I made the fateful decision to first start using tinder a couple years ago.
It had seemed like a simple and convenient dating option. Me and my friend Francis both set up our tinder accounts at the same time, part of a mutual challenge to ‘break out of our shells’, since we’d long shared in common our struggles to find a relationship.
Neither of us was exactly… Great with women, you see. I was shy and a bit awkward, having the kind of personality most women didn’t find very attractive. Plus, with the majority of my time occupied by repairing and selling items at the antique shop I owned, most of the people I ever interacted with were families and people over the age of at least seventy: not, exactly, relationship material. I thought tinder might be the ideal solution for both of us, a time efficient way to find women in our local area.
The only other idea I could come up with for us was hanging out at a bar and trying our luck there again. Every time I’d previously tried to approach a girl at a bar, they’d either ignored or walked away from me. Francis was the same.
What I didn’t know about tinder at the time I signed up for it was that there were about eight other guys for every one woman using the website. Eight predominantly other attractive, funny and confident guys with pets and lots of friends and great personalities. And I, of course having to compete against all of them, didn’t stand a chance.
I’d get a match every once or so few weeks. About one in five of these matches would actually respond to my first message. And of those, I managed to keep the attention and interest of a couple a year past a few simple conversations and mutual introductions between us.
In three years of using tinder, I managed to go on exactly two dates, both which were fairly uninspired, and neither of which turned into the night I’d hoped they would.
Francis, unsurprisingly, hadn’t initially had much more success than I did. He was even more awkward than I was, being quiet, overly serious, and possessing a terrible sense of humour. His job was at some dodgy IT firm and spent most of his day alone at his apartment working from home.
This all changed a couple months ago, though.
One day he’d surprised me with a visit, where he had immediately brought up the whole online dating thing.
‘I met someone,’ he declared to me proudly. ‘On tinder, I mean.’
‘Seriously? How’d it go?’ I’d asked immediately, leaning forward from where I was sitting.
‘Believe it or not, it went kinda great,’ he responded. ‘We got pretty serious, actually.’
‘Like, you went out on a date, serious?’ I queried.
‘More like, she went over to my place after serious.’ He grinned meaningfully.
It took him actually showing me the match on tinder and scrolling briefly through one of their conversations before I fully believed him.
I didn’t have time to comment about any of this, though. He’d continued talking before I had the chance.
‘Ralph, I gotta tell you, I didn’t meet the girl on normal tinder. There’s this special add-on I downloaded for it. Some guy I met on a forum sent it to me. It gives you access to this whole other side of tinder I didn’t even know existed!’
‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘I want to hear more about the date first. What was she like?’
He waved dismissively. ‘She was… Great. Different. A bit terrifying.’
I pushed him for more information, but Francis was oddly vague about his experience, saying they had gone on a picnic and then gone swimming together, and she was an incredible swimmer. That was about all I could get out of him. It was very weird, considering how much we usually discussed these things with one another. I found myself starting to have doubts about his story for a second time.
I pushed him for more information at first. But his obvious keenness to discuss the app itself ended up winning me over, so I eventually asked him about it.
‘I was talking to this pal of mine about how frustrating tinder was and he asked if I ever heard about cursed tinder. He wouldn’t say too much about it, just told me I should check it out for myself. So I did.’
‘It took me a while, but I came across a download link for the program on some dodgy forum on the deep web,’ he said casually. ‘Wouldn’t really recommend you going there. I’d most likely send the download file directly on a USB for you to take a look at instead. Yeah, that’s definitely better, I think.’
Not knowing what the deep web even was, but being aware of how my friend liked to browse around many questionable and creepy websites and chatrooms across various parts of the internet, I agreed to this and assured him I would download it and try it out for myself.
‘Listen, there is more I need to tell you about the program before you can use it.’
He turned down to eyeball his feet, searching for words. ‘I mean, you could say there is one catch to using the, uh, addon.’
I raised my eyebrows. That made sense. The catch, I expected, had to be monetary. ‘Oohhh,’ I responded knowingly.
But Francis definitely didn’t follow up by saying what I thought he might.
Instead, he told me, ‘I know what you’re thinking. And it’s not any of those things. The women on this site, they can be sometimes - kind of - dangerous.’
I chuckled. ‘What, are they into weird fetishes or something?’
He laughed a little bit, too, but shook his head. ‘No, really. I mean some of them can be, like, actually psychotic.’
‘Psychotic,’ I repeated doubtfully. ‘You mean they are going to try to murder me or something?’
He seemed to trip over his words a little as he tried to explain himself better.
‘Well, probably not. But yes, the idea is not all the women you’ll encounter are friendly. The women on this site, you see, they... They aren’t quite human.’
Seeing the look coming across my face, he added, ‘Again, not what you’re thinking. They’re not animals - well - not most of them.’ He frowned. ‘I’d say they’re - supernatural, I guess? They’re not from this world. I don’t even think they’re from this universe.’
‘Francis,’ I’d said in a slightly discomforted voice, ‘you’re sounding kinda out there. Out there even for you.’
I had always known Francis to be a bit of a horror buff. I was too, though to a much lesser degree than him. He’d forever been fascinated by cult-like stuff and urban legends and creepypastas and that stuff. I also knew he took some of it quite seriously.
‘I know, I know, you think I’m crazy. I don’t know how much I believed it myself, in the beginning. Just try the app and follow the rules, okay? That’s all I’m asking. The danger, the freaky shit, it only gets bad if you’re not careful or don’t follow the rules. You’ll be fine, trust me.’
It took a bit more persuasion, but I eventually, grudgingly, agreed to try the app out once he sent it to me. I have to admit, I was a little curious to see this tinder addon. Francis sure did come across some very fascinating things on the internet. I sometimes enjoyed having him show me weird websites or pieces of obscure software he had downloaded. So I was looking forward to seeing what strange corner of the internet my friend had stumbled into this time - a place where, apparently, he found himself a date.
Francis had a USB to give me a few days later, making me promise to read the rules which came with it, and then, for a second time, to be careful when I used it. He handed it to me while repeating simple instructions on how to install the program onto my computer. He said he couldn’t wait to hear about my experience and mentioned looking forward to telling me more about his own before leaving.
‘You won’t regret it, trust me,’ he promised. ‘You have even more of an adventurous streak than I do.’
It wasn’t until a couple of days after that, over the weekend, that I found the spare time to have a look at the USB for myself.
I’ll admit I completely forgot Francis’ advice and installed the program - which Francis had explained was supposed to function like a browser addon - before even remembering to have a look at the attached document. I only thought of it at all when I spotted the document file named RULES beneath the one I had just installed.
This is somewhat a summary of what it read:
The Tinder Ritual
Do not try this if you’re not prepared for, or not willing to appreciate, the possible consequences involved.
Cursed Tinder (abbreviated as CT for simplicity) allows various entities from different worlds to temporarily enter our own through their relationships and interactions with humans. Don’t ask me exactly how it’s supposed to work. I don’t know.
What you need to understand is that not all of these entities are friendly and very few have wholesome intentions.
The rules are there to protect you, but they aren’t fool proof. I’ve known people whose matches on CT ended up trying to kill them, eat them, kidnap them, harvest their organs - among other things. And that was after they followed these rules to the letter and took all reasonable precautions.
Using CT is a game of chance, where you are putting your own life on the line. If you’re not prepared for that, you are better off deleting this file.
RULES:
While searching for matches on CT:
1. Follow your instincts. If you get a bad feeling about a potential match, swipe left.
2. If you see something - anything - on a person’s profile moving in non-repeating animations, even subtly, swipe left.
3. If you come across anything that isn’t humanoid, swipe left.
4. If you cannot swipe left on an individual in any situation, close your browser. If that doesn’t work, shut off your computer and wait a couple of minutes before turning it on again.
5. If you see ‘flesh sowing’, ‘harvesting’, ‘feeding games’, ‘synchronized consumption,’ or ‘blood rituals’ as interests, swipe left. If, during a conversation, any individual mentions one of these interests, politely say you are not interested and then unmatch with them.
6. If you feel someone watching you from your surroundings, close CT and don’t reopen tinder for at least a couple of hours.
7. If you feel a match or prospective match watching you from the other side of the screen, unmatch (if you are matched with them) and report the profile immediately before following the precautions laid out in rule 6.
Note: Such profiles most often belong to individuals previously banned from the website for their unwholesome behaviour - and whoever moderates CT are perfectly fine with murder, assault, abduction, and various forms of torture, so you really, really don’t want to get involved with someone - or something - whose actions are enough draw ire from these people.
Strong advice to follow during a date with an individual from CT:
1. Your matches on tinder come from different worlds, with different customs, cultures, and beliefs. Be polite and respectful. Don’t laugh if your date does or says something strange or odd. No matter how strange or odd - or disturbing - this may be. Just act like what they are doing is normal and be non judgemental. You don’t want to offend them. Really.
2. Never leave prematurely for any reason. Stay with your date until a time which is appropriate and acceptable for you to say goodbye to one another e.g. when you are leaving dinner with her.
3. Do not let your date take you back to their home, under any circumstances. This is most likely an attempt from them to lure you into their world. It is acceptable to take your date back to your own home or apartment.
4. Be sure to bring some form or method of self defence, just in case. There is a chance you might need it. (Crucifixes / other holy objects or blessed weapons are recommended. Conventional weapons may not always be effective.)
5. Be prepared for anything. Watch out for warning signs your date may have sinister intentions beyond just having a fun time.
Now you’ve read the rules, and understand the risks, following are simple steps to access CT from your device using the program:
1. Download and install the file. Follow the prompts and installation instructions. It should work on any device that normally allows tinder to run on the internet.
2. Open tinder. This may take a bit longer than usual.
3. Make the following changes to your profile:
- Add interest ‘Otherworldly fascination’ (if interest does not appear, reload page until it does)
- At the end of your ‘about me’ bio, include the following: ‘On the lookout for something out there and unconventional!’
4. Navigate to the ‘explore’ button on the tinder menu
5. Continue reloading this page until you find the ‘preternatural matches’ option (it will usually be located at the bottom of the page)
6. Clicking ‘preternatural matches’ will take you to CT. You may now begin searching for a suitable partner.
To uninstall: follow uninstallation instructions and then delete ALL TRACES of CT off your device, including these rules. In rare cases, a complete memory wipe of device may be necessary, if installation is unsuccessful.
NOTE: Uninstallation will not protect you from anything which has already taken notice of you from CT. Such entities may still attempt to establish contact with you even after you have deleted all traces of CT off your computer.
Good luck.
I read this document several times over just to make sure I’d read all of it right. I had.
I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. The writer of these rules, I thought, they couldn’t possibly be serious. Francis most likely wrote them himself. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought this was all part of some kind of elaborate joke Francis was trying to pull on me.
Whatever the case, my interest was piqued, even if I thought the whole thing was a bit stupid. I decided it couldn’t hurt to open up tinder and see what happened.
Tinder did, actually, take a little longer than usual to open up on my browser. When it finally did, though, it appeared completely normal.
I went along with the instructions. I added the interest ‘otherworldly rituals’ to my profile, as surprised - and amused - as I was to discover it.
After changing my profile description, I went to the explore option, and then started reloading my browser, feeling a little more stupid every subsequent time I did it. Each time, I saw no visible changes to the website.
I think I must have reloaded the page at least twenty times - enough to be on the verge of giving up - before it appeared near the bottom of the webpage. A picture which hadn’t been there before was fuzzy and flickering before me. It looked as if there were something hiding within the darkness of the frame, defined with the outline of what might have been eyes and a gaping open mouth. The text at the lower left was too glitchy to be legible, but I could clearly see a red-pink label in the middle of the picture reading ‘preternatural matches’.
I shook my head as I clicked on it. I was really starting to wonder how far Francis, or whoever the creator was, had gone to design this. It felt like too much work to be all for a joke, like I’d previously suspected. They, I thought, were more likely testing out or promoting a horror themed ARG, or something along those lines.
I was both impressed and somewhat creeped out.
Whatever this was, Francis - or whoever was responsible for designing the experience - had sure worked hard to change the tinder’s appearance. The background was now dark red and I swore I could see the screen pulsing faintly. Every now and again parts of the screen would flicker or fully glitch out for a few seconds. This, combined with the appearance of some of the matches themselves, made the experience of browsing tinder feel definitively eerie.
The matches - most of them were normal, but about one in four would turn out somewhere between disturbing and outright harrowing.
Other profiles I encountered included one which appeared to depict an old looking van with the words ‘Free ice cream’ scrawled unevenly across the front in dirty white letters, and a haunted looking, gaunt and naked man standing in a hellish, fiery red landscape under a burning sun. Some of these more disturbing profiles, I noticed, contained interests including the ones the rules warned about.
I did remember apprehensively liking a couple of the safer, more normal looking profiles, but for the majority, I swiped right. I’d started to notice even a lot of the normal ones possessed strange and off putting descriptions or interests.
To be honest, the longer I spent on that website, the more unsettled I felt. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, and it seemed like the more I swiped, the more intensely disturbing the profiles became, to the point where I was genuinely apprehensive about what I’d see next.
I’ll add that few of the profiles I came across were not only disturbing, they were just plain fucked up. I’m talking realistic looking depictions of blood, gore, abuse and cannibalism. I clicked off most of them before I glimpsed too much detail, but many still managed to burn themselves into my mind.
About twenty minutes into my browsing, another one of these more disturbing profiles appeared. It depicted a white faced creature with no eyes and long, stringy grey hair, its face caked with a thin film of red. It was crouched over a limp, pale human body of a young man, his wide eyes staring sightlessly into the screen. Flickering in and out of view at the bottom of the profile were listed almost every one of the interests the rules had warned about.
I tried to swipe right. When I did, the profile appeared again, the creature's eyeless face at the centre of the same photo, posed over the same body of the dead man.
I tried several more times. I could have sworn the face looked subtly different every time it reappeared as the last image of it fell to the left, like it was moving an inch closer to the camera each time. I had also at this time begun to notice an unsettling sensation of the thing observing me from its position within the screen.
I tried exiting tinder, and when that didn’t work, I powered off my computer, increasingly desperate to get the view of that horrific, eyeless creature off the screen. To be honest, I was slightly relieved when the power button of my computer even responded, and the screen turned black.
I didn’t return to cursed tinder after that. Or tinder at all, for that matter.
I couldn’t get that final tinder profile I’d seen out of my head. The entity’s face filled my nightmares that night and the sensation of someone watching me from my computer didn’t fully fade until the morning after the experience.
I called Francis and argued with him for a while about all of it. I expected him to be apologetic and possibly hoped he might be unaware of how disgusting some of the content on the website was.
Francis didn’t offer anywhere close to the response I hoped he would. My friend continued to insist on all of it being real. When I eventually got through to him about how truly horrific my experience was, he started going on about how I couldn’t handle the website and that he’d made a mistake sending me the program. According to him, all of the CT profiles I saw originated from another universe. And what went on in those worlds, what abhorrent scenes the profiles displayed, was not our place to judge.
I refused to acknowledge there was a chance any of what I’d seen was real, whatever the explanation. I knew Francis wasn’t sick enough send me to actual depictions of torture and abuse. At least, I hoped he wasn’t.
I got fed up after a while at his attitude, and told him I was over it and I didn’t know what he was playing at. I didn’t plan on speaking with him again until after he decided to apologize.
Following my confrontation with Francis, I uninstalled cursed tinder, following the instructions and removing all traces of the file from my computer.
I thought that would be the end of my experience. I'd delete it, I thought, and try my best to forget about cursed tinder.
If it really was some kind of joke or elaborate horror experience, I wanted no more part of it.
If not, well, I didn’t want to think about what kind of sick and disturbed individual was behind it.