The is an early Japanese Internet

urban legend Urban legend (sometimes modern legend, urban myth, or simply legend) is a genre of folklore concerning stories about an unusual (usually scary) or humorous event that many people believe to be true but largely are not. These legends can be e ...

about a red

pop-up ad Pop-up ads or pop-ups are forms of online advertising on the World Wide Web. A pop-up is a graphical user interface (GUI) display area, usually a small window, that suddenly appears ("pops up") in the foreground of the visual interface. The pop- ...

which announces the forthcoming death of the person who encounters it on their computer screen. It may have its origin in an

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...

horror animation of the late 1990s that tells the story of the legend.

Legend

While browsing the Internet, the victim will be presented with a red pop-up with text saying "Do you like , ?" (). The pop-up will reappear after trying to close it, with text coming out of the vertical line. Over time, the sentence will be completed, reading "Do you like the red room?" (). Variations of the legend differ on what happens next. According to the most common one, the screen will turn red, displaying a list of names of the Red Room's victims. The target will sense a mysterious presence behind them, after which they will lose consciousness. They will later be found dead in their home, with the walls of the room in which they are discovered "painted red with blood". A lesser known variation states that the target will instead have a crack appear somewhere on their body which quickly grows in size, splitting them apart.

Origin and spread

In the late 1990s, a Japanese interactive

horror

animation Animation is a filmmaking technique whereby still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animati ...

, considered to be the origin of the Red Room Curse urban legend, was uploaded to

GeoCities GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1 ...

. It told the story of a young boy who was cursed and died after seeing the pop-up. The legend of the curse gained notoriety in 2004 due to the Sasebo slashing – the murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by an 11-year-old classmate referred to as "Girl A" at an elementary school in

Sasebo is a core city located in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. It is the second-largest city in Nagasaki Prefecture, after its capital, Nagasaki. , the city had an estimated population of 230,873 in 102,670 households, and a population density of 540 per ...

. "Girl A" was reported to be a fan of the Red Room Curse animation, having the video bookmarked on her computer at the time of the murder. The webpage in question is no longer live. A short film titled ''The Red Room Curse'' inspired by the urban legend was released in 2016.

References

{{Urban legends Japanese urban legends Flash games Creepypasta Adobe Flash Internet memes introduced in 2004