Ticci Toby: is the creepypasta based on a real story?

What the Ticci Toby legend says

Ticci Toby's origin story follows Toby Rogers, a 17-year-old who comes home from hospital after a car crash that killed his older sister, Lyra. He has a rare condition that leaves him unable to feel pain, and frequent tics and twitches. Waiting at the house is his father, a drinker who has been violent towards the family and never came to the hospital. Over the following weeks Toby withdraws, loses stretches of memory, glimpses a dark, faceless figure and hears voices urging him to kill his father. In the end he does, and runs for the woods.

There a tall figure in a black suit, with long, bony white fingers, rests a hand on his shoulder. Readers of internet horror will recognise Slender Man, and the narration announces that this was how Toby Rogers died. A closing television bulletin reports new killings in the woods and says investigators suspect the boy may still be alive, because his body was never found.

Where it started: Kastoway and the proxy idea

Slender Man came first. Know Your Meme dates him to 10 June 2009, when the Something Awful user Victor Surge, whose real name is Eric Knudsen, posted two edited photographs to a forum contest for fake paranormal pictures. Over the next few years fans built a shared world around the character, in which some humans are cast as his proxies.

Ticci Toby was made by an artist who posts on DeviantArt as Kastoway. The earliest dated work we found is an Ask Toby drawing submitted on 21 November 2012, part of a numbered question-and-answer series about the character. The origin story itself, titled Ticci-Toby, went up on 23 May 2013, filed under literature about characters and settings. In a note beneath it the author called it the beginning and promised later pieces about Toby being a proxy. Some retellings place his creation in 2011; we found no dated work from that year to confirm it.

How the character spread

The character grew through fan art and readings, not through any claim to be true. By early December 2013 the story page showed more than 20,000 views and 177 comments, some from readers who said they had found it through a YouTube reading. Kastoway's own gallery paired Toby with other creepypasta characters, and other artists posted their own versions of him.

The attention became too much for the creator. In a journal post on 4 April 2015, Kastoway wrote that they would no longer respond to anything about Ticci Toby, that others could use the character if they wished, and that they wanted nothing to do with the fandom.

Which details hold up: is Ticci Toby real?

The realistic touches are all inside the fiction: the hospital, the counsellor's questions, the news bulletin at the end. The story names no town, no date and no real newspaper or broadcaster, and we found no news report or court record of a crime that matches it. Nor did we find a real person behind the character. The claims we came across that there is a Ticci Toby true story do not name a source.

There is a real crime linked to the proxy idea, but it does not involve Toby. On 31 May 2014, prosecutors said, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, stabbed a friend, who survived. NBC News reported that one of them told police they wanted to become “proxies” of Slender Man, a character featured on the Creepypasta Wiki. The coverage we read is about Slender Man and does not mention Ticci Toby, so this file does not connect the two.

Verdict

Ticci Toby explained: a fan-made character in the Slender Man world, created on DeviantArt by Kastoway and given his origin story in May 2013. The news report at the end is part of the fiction, and no real crime has been shown to be connected to him. Real or Legend files the character as fiction.