The internet is dark and full of terrors, but nothing is as utterly horrifying as Momo, the latest creepy creature to crawl into your DMs.

Momo is best described as a combination of Slender Man and the Blue Whale ‘suicide game’ people were freaking out a while back.

No one really knows where she came from, although the original image can be traced to a photo of a sculpture that was exhibited at an exhibition in Japan in 2016.

You can tell from that image up top that it’s going to be the stuff of nightmares. Consider yourself warned:

The Independent writes that Momo is:

…linked with a bizarre and chilling photo, as well as a series of stories that are just as sinister. The picture is being used by people on WhatsApp who trick young people into extreme behaviour that includes taking their own lives, according to those reports.

It has led to warnings from the police, telling children to be careful and their parents to look after them. Many include the image, and suggestions that it has some sort of unknown power.

So what is Momo’s story? Momo forms part of creepypasta, a subreddit known for horror-related images or stories that have made their way onto the internet.

As such, it is just another part of the creepypasta corpus. Users add to those legends by writing new stories – and sometimes doing so in ways that are indistinguishable from real creepy phenomena.

One of those stories appears to be the suggestion that Momo, or someone using the picture, has an account on WhatsApp. That WhatsApp will send strange messages to people who attempt to communicate with it, the stories suggested.

But don’t delete your Whatsapp account just yet:

It does appear to be true that at least one person was doing so: people online claim to have spoken with that account, and received messages ranging from creepy to outright aggressive. But there is nothing to suggest that the person controlling that account was anything more than someone looking to scare or annoy people.

Whether Momo is some weirdo with a WhatsApp account or the stuff of urban legends, we know one thing for certain: she is creepy AF.

[source:independent]