Why are people ending posts with ‘there’s a man out front’? It’s from a creepypasta story.

A creepypasta story posted to Twitter in early August has spawned a series of tweets that conclude with “There’s a man out front,” and users who haven’t read the story don’t seem to understand why.

Creepypasta stories are scary legends or myths that are copied and pasted over and over on the internet (hence the name). They’re often brief and intended to scare people.

Its Reddit community is in the top 1% on the platform with over 800,000 members and spawned four related subreddits, including r/StayAwake and r/HorrorNarrations. Creepypasta stories are thought to have originated through email chain forwards in the ’90s and eventually made their way to 4chan forums in the mid-2000s.

Arguably one of the most well-known creepypasta stories is Slenderman, a fictional and faceless monster who follows children.

Where did ‘There’s a man out front’ come from?

Some creepypasta creators have evolved beyond writing out stories to further convince readers that the content is real by challenging media literacy abilities. Dustin Couch is one of those creators and has built a following by Photoshopping fake Twitter threads as a way to tell his creepypasta stories.

In his most recent thread, Couch tweeted four images of fake tweets to convey his story of scientists discovering a “New Hole,” where screams can be heard coming from it. But more than that, there’s a Wi-Fi signal coming from the hole that, when connected to, somehow makes people type the phrase “there’s a man out front” on posts.

Couch cleverly included ads, memes, unrelated tweets and fake conversations to really sell viewers on the idea that this could be real.

The thread has over 2 million views in less than a week, and now other Twitter users are pretending the creepypasta is real by adding “There’s a man out front” to their posts.

Couch told Mashable he was inspired by the social media response to the OceanGate submersible.

“The idea for the post was just people responding to a ‘Car wreck you can’t look away from’ kind of news story as it developed,” he explained. “The idea for a story that could take place on the internet comes first, then I come up with a bunch of posts about it and pick the funniest ones. Then I put it together in MS Paint.”

He told the outlet it can sometimes take him five to six hours to make sure everything is consistent and correct.

“I always end up missing two or three errors though,” he said.

Other Dustin Couch creepypasta creations

Every other month of so, Couch posts a new creepypasta tweet that, again, challenges viewers’ media literacy abilities. He comes up with ideas and simplistic captions that sell to someone who scrolled past his tweet, without the context of his whole account, that the story could very well be real. One of his most viral ones is from 2020 when he pretended that a couple was sending him selfies every night at 3:29 a.m.

In another one, Couch pretends he’s getting super-specific ads for things he just talked about out loud with his roommate.

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