The 10 creepiest videos on YouTube

Nothing on Netflix or Amazon Prime scaring you? Try YouTube instead.

Ever since YouTube began, there's been some truly disturbing footage that's made its way onto the platform.

Granted, the community guidelines and strict uploading policy now means that graphic and violent imagery is largely kept off the site, there are still some videos on YouTube that are genuinely creepy and disturbing.

What with it being Hallowe'en weekend and all, we decided to make sure none of you get any sleep tonight - so here's the ten creepiest videos we could find on YouTube and a little detail on them all.

Enjoy!

10. 'I FEEL FANTASTIC'

Nobody's exactly sure what's going on in 'I Feel Fantastic', but it hasn't stopped anyone from speculating and coming up with theories - many of which are disturbing, to say the least. The prevailing theory was that the video was made by a serial killer who murders people for their clothes with which he dresses the creepy singing robot. That cutaway you see in the video of the backyard is where he buries his victim. The reality? According to a few reports, the reality is much more simpler. The video was part of an old Geocities website about an eccentric inventor who was trying to making a singing robot for his experimental band. He planned to market a range of singing robots, but never got it off the ground and uploaded the video just after YouTube launched with no context.

9. 'MARBLE HORNETS'

Odds are you've probably heard of Slender Man, but where did he come from? It all grew out of a series of videos collectively known as 'Marble Hornets'. There's a rich story about all the videos and who Slender Man was and so on, but essentially, 'Marble Hornets' was an attempt by a group of young filmmakers to make their own found footage horror using zero money and uploading it straight to YouTube. An ARG - alternate-reality game - grew up around 'Marble Hornets', with people trying to figure out different parts of the story and so on. They're all still online and, as we know, Slender Man became something of a pop culture phenomenon.

8. 'THE WYOMING INCIDENT'

Alternate-reality games, like the one just mentioned in 'Marble Hornets', normally have a huge amount of detail put into them that people investigate and obsess over. The Wyoming Incident was another such game, but what made this particularly creepy was that some people actually thought it was real. The made-up story was that a series of broadcast intrusions - that's when an old TV broadcast is interrupted by another signal - took place in rural Wyoming, with viewers seeing weird imagery and experiencing odd side effects in the preceding days. The videos, which were uploaded onto YouTube and passed off as genuine, captured people's imagination. Of course, it all turned out to be a hoax. Here's the first that was shown on YouTube, out of a series of around thirteen known videos.

7. 'THE MAX HEADROOM INCIDENT'

Speaking of broadcast intrusions, this particular video is really real. In 1987 in Chicago during a broadcast on PBS of 'Doctor Who', the show was interrupted by a truly bizarre video of someone wearing a Max Headroom mask. The video, which only lasted about thirty seconds, saw the man talk directly to the camera in a mask before it cut away to him being spanked by a woman using a flyswatter. The broadcast was videotaped and became something of a local legend, however the video surfaced again on YouTube years later and has since become one of the Internet's favourite mysteries. The culprit, to this very day, has never been identified despite repeated attempts and investigations by internet sleuths.

6. 'TRANSFIGURATION'

These next three videos are, believe it or not, performance art pieces. No, really. This particular piece, which found its way onto YouTube around ten years ago by performance artist Oliver de Sagazan. His work regularly features him pouring layers upon layers of body painting, clay and other liquids and so on on his body and then... well, take a look. It gets weird.

5. 'THERE IS NOTHING'

This video is almost as old as YouTube itself. Created by video artist David Earle, 'There Is Nothing', or 'Dining Room' was a looped short movie. In other words, you played it backwards and you played it forward and the effect was the same. As Earle describes it, it was inspired by his own belief that there is nothing on the other side of life, i.e. death, and that the video was essentially about a dead person coming back to life and confirming his own suspicion - that there is nothing on either side. Knowing that fact about the video actually makes it more disturbing for us, to be honest.

4. 'HAND THING'

While the previous two were created specifically for art installations, Shaye Saint John is something truly, truly weird and bizarre. Through 2006 and 2009, a number of videos were uploaded online by an artist called Eric Fournier. The backstory was that Shaye Saint John, this character in his videos, was a former supermodel who rebuilt herself using mannequin parts. The videos are all, as you'd expect, complete gibberish and make absolutely no sense - but there is something really, really off about them. The most popular of his videos is 'HAND THING', which reached over 4,000,000 views on its original upload.

3. ANY VIDEO ABOUT NUMBER STATIONS

If you've got time, read up about Number Stations on Wikipedia. They're basically these shortwave broadcasts that are speculated to be used by the likes of the CIA, KGB, Mossad, and intelligence agencies for sending encrypted messages to agents embedded in hostile territory. While that might sound like something from the Cold War or the like, they're still broadcasting to this day and can be picked up on shortwave radios. This video below was recorded in February of this year and was believed to have been recorded from a number station in Ukraine.

2. 'THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER'

Children's animation in the '80s did not f**k around. Case in point is 'The Adventures of Mark Twain', a claymation movie about various stories based on the writings of - you guessed it - Mark Twain. It was broken up into different segments and one particular segment has gone down in internet history when it was uploaded a good few years ago with the backstory that it was banned from television. As best we can tell, the segment was never banned from television or anything of the sort. It is, however, a pretty creepy story and the weird claymation just adds to it all.