Ghost in the machine? Legend of the 'haunted' N64 video game cartridge

Summary

Ghost in the machine? How a 'haunted' N64 video game cartridge terrified children around the worldAlamy/ BBC(Credit: Alamy/ BBC)A second-hand Zelda cartridge. A cryptic forum thread. A generation of frightened children. This is the story of Ben Drowned – the internet's most infamous video game ghost.It was Christmas Eve and 10-year-old Saarthak Johri couldn't sleep – but not because of excitement. He was shot through with fear. It was roughly a decade ago and Johri was a kid growing up in Saginaw, Michigan, in the US. He had spent the day slumped in an easy chair, staring at his phone, totally absorbed in an online urban myth. Johri knew it wasn't real, it couldn't be. And yet, he was powerless to get it out of his mind.He had found a trail of old forum posts supposedly written by a college student. The student, who used the online pseudonym Jadusable, had bought a strange copy of a Nintendo 64 video game at a yard sale. It was The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a notoriously dark instalment in the Zelda franchise, released 25 years ago this week on 27 April 2000.Majora's Mask is full of unnerving discussions about death, denial, fear, regret – and a looming apocalypse. But something was off about the cartridge Jadusable found. It had no label, just "Majora" scribbled on the plastic in marker. And something was seriously wrong with it.Jadusable wrote that the game's familiar graphics were strange and distorted. Music played backwards in a spine-chilling loop. Worst of all, he was plagued by a terrifying statue of the main character, Link, with a petrified grimace on its face. It kept appearing in the game out of nowhere – like a digital ghost. On YouTube, Jadusable posted video evidence of everything he had described. This game cartridge, it seemed, was haunted – inhabited by the spirit of its former owner, a child named Ben who had drowned in a tragic accident. Johri pored over every detail, rapt with morbid curiosity.As the story unfolded through roughly 11,000-w...