Candle Cove

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About

Candle Cove refers to a creepypasta story about a fictional TV show of the same name. The story is about a group of people who are reminiscing on an online message board about a scary show they had watched as children before it was revealed that the show never existed.

Origin

Written sometime in 2009 by webcartoonist Kris Straub^[6], the story is presented in the format of a message board conversation among numerous participants, who manage to piece together their memories of a children's TV show about a young girl named Janice and her imaginary band of pirates with dark personalities. As the dialogue progresses, a handful of posters come to the eerie realization that they have had the same nightmares from watching the show, only to be eclipsed by an even more shocking revelation from the final poster asserting that the show actually consists of 30 minutes of static and nothing more. The story was uploaded to the horror fiction site Ichior Falls^[2] on March 15th, 2009 under a Creative Commons license.

Skyshale033
Subject: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Does anyone remember this kid’s show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been 6 or 7. I never found reference to it anywhere so I think it was on a local station around 1971 or 1972. I lived in Ironton at the time. I don’t remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a weird time, like 4:00 PM.

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
it seems really familiar to me…..i grew up outside of ashland and was 9 yrs old in 72. candle cove…was it about pirates? i remember a pirate marionete [sic] at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
YES! Okay I’m not crazy! I remember Pirate Percy. I was always kind of scared of him. He looked like he was built from parts of other dolls, real low-budget. His head was an old porcelain baby doll, looked like an antique that didn’t belong on the body. I don’t remember what station this was! I don’t think it was WTSF though.

Jaren_2005
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Sorry to ressurect this old thread but I know exactly what show you mean, Skyshale. I think Candle Cove ran for only a couple months in ‘71, not ‘72. I was 12 and I watched it a few times with my brother. It was channel 58, whatever station that was. My mom would let me switch to it after the news. Let me see what I remember.

It took place in Candle cove, and it was about a little girl who imagined herself to be friends with pirates. The pirate ship was called the Laughingstock, and Pirate Percy wasn’t a very good pirate because he got scared too easily. And there was calliope music constantly playing. Don’t remember the girl’s name. Janice or Jade or something. Think it was Janice.

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Thank you Jaren!!! Memories flooded back when you mentioned the Laughingstock and channel 58. I remember the bow of the ship was a wooden smiling face, with the lower jaw submerged. It looked like it was swallowing the sea and it had that awful Ed Wynn voice and laugh. I especially remember how jarring it was when they switched from the wooden/plastic model, to the foam puppet version of the head that talked.

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
ha ha i remember now too. do you remember this part skyshale: “you have…to go…INSIDE.”

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Ugh mike, I got a chill reading that. Yes I remember. That’s what the ship always told Percy when there was a spooky place he had to go in, like a cave or a dark room where the treasure was. And the camera would push in on Laughingstock’s face with each pause. YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE. With his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and the fishing line that opened and closed it. Ugh. It just looked so cheap and awful.

You guys remember the villain? He had a face that was just a handlebar mustache above really tall, narrow teeth.

kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
i honestly, honestly thought the villain was pirate percy. i was about 5 when this show was on. nightmare fuel.

Jaren_2005
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
That wasn’t the villain, the puppet with the mustache. That was the villain’s sidekick, Horace Horrible. He had a monocle too, but it was on top of the mustache. I used to think that meant he had only one eye.

But yeah, the villain was another marionette. The Skin-Taker. I can’t believe what they let us watch back then.

kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
jesus h. christ, the skin taker. what kind of a kids show were we watching? i seriously could not look at the screen when the skin taker showed up. he just descended out of nowhere on his strings, just a dirty skeleton wearing that brown top hat and cape. and his glass eyes that were too big for his skull. christ almighty.

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Wasn’t his top hat and cloak all sewn up crazily? Was that supposed to be children’s skin??

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
yeah i think so. rememer his mouth didn’t open and close, his jaw just slid back and foth. i remember the little girl said “why does your mouth move like that” and the skin-taker didn’t look at the girl but at the camera and said “TO GRIND YOUR SKIN”

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
I’m so relieved that other people remember this terrible show!

I used to have this awful memory, a bad dream I had where the opening jingle ended, the show faded in from black, and all the characters were there, but the camera was just cutting to each of their faces, and they were just screaming, and the puppets and marionettes were flailing spastically, and just all screaming, screaming. The girl was just moaning and crying like she had been through hours of this. I woke up many times from that nightmare. I used to wet the bed when I had it.

kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
i don’t think that was a dream. i remember that. i remember that was an episode.

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
No no no, not possible. There was no plot or anything, I mean literally just standing in place crying and screaming for the whole show.

kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
maybe i’m manufacturing the memory because you said that, but i swear to god i remember seeing what you described. they just screamed.

Jaren_2005
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Oh God. Yes. The little girl, Janice, I remember seeing her shake. And the Skin-Taker screaming through his gnashing teeth, his jaw careening so wildly I thought it would come off its wire hinges. I turned it off and it was the last time I watched. I ran to tell my brother and we didn’t have the courage to turn it back on.

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
i visited my mom today at the nursing home. i asked her about when i was littel in the early 70s, when i was 8 or 9 and if she remebered a kid’s show, candle cove. she said she was suprised i could remember that and i asked why, and she said “because i used to think it was so strange that you said ‘i’m gona go watch candle cove now mom’ and then you would tune the tv to static and juts watch dead air for 30 minutes. you had a big imagination with your little pirate show.”

Spread

On June 5th, 2009, the story was added to Creepypasta.com^[7], where it has received a 9.2/10 rating and more than 600 comments as of October 2013. By July, YouTubers had begun to upload their own interpretations of supposed Candle Cove episodes (shown below). Throughout the latter half of 2009, discussions of the story appeared throughout 4chan^[8], as well as on Reddit^[9], the IGN message board^[10], TVForum.co.uk^[11] and the Horror.com forums.^[12]

[This video has been removed]

By March 2010, fan art from the series began to appear on DeviantART.^[13] The same month, the Role Playing Public Radio podcast^[14] completed a pen and paper World of Darkness game based on a group of people watching a tape they found allegedly containing an episode of Candle Cove. On August 8th, 2010, pages for Candle Cove were created on TV Tropes' Darth Wiki^[15] and the Creepypasta Wiki.^[16] That November, Straub wrote a blog post^[3] noting he had been inspired to write the piece by a March 2000 article on The Onion^[18] (shown below) about an adult who had nightmares relating to a local access television show from the 1970s. He also spoke about attribution and asked that readers consult with him before adapting the story.

In April 2011, the Candle Cove Wiki^[5] was established, containing breakdowns of episodes, descriptions of settings and character pages that were all created by fans. That June, Candle Cove was added to Urban Dictionary^[19] and the story was featured on entertainment blog Crushable^[20] as part of a series on creepy fiction. In October, MetaFilter^[21] users attempted to recreate the NetNostalgia Forum thread, which turned into a lengthy discussion about the legend. On November 30th, Straub did an interview with Kindertrauma^[1] where he spoke about the surprise of seeing Rule 34 images of his characters.

Channel Zero

In February 2016, the Syfy television channel greenlit the horror anthology show Channel Zero for two seasons, each consisting of six episodes. On September 26th, 2016, the Syfy YouTube channel uploaded a trailer for the series (shown below). On October 9th, the trailer reached the front page of the /r/creepy^[26] subreddit, garnering more than 2,200 votes (95% upvoted) and 240 comments in 48 hours. On October 11th, 2016, the first season premiered, which is based on the Candle Cove story. The second season, set to premiere in 2017, is based on the creepypasta story "The No-End House."

Fan Art

As of October 2013, there are nearly 50 stories on Creepypasta.com^[24] relating to Candle Cove. There are also a handful of additional stories on Archive of Our Own.^[25] Fan art can be found on Tumblr^[22] and deviantART^[23], which has more than 800 search results for "Candle Cove" as of October 2013. On YouTube, there are more than 32,000 search results^[17] for the phrase, yielding videos with dramatic readings as well as recreations of what the show may have looked like.