The Other Watcher By Lynne Mcneill

An Analysis of “The Other Watcher” For my ghostly folklore I found the creepypasta, “The Other Watcher”. The tale is about a man. This man is checking into a hotel. At the front desk he is given a key and his room number and told by the lady at the front desk about a room on the way to his that has no number. She tells him that he is not to go into that room. It is a store room and he should leave it alone. She insists and won’t let him go up until he agrees. He does as he is told on the first night and goes straight to his room and to bed. On the second night his curiosity gets the better of him. He tries the door knob, but it’s locked. He bends down to look through the keyhole and sees a room just like his and in the corner a woman is standing
Lynne McNeill in Folklore Rules describes folklore as “informal (meaning variable) and traditional (meaning passed on) (13)”. “The Other Watcher” qualifies on both fronts because it is variable in its telling. It goes by different names and changes a few details depending on which person posted it. It is shared, through the internet, and after it is read on the internet it is shared outside of it. McNiell tells us, “folklore is informal traditional culture. (81)” a lot of our daily socializing is on computers and the folklore shared there is all part of a digital folk group with its own rules and interactions. Being shared on the internet means it is part of the digital folk group. It fits into the category of ‘creepypasta’. For a description of ‘creepypasta’ we look to Will Wiles and his article intitled “Creepypasta”, “creepypasta’ derives from ‘copypasta’, a generic term for any short piece of writing, image or video clip that is widely copy-and-pasted across forums and message boards. (51) ”. Now that we have a handle on what “The Other Watcher” is, we can break it down and start looking at what is inside it. For that we need to know what to look for, McNeill helps us there as