MYSTERY
The Russian Sleep Experiment
On August 10, 2010, an anonymous user calling himself OrangeSoda posted a 1,200-word story on the Creepypasta Wiki. It described a Soviet experiment in which five political prisoners had been sealed in a sound-proofed chamber and exposed to a stimulant gas that kept them awake for thirty days. The story has no documentary basis. No declassified Russian archive contains anything resembling it. But over the next fifteen years it has become — to a significant fraction of the people who encounter it — historically true. This is the story of how a fiction acquires the texture of evidence.
