The screen is almost completely black.
No graphics.
No music.
No character standing in front of you waiting for instructions.
Just a few lines of text glowing on an old computer monitor.
You’re standing in a dark room.
Moonlight comes through the window.
Nearby are three objects:
Gold.
A shovel.
A rope.
There’s a door to the east.
That’s it.
You type a command.
The game responds.
You move through the door and eventually reach a forest where paths disappear into different directions.
Choose the wrong one…
and the computer crashes.
Not the game.
The entire computer.
You reboot and try again.
Another wrong turn.
Another crash.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Most people would have thrown the disk away.
According to the legend, that’s exactly what almost everyone did.
But one player didn’t.
His name was Michael Nevins, and he became convinced there was something hidden inside the strange little game.
So he kept playing.
For more than five hours.
Thirty-three screens.
Countless crashes.
Until finally, the words on the screen changed.
There were no more paths.
The ground was soft.
And the game seemed to be telling him that this was the place.
Michael eventually figured out what it wanted him to do.
Dig a hole.
Put the gold inside.
Fill the hole.
The screen changed one final time.
Congratulations.
Then two numbers appeared.
Coordinates.
Michael looked them up.
They pointed to a remote area inside Lassen Volcanic National Park in California.
Most people would have stopped there.
Michael grabbed a shovel.
And according to the story…
he went looking for whatever Pale Luna had buried.
The Lost Game Known as Pale Luna
Long before people could download a game in seconds, getting new software could be a little more complicated.
During the 1980s, computer enthusiasts sometimes traded programs on floppy disks. Friends copied games for friends. Hobbyist programmers created their own games and passed them around. A strange little program could travel from computer to computer without ever appearing on a store shelf.
According to the legend, Pale Luna circulated this way around the San Francisco Bay Area.
It never became popular.
Quite the opposite.
People supposedly hated it.
Pale Luna was a text adventure, the kind of game where everything happened through written descriptions and typed commands. There were no elaborate graphics to tell you where to go. If the game told you there was a door to the east, you typed a command telling your character to go east.
Games like Zork had made the format popular.
Pale Luna apparently made it miserable.
The game accepted very few commands. Most choices led nowhere. Worse, choosing the wrong direction supposedly caused the computer to freeze completely, forcing the player to restart the machine.
Then you had to begin again.
No convenient autosave.
No helpful checkpoint.
Just another black screen.
Another command.
Another chance to get it wrong.
Most players reportedly decided the game was simply badly programmed and nearly impossible to play.
Copies were thrown away.
Disks were lost.
Computers were replaced.
Eventually, according to the story, Pale Luna almost completely disappeared.
But before that happened, one player decided he was going to beat it.
Michael Nevins Plays Pale Luna
Michael Nevins apparently had something Pale Luna required more than skill.
Patience.
Every time the computer crashed, he restarted it.
Then he remembered which direction had caused the crash and tried another.
North.
Crash.
Restart.
West.
Crash.
Restart.
East.
Continue.
Slowly, Michael began mapping his way through the game.
One correct decision at a time.
The process reportedly took five hours and thirty-three screens before something finally changed.
The endless forest stopped.
The game told him there were no paths.
Then a strange message appeared repeatedly:
Pale Luna smiles wide.
The ground was soft.
And one final word appeared.
Here.
Michael had reached something.
The question was what the game expected him to do.
Pale Luna’s Final Puzzle
Michael still carried the same three objects he’d encountered near the beginning.
The gold.
The shovel.
The rope.
Throughout the game, attempts to use them had produced strange or useless responses.
Now he began experimenting.
Eventually, according to the story, he discovered the correct sequence.
Dig a hole.
Drop the gold.
Fill the hole.
The screen responded immediately.
The game congratulated him.
Then it displayed:
40.24248
-121.4434
Nothing else happened.
No ending.
No explanation.
No final message revealing what Pale Luna actually meant.
The game simply stopped accepting commands.
Michael had spent hours trying to solve it, and his reward was two strings of numbers.
Then he realized what they looked like.
Latitude and longitude.
Coordinates.
And when Michael checked where they led, the story took a turn that transformed Pale Luna from a frustrating old computer game into an internet horror legend.
The coordinates pointed toward Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California.
Somewhere out in the forest.
Following the Game Into the Woods
Michael could have stopped.
He had technically beaten the game.
Maybe the coordinates were a joke.
Maybe the programmer had chosen them randomly.
Maybe there was nothing there at all.
But after spending hours fighting his way through Pale Luna, Michael wanted to know.
So the next day, he headed toward the coordinates.
And he brought a shovel.
As he made his way through the forest, something reportedly began to bother him.
The route felt familiar.
Turns along the trail seemed strangely similar to the directions he’d followed inside Pale Luna.
Left.
Right.
Another turn.
Deeper into the trees.
The game had made him wander through a virtual forest.
Now he was walking through a real one.
Eventually, Michael reached the location indicated by the coordinates.
The ground looked disturbed.
He started digging.
At first, he apparently expected treasure.
After all, the game had made him bury gold.
Maybe its creator had hidden something for the first person stubborn enough to reach the end.
Michael pushed the shovel into the earth.
Again.
And again.
Then he uncovered something that wasn’t gold.
Human remains.
What Were Pale Luna’s Coordinates Hiding?
According to the Pale Luna story, Michael uncovered the badly decomposed head of a young girl.
He immediately contacted authorities.
The remains were supposedly identified as belonging to 11-year-old Karen Paulsen, a girl who had disappeared from San Diego approximately a year and a half earlier.
The rest of her body was never found.
And suddenly the strange choices inside Pale Luna seemed much darker.
The shovel.
The hole.
The buried gold.
The endless path through the forest.
The coordinates.
Had someone created an entire computer game simply to lead another person to a grave?
And if so…
was the programmer responsible for what Michael found there?
Authorities supposedly tried to trace the creator of Pale Luna, but the informal software-swapping circles through which the game had traveled made its origin almost impossible to determine.
The trail ended.
Just like the game.
And according to the legend, whoever created Pale Luna was never identified.
Where Did Pale Luna Come From?
That’s one of the questions that makes the story work so well.
No company supposedly released Pale Luna.
There was no recognizable developer attached to it.
No glossy box.
No instruction manual.
Just copies of copies passed between computer enthusiasts.
Someone received a disk from a friend.
That friend got it from someone else.
Keep following the chain backward and eventually…
nobody remembers where the first copy came from.
The legend claims every known original copy eventually disappeared.
Some were deliberately thrown away because the game was so frustrating.
Others vanished along with the aging computers and floppy disks of the era.
That meant there was supposedly no original program left to examine.
Only the story.
And two coordinates.
The Legend of Pale Luna Spreads Online
Eventually, the story of Pale Luna found its way online.
In 2011, a version credited to Mikhail Honoridez began circulating as a creepypasta, introducing a new generation of readers to the strange lost game, Michael Nevins, and those coordinates in the California wilderness.
But the story didn’t stay confined to message boards and horror sites.
People began recreating the game.
Playable versions appeared online, allowing curious gamers to experience their own version of the mysterious text adventure. One Flash adaptation was released on Kongregate in December 2011 and openly described itself as a game based on the creepypasta.
Years later, another downloadable version appeared claiming that an original Pale Luna floppy disk had surfaced in San Francisco in 2020. That version describes itself as the closest thing to a recovered build, adding yet another strange chapter to the growing Pale Luna mythology.
And perhaps that’s fitting.
A story about a game passed anonymously from person to person eventually created real games passed from person to person.
The legend produced the very thing it claimed had disappeared.
Why Pale Luna Still Works
Compared with later haunted-game creepypastas, Pale Luna is surprisingly restrained.
There are no bloody characters suddenly staring through the screen.
No demonic face appears on the monitor.
The computer doesn’t know the player’s name.
Nothing crawls out of the game.
Pale Luna simply gives you directions.
That’s what makes it creepy.
The horror doesn’t happen inside the computer.
The game sends you somewhere else.
Imagine discovering an old floppy disk today.
You somehow get it running.
The game is terrible.
It crashes constantly.
But something about it keeps bothering you, so you continue.
Hours later, two coordinates appear.
You put them into your phone.
They’re real.
Not another country.
Not somewhere thousands of miles away.
They’re close enough to drive to.
And suddenly you’re faced with the same decision Michael supposedly made.
You could turn off the computer.
Throw away the disk.
Forget you ever saw those numbers.
Or…
you could grab a shovel.
Similar Gaming Legends
Killswitch
According to one of gaming’s strangest legends, Killswitch was an obscure game released in extremely limited numbers before mysteriously disappearing. Players supposedly had to choose between two characters, but the game’s strangest secret involved what happened when someone finally tried to document a complete playthrough.
Petscop
A seemingly unfinished PlayStation game became the center of a sprawling internet mystery after videos began appearing online showing increasingly disturbing areas hidden beneath its cheerful surface. The deeper the player went, the less Petscop seemed like an innocent children’s game.
NES Godzilla Creepypasta
What begins as someone playing an old Godzilla cartridge gradually becomes something far darker when unfamiliar monsters, impossible levels, and disturbing images begin appearing in a game that shouldn’t contain them.
Ben Drowned
A supposedly haunted copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask begins behaving strangely after its new owner discovers a save file belonging to someone named Ben. Soon, glitches and unsettling messages suggest something inside the cartridge knows it’s being watched.
Final Thoughts
Most haunted-game legends warn you about what might happen if you keep playing.
Pale Luna asks a different question.
What happens when the game ends?
According to the story, Michael Nevins could have stopped the moment those coordinates appeared.
He didn’t.
He followed the game’s directions into a real forest carrying the same tool Pale Luna had placed in his virtual hands.
A shovel.
And when he reached the end of the path, he supposedly discovered why the game had sent him there.
Maybe that’s why Pale Luna remains memorable among so many lost-game stories.
The screen itself isn’t frightening.
It’s just words.
Directions.
Numbers.
But numbers can point somewhere.
So if you ever find an old game no one remembers making, and after hours of playing it suddenly gives you a set of coordinates…
you might want to let someone else find out what’s buried there.
About the Author
Karen Cody is the creator of Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth, a blog exploring eerie folklore, strange history, and the mysteries behind the world’s most chilling stories. From haunted places and supernatural creatures to ghost stories, horror films, and modern myths, she examines the legends—both ancient and modern—that continue to fascinate and frighten us.
© 2026 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.