Another classic creepypasta! The images associated with this story are perhaps better known than the story itself, but if you've been on the internet for a while there's a good chance you've seen both.
The only content warning I have this time is for suicide.
“Smile Dog”
Plot Summary
Our narrator is a college-age young man, an aspiring writer, who contacts a woman named Mary E. in '07 wanting to hear more about an image known as "smile.jpg." Mary saw this image back in '92, when she was the sysop for one of her local bulletin board systems (BBS — if you weren't using the internet back then, or, like me, weren't born yet, you might not know the term). Unlike the others exposed to the image, an estimated 400 people at that time, Mary has spoken out over the years about her experience, which is how our narrator came to hear of her. Back when he was a tenth grader, he heard smile.jpg being discussed online and quickly became intrigued. Smile.jpg depicts an entity generally referred to as "smile.dog" — apparently, viewing the photo in question triggers sudden onset temporal lobe epilepsy along with acute anxiety, which is how the narrator is certain that all the images he's seen online claiming to be smile.jpg are fakes. These fake smile.jpgs crop up with regularity on places like /x/ and other horror- or paranormal-themed boards, but the real smile.jpg apparently only resurfaces occasionally, causing great psychological harm to all who view it before an admin or moderator manages to take it down.
When the narrator arrives at Mary's house to interview her, she locks herself in her bedroom and refuses to come out, speaking to the narrator and her husband only through the locked door. She's incoherent and crying, and all the narrator can glean is that she's refusing to speak to him because of nightmares she's been having. This isn't a huge surprise to him, given that Mary is obviously not the most mentally stable woman after her exposure to smile.jpg, and after about half an hour of trying to take notes he calls it a day, figuring maybe he can contact someone else who's seen the real thing.
Narrator describes smile.jpg to us, based on what he's heard about it. The picture shows a dim room, only illuminated by the camera flash, with some sort of dog-like entity (described as looking something like a Siberian Husky) sitting in front of the camera. To the left of the dog is an outstretched human hand, described as "beckoning" to the viewer. The dog's mouth is open as though it's grinning, and packed with straight, white, human-like teeth.
Supposedly, those exposed to smile.jpg will subsequently experience regular epileptic fits, during which they again see the picture in their mind's eye. Disturbing nightmares involving smile.dog are also reported. Medication seems to help in some cases, but it's definitely not doing the trick for Mary, and she's probably not alone there.
After the unsuccessful interview with Mary, the narrator puts out feelers online hoping that someone else who's viewed the real smile.jpg will contact him. He doesn't hear back from anybody, but as he's just started college he's got plenty else on his mind. Finally, in March of '08, Mary sends him an email.
Mary apologizes to the narrator for her behavior on the day of the interview. She explains that she's seen smile.dog in her dreams every night since viewing smile.jpg, and that the dog talks to her. It's not really a dog, she says, but she's unsure what it actually is. It tells her it'll leave her alone if only she "spreads the word," and she's certain it's referring to passing along smile.jpg to an unexposed person. Shortly after first seeing smile.jpg she received an envelope in the mail with no return address, and inside was a floppy disk. Without even checking, she was certain of what was on it.
She knew what she had to do to cure herself of the nightmares, but resisted. Other users of the BBS board she used to be the sysop for stopped posting after their exposure to smile.jpg, and she heard that some of them had committed suicide. It's the ones she never heard from or about again that worried her the most.
Mary confesses that, at the time when the narrator first contacted her, she decided she was going to give him the floppy disk. After all, he was a complete stranger, he'd pretty much been asking for it, and it was a way out for her that didn't involve potentially ruining the life of a loved one. However, at the last minute she realized that she was plotting to ruin an innocent man's life, and she couldn't go through with it. She's writing this email to warn him off trying to research smile.jpg further, as she's worried he'll come across someone who has no problem showing him the image.
Later that month, Mary's husband contacts the narrator, telling him that Mary has committed suicide. He tearfully implores the narrator to heed what Mary said, adding that he burned the floppy disk, and that it "hissed like an animal" as it burned.
The narrator isn't sure how to take this. He thinks at first that maybe the couple was playing him and that Mary is alive and well, but when he looks up obituaries he finds that she is, indeed, now dead. He decides to give up on his pursuit of smile.jpg, at least until the school year is over.
Several months later, though, he receives an email. The person contacting him says they got his email off a board where he posted about smile.jpg, and that they've seen the image and it's not that bad. They end it with "just spreading the word" and a smile emoji. There's a .jpg attachment, which doesn't automatically download because this is 2008, I guess, and the narrator debates downloading it for a while. He's still not sure if he believes the image holds some sort of power; maybe Mary had always been unstable, and the culprit was mental illness and not a supernatural .jpg image. On the flip side, if it does, what would he do? Would he keep it to himself for years, slowly going mad, like Mary did? Or would he spread the word to others? Would he stick with his original plan of writing an article about smile.jpg, and attaching the image at the end of it? Could he do that?
The pasta — or article, if you'd rather — ends by saying that yes, he could. At the bottom is the image.
Closing Thoughts
This one is old-school, and it shows. Even though it's set in the mid-00s, the horror here is clearly playing off of the chain emails that were most popular in the late '90s — still, if you had an email account in the mid-00s, as I did, you'll know that chain emails with weird attachments were still a pretty common thing, as were chain emails that tried to get you to spread them by either promising something good would happen if you did or threatening that something bad would happen if you didn't (or both). I doubt that those who weren't around for that phenomenon would really "get" this story. Sure, it's not an entirely dead phenomenon, and certainly it's a known thing regardless of whether or not you experienced it firsthand, but back in the day there was a legitimate threat to opening an unknown attachment in an email — a computer virus, worm, or Trojan horse. Nowadays most of us know to be cautious about weird-looking attachments, messages from unknown senders, or phishing scams, but it used to be a whole lot easier for these things to spread from technologically uneducated person to technologically uneducated person, and older, simpler computers were at greater risk of being seriously harmed by a malicious attachment or hyperlink. The idea of an attachment directly hurting the computer's user rather than the computer is a natural escalation of the concept.
While, of course, the various images on the web purporting to be smile.jpg are harmless, and your mileage may vary on whether any of them are even creepy, this doesn't necessarily contradict the author's tale, especially now that this story has ascended to meme status and been reproduced all over the internet. After all, the real smile.jpg was always quickly taken down when it was posted online, and one could argue that the images that now accompany the story are simply stand-ins for the real thing, since the author himself says that there are plenty of fakes online. Really investigating this legend, if you believe in it, is something to be done at your own peril.
Stories like these are old hat by now. "Smile Dog" isn't the only haunted image story, or haunted chain message story — there are probably hundreds. It's lost much of its impact with the passage of time. Still, the same can be said for many good stories, and I'm inclined to cut this particular instance quite a bit of slack for being an early and memorable take on the idea. It hasn't exactly aged well, but it speaks to a fear of the internet that was once very real to a great many people, and I think good horror works by tapping into something its audience is already afraid of.