Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of SPOOKY, including the Bestiary, field reports, discussion notes, evidence uploads, entity proposals, corrections, profiles, notifications, and moderation tools.

By using the archive, creating an account, filing a report, uploading evidence, proposing an entity, posting a note, corroborating a report, or otherwise contributing content, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the archive.

If you use the archive on behalf of an organization, you confirm that you are authorized to bind that organization to these Terms.

The archive is intended for adults. You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of legal majority where you live, to create an account or submit content.

Do not use the archive if you are barred from doing so under applicable law or if your account has been suspended or terminated.

SPOOKY is a public archive for paranormal encounter reports, folklore research, demonology references, community discussion, and original horror fiction. Reports are witness testimony and community submissions, not verified fact.

The archive is for documentation, discussion, and entertainment. It is not emergency, medical, psychological, legal, investigative, spiritual, religious, security, or safety advice.

If you believe you or someone else is in danger, contact emergency services or qualified professionals. Do not trespass, stalk, harass, break into property, interfere with investigations, perform unsafe rituals, ingest substances, or put yourself or others at risk because of anything you read here.

The archive may contain folklore, demonology references, alleged ritual accounts, wards, banishments, invocations, curses, spirit-contact claims, possession claims, exorcism references, and comments about supernatural practices. That material is provided only for documentation, criticism, research, discussion, or fiction.

The archive does not instruct, encourage, supervise, endorse, verify, sell, or participate in any ritual, summoning, banishment, curse, spell, exorcism, paranormal investigation, spiritual practice, or occult act. Nothing on the archive is religious, spiritual, medical, mental-health, safety, legal, or professional advice.

If a user chooses to perform, copy, adapt, test, rely on, or respond to any ritual, summoning, invocation, banishment, curse, investigation, challenge, comment, or alleged occult practice, that user acts entirely at their own risk and is solely responsible for any resulting injury, distress, property damage, legal violation, relationship harm, financial loss, or other consequence.

Users may not use reports, comments, evidence, proposals, profiles, or messages to pressure, dare, command, recruit, sell, or coordinate rituals, summoning attempts, exorcisms, trespass, harassment, self-harm, animal harm, violence, unlawful entry, stalking, or other unsafe conduct. The archive may remove or restrict such material at any time.

You are responsible for your account activity and for protecting access to your email account and one-time sign-in codes. Never share a sign-in code. Notify the operator if you believe your account or email access has been compromised.

You may not impersonate another person, misrepresent your affiliation, create accounts for abuse or evasion, scrape the archive at abusive volumes, interfere with the service, or attempt unauthorized access to accounts, systems, uploads, or data.

You are solely responsible for content you submit, including reports, stories, comments, proposals, corrections, corroborations, usernames, profile information, files, photos, audio, video, metadata, links, and any other material you provide.

You confirm that you have all rights, permissions, and consents needed to submit your content and to grant the license in these Terms. This includes permission from people who appear in uploaded evidence or whose personal information would be revealed.

Do not submit anything confidential, privileged, classified, private, commercially sensitive, or personally identifying unless you have the legal right to do so and are comfortable with it being handled under these Terms.

You keep ownership of content you own. By submitting content, you grant the archive a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, display, publish, distribute, modify for formatting, excerpt, moderate, remove, preserve, back up, analyze, and otherwise use that content to operate, improve, promote, and protect the archive.

This license lets the archive show your reports and notes, create previews and excerpts, attach content to entity dossiers or motif pages, preserve evidence with the related report, make safety or formatting edits, and keep reasonable backup or audit copies even if content is later hidden or removed.

For anonymous field reports, the public attribution may be withheld, but the archive may retain internal account linkage for moderation, corroboration, abuse prevention, legal compliance, and safety.

You may not submit, upload, link to, encourage, or use the archive to distribute content or conduct that is illegal, infringing, fraudulent, defamatory, threatening, harassing, abusive, exploitative, hateful, invasive of privacy, or intended to cause harm.

You may not submit non-consensual intimate imagery, sexual content involving minors, sexualized deepfakes, doxxing, personal addresses or phone numbers, gore posted for shock value, malware, credential theft, spam, scams, impersonation, instructions for violence or self-harm, or content designed to evade moderation.

Do not present fiction, hoaxes, manipulated evidence, AI-generated material, copied folklore, or third-party content as first-hand fact. Fiction belongs in the Creepypasta collection and should be labeled honestly.

You may not use the archive to coordinate harassment, trespass, stalking, vigilantism, dangerous investigations, occult or spiritual services offered as guaranteed outcomes, ritual dares, summoning attempts, exorcisms, curses aimed at real people, or any activity that puts people, animals, property, or evidence at risk.

Comments are user-generated speech. A comment describing or urging a ritual, summoning, invocation, banishment, or supernatural practice is not an instruction, endorsement, verification, or request from the archive or its operator.

Evidence uploads must relate to the report they accompany. You are responsible for ensuring that uploaded photos, audio, video, and files are lawful to share and do not violate another person’s privacy, publicity, copyright, trademark, or other rights.

The archive may process uploads for safety, storage, previews, thumbnails, metadata removal, format validation, malware or abuse review, moderation, and legal compliance. Metadata stripping may not remove every identifying detail, especially from non-photo files or details visible in the content itself.

The archive may reject, hide, delete, or restrict evidence at any time, including material that appears unlawful, unsafe, misleading, off-topic, exploitative, infringing, or inconsistent with these Terms.

The archive may review, label, edit for formatting, decline, move, hide, remove, preserve, or restrict content at any time, with or without notice. The archive may also suspend or terminate accounts, limit features, remove corroborations, or block access when needed to protect the service, users, third parties, or the operator.

Moderation decisions are not admissions that content is true, false, lawful, unlawful, safe, unsafe, verified, defamatory, or non-defamatory. The archive is not obligated to monitor all content, but may do so voluntarily.

Community flags, staff rulings, entity statuses, danger classes, labels, and archive notes are organizational tools. They are not guarantees, endorsements, professional findings, or safety determinations.

Respect copyright and other intellectual-property rights. Do not upload or post content you do not have permission to use, unless your use is lawful.

The archive may remove or disable access to material alleged to infringe rights and may terminate accounts of repeat infringers or users who repeatedly submit unlawful or rights-violating material.

For full U.S. DMCA safe-harbor protection, the operator should publish designated-agent contact information on the site and register that agent with the U.S. Copyright Office. Until a dedicated legal notice address is published, use the archive’s available reporting, flagging, or operator-contact channel for takedown concerns.

Public submissions may be visible to anyone. Usernames, display names, report text, comment text, entity proposals, public profile activity, corroboration counts, approximate locations, uploaded evidence, timestamps, and moderation labels may be public depending on the feature used.

Do not rely on the archive as private storage. Anonymous filing hides public attribution for qualifying field reports, but it does not make the report private and does not prevent internal review, legal compliance, abuse prevention, or safety-related access by the operator.

No online service is perfectly secure. You are responsible for minimizing sensitive details in anything you submit.

The archive may link to external sources, references, maps, evidence, or community materials. The archive does not control third-party sites and is not responsible for their content, availability, privacy practices, security, or accuracy.

You are responsible for your interactions with other users. The archive is not responsible for disputes, offline meetings, investigations, collaborations, payments, services, or communications between users.

The archive is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, reliability, availability, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, quiet enjoyment, security, spiritual efficacy, paranormal protection, ritual outcome, or supernatural result.

The operator does not promise that the archive will be uninterrupted, error-free, safe, free of harmful content, free of malware, legally compliant in every jurisdiction, or that any content will be preserved forever.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator and its owners, maintainers, staff, moderators, contributors, affiliates, service providers, and agents will not be liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, punitive, or enhanced damages; lost profits; lost data; reputational harm; emotional distress; personal injury; property damage; spiritual or supernatural claims; or claims arising from user content, evidence uploads, comments, rituals, summoning attempts, investigations, reliance on archive material, moderation decisions, service interruptions, unauthorized access, or third-party conduct.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator’s total liability for any claim relating to the archive or these Terms will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid to use the archive in the three months before the claim or US$100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some limits may not apply to you. In those cases, liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by law.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the operator and its owners, maintainers, staff, moderators, contributors, affiliates, service providers, and agents from and against claims, losses, liabilities, damages, judgments, penalties, fines, costs, and expenses, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, arising out of or related to your content, your evidence uploads, your use of the archive, your violation of these Terms, your violation of law, or your violation of another person’s rights.

The archive may change, suspend, or discontinue any feature at any time. The operator may update these Terms from time to time. Updated Terms apply when posted unless a later effective date is stated.

If you continue using the archive after updated Terms take effect, you accept the updated Terms. If you do not agree, stop using the archive.

These Terms are governed by the laws applicable where the operator is legally domiciled, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, unless mandatory consumer-protection law requires otherwise.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, disputes must be brought individually and not as a class, consolidated, representative, or private-attorney-general action. Any claim must be filed within one year after it arises unless applicable law requires a longer period.

Before relying on this section for a public launch, the operator should have counsel set the correct legal entity, jurisdiction, venue, arbitration preferences, and consumer-law carveouts.

For safety, abuse, privacy, copyright, or other legal concerns, use the reporting, flagging, or operator-contact channel made available with the archive deployment.

The operator should publish a dedicated legal notice email and, if eligible for U.S. DMCA safe-harbor protection, a registered DMCA designated agent before opening the archive to the public.