Penpal began as a series of posts on r/nosleep in 2012 by user 1000Vultures (Dathan Auerbach). It became one of the most celebrated long-form horror narratives in the community and was later published as a novel. This is an excerpt from the opening, included here as an archival document. The full work is available as a published book.
HR
When I was a child, I had a pen pal through a school program. We wrote letters. This is not unusual. Lots of kids had pen pals.
The program lasted for one year. I exchanged letters with my pen pal — a boy my age, supposedly, from another state. The letters were about normal things. School, family, hobbies. Normal.
The program ended. I forgot about it.
Years later, when I was an adult, I found a photograph.
The photograph was in a box of my childhood things. I don't remember it being taken. I'm in it — around age seven, in my backyard, playing. A normal childhood photograph. But I didn't remember the angle. The angle was wrong for anyone who should have been taking the photograph — too far away, too high, from the trees at the edge of the yard.
Someone had been in the trees.
I started asking questions. I asked my mother about the pen pal program. She remembered it. I asked if she'd ever seen the letters before they were sent. She said no — the school handled the program.
I contacted the school. The pen pal program was discontinued in 1993, years before I would have participated. Records from that period were incomplete.
I tracked down the address the letters had come from. The address was a vacant lot.
The letters had been coming from a vacant lot. For a year. Someone had been writing to me from a vacant lot, pretending to be a child my age.
And someone had been in the trees behind my yard.
The connection between these two facts took me years to establish fully. I'm going to tell you what I found. I'm going to tell you how long it went on and what the person wanted and how close they got.
I'm going to tell you all of it.
I need you to understand first: I had a normal childhood. I was not aware of any of this at the time. I was happy. While someone watched me from the trees and wrote me letters pretending to be my friend, I was a happy child who had a pen pal.
That's the part that still keeps me awake.
Read the full account. It is one of the finest things the nosleep community produced.