miskatonic's library.
Western Folklore
Wild Hunt
A spectral cavalcade of the dead that crosses the night sky; to witness it brings war, plague, or the death of the witness.
Authors
William Hope Hodgson
A British author who, before Lovecraft, gave shape to sea-borne and cosmic dread, laying the groundwork for cosmic horror with The House on the Borderland and The Night Land.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Wolves of God
An Old-School Revival tabletop RPG set in the Dark Ages England of the eighth century.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Wraith
An incorporeal spirit that physical weapons cannot touch, dwelling in darkness.
Great Old Ones
Y'golonac
The god of depravity, a headless entity with mouths on its palms, summoned merely by reading its name.
Eastern Folklore
Yama-uba
A mountain-crone yōkai of Japan, at once nurturing and devouring, who swallows travelers through a mouth atop her head.
Eastern Folklore
Yamata no Orochi
An eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent slain by Susanoo, who found the sword Kusanagi in its tail.
Outer Gods
Yhoundeh
The elk goddess of Hyperborea created by Clark Ashton Smith, whose state religion persecutes forbidden cults as heresy.
Great Old Ones
Yibb-Tstll
A bat-winged being who perceives all of time and space.
Outer Gods
Yidhra
An Outer God called the Dream Witch, who absorbs the evolutionary traits of the lifeforms she devours and hides her true form within illusion.
Great Old Ones
Yig
The Father of Serpents, a reptilian deity that curses any who harm snakes.
Outer Gods
Yog-Sothoth
A being coterminous with all space and time, known as "the Gate and the Key."
Great Old Ones
Ythogtha
The second son of Cthulhu, imprisoned in the Abyss of Yhe.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Yuan-ti
A race of human-snake hybrids in Dungeons & Dragons that degenerate humans into serpents over generations.
Places
Yuggoth
The outermost dark world of the solar system, identified with Pluto and serving as the primary outpost of the fungoid Mi-go.
Eastern Folklore
Yuki-onna
A Japanese snow spirit who freezes people to death with her icy breath in the blizzard.
Modern Lore & Anomalies
Yume Nikki
A freeware game with no dialogue, combat or plot, wandering the dreams of a girl who will not leave her room — made by someone about whom almost nothing is known.
Characters
Zadok Allen
An aged, half-mad Innsmouth drunkard who, loosened by whiskey, reveals the town's terrible history to the narrator.
Eastern Folklore
Zashiki-warashi
A child spirit that dwells in a house; the home it inhabits prospers, and its departure brings ruin.
Great Old Ones
Zhar
The twin of Lloigor, an ancient entity imprisoned alongside its counterpart deep beneath Indo-China.
Eastern Folklore
Zhulong
A giant dragon with a human face and serpent’s body whose eyes create day and night.
Dungeons & TTRPG
Zombie
A mindless reanimated corpse — rooted in Vodou folklore, settled into the dungeon as a low-tier undead.
Great Old Ones
Zoth-Ommog
The third son of Cthulhu, imprisoned beneath the seabed near R'lyeh.
Places
Zothique
The last continent of a dying far-future Earth, created by Clark Ashton Smith, where decadent humanity and alien gods coexist under dimming stars.
Dungeons & TTRPG
ZWEIHÄNDER
A grimdark dark fantasy TTRPG of lethal combat that rejects the D&D power-fantasy model.