rookie scares 👻

For context, I'm a student teacher. I work in a second-grade classroom in a suburban neighborhood where quite a bit of these kids come from not-so-great homes where their parents may or may not supervise them all the time properly.

There are two particular boys in my class who appear to be REALLY into scary things. Despite being like, seven or eight years old, they already seem to be in that edgy teenager mindset where they seem to be not scared of things and actively choose to look them up. I'll call them "Doodles" and "Swiper". You know, for funnies. And to keep their identities private, of course

Doodles seems to be super into the Trevor Henderson monsters, particularly "Cartoon Cat" and "Siren Head". No joke, he... well, doodles those things on almost EVERY loose-leaf paper he gets his hands on (even assignments). Now, yeah, I know these things do look scary at first glance (depending on who you are), but it gets less scary when you see/learn they're used in Elsagate content.
Funnily enough, I already knew about Trevor Henderson's work before even walking into this classroom. I even casually mentioned one day, "yeah, I know them", when Doodles talked about the monsters he drew.

Swiper, on the other hand, seems to be into the SCP monsters. Whenever he has the opportunity, he'll look up images of some of them (particularly the plague doctor) even when he's really not supposed to.
Again, I already knew about SCP beforehand and even casually mentioned that I knew about them one day. Similar to the Trevor Henderson monsters, the SCP franchise has probably been milked to death my this point (*cough cough Elsagate got them too*) and has progressively become less scary to me over the years.

It'll probably never happen (considering it'd probably inappropriate for an adult to expose kids to this kind of stuff), but I'm just WAITING for the day when I'll be able to show these kids the true horror that is CREEPYPASTA. 
The kind of things Doodles and Swiper are obsessed with? Those are rookie scares. You've never experienced true horror unless you've stumbled upon things like Jeff the Killer, Slenderman, Candle Cove, and Ben Drowned back in the day. 
Now THOSE things kept me up at night.

Bonus points if you've ever listened to MrCreepyPasta, CreepsMcPasta, and other narrators back in the day as well. 
None of that clickbaity garbage where YouTubers would be all quirky and overdramatic just to be engaging and put more than half their faces in their thumbnails. Just straight-to-the-point narration with little to no visuals. 

Again, that's TRUE HORROR RIGHT THERE.

Update (10/17/2022): I can't believe I forgot about those random "ghost caught on tape" videos I used to look up back in the day. I got so spooked by those creepy photographs (even though a lot of them are probably fake 🙃)