Two for the price of one! Well, sort of. The second story here, as the name suggests, is more of an addendum to the first story. Hence, I'll be tackling both at once.
This is another "lost episode" pasta. The only warning I have is for death, which is probably obvious enough from the title.
“Dead Bart”
Plot Summary
According to the narrator, Fox has a weird way of counting episodes of The Simpsons. This is news to me, but I'm far from being an expert. Apparently their numbering is off, all because of a season 1 episode that no one in an official capacity likes to acknowledge.
The narrator first heard about this missing episode, titled "Dead Bart," when someone asked about it during a Q&A with David Silverman. Silverman responded by simply leaving the stage. Narrator later learned that the lost episode was written entirely by Matt Groening during an apparent depressive funk and that no one who was working on The Simpsons back then likes to talk about it. Officially, the episode doesn't exist.
Our narrator is tenacious, though, and after a fan event they followed Groening out to ask him about the episode. He was nonchalant about being followed — the man is probably used to weird fans — but when the episode was mentioned, he turned pale, quickly jotted a web address down on a piece of paper, and handed it to the narrator, begging them not to mention it again. (To who?)
Upon visiting the web address Groening provided, the narrator was taken to a blank site with a single download link. They don't provide us this link, because the linked file, in addition to containing the promised episode, also contained a virus so bad they had to reformat their hard drive (okay, I'm reading between the lines there, because the narrator called this "rebooting" their computer, but it was clearly a hell of a lot more serious than that). They managed to save the file first, though, and were able to watch the episode.
In the first act, things seem more or less normal, although the animation is lousy (if you've seen season 1 of The Simpsons, that's probably not a shock) and the way the characters are written seems a little off. Instead of coming off like a wacky dysfunctional family, they seem... well, actually dysfunctional. The plot concerns a trip the Simpsons are about to take, by plane. Near the end of the first act, as the plane is taking off, Bart breaks a window while fooling around and is sucked out. The first act ends with a still shot of his dead body, which is drawn in a much more realistic fashion than the typical art style, apparently playing off an idea Groening had about the wacky animated style of the show representing the vibrancy of life and death turning things more realistic. (No, the author doesn't call this "hyper-realism," and I'm gonna say this example isn't bad anyway as it's a still frame the animators just put a lot of time into.)
In act two, the rest of the family is sitting around the table, crying. The acting is good; they sound genuinely pained and upset. The animation, on the other hand, takes such a dip in quality that the characters look more like deformed blotches of line and color. Faces appear in the windows, flashing in and out too quickly to discern anything about them. This goes on for all of act two.
Act three opens with a "one year later" title card. The family, now skeletally thin, is still seated around the table. No sign of Maggie or the pets. They head out to visit Bart's grave, passing through an apparently deserted Springfield. As they near the graveyard, the houses look more and more decrepit. At the grave, Bart's body, looking the same as it did at the end of act 1, is just lying in front of his tombstone. The remaining Simpsons start crying again, then stop. The camera zooms in on Homer's face as he apparently tells a joke, but our narrator couldn't make out what he said.
As the camera zooms out at the end of the episode, the rest of the graveyard is visible. The tombstones all bear the names of guest stars on The Simpsons, although of course most of them hadn't been on the show yet at the time "Dead Bart" was made. All have death dates, which check out against when those stars really did die. The episode ends with a picture of the whole family sitting on their couch, all dead, all drawn in the realistic style used for Bart's corpse.
The narrator thinks that maybe the dates on the tombstones could be used to predict the deaths of still-living guest stars, but notices that most of these stones bear the same date.
This brings us to:
“A Dead Bart Update”
Plot Summary
The narrator got rid of the laptop they watched "Dead Bart" on, saying that even after completely reformatting it it wouldn't work correctly. "Dead Bart" would keep playing itself and resisted all attempts to delete it from the hard drive. After a recurring nightmare where the narrator sees themself at age ten, dead, in place of the realistic Bart drawing, and subsequently thinking they see that same image flashing on the screen of their laptop, they destroy the computer.
Attempting to research "Dead Bart" online, they learn that the episode actually aired in a Portland, Oregon suburb. The narrator has a cousin in the area who was watching The Simpsons back when season 1 aired, so they call him up and ask him about it. The cousin did, indeed, see the episode, but had become convinced that it was a nightmare that he had. He's so disturbed to learn that it's real that he hangs up. (He actually screams before hanging up, which I found to be an unintentionally humorous detail.)
Narrator keeps hunting online and eventually tracks down someone who has the episode on tape and is willing to sell. (They buy a cheap used TV/VCR for the purposes of viewing said tape, as they have the feeling that whatever they use to watch it on will never be the same afterwards.) They invite over a friend and the two of them watch together. The narrator says that it was more or less the same as they recalled, but, as this version kept in the ads from the TV broadcast, they were able to report that the ads they saw on the tape were also disturbingly bizarre. Some featured monsters from the narrator's nightmares, some were news promos about tragedies that haven't yet happened, others were done in surreal CGI that shouldn't have been possible in the eighties. Their friend reported a completely different viewing experience, although they both saw the same news promo about millions of people dying in their sleep mysteriously in June of 2013 — the same date that was on the graves of the still-living celebrities during the end of the episode.
Lastly, the narrator says that in this version of the episode, they had no trouble hearing the joke Homer makes at the end of the episode after viewing Bart's corpse at the cemetery. He says "If only we all were that lucky."
Closing Thoughts
In terms of "lost episode" creepypastas, a genre that by now has been done to death so thoroughly that someone even wrote a creepypasta about the guy making all these fake scary episodes of animated TV shows, this one actually isn't bad. I think it's unfortunate that the "hyper-realism" trope took off, for a lot of reasons, but it ends up making an aspect of this story that's actually interesting seem clichéd. "Dead Bart" isn't well-made, even by season 1 Simpsons standards, but a lot of time and care was spent on the realistic drawing of Bart's corpse. It shows where the creator's priorities were at, and it's illuminating as to the state of mind he was in while making the episode.
What seems to be implied is that Groening, sometime during the first season of The Simpsons, became terribly depressed, at least in part due to ominous premonitions of the future. He became disillusioned with his own show, and, whether intentionally or not, wrote Homer and his family as genuinely dysfunctional rather than comical, showcasing the worst of their traits. (This kind of thing actually works well for The Simpsons in particular; I've seen other creepypastas attempt to do the same with other cartoon characters, to varying degrees of success, but the Simpsons really do come off as a pretty messed-up bunch in some of the worse episodes, which is something that's been written about extensively). He kills off Bart early on in the episode, having him die essentially as a result of his typical hijinks, and focuses strongly on his death throughout the rest of the episode, including an entire act depicting nothing but his family crying. There's a lot to be said about the symbolism of killing off one of your literary children (so to speak), especially when the character in question is literally a child, but I trust I don't have to harp on that. At the end of the episode, Springfield is shown to be in an abandoned and possibly post-apocalyptic state, and the shot of the graves at the end cements that Groening had seen the future and couldn't cope with what he saw.
It's not a masterwork, but "Dead Bart" goes quite a bit deeper than most "lost episode" pastas. I've read a ton of the damn things, and usually they're in the "Squidward's Suicide" vein — the episode being described is disturbing, but ultimately doesn't seem to mean anything. These stories only work, to the extent that they work at all, because the corruption of something innocent and aimed at children tends to freak people out. "Dead Bart" is one of the few with some thought behind it, and, while it's fairly mediocre as creepypasta goes, it's a standout within its subgenre for that reason.
The sequel doesn't add too much, but does cement the supernatural element. Apparently "Dead Bart" looks different to different viewers, and ads that aired when it did were affected too. This is a potentially interesting angle, but not a lot ends up being done with it, leaving me unsure how to feel about its inclusion. I'm sure it would have been freakier if you read it prior to June of 2013, but unfortunately (fortunately?) that date didn't age too well. I do like that we get to learn the "joke" Homer made at the end, and I think it was a good line to close the sequel on.