Most people know about the plot of The Ring. You watch a cursed video. A creepy dead girl pops out of the TV screen. She looks at you and utters: “Seven days…” And within seven days, your ass is dead.
While a worthy plot for a spooky horror film, once the film is done, most people return to their daily lives, fully aware that it was just a movie, that no such thing would happen in real life. Even those who are not a fan of horror are at least aware that those stories aren’t real.
So why then, in the past several months, have so many people been consumed with a mass scare hoax based on a bootleg rip-off version of The Ring?
Momo Who?
Her name is Momo. Well actually, not really. That name was randomly assigned to this horrific-looking bird-demon-lady by whoever started the hoax, before using poor Momo as their poster child.
If you watched the news or used the internet at any point around Feb-March 2019 you probably saw the police, the news, and various educational facilities warning about the sinister “Momo Challenge,” purportedly enticing young kids to commit acts of self-harm, leading up to suicide, via What’s App and more recently, YouTube, all said to be orchestrated by none other than this character, Momo.
Despite all the noise surrounding the Momo incident (disregarding the shrieks of terror upon seeing her face), when people finally decided to do some belated fact-checking, folks found that the “Momo Challenge” or “Momo Game” didn’t actually exist. It was the 21st-century equivalent of saying “Bloody Mary” in the mirror three times.
The initial scare arose back in 2016 when Momo was thought to have been related to the suicide of a 12 year old girl, but was eventually written off as having no connection. And since that incident, there hasn’t been a single reported similar case.
So why did people insist on cultivating such a tragic story and passing it along?
It turns out this “Momo Challenge” was actually the result of a type of online horror story, called a creepypasta, in which readers contribute scary occurrences and paranormal ideas on the r/creepy Reddit forum. Combined with real-life or personal themes, the stories create a sort of urban legend that is not just frightening, but also realistic. Oftentimes, contributors will also either draw a creature or include some sort of spooky photo along with the story to give their character a face and the reader extra thrills.
The creepypasta phenomenon led to controversy in the United States in 2014, when two girls who became caught up in the story of Slender Man stabbed their friend in a bid to appease the fictional character. It sparked a debate over whether the phenomenon was an example of the “dark side” of the Internet gone too far, or whether the entire phenomenon was just a modern-day extension of classical horror storytelling.
Will the Real Yokai Please Stand Up?
The real Momo was actually a sculpture created by Japanese artist Aiso Keisuke for a horror exhibit in Tokyo back in 2016 – and her name wasn’t Momo. She was called “Mother Bird,” and she was patterned after a folkloric creature of Japanese urban legend called Ubume, a half-woman, half-bird creature said to be the lost soul of a woman who died in childbirth, and who haunts the area where she died.
Ubume are part of Japan’s rich culture of yokai (妖怪), other-worldly creatures based in folk legends from around different areas of Japan. The world of yokai has been fodder for artists for centuries. In 1776, for example, while America was busy getting its revolution on, artist Toriyama Sekien published Gazu Hyakki Yako (画図百鬼夜行), a three-volume set of yokai that preceded the first Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual by a good 201 years. Thanks to the work of manga artist Mizuki Shigeru and his work Ge-ge-ge no Kitaro (ゲゲゲの鬼太郎), yokai have witnessed a sort of boom in Japan in recent decades, and have also experienced popularity among anime and manga fans worldwide thanks to Kitaro and the game Yokai Watch.
The Momo memes, of course, carry none of this cultural context with them. The image used is usually cropped-out, face-only edits of the Mother Bird images, originally posted on Instagram by Japanese visitors to the exhibit. Needless to say, none of those photos mentioned nor had any connection to anything involving the harm of children, or anything else ill-intentioned.
Forward to 10 Friends, or Suffer the Curse!
At this point it is still not entirely clear who began the very first Momo story, or why and how they did, or if they even knew they were appropriating a piece of Japanese culture. It’s also unknown whether the original author and the first person to send a WhatsApp message as Momo are the same person. Yet it is believed that this first disturbing message was an isolated incident of either bullying or trolling by someone piggybacking off of the original Reddit story.
The Momo scare was basically a modern-day version of those old-school chain letters going around when AOL was still a thing, which urged you to send to “10 or more friends” or risk having “bad luck for the next 10 years.” The only real difference is while grandma’s chain letters now sit unread and unforwarded, this chain letter was forwarded, shared, replicated, and publicized millions of times in the past few months alone, thanks to the original warning posts being shared by influencers with high followings, and even celebs like Kim Kardashian. (Sorry, grandma.)
Yet what these influencers thought was a good deed ended up doing more harm than good, as the widespread, exaggerated warnings brought mass panic over something that never even existed, which consequently gave troublemakers on the internet the very ammo they needed to fuel their next big prank. These well-meaning yet uninformed adults on the internet ended up creating the very thing they were trying to prevent.
To be sure, this isn’t the first time such panics have spread. When one of our authors (Jay, who’s old) was a kid in the 1980s, his small town was gripped with stories of strangers putting razor blades in apples, and poisoning candy. Indeed, such myths have circulated since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The existence of the Internet, however, means that such rumors can spread at near light speed. And with people increasingly living in their own private social media bubbles of like-minded thinkers, such rumors have become harder to stop.
How Japan – and the Artist – Reacted
While all of this was going around overseas (the first “wave” originated in South America in 2018 in correlation with the death of the young girl mentioned above), back in Momo’s home country of Japan, nobody had a clue what was going on. So you can imagine the shock it was to her original creator when he found out not just that his creation had gone viral (albeit belatedly), but the reason why.
Aiso Keisuke is an artist and the head of Link Factory, a small Tokyo company that creates stage props for film and TV. A longtime horror fan himself, he also creates many horror-themed pieces, including a series of spooky sculptures that he called The Grudge Girls Collection, of which Momo was a part. She was featured in an exhibit at Vanilla Gallery in Ginza in 2016, however to his disappointment, did not get as much recognition as he had hoped. In fact, he claims that after the event, he simply wrapped her up and left her outside his apartment, where she sat for a couple of years before she started to decay, and Aiso decided to just throw her away.
When he first found out about the hoax, and how his creation was being used, it was a rude wake-up call. It started with hate mail and death threats, shaming him for daring to create such a “hideous monster.” Aiso was stunned. But more than anything, when he learned what was happening, he was disappointed. Despite the belated attention it brought him, which he was quite pleased by, the way in which it came was morbid and depressing. At the same time, as a father of a young child himself, he claims he understood the worry of the parents who had fallen for the hoax.
Though the commotion of the first round quickly subsided, in February of 2019 he began receiving hate mail again, and that’s when he learned about the hoax’s second wave. Frustrated once again, and wanting to prevent any further misunderstandings (and of course, any potential harm to children), he issued a public statement:
Momo is dead. The curse is gone.
He hoped this would help diffuse the myth, and discourage the trolls from using Momo for creating such harmful media anymore. In his statement, Aiso was actually referring to the fact that he had already thrown away Momo a while ago (after the first hoax incident). However, the Western news media seems to have spun the report to reflect his act of tossing Momo as a direct response to the commotion, in a sense painting him as a “hero” for destroying his creation for the sake of the children. Though this version is quite different from what really happened, Aiso doesn’t seem to care. As long as the end goal is reached of putting the hoax to rest (and to hopefully stop painting him and his character as a villain.)
As mentioned above, despite Momo originating in Japan, Momo’s home country was one of the last to hear word about the hoax. So when word did start to get around, most people were unfamiliar with Momo’s origins. Some also fell victim to the hoax. Staff and artists at the Vanilla Gallery even said they received death threats from people who had apparently learned where Momo had come from, but not who made her or why.
In fact, even the young lady who posted the first image of Momo that went viral removed the image from her Instagram and put up both a description and IG story in English in response to a sudden influx of Western followers sharing and commenting on her post. Her note is a disclaimer stating that she is not affiliated with Momo in any way, that the photo was a personal one taken during her visit to the gallery, and that she would be archiving the photo thereafter.
Several other online sources, including personal blogs and Twitter, include accounts of other unsuspecting Japanese citizens expressing shock and horror upon learning about the Momo hoax for the first time, and worry for their children.
However, some of Aiso’s fans in both Japan and the West also decided to show their support by showing the “cute” and “innocent” side of Momo.
Aiso Keisuke’s Yubume, which was displayed in the ghost gallery exhibit in 2016 by LINK FACTORY, has generated discussion abroad. It became a net legend through an SNS account called MOMO that would reply with grotesque images if you contacted it. But it’s now become a “creepy-cute” mascot due to reports of its origins and the yokai legend.
Momo is No Mo’
Once it was confirmed via Aiso’s public statement mentioned above, and Momo was now canonically “dead,” the chatter subsided rather quickly. The social media world was already well on its way to the next big meme. However, what does this virtual death scare say about us as a society?
In the digital age, it’s more important than ever to be vigilant about what you share online and pass off as true. Fact-checking is extremely important especially now when just about anybody with internet access and a grudge can use the resources right at their fingertips to fabricate stories and information for less-than-honorable reasons. And with so many people intentionally using the internet irresponsibly and for malevolent purposes, such as bullying and even hacking, it is important to know where your information is coming from, and what you are spreading when you share it.
There’s also an element of cultural appropriation to this story. Despite Mother Bird being grounded in a centuries-long tradition of Japanese folklore, her image was taken and reused with no regard – or respect – for its origins. While discerning fans of Japanese culture in the West eventually caught on, most folks didn’t. The hoax should be a teaching moment where we encourage people to use the vast troughs of information the Internet has put at their disposal to investigate and learn a little more about the rich cultural history of countries other than their own – and discourage them from simply using other peoples’ work to serve their own ends.
Aiso may have created Mother Bird, and subsequently destroyed her. However, it’s the internet who brought Momo to life – only to subsequently burn her at the stake.
