A pale, hairless humanoid, roughly the size of a large dog when crouched, with elongated fingers and eyes set too wide. It is defined by proximity behavior: witnesses wake to find it at the foot of the bed, motionless, watching — and encounters end when it flees at inhuman speed on all fours.
The Rake originated as creepypasta, and the archive labels its literary genealogy honestly. What keeps the case open is the volume of independent reports — predating and postdating the 2005 posts — describing the same crouched pale figure, the same watching behavior, and the same aftermath: escalating dread, insomnia, and the sense of having been selected.
Whether the fiction described something that already existed, or something answered to the description, is a question the archive is not equipped to close.