Smile Dog

"You try to tell yourself over and over, it’s just an image.Just a stupid picture of a stupid dog that somone has photoshopped teeth onto. It isn’t even scary, or at least it doesn’t scare you. Not one bit. How could it scare you? It’s just a picture. You tell …"

- The titular story.

Smile Dog, also known as smile.jpg or smile.dog, was a creepypasta character that appeared as an image file. The character appears in the story of the same name, in which some recalled its appearance as being a Siberian husky with a human-like grin. Another version has the dog's fur turned into red-tint and edited to have a bigger smile, which all users claim to be its "true form". Smile Dog is one of the classic creepypastas that were made in 2008, when it first spread around the imageboard website 4chan. The original image claimed to have caused someone's nightmares when viewed, ranging from insanity to suicide, according to those who saw it. However, the image is currently lost and has no origin whatsoever.

Story
Smile Dog has numerous stories written by writers to explain it, but one of the most famous was written by an amateur writer. In the famous one, which was written in first-person, involves a writer who narrates in the story that he had met an old woman named Mary E. in the summer of 2007, who was one of the 400 people that saw the original image of Smile Dog, when she was at the small Chicago-based Bulletin Board System in 1992, which Mary was a sysop for. Mary was the most cited victim who saw the image, which some people referred to it as "smile.dog", and she had been mentioned in many Chicago newspapers’ online obituaries. The image was spread across on the /x/ of imageboard 4chan on 2008, but the writer claimed that this is not what the original was, rather than it being a supposed close recreation, because it did not have the effect the original smile.jpg "is believed to have", such as "sudden onset temporal lobe epilepsy and acute anxiety". This image was reported to cause someone's "very vivid and disturbing nightmares" when viewed, and victims who allegedly saw the image described the hand on the image as "beckoning.", and some others claimed it to be the hand of the devil. For example, an anonymous hacker once flooded with the supposedly original smile.jpg on the forum of the site Something Awful, causing most of the forum users to go insane and epileptic. The story also said that this image was originally spread as a chainmail in the "mid-to-late 90s", followed with a link to the image.

Mary E. received the writer with a lengthy email explaining her experience with the image, such as not being able to sleep for 15 years. She claimed that the dog demanded her to "spread the word", supposedly encouraging her to show it to someone else. The week after her incident, she was received a floppy disk with one file on it, which probably was for her to show it to someone. She recalled that some victims of the BBS board had been stop posting and then committed suicide. Mary also refused to give the writer a floppy disk as part of his research, because she was concerned about "plotting to ruin your life". Later that month, Mary's husband informed the narrator that she had committed suicide. Her husband named Terence recalled having burned down the disk, but until it was a "stinking pile of blackened plastic".

History
As the story explains, the image had been spreading around in the 4chan's /x/ board in 2008. Urban Dictonary's entries of Smile Dog described it as "one of the first creepypasta chain letters" and having "a reputation for driving those who view it insane", with the most earliest one on the site was submitted on January 15, 2009. A famous story of Smile Dog was created on April 27, 2010, and was then added to Creepypasta Wiki on August 27th 2009. Smile Dog was also used in SCP-450. a popular YouTube screamer, which was added as one of the scary pictures in the slideshow.

Links

 * The famous close recreation of Smile Dog: files.catbox.moe/wlxa8c.jpg
 * Smile Dog's "True Form" image: files.catbox.moe/zrzad3.jpg
 * Full story: creepypasta.com/tag/smile-dog/