The real story behind that creepy, viral Mickey Mouse YouTube video

Allow us to prepare you for this: You’re about to see a version of Mickey Mouse that is starkly different from what you remember from your childhood. Lucia Peters, Associate Lifestyle Editor for Bustle, has done some truly astounding research over the last year, and thanks to her we’ve learned all about creepypasta and that really scary Mickey Mouse YouTube video that’s got us all freaked out.

What is creepypasta, you ask? It’s a genre of Internet horror stories, and they’re responsible for pictures or videos accompanied by creepy narratives that make you shudder — while also give you something to do when you’re bored at work. Take Smile Dog, for instance.

Creepy, right? Well, this Mickey Mouse creepypasta is even creepier, so buckle your seatbelt. It’s called the “Suicidemouse.avi,” and according to the storyline, it’s a “lost” Mickey Mouse cartoon that was discovered while famous film critic Leonard Maltin was sifting through old Mickey Mouse cartoons to decide which ones would be used for the DVD compilation.

The video is truly one of the most disturbing things known to the Internet world. Well, at least we think so, anyway. Since 2009, the video has over 1.1 million views. Have a look yourself and be the judge.

It starts with a very forlorn Mickey Mouse walking down the street with his hands behind his back, staring at the ground. The messy, horror-movie-like piano music in the background sends shivers down your spine. A minute in a half in, the screen goes black, and apparently, when the video was discovered, it stays that way until the sixth minute. It’s been edited, though, so when the images return, it’s a little, um, different.

Mickey is still walking down the street but you hear a man screaming in the background. More voices join in, and it becomes a jumbled mess of blood-curling screams. Soon enough, the images even become distorted, until finally Mickey’s face appears, wobbly and blurred. Then this phrase appears, written in Cyrillic: “The sights of hell bring its viewers back in.”

The creepypasta story behind it is what makes all the more disturbing, though. When Maltin first viewed this video, he became so upset that he had to leave the room and he had an assistant finish watching so they could takes notes for him. The guard who was on watch that night said the assistant stumbled out of the room after finishing the video, uttered the phrase “Real suffering is not known” seven times, and grabbed the guard’s gun and killed himself.

SO. CREEPY. All of it. Just creepy. Well, we’re happy to tell you that truth is, this story is not real. Not even close.

The “Suicidemouse.avi” is meant to come from the 1930s, but Lucia Peters reports that it doesn’t visually resemble the other Mickey Mouse cartoons from this time period to make us believe that they’re from the same place. She does say that the significance of this video and its correlating story is that they served as the precedent for all the “lost story” creepypasta stories out there, and apparently there are a lot of those.

The fact that “Suicidemouse.avi” is so believable makes it all the harder to shake it off, but again, its believability paved the way for all those other creepypasta stories to exist. So rest easy that this scary version of Mickey isn’t for real — and let’s all collectively sigh knowing that the actual (and arguably tasteless) suicide part of this story is definitely not for real.