Crybaby Lane Creepy Pasta

Posted on /x/ in January 2011

In 1999, I was twenty-two, and I had just graduated from Emerson University in downtown Boston, majoring in Screenwriting. I focused specifically in cartoons and children’s programming, and I was an intern at PBS when I got the offer. I wish I never accepted it, but my debt was pretty bad. When Nickelodeon Studios offered me a paid internship at the studio in California, I accepted immediately. Boston was cold, and the snow was dirty, and after spending five years of my life there, I jumped at the chance. My dead end job as Benjamin Franklin tour guide wasn’t exactly the best.
Many of you ask to see Cry Baby Lane, but if you want to see the original Cry Baby Lane, the one that the fuckhead Lauer shot in Ohio, you never will. You never will. I have the video, hidden in my basement underneath yellowed National Geographic Magazines and hardened mouse shit. Even if Nickelodeon somehow consents to releasing it to you. you won’t even be seeing what was shown on TV.
I don’t even think Nickelodeon HAS the original cut of the movie anymore, and if they do it’s in only back-up copies, and if the back up copies exist they must be locked away in some vault along with all the deleted episodes of Ren And Stimpy and the never-before-mentioned episodes of SpongeBob Square Pants. I’ll get to those later. I’m pretty sure the director, Peter Lauer has the original copy, and it’s probably on his mantle next to his snuff films, that creepy fuck. I’m pretty sure no one knows about my copies, and if they did I would probably have my feet tied to a concrete block, rotting like a skeletal balloon far underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Anyway, I was hired in 1999, and immediately I was put on a creative production team for the Movie Cry Baby Lane. It would be almost a year before the movie was broadcast: all in all, it was a pretty low effort kind of thing. There were only four people on the creative team, and I was the only steady one, and the only sane one. Lauer would replace them on a whim, with other people that were just as brainless as the ones that were replaced. He said it was to keep it fresh, to get fresh opinions. I thought it was because he was hiding something...and I was right.
We had a little over a year to make a made for TV movie- not just to write it and cast it but to film and do the normal shit. Lauer didn’t work fast at all- after the first three weeks we only had the ideas for the first 15 minutes of a 85 minute movie. Lauer, even at this point, was a weirdo. He was tall and lanky, and he carried himself awkwardly- he stuttered when he talked, and sometimes, when you were hunched over a piece of paper during those endless ‘brainstorming sessions’ you’d look up and he’d be staring at you, smiling. He’d look away when you caught his eye, and I guess that was the creepiest part- he always looked like he had something to hide, and it wasn’t like he was trying to hide it that well. He wanted you to feel uncomfortable, he fed off of those times when I was walking into the conference room and he’d just be standing with his back toward us, turning around only when everyone was there, twirling pens and crinkling water-bottles impatiently.
The brainstorm sessions, at first, were alright. We got the premise of it down pat: two bothers unleash a demon and they get into mischief trying to get everything back to normal. Not exactly daytime Emmy stuff, but you know, it was an alright start to a made-for-television preteen Movie. I thought the movie should be goofy and spooky, kind of like a Courage the Cowardly dog sort of deal. Lauer, however, from the very beginning made it clear that he wanted the film to be as scary and disturbing as possible. He didn’t want it to be cheap thrills, with a good, wholesome ending. He wanted to push it farther than Are You Afraid of The Dark ever dreamed of. And I guess he did. Cry Baby Lane isn’t in the same ball-field as Are You Afraid of The Dark or Courage the Cowardly Dog. To quote good old Jules Winfield, “They aren’t even the same fucking sport.”
It was about 3 weeks into production when I first noticed something. Lauer had the absolute power of persuasion over everyone else in the creative production team. No one fought him, and by the third week, he was already suggesting some, well, morbid things. I remember he said he wanted the the little brother to die halfway through the movie, getting hit with a dump truck. I immediately shot it down. I was the only one who said anything, and it stayed that was until I left the studio entirely for a couple weeks.
At first, cannibalism and other fucked up shit was kept to jokes and tasteless comments, but as time went on, it became more and more overt. I’d pitch a idea (which most of the time he would end up using, twisted into his own little perverse abomination)
“How about the movie starts with a morbid undertaker who reads them stories,” I’d say, to which he would reply, “Yeah...and then he can cut them up into little pieces and force-feed them to his dog!” He made those jokes a few times in the early stages. The he got serious.
He’d stand up like he was a skinny, perverted and fucked up faux jesus or something. He’d clear his throat loudly, and proclaim his idea. I’d be the only one to shoot it down. Every-fucking-time.

One day near the end of our brainstorming sessions, Lauer cleared his voice and stood up. We all fell silent, and looked at him, like we normally would have. He stood up, and said,
“Gentlemen and females, I have an idea.”
I remember what he did- he paused, and looked right at me.
“The story will revolve around the legend of a pair of Siamese Twins. Have you ever heard of the Donner Party?”
Everyone nodded, except for me. I didn’t like where the conversation was going.
“They ate themselves when it got cold. They ate each other.”
Everyone nodded again. I closed my eyes.
“What would Siamese Twins do if they had nothing to eat? Would they wait until the other twin dies, then consume her own sister’s flesh? Would they claw out each other's eyes until one of them died, then dine upon them like a vulture tearing at the skin of a dead deer? I do not know. It is interesting indeed.”
I didn’t know what the fuck I was hearing. I opened my eyes and looked around the room- no one was fucking moving. Everyone’s eyes were on Lauer except for mine, and when I looked at him, he was still staring at me.
“Children like violence, they revel in it. Children like to be scared. So we’ll scare them, wont we, Jonny?” He leaned over the table, getting pretty damn close to my face. His breath smelt like decaying shit. I stared back at him.
“I think your fucked up, to be honest.”
He smiled, then backed away.
“Oh, I’m fucked up alright, but you have to be fucked up to survive in this cutthroat world!” His grin expanded.
“Children need to learn how to survive, Jonny, they needn’t be lulled and comforted by Barney and the easy and the fucking known, a pseudo reality created by fuckhead granola parents who have no idea what it’s like to sleep with your dead, rotting brother your to scared to get up, and face your father, blackout drunk outside your door with a bloody hammer waiting for you to get up and make a run for it. My fucking movie is going to teach them a little something about the real fucking world!”
It was silent.
“Right now, I’m going to show you some pictures that will spark some of your imaginations, and put a whole new meaning to the term brainstorm.”
He got up, and locked the door from the inside.
I stood up, and said, “What the fuck are you doing? Let me out.”
“Let’s not make any...errors in judgement, Jonathan. Sit down.”
“No-”
“Sit.”
For some reason I did, and Lauer pulled out one of those shitty overhead projectors. He turned on the switch, and he speak-shouted, in a unusually high and semi-frantic voice,
“This is the fucking MUSE we NEED to CONTINUE with THIS PRO-FUCKING-DUCTION!
THIS IS WHAT EVERY CHILD SHOULD SEE!”
His eyes bulged in his head.
He put the image down on the glass surface of the overhead.
It was silent.


The image was in black and white, and it was grainy. I could make out a kid lying on a brick floor, his arms cut off and his bloody little nub black dots. The only thing that was clear was his face. He was bleeding from the mouth.
Lauer almost threw the paper off the overhead, and it fluttered to the ground. He slammed down another one.
It was a zoomed-in shot of the boys face. It was in color. The blood trickled from his open mouth onto the brick floor, his eyes shut, grimy blood underneath his eyebrows and eyelashes.
Then, his eyes opened, and I screamed. No one else in the fucking room did, and it died in infancy, the shrillness ringing in the air.

The pupils were completely black. The rest of the eye was normally white.
The longer I stared, the more the eyes opened, widening and widening until it looked like the skin above his eyebrows and eye sockets was going to rip in half.
Then they started to bleed. Blood started as a trickle, and I swear to god I could hear it. More and and more, until it was like a full blown stream. More. More, until the brick on the floor was a lake of blood. I could hear it. Drip, drip drip. Eventually, I could smell the kid. I could fucking smell his rot.
I leaned underneath the table and vomited. When I rose back up, the images were gone. Everyone else in the room was expressionless. Lauer turned on the lights.
“You may go,” he said, unlocking the door.
I walked through those fucking doors, and promised myself I would never go back.

This happened near the end of the brainstorming process, and by the time I left the casting was done and the script was almost fully written. They were desperately behind schedule- I think Lauer planned it that way, so their wouldn’t be time for proper editing. I never watched the real thing when it aired, but I heard from a friend who was working at the editing department that they had to cut a good 15-20 minutes of ‘disturbing’ footage from the film before it was fit to be released, and it was only fit to be released. They didn’t have enough time to check the footage frame by frame.
I guess he got his wish, unless they cut every single scene that had the pictures in them. Every child watching Crybaby Lane has an unconscious memory of those pictures, and I weep for them, I really do- they fucked me up, and as I write this to you, /x/, it will be last thing I’ll ever write before I slit my throat and before blood spatters all over this fucking computer screen.

There’s something I should tell you first, though.
Early on, Lauer posed an idea of the two brothers capturing a squirrel, putting said squirrel in a jar, and slowly drowning it before filling the jar with sand and dropping it into the bottom of a pond.
Soon after this was suggested, Sandy from Spongebob Squarepants appeared in ‘Tea at The Treedome.’

Lauer also suggested, in one scene of the movie, for a man with a ‘squid-like-nose’ to take off his pants in front of the two boys and rape them off camera. Squidward soon appeared as a major character in Spongebob Squarepants.

It was suggested that the two be stepbrothers, forced to live in the same house after the first one’s mom was found dead in a shallow grave, her body heavily cannibalized by her own husband, a local weatherman. A show with the vaguely premise, Drake and Josh, started in 2004, and the Step Father is indeed a weather-man.

Lauer also suggested the younger brother have a dog house in which he keeps various animal fetuses preserved in acid. He also suggested that the younger brother tie his sister to a pole and shoot hydrochloric acid at her through a water gun.
As Told By Ginger debuted soon after.

A man who captures the souls of children in a vacuum cleaner and sends them to hell? Danny Phantom.

A robot who goes insane on the two brothers, kills one of them, wears his skin, pretending to be the dead brother at high school?
My Life As a Teenage Robot.

The list goes on and on. Nickelodeon knows. They thrive on it. They’re proud to continue the legacy of Lauer, sometimes subtly, and sometimes overtly. And there’s nothing you and I can do about it.