1999

About

1999 is a creepypasta story centered around a fictional Canadian public access TV channel called Caledon Local 21. The channel's mascot is Mr. Bear, a parody of Bear in the Big Blue House played by the man who runs the channel. The narrator is a Canadian blogger who says to have watched the channel as a child back in 1999.

Origin

The original draft of the story was written by Camden Lamont for his blog, Slack LaLane, on November 14, 2009.^[1] He continued to update it until April 2011. It is set in 2009, ten years after the Caledon Local 21 channel supposedly existed.

The story begins with the narrator Elliot recounting "Mr. Bear's Cellar," an eerie public access show starring a man in a bear costume. One episode involved Mr. Bear asking children to write him letters. A young Elliot wrote to Mr. Bear in 1999 and got a response, telling him to come to an address in Caledon. When Elliot's father took him there, police were excavating the house, and Elliot never heard from Caledon Local 21 again.^[2]

In the present day, Elliot investigates the history of Caledon Local 21, eventually finding a police station with several tapes from the channel. After watching the final episode of "Mr. Bear's Cellar," in which Mr. Bear burns his children playmates alive, Elliot is scarred by the realization that he could have met the same fate. He leaves the blog on a cliffhanger: he mentions an email address, seemingly belonging to Mr. Bear, that he thinks is a cruel prank. The story closes with him saying he'll update as soon as he can, implying the email was real and that he was somehow found by Mr. Bear.^[2]

Spread

On September 9th, 2012, a 4chan user posted a thread on /x/ (paranormal) board, stating that he "was looking back at the old '1999' blog, about the local cable television station" and wanted to know if it ever received an official continuation.^[3] This inspired discussion about the cliffhanger ending and drove many readers to Slack LaLane. Most of the online discourse about the story involves the cliffhanger, with readers wondering what exactly happened to Elliot after he notices Mr. Bear's email address. To date, Lamont has not released an epilogue or sequel.

The story started to gain more widespread popularity in June 2014 after several well-known horror narrators, including CreepsMcPasta^[4] and SomeOrdinaryGamers,^[5] uploaded readings of the text to YouTube. It also appeared on horror-themed websites such as Creep.ee^[6] and Creepypasta.com,^[2] where it is currently hosted.

A YouTube channel (titled "Caledon Local 21 Channel") has uploaded fan-made recreations of the episodes described in the story.^[7] The videos include three episodes of "Mr. Bear's Cellar," as well as one of "Soup & Spoon" and one of "Paint with the Soul." Each video features distorted VCR tracking lines, but they are all in the HD 16:9 aspect ratio.^[7]

A fan-created wiki for 1999 has also been established, hosted by FANDOM/Wikia.^[8] It is titled "1999: Caledon Local 21 Wiki." The site includes pages for each episode of "Mr. Bear's Cellar," breakdowns of the story's chapters, and translations of the story in different languages.^[8] Images of the supposed Mr. Bear accompany many of these articles, sourced from the Amazon Video adaptation of 1999 as well as fan-made recreations.

Film adaptation on Amazon Video

On September 8th, 2017, a live-action film adaptation of the story premiered on Amazon Video.^[9] It was spread out over a series of four 10-minute specials, titled "Welcome to Caledon," "All Scratched Out," "We Tried to Forget," and "Burn with Me."^[9] The specials were overseen by Lamont, who is credited as an executive producer, and they are faithful to the original text.^[9] This series is currently the only official adaptation of the story made with Lamont's input.

The YouTube channel for Horrorgraph, the studio that released the specials, also features several clips from the series. On October 6th, 2017, it uploaded the entirety of the third special "We Tried to Forget."^[10]

Plagiarism accusations

The story was published to Creepypasta Wiki on September 19th, 2011. When it was first posted on Wikia, it was simply the original story, but anonymous users eventually added to the blog with new, unofficial continuations. The wiki's copy of the story was last updated in June 2015, around the time accusations of plagiarism surfaced (see below). Many readers noticed a striking similarity between the most recent addition and a video from a notable online horror series alantutorial, created by Alan Resnick. Upon closer inspection, it was shown that the update to 1999 seemed to be a carbon-copy of the video in question, with only minor changes (for example, the alantutorial video says "tutorial-heads" where the 1999 update says "painter-heads"; the alantutorial video shows a trash can being pushed over where the 1999 update features a mattress). A comparison of the two is below:

Paint with the Soul – Episode 2, "How to Find Berries": Paint with the Soul never stood out to me because I never saw it on TV myself and the actual episodes didn’t make a lot of sense. The episode started with the usual bad quality, cutting right to an ally way. The camera man made his way through the ally, the derelict buildings on one side, a rusting metal fence on the other. “H-hey painting-heads, today I’m going to show how to find some fresh wild berries!” I recognized that voice as the one from other episodes. Like episode 3, the man’s voice was fairly shaking and sounded somewhat anxious. The man walked over to a mattress turned against a building. “H-here we have t-the house where the squirrels hide things.” The man pulled out a shaking hand, it was covered in what looked like blood. With the bad quality of the film, the liquid looked alarmingly bright. The hand grabbed the mattress and pushed it onto the ground, revealing a plastic container behind it.The camera zoomed into the container, revealing it to be full of small red berries. “A-and here we have berries!” The man placed the camera on the ground so that it was level with the berries, he took a small handful and presumably ate them. “Mmm, tastes good!” the man exclaimed. Suddenly a scream erupted from somewhere in the distance, causing the man to hastily pick of the camera and begin to sprint. The episode cut out shortly after.

In response, the Creepypasta Wikia staff inserted a disclaimer at the top of the blog's entry in February 2016 addressing the issue. The page was deleted by Wikia staff on November 26, 2018 in response to a DMCA takedown notice claim, possibly by an author from the original Slack LaLane blog. It was later revealed that Lamont himself had no idea his work had been posted and continuously updated, nor did he consent to either of these things. Subsequently, YouTube videos featuring the 2015 updates were removed from YouTube, either willingly by the uploaders or by DMCA notices filed by Slack LaLane themselves. Readings of the earlier entries and foreign-language readings remained.

The story remains on sites such as Creep.ee,^[6] Creepypasta.com,^[2] and the original post on Slack LaLane.^[1]

Search Interest

External References