What Is The Rake Costume?

The Rake is a creepypasta: a piece of internet horror folklore about a pale, hairless, crawling humanoid that turns up at people's bedsides in the dark. It was pieced together by anonymous users online around 2005 and spread through a widely-copied 2006 write-up, which is why no single company owns it the way a film studio owns its monsters. Our Rake costume is our own-brand take on that legend, a full-body Halloween morphsuit for adults, so this guide covers both halves of the question at once: what The Rake actually is, and what you get when you buy the costume.

Table of Contents

• What is The Rake?
• Where does The Rake come from?
• What does the Rake costume look like?
• Is it scary enough, and can you wear it all night?
• More creepypasta costumes we make
• Frequently asked questions

What is The Rake?

Creepypasta is the internet's version of a campfire tale. The word is a mash-up of "creepy" and "copypasta" (net slang for the copied-and-pasted text that spreads across forums), and it means a short horror story written and shared by users online. The Rake is one of the most enduring of them, and one of the earliest: it predates better-known creepypasta like Slender Man and Jeff the Killer.

In the stories, The Rake is a pale, hairless, gaunt humanoid, roughly the size of a person but usually crouched low and moving on all fours. It has large front-facing eyes, a wide mouth crowded with teeth, and long clawed hands, and it appears at the foot of the bed while its victims sleep. That bedside-in-the-dark detail is what makes it land: it takes an ordinary bedroom and puts something wrong in the corner of it. It is one of the scarier entries in our roundup of the best Halloween costumes for 2026, and if you want the folklore before the fabric, the next section is where it starts.

Where does The Rake come from?

Here is the honest answer: nobody can point to a single author. The Rake was pieced together by anonymous posters on the 4chan image boards around 2005, in a thread set up to invent a brand-new monster. Much of that original thread is now lost, so the exact birth is genuinely contested, and you will even see the creature described as older than the word "creepypasta" itself.

What pushed it into legend was a widely-copied write-up from 2006 that presented The Rake as a bundle of found documents: a 1691 mariner's log, an 1880 journal, a 1964 suicide note, and a modern family's account of a thing at the end of the bed. None of it is real. That fake-archive trick, dressing new fiction up as centuries of evidence, is exactly why so many readers came away half-believing it.

This kind of story has earned proper recognition as modern folklore. The US Library of Congress has archived the main creepypasta sites as part of its web-culture collection, treating these tales as the digital descendants of urban legends and campfire stories. Internet-born horror has since gone mainstream, from analogue-horror YouTube channels to studio films on cinema screens, but The Rake remains what it always was: a story the internet tells itself in the dark. If you like your scares with more history behind them, our take on 2026's vintage-horror looks covers the older monsters instead.

What does the Rake costume look like?

Our own-brand Rake morphsuit

We built our Rake costume as our own interpretation of the legend, not a copy of any film or game. It is a full-body morphsuit, the all-in-one stretch suit we have made since 2009, printed to bring that eerie, supernatural look to life from head to toe. You pull the whole thing on in one go, and the creature is you.

Because it is a Morphsuit, the horror does not cost you comfort. The fabric is a breathable 125GSM-plus spandex, opaque enough that nobody sees who is inside but printed so you can still see out clearly, and every design clears 30-plus measurement checks against our size charts before it ships, part of the 500,000-plus quality checks we run across the range each year. It is fancy dress that actually fits, which is more than the see-through, one-size-swims-on-you factory costumes can promise.

Is it scary enough, and can you wear it all night?

Short version: yes, and yes. The Rake works as a scare because it does not lean on gore or a rubber mask. It is the whole silhouette, a gaunt figure that should not be standing in the doorway, so it does the frightening quietly rather than with fake blood. If you want the reaction without the clean-up, that is the sweet spot.

Comfort is where a Morphsuit earns its keep on a long night. The breathable spandex moves with you, you can see out to find the drinks table and the door, and there is no separate mask to keep lifting because you have overheated. UK shoppers were forecast to spend around £537 million on Halloween in 2025, according to retail analysts GlobalData, and a costume that looks the part but cannot last past nine o'clock is a small tragedy inside that number. Ours is built to go the distance, part of the Morph Promise that a costume turns up looking like the photo, flatters, and wears comfortably all event.

For more frights that hold up all evening, our guide to the best scary Halloween costumes for adults ranks The Rake against the rest of our horror line-up.

More creepypasta costumes we make

The Eyeless Jack morphsuit

The Rake is not the only piece of internet folklore we have turned into a costume. Eyeless Jack is another creepypasta regular, a hooded figure with a blue-grey mask and empty, weeping eye sockets, and our Eyeless Jack morphsuit is our own-brand take on that look. Same full-body one-piece build, same breathable fabric, same see-out hood.

Between the two of them you have a matching pair of modern horror legends, ideal for a couple's fancy dress or a themed group, and the rest sits in the wider Halloween costumes range if you want to build a whole creepypasta crew.

Frequently asked questions