Is the Rake real? The 2005 creepypasta, explained

What the Rake legend says

The Rake story is written like a dossier. In the summer of 2003, it says, a strange humanlike creature caused a stir in the northeastern United States, mostly in rural New York, before local coverage stopped and most written accounts were somehow destroyed. Witnesses later joined forces, and by early 2006 they had gathered nearly two dozen documents from the 12th century to the present, spread across four continents. The narrator claims to have obtained excerpts from the group's forthcoming book.

Those excerpts carry the legend. A suicide note from 1964 blames an unnamed male presence that appears whenever the writer wakes. A journal entry from 1880, presented as a translation from Spanish, describes hollow black eyes. A mariner's log from 1691 says the crew must return to England “at the request of the Rake.” The longest piece is a 2006 statement from a mother who woke to find a pale, hairless figure crouched at the foot of her bed. It attacked her daughter, who named the creature as the Rake before she died, and her husband was killed driving to the hospital.

Where it started: the Rake on 4chan

According to Know Your Meme, the Rake origin is a thread on 4chan's random board, /b/, in late 2005, in which an anonymous user suggested making a new monster. Posters traded ideas and kept revising a list of features: about six feet tall but usually crouching, pale greyish skin, no nose, a mouth that opens on a hinge, a habit of staring at people in suburban front yards. One working name was Operation Crawler. Know Your Meme reproduces these design notes, but 4chan threads expire, and we could not find an archived copy of the 2005 thread to confirm its date.

The earliest dated text of the story is a post titled Horror Theater – The Rake on the personal blog panda6.net, dated 20 July 2006. The Creepypasta Wiki credits the story to Bryan Somerville. Know Your Meme describes the blog as belonging to a Something Awful forum member and notes that the post never says whether the text was written for it or copied from elsewhere. The documents dated 1691, 1880 and 1964 are all already in that 2006 post.

How the Rake creepypasta spread

The text travelled by copy and paste. It turned up on LiveJournal on 20 December 2008, where the user who posted it to a paranormal community said it sounded made up and asked what it was based on. Know Your Meme records it on /x/, 4chan's paranormal board, by April 2009, on Something Awful by June 2009 and on Reddit's paranormal forum in August 2010. From September 2010 the Slender Man web series EverymanHYBRID worked the creature into its episodes, and a Tumblr blog devoted to the Rake launched that December. Know Your Meme counts nearly 8,000 Rake images on DeviantArt.

The name eventually reached film. The Rake, a horror feature directed by Tony Wash and co-written by Wash and Jeremy Silva, was released on DVD and digital on 5 June 2018 through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Its plot follows a woman who, twenty years after her parents were killed, believes a local legend called the Rake did it and has come back for her family.

Which details hold up

Anyone looking for the Rake real story runs into the same wall: none of the evidence inside the story can be checked. The 2003 news coverage is said to have been suppressed, the written accounts are said to have been destroyed, and the book the excerpts come from is never named. The 1691 log names no ship, the 1880 journal no writer, and the 1964 note gives only first names. Every one of these documents first appears in the 2006 blog post, and none of the sources we read shows any of them in an archive, library or newspaper since.

The closest thing to a Rake sighting on record was a mix-up. Know Your Meme reports that in December 2010 a local television station in Louisiana showed a viewer's photo of a pale creature, said to have been taken at a hunting ground, and many YouTube commenters took it for the Rake. The figure was a Grim, a monster from the video game Resistance 3.

Verdict

The Rake explained: a creature designed by anonymous internet users, given a paper trail in a 2006 blog post, and spread by reposts, web series, fan art and a 2018 film. Its historical documents exist only inside the story. Real or Legend files the Rake legend as fiction.