This story goes way back to 2006, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
When I was 16, I had a really good friend a year younger who was deep into coding. I met him years earlier in a computer club in middle school and he had been integral in me becoming tech-literate over time. The guy knew 3 coding languages by heart in his 7th grade...
Anyways, he ends up telling me about TOR and all that while we were chatting with some friends in IRC after school. Some of the older guys had some really interesting stories and I, of course, dug real deep into them all. It didn't take long for me to download TOR and start looking up .onion links.
My first couple of weeks were spent clicking around, just trying to go deeper and find different things. I was saving all the good links I could find in a notecard. I found various things like a dark-web search engine, something similar to a hidden-wiki, a few conspiracy sites, the usual drug stuff, porn I wanted to be nowhere near, and even a hitman forum.
The thing that made me uninstall TOR came about 2.5 weeks into using it almost religiously after school. I had stumbled on a forum, probably something along the lines of "Think.EvIL Forums" or some crap. It was behind a wall of about 4 or 5 different forums linking deeper and deeper. All of the banter was about really dark topics. Raping, torture, long-term abuse tactics, cannibalism, you name it.
As with anything on the dark web, most the posts were either weeks or months old. There were a few sub-forums that were more active than others. However, when looking at the main page and seeing which post had the most recent, there was something posted within the last hour.
It was a link.
"Red-room going live soon - (onion jargon here).onion"
At this point, I was hit with a wave of emotion. Like none I had ever felt before. I was washed over with a wave of ice, frozen in my seat. There was a looming terror of what it could mean. I had only heard a couple things about Red Rooms before coming upon this. Only the most potent of teenage curiosity fueled my finger to copy and paste the link.
What I saw is exactly what has been described by other accounts that have been posted. As such, bringing up the more gorey no-sleep bits is a bit hard for me to think about, let alone write. Details will be omitted. It was a live webcam chatroom. Inside what looked to be an abandoned house, was a person sitting on a chair sobbing with a pillowcase covering their body and someone else moving around stuff. The person moving around was the Admin of the chat session and he came closer to the camera and uncovered the woman as she jumped in terror from that act alone. A woman with duct-tape on her face and a man with a black t-shirt over his head (or something similar). After welcoming people to "the show," as the woman cried he asked in type what the crowd wanted to see and how much they'd pay to see it. I just remember being sat there in sheer terror, half trying to figure out how to help this lady and half completely frozen stiff. The details are still a bit blurry so even if I wanted to add them, it's difficult to do. However, someone offered $500 for something along the lines of beating the woman with a baseball bat.
I think I started crying and, to be completely honest, remembering it this much is about to bring me to tears again... The screams haunt me. The man who paid $500 for that asked the Admin to end her with a knife immediately... Someone had then asked me why I wasn't talking and iirc, I pulled the plug on my computer and called my friend.
I had told him what happened, and all he said was, "you've probably just been reading too many stories and fell asleep at the computer and had a nightmare."
Because of all the stories that float around about the dark web, no one ever believes this story. Yet it happened. Every time it comes back in my mind I pray that it was just a snuff film with a bad budget... But the screams and blood were too real for that.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/93chhf/the_time_i_found_a_real_red_room_on_the_dark_web/
(Fictional horror story) So I was laying in bed home alone and my parents were on a date or at a friends house or something. They told me that I should start looking for jobs given as I was 18 at the time and hadn't figured out what I wanted to do with my career yet. I grabbed some of my parents liquor and drank a bit, not enough to get a drunk though, (I know so edgy right?). I layed down in my bed and started to surf the internet, not for jobs but just for fun because I was bored. As I was surfing websites reading one article after another I sorta lost track of time and what website I was on and ended up on some website that I can't for the life of me remember the name of the site but it looked somewhat interesting, it had a black headline and said the title in red. and so I started to scroll down the page. There were some videos that I just assumed were adds so I scrolled past them then I stopped on a large looking article and started to read it. It seemed pretty normal at first but when I got near the end it got disturbing. "This weeks video will consist of our victims arms being cut off and them being hung by their feet on a meat hook. This was most requested as of last week, Enjoy". Then my computer screen turned black and I assumed that my computer crashed so I waited for the home screen to be shown next as it usually does when it crashes, but this didn't happen. next it showed a room that looked as if it were a basement, there was an operation table and a meat hook plus some mechanical tape. I was confused at first until I heard faint screaming coming from the background of the video and a man was shown being carried by to heavily built men by the arms. They placed him on the operation table on his back, still holding down his arms. Then another man with a white mask slowly walked toward the men with a circular saw in hand. At this point I was freaking out and tried to find an exit button to the video but the video was frozen onto the screen. It was one of the things where you just can't look away. I stared at the screen as I heard his screams and unwillingly watched his arms get cut off. They grabbed him and hung him on the meet hook by stabbing it into his feet. I threw up after the video. "How can people be this sick in the head to be able to do this stuff, or watch it while enjoying it?!" I thought to myself in disbelief. I looked at the chat bar and there was people commenting that they loved it and that they need to do more things like that. I felt sick and tried to turn off my computer but it wouldn't shut off. I unplugged it as soon as a warning popped onto the screen that said "You're next, we have your location and you aren't safe anymore". I ran to grab a knife and when I grabbed onto one there was a loud bang on the kitchen window. I turned around to see a man peering into my window. he hit the window again with the back of a knife, breaking the window when he saw that I saw him and I ran to my room locking the door. I heard him run up the stairs and my heart dropped the sudden he started banging on my door and I felt my door caving in. The door broke and I lost all hope as I was knocked out. The last thing I remember was waking up in the same room I had saw in the video, the rest is a blur.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/horrorstories/comments/83zf5f/dark_web_horror_story/