“Squidward's Suicide” is a chilling internet urban legend centered on a lost episode of the popular children's animated series “SpongeBob SquarePants,” in which the unlikable supporting character Squidward takes his own life.
"Squidward Suicide."
I used to be an intern at Nickelodeon Studios back in 2005. I worked on a few shows, but the one I spent the most time on was SpongeBob SquarePants. I was there during the production of season 4. While most people remember that season for being a bit lower in quality, there is one dark secret from that time that I've never been able to forget.
It was a normal day in the editing room. We were reviewing a batch of upcoming episodes that had just arrived from the animation core. Among them was an episode titled simply: "Squidward's Suicide" (though some production logs referred to it as "Red Mist").
At first, we thought it was just a sick joke played by one of the Korean animators or an internal placeholder title. The episode was handed to an editor named Bob, who loaded it up into the editing suite to check for audio sync and visual errors. I stood behind him, sipping my coffee.
The episode began with the standard title card, but something was off. The background music was a low, distorted, and incredibly slow rendition of the SpongeBob theme. Squidward was shown in his house, playing his clarinet terribly, just like in any normal episode. However, SpongeBob and Patrick's laughing from outside wasn't just annoying, it sounded strangely muted, high-pitched, and hollow.
Suddenly, the scene cut to Squidward playing a concert. The audience wasn't cheering; they were completely silent, staring blankly at the stage with dead, hyper-realistic eyes. As Squidward continued to play, the camera zoomed in closer and closer on his face.
That's when the audio changed entirely. Instead of the clarinet, a faint, agonizing sound filled the room, it sounded like a real person softly whimpering and crying. The animation quality suddenly dropped drastically. The colors became washed out, and the frame rate stuttered.
Squidward stopped playing. He dropped his clarinet and clutched his head, looking directly out of the screen. His eyes began to bleed, not in a cartoonish way, but with hyper-realistic, dark crimson blood that poured down his turquoise skin.
Then, the jumpscares began. Between frames of Squidward crying, terrifying, photorealistic flash-images of mutilated corpses and slaughtered animals flickered on the screen for a fraction of a second. They went by so fast that you could barely register them, but the psychological impact was instant. Bob froze in his chair, pale as a ghost.
The audio grew louder, a cacophony of unbearable, high-pitched screaming, weeping, and static. Squidward fell to his knees on the stage, pulling a heavy-duty shotgun out of nowhere. He looked directly at the camera with a look of pure, unadulterated torment and agony on his face.
Before anyone could react or stop the tape, a deafening gunshot blasted through the speakers. Squidward’s head blew apart in a horrific explosion of blood, tissue, and gray matter, splattering across the back wall of the theater stage. His lifeless body crumpled to the floor in a pool of dark red.
The screen cut to black.
For about ten seconds, absolute silence filled the editing room. None of us moved. None of us breathed. The tape continued to roll into static until finally, a low, demonic voice whispered quietly from the speakers:
"Red mist... the red mist shall come."
The tape ended.
Panic quickly set in. Supervisors were called immediately, and security confiscated the master tape. We were all sworn to absolute secrecy under strict non-disclosure agreements, threatened with immediate termination and legal action if a single word of what we saw ever leaked to the public.
To this day, I have no idea who actually made that animation or how it ever made it into the studio's pipeline disguised as a regular episode. Whenever I hear people talk about classic SpongeBob, my mind always drifts back to that dark room in 2005, and the terrifying image of Squidward looking straight through the screen before pulling the trigger.
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