The Internet's Cursed Images Are Creeping People Out on Twitter

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s so fascinating about the found photos on @cursedimages, a Twitter feed that has been sharing unsettling, context-less images, labelled only with seemingly random numbers, since late July. The account bio reads simply “all of these images are cursed.”

Cursed Images has over 98k followers and a mysterious account administrator insists on total anonymity. When approached by The New Yorker for an interview, the creepy curator declined a phone call and allowed only emailed questions, explaining, “Some people have stated I’m a bot. Others think I’m a creep with too much time on their hands. But it’s just like the lack of context for the images. Whoever you think I am, that’s what I am.”

The found photography on Cursed Images ranges from near-apocalyptic fires and floods, to gross culinary creations, to uncomfortable social events and poorly thought-out Halloween costumes. Even the relatively pleasant images in the feed are made creepy by their inclusion. Why is this shot cursed, you’re forced to ask, considering the possibility that something awful is about to happen outside of the frame, or that there’s a hidden, horrible meaning to the image that you’ll never understand.

There’s just something deeply, uncomfortably creepy about stumbling across the low-res digital detritus of the early 2000s internet, unexpected, in your Twitter feed. Some of the images are so poorly focused and blurry that they look unreal, with strange smudges blurring the screen like photographic ghosts.

Find some of our favorite weird shots from Cursed Images below, and check out the rest on the original Twitter feed.