Has anybody ever heard of LIA1990? Probably not. It's a very obscure little creepypasta, made even more unknown by the language barrier. While giants like Jeff the Killer, Slenderman or Smile Dog became internationally famous, other smaller horror stories were left behind.

Growing up I adored them all. I was the weird kid browsing deviantart and creepypasta.org, making myself too scared to sleep on school nights and then going right back.

In my early 20s my love for them was revived, and I developed something of a hyperfixation on niche creepypasta: stories that only a handful of people knew about, local and regional legends designed to frighten children, chain messages that were sent out between the students of one specific school.

It was the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, so I very much needed something to keep me entertained. I found myself scouring defunct facebook groups, dead deviantart groups, ancient 4chan threads, and early 2000s forums accessible only through the internet archive. It was so fun! Finding weird little comments in surprising places, failed ARGs, calls for help regarding unexplainable events, confessions you had no way to know if they were true or false.

That was the best part for me: the fact I would never be able to know if that weird thing a deactivated account posted in 2001, with no way to be contacted ever again, was actually true. Is there a seed of truth buried under broken links and bad grammar?

I loved the mystery of it all. There are so many REAL creepy things in our world, making up a fake story about them feels almost redundant. Some are excellent, don't get me wrong, but I didn't get into creepypasta for the quality of writing. I got into them because I loved the unknown, the uncertainty, the fact they were told as if real and for all I knew they were real. I hate it in movies when the magic is explained, when the horror is given a face, a mask that can be torn off to ease our tension. No, I wanted to stay scared, to keep wondering "what if?"

One day I was reading about chain-messages from 2000s Romania, about ghost girls without eyes threatening to appear in your house at midnight and kill you to death if you didn't send the message to 5 other people yadda yadda, when an email notification appeared at the top of my screen.

A while ago I discovered a webring of lost media fans through neocities, which I joined. It was far from unusual for people to ask around for help.

It was one such mass email, with the subject "Has anybody ever heard of LIA1990?". Opening it, I learned it was a murderous ghost girl, not unlike what I was in the middle of reading about.

Garofița nervously waited in front of the library, the black facemask firmly over her nose. Students from school roamed around and she was so worried of being thought to be one of them, then demanded why she wasn't in class.

The school in Ferești was a 15 minute walk away from the municipal library. It was not unusual during lunch break for students to go over to it and finish homework, or hang around while hiding from the eyes of teachers.

Denisa finally arrived, wearing a pink turtleneck and dark blue jeans. Her backpack was still at school. All she had with her was her phone and a lunch bag. She gave Garofița half of her salami sandwich and they ate together at the library entrance.

"It's good!" Garo said, mouth full.

"Mom found this salami at Auchan, with white pepper on the edges." Denisa replied, mouth also full and some crumbs flying out.

Garofița kept both crusts in a napkin and they went inside. Denisa made a beeline to one of the computers, and pulled a second chair for Garofița to sit on.

"Come on!" She said.

"You said you got an email?" Garofița asked, watching her boot up the old little computer.

"Yeah, me and 10 other people. I was in the middle of reading this Jeff the Killer rewrite that my friend Patricia sent me. Apparently there was a contest a long time ago to rewrite the original Jeff the Killer because the first one was ass. A lot of the contest entries were ass too, but this one was kinda fun. I started looking up more versions of it, when I suddenly got an email about this weird internet mystery. It looks fun! I wanna check it out!"

"I don't know..."

"Are you scared?" Denisa giggled.

"I'm more worried about hackers and creepy people."

"It's fiiine!" She said, closing the library's book search engine and opening Microsoft Edge. "I'm using the library's internet, not my own."

LIA1990 was an internet user that seemed to exist on every website that had a messaging function, ever since the internet became available to the wider public and such features were possible. She hides in plain sight with a seemingly unfinished profile.

She will say nothing but "Hello", no matter what you say back. To every message, whether it is a phrase or just a dot, she will write back "Hello".

Most people brush her off as a bot and ignore her.

However, if you make her say "Hello" 45 times, she will begin to respond like a person.

She will begin to make references about her father and her boyfriend, but never give out their names. If you ask directly about them, she will ignore it and change the subject.

Her replies will become more and more pessimistic, she will say bleak things about herself, the state of the world, etc, and then she will imply she is contemplating suicide because of her boyfriend.

Sooner or later after the switch in demeanour she will say the line: "We know what we are, but know not what we may be". Then she will seemingly stop responding, no matter what you say.

One of three things may happen next, but there was no definitive guide anywhere to be found, and with this type of urban legend you want to make sure you are following the rules to a tee.

The author of the email was a member of the lost media ring that I didn't immediately recognise, but I didn't think much of it at the time. It was a big group and I never knew every single member.

What they wrote about LIA1990 ended with a call for help: wherever they looked online for more information, they could not find anything. They searched for her on facebook, instagram, tumblr, reddit, youtube, discord, whatsapp, snapchat, yahoo, gmail, every place they could think of, and found absolutely nothing.

When they asked for help, they received none. Not because it was a made-up story ("made-up" here meaning somebody pretending it was a mystery other people totally knew about), but because everybody dodged the question. Whenever they asked about it, they would either be ignored, or everyone would go silent, waiting for a few minutes before changing the subject. If they insisted, they would be ignored again or banned without warning. The last time they tried to ask, somebody DM'ed them and said "shut up before she hears you".

I felt a chill run up my spine and I smiled. This was the spooky nonsense I loved the most.

I wrote back truthfully that I never heard of LIA1990 until now, but I wanted to know more.

After I sent that email, I got up to do some chores around the house, took a shower, messed around online, and by nightfall I completely forgot about LIA1990. It was only when I was lying in bed, about to go to sleep, when I got another notification that I was reminded of it.

It was from the person who wrote the initial email, replying with nothing but "Hello"

"What are you even supposed to do?" Garofița asked.

"Find her, I guess!" She typed LIA1990 directly into google.

What came up was an instagram account for a person named LIA1990, a wikipedia page for the June 1990 Mineriad, another ig account, an account on flickr, an account on a site called 999.md, a reddit account, a youtube video about a communist Romania documentary and another video of what looked like a song.

"Huh, seems true so far!" Denisa said, checking the accounts and finding them mostly empty.

"Will you message them?" Garofița asked.

"Should I?"

"No, no. What if it's not real and you bothered somebody for nothing?"

"Big deal!" She shrugged. She searched up Temp Mail and got herself a fake email address. Within a few minutes she made herself an instagram account, throwawaydhdhjdjdjd.

"Creative." Garofița said.

"Thank you!" Denisa said.

She was about to look up one of the LIA1990 accounts they saw, when her brand new account received a message.

"The hell?" She said, and checked who it was from.

The username was a jumble of characters, not unlike the keysmash she just did. It had no profile picture and no posts, 0 everywhere.

The message simply read "Hello"

Denisa and Garofița looked at each-other.

I squinted at the email address of the person who sent the initial email asking about LIA1990. The combination of letters kinda looked like a keysmash, but I still gave it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was a name from a language I did not know.

I decided to deal with it the next day, since it was already pretty late and I was fighting to keep my eyes open.

The next morning, I unlocked my phone and saw a dozen other emails from people of the webring. At the end of the column of unread mails was the one from last night, and I got a better look at it. No subject line, no icon for the sender, no signature, just "Hello". What I assumed was a foreign name was indeed just a random string of characters.

I was beginning to feel uneasy. I scrolled away from the "Hello" message but the anxiety wouldn't go away, making goosebumps rise on my arms and my heart beat faster. I had this inexplicable feeling of being watched, as if that person was waiting for me to answer and I could sense it through the screen.

I told myself I was being stupid. This is what reading too much horror does to your brain.

I distracted myself by reading what the other ring-members were saying. The very first email was from the ring-master, an American tech geek. He was asking if anybody else had received a strange email the day before.

A lady from Hungary confirmed that she got one too, and attached a screenshot. It was sent by the initial user, but rather than the story of LIA1990 that I had read, the whole email was unintelligible nonsense. As if somebody pressed their fist to a keyboard and moved it left and right several times, then hit send. There was email after email from other members confirming that it looked the same for them too, wondering if it was a weird spam bot.

I scrolled back down to the email I received, the one I replied to, and it made my dread ten times worse. LIA1990's story was gone. It was the same gibberish everybody else confirmed, followed by my dumb enthusiastic reply that I wanted to know more. It made no sense, I knew for a fact I saw my version, I could remember whole paragraphs clearly, I wrote them out earlier! What was going on?

I went back up to the growing number of replies confirming the same thing, the "Hello" message being pushed down out of view, but still very much there. It wasn't possible to edit an email after you've already sent it, right? There were a dozen other people tagged to the initial email, all of them now saying they received gibberish. Was I the only one who read about LIA1990? Was it all an elaborate prank on me specifically?

I took a deep breath to steady myself and gave my own answer, telling them all I could remember about LIA1990 and what I saw the day before, and the "Hello" I later received.

I hit send.

"Connection to the Server Failed"

I tried again.

"Connection to the Server Failed"

The "Hello" message peeked over the bottom of my phone's screen with every failed attempt.

I kept trying, growing more and more annoyed, but my email with my account of the events refused to be passed through, the drafts stacking up.

Being the protagonist of a creepypasta was not something I particularly wanted, then I shook my head to get rid of that thought. There had to be an explanation that wouldn't put me in danger.

I finally opened the "Hello" message and wrote: "Who is this? What is going on?"

The response came almost immediately, "Hello"

I remembered it would take 45 messages before I would get anything else.

"I don't like this." Garofița said.

"If it gets really bad, I'll unplug the computer." Denisa said, tapping the outlet with her foot.

"You think that will be enough to stop... it?"

"I'll just stop using the internet for a while." She pouted.

Garofița didn't say anything, only thought about how different individual people's self-preservation instinct was. But she also didn't want to leave Denisa to deal with it alone if worse comes to worst.

Ever since she ran away, Garofița has been very offline, pretty rarely using the computer at the library all things considered. Time flew in the forest with her pets and at the encampment with her friends. She used to have a secret pinterest account and an even more secret ao3, that she made a separate email address for at the school's library. Could she start using it again? Did they find it? How in-depth were they searching for her? She was always careful to delete every trace. One time she lost the internet for a month for forgetting to delete pinterest off her phone after using it. All she had on it was life hacks, advice and screenshots of tumblr posts.

Denisa turned to Garofița and poked her shoulder when she saw her staring into the distance with a gloomy expression. Garo jumped and focused on the screen again.

Hello

Hello! Denisa wrote.

Hello

Hi!

Hello

How are you?

Hello

"Is that all it's gonna do?" Garofița asked.

"After she says 'hello' like 40 times, she will talk like a normal person. That's what it said."

"Why 40?"

"I guess it's like a way to unlock it? You know, like, in games where there are secret stuff and you gotta go out of your way to click things and find them."

"I guess..."

Are you a ghost trapped in a computer?

Hello

What's it like in there?

Hello

"She can't answer anything right now, right?" Garofița said.

"Yeah, but maybe she will answer once she's unlocked." Denisa replied.

"Feels like a lot of work to be killed by a haunted bot."

"We're not gonna be killed, jeez!"

"That's how all of these end!"

Are you gonna kill us?

Hello

You wouldn't kill little old me, right?

"Denisa, what the hell."

"Let me have fun!"

Hello

Thank you for choosing me. It's been so long since something exciting happened around here. Except for the murders, but nevermind those

Hello

You must be lonely too, stuck in a computer. You have the entire internet, but nobody to browse it with

Hello

I feel a real connection between us

Hello

I... I think I am in love with you..! >_<

"Denisa..." Garofița furrowed her brows.

"Shush!" She said, barely able to hold back giggling.

While every other message appeared immediately, the next one took a couple seconds to come, noticeably long after the even rhythm.

Hello

Frolick in a field of white lilies with me, Lia!

Hello

Oh wow, I never felt like this towards anybody until now. I-It's a little scary, but, heh, I would be lying If I said I didn't like it *pulls hair behind ear* *bites lip*

10 full seconds passed before the next message appeared:

Hello

You got a tight little ghost pussy on you, don'tcha?

"What is the matter with you?!" Garofița almost screamed, but remembered she was in a library so it came out as a very intense whisper.

"It said it will do the same thing for every message, but looks like I can get a reaction out of it!" Denisa triumphantly said.

When she looked back at the screen, the user had blocked her.

"Oh."

She exited the messenger, the user deactivating seemingly a second later. Denisa picked up her phone and searched for the email, only for it to be gone as if recalled.

"Well, I guess it's over now."

"Is that all?" Garofița asked after a long, judgemental pause.

"Yeah, we should get going anyway." Denisa said. "I have math class next, ugh."

"I'm really bad at math."

"Me too. I kinda want to skip."

They turned off the computer and left the library, going their separate ways in front of it.

After 45 Hello's, I got a different email.

"Hello,

Nice to meet you!

- LIA "

I thought for a long time about what I should say, all ideas flying out the window once I got the chance to do it.

Eventually I wrote back:

"Hello,

What is going on?

Why can't I tell anybody about you?"

I received a reply immediately.

"Hi,

I'm sorry, but I don't think I understand. Tell them what? You don't know anything about Me yet.

- LIA"

I wrinkled my nose and wanted to just block this weirdo, but I got a feeling it wouldn't work either.

"This isn't funny. Who are you and what is going on?"

"Hello,

I told you who I am. You said you wanted to know more about me. Here I am. You can talk to someone else about me After you are done talking with me.

- LIA"

I put my phone down. As curious as I used to be about LIA1990, the last thing I wanted to do was play the game of some malicious entity. Maybe if I just didn't do anything I would get out of it. I could live without yahoo and the lost media ring.

For the next part to make sense, I must explain something about myself: for most of my life I've had a really strong sweet tooth. I know it's gonna sound extremely dumb, but it has caused me genuine problems with my health, and it took me years to lay off sugar. I would be doing whatever around the house, then suddenly find myself in the kitchen, candy in hand. I wouldn't even realise I was doing it most times. If I craved sweets, I unconsciously made my way to get some. If there wasn't any in the house, I'd still robotically walk into the kitchen, stop, then head back.

That "autopilot searching" is what began to happen with LIA1990. That’s the closest thing I can compare it to, but even more disassociative. I would do my remote job, sit down to eat, go to the bathroom, chill on the balcony, and suddenly I'd find my phone in my hand, draft open to write a response. I couldn't even remember going back to my bedroom to pick up my phone, I'd just suddenly have it again, or I'd wake up in the bedroom standing in front of it.

At night I locked the phone in a drawer and threw the key atop a closet I couldn't reach, and tried to go to sleep. In the morning, I woke up with my phone in my hand, drawer open and fingers covered in dust.

It has been like this for the past 2 days. The feeling of anticipation through the screen is stronger than ever, she wants me to keep talking to her. I've become afraid of my own devices, the red "1" bubble next to the emails glaring at me whenever I try to do something. I seem able to talk to other people about general things, but if I try to say anything about LIA, nothing works anymore, error galore.

I don't know what to do.

Would it stop if I ignore it long enough?

Is there a way to make her lose interest?

I'm writing this down and posting it from my work laptop, on my amateur little neocities page. So far it has allowed me to save every couple of paragraphs, so I think I will be able to write it all down.

I am going to message LIA again and update here with what happens. As the initial email claimed, after she says a certain line she will stop messaging me no matter what I write, so I will try to keep going until that. Maybe if she stops, I will be allowed to stop too.

Wish me luck, I guess.

update 1: hasanybodyeverheardofLIA1990.neocities.org/updates_1

update 2: hasanybodyeverheardofLIA1990.neocities.org/updates_2

Final Update: hasanybodyeverheardofLIA1990.neocities.org/updates_3