The Template: A Squarespace Designer’s Horror Story

Preface by Stephen King (probably)

There’s a special kind of horror in the digital age. Not the kind that comes from fanged things under the bed or masks in the woods. No, this horror hides in source code, flickers in dead pixels, whispers in metadata. It's the fear of losing what you've built—not just a document or a project, but a piece of yourself you’ve fed into the machine.

What you’re about to read isn’t just a ghost story. It’s a cautionary tale. A bloody post-it stuck to your creative process. Because what if the tools you use every day—your templates, your plugins, your precious drag-and-drop—remember everything you do? What if they don’t like it?

So, reader, keep your fingers off Ctrl+C. Don’t lift that line of code. And for God’s sake, never preview a site called “Sacrifice.”

You’ve been warned.

—S.K.

Chapter One: Check-In

"Welcome to Template Hill," croaked the old woman behind the reception desk. Her skin looked like old parchment, her fingers knotted like a tree’s roots. She didn’t blink. Not once. Rain hammered the windows behind her as the group of designers dripped onto the faded welcome mat, dragging gear cases and laptop bags like weary pilgrims.

"Template Hill?" Jamie, always the sceptic, squinted at the wooden sign above the desk. It read ‘Mountain Lake Design Retreat’ in flaking gold leaf. "I thought this was—"

"It is," the woman interrupted. Her voice was brittle, dry. "But the hill’s true name is older than the website. Older than Squarespace."

Tess, team leader and founder of Woven & Wired Studios, offered a forced chuckle. "Well, we’re here for the full retreat package. Seven days, total immersion. No emails. No distractions. Just creativity, nature, and pure design."

As she spoke, her eyes kept flicking—almost involuntarily—to Jules. He noticed. He always did. There’d been something between them once: a late-night pitch, too many espressos, a moment too close by a printer jammed with labels. Nothing happened. But the air around them still crackled with 'almost'.

They filed in behind her: Jules, a Helvetica Neue purist who once redesigned a yoga studio site in eight shades of grey and considered it a masterpiece; Marcus, a brooding developer who wore dark jumpers in summer and once claimed he could style emotion using nothing but CSS; Hannah, introverted and intense, whose design files were organised like military campaigns; and Benji—the intern—whose boundless optimism and terrifying lack of technical knowledge made him both loveable and a liability.

Benji had somehow plugged his laptop into a toaster. Not metaphorically—a literal toaster. “It’s ergonomic,” he explained, proudly. “And it keeps my hands warm.”

"Oh, brilliant," muttered Marcus, "we’ve brought a sandwich press to a spectral showdown."

The cabin was huge and decaying, an old summer camp from the 1980s with leftover bunk beds and mouldy banners still proclaiming 'Camp Imaginaria 1987'. The Wi-Fi flickered like candlelight. Every floorboard creaked as though in pain. And it smelled like someone had tried to clean mildew with lemon-scented sadness.

But the team didn’t care. They had a mission: to finish their Squarespace template pack and launch Camp Pixel, their own collective. This retreat was the culmination of months of work—branding exercises, positioning strategies, even moodboarding retreats like this one. Camp Pixel would be their answer to saturated, soulless design kits. Bespoke. Honest. Human.

What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter Two: Broken Links

The rain didn’t let up. By the second night, the woods around Template Hill had turned into a swampy moat, and their phone signals had dwindled to one bar of hope and a buffering emoji. Inside, the cabin buzzed with a kind of caffeinated intensity. Laptops glowed in the shadows like devotional candles. Post-it notes bloomed on every surface.

Each designer had claimed a corner of the cabin like settlers in a pixelated frontier. Jules had created a fortress of minimalism, a desk curated down to a Moleskine, two pens, and a mug that read “Helvetica Is My Love Language.” Marcus lurked in near-darkness, typing as if summoning something. Hannah’s workstation looked like an architect’s dream—precise, clinical, and a little frightening.

Benji had taken over the kitchen table. Beside his toaster-laptop combo sat a tangle of adaptors, USB sticks, and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. He had a cup of tea with so much milk it looked more like beige regret.

“Designers,” Tess called out, trying to strike a cheery tone, “we’ve got five days left and a world to brand. Let’s channel our inner Don Drapers—without the chain-smoking and emotional repression.”

Jules smirked at that. Tess caught it and flushed. They hadn’t spoken properly since last year’s agency Christmas party, where they’d ended up locked in a stairwell together. The elevator had been out. That wasn’t a euphemism—but it very nearly had been.

Then, without warning, Jules’s screen glitched.

He was adjusting the banner video on a demo site for a personal trainer—big fonts, lots of sweat—when the screen blinked to static.

Then black.

And then, in grey text that looked like it had been typed by a particularly passive-aggressive ghost:

404: Something is coming.

“Charming,” he muttered.

Marcus appeared behind him like a Victorian haunting. “You tripped the cache, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t trip anything. It just—”

Tess joined them. “Squarespace auto-saves everything. Try restarting. Maybe the router's feeling emotional.”

Jules tried. The screen stayed black. The site was gone. Every page. Every image. Vanished like unpaid invoices.

Benji popped his head up. “Maybe it’s one of those ghost plugins. You know, like haunted extensions? I read a Reddit thread—”

“Benji, mate,” Marcus said, rubbing his temples. “You once tried to design a contact form in Excel. Maybe sit this theory out.”

Jules exhaled sharply. “My whole project’s disappeared.”

Tess looked at the error message again. She didn’t say what she was thinking—but the room suddenly felt colder.

“Unless…”

“Unless what?”

She didn’t answer.

Not yet.

Chapter Three: The Source Code

Marcus didn’t believe in ghosts. But he did believe in cursed interfaces. He’d once debugged a WordPress site that played a Gregorian chant whenever someone typed in the contact form. He still woke up humming it sometimes.

That night, long after the others had shuffled off to bed—Benji with a full stomach of toast, Jules still replaying a moment when Tess’s hand had accidentally brushed his—Marcus was still at it. His moody apothecary theme was nearly done. Herbal green, ancient parchment textures, slow fade transitions. It was as close to poetry as HTML allowed.

And then he saw it.

"You are not alone." (appeared as embedded code)

He stared. He hadn’t typed it. He definitely hadn’t written it with a “u.”

He deleted the line. Saved. Closed the laptop.

The room groaned, as if the cabin itself disapproved. Then, from nowhere, static. Faint, like the sound of a television confessing its sins.

He turned toward the bunkroom mirror.

Green terminal code scrolled across the glass:

You copied. You pasted. You stole from The Template.

Marcus leaned in, heartbeat thudding.

You built without permission.

The lights popped. His screen hissed. Something wet and wrong crackled through the air like a soggy ethernet cable in a thunderstorm.

He whispered, “Not possible…”

But it was.

The next morning, Marcus was gone.

His bunk untouched. His laptop oozed static. His notes—once filled with sketches and styling plans—now bore only one phrase, scratched over and over:

You can’t unpublish what’s buried.

Benji clutched a half-buttered crumpet. “Maybe he just nipped out for oat milk?”

“Without his laptop?” Tess muttered. “Not Marcus. He’d sooner forget trousers.”

Jules nodded grimly. “Something’s wrong. And it’s not just bad Wi-Fi anymore.”

The group stood in silence. Somewhere in the walls, a hard drive was spinning that no one could locate.

Outside, the storm began again.

Chapter Four: The Plugin

The storm had evolved from ‘cosy writing weather’ to ‘nature’s wrath against digital creativity.’ Thunder rolled, lightning cracked—and the router blinked like it was about to file a complaint with IT.

But Marcus didn’t return.

They found his bunk empty. His laptop was hot to the touch. And his neatly annotated CSS notes had become a chaotic sprawl of red ink that simply read:

You can’t unpublish what’s buried.

Benji, ever the optimist, clutched his reusable water bottle. “Maybe he went into the woods for clarity. That’s a thing, right?”

Jules raised an eyebrow. “With no shoes? And leaving his laptop behind? Marcus wouldn’t go to the bathroom without his MacBook.”

Tess said nothing. Just stared at the code still on Marcus’s screen. Her fingers hovered above the trackpad—but didn’t touch.

Instead, she turned to the others. “Okay. I don’t want to alarm anyone—”

“Too late,” muttered Hannah.

“—but something is off. Jules’s files disappeared. Marcus is missing. And none of our projects are syncing. It’s like we’re stuck in... I don’t know. Local cache limbo.”

Benji frowned. “You mean like a haunted offline mode?”

“Exactly,” said Jules. “We’re ghosts in the machine. Only the machine’s a bit passive-aggressive and may want us dead.”

“Could be worse,” said Benji, trying to lighten the mood. “At least no one’s tried to sell us an NFT.”

Hannah sat down slowly, staring at her laptop. “I found something earlier. On Marcus’s backup drive.”

She pulled it up.

A folder named: T9

Inside: a shell of a site. Pages titled Founder, Process, Gallery, and... Sacrifice.

They all exchanged looks.

“Should we open it?” asked Benji.

“No,” said Jules. “Which means we’re obviously going to.”

Hannah clicked ‘Preview’ on Sacrifice.

The screen filled with corrupted assets—Latin phrases in fading serif fonts, broken templates stitched together like Frankenstein’s wireframe. At the bottom, the cursor blinked.

Then Hannah’s webcam light switched on.

She slammed the lid shut.

“Tess,” she said, pale, “we need to leave. Now.”

They all stood.

The lights flickered.

Outside, the wind howled through the trees like a deployment gone wrong.

Chapter Five: Template-9

The screen on Jules’s laptop pulsed gently—like it was breathing. A new tab had opened by itself. The URL read: template9.squarespace.com/returning, which should’ve been impossible. Squarespace didn’t allow subdomains like that. Or at least, it hadn’t yesterday.

Benji peered over Jules’s shoulder. “That’s not normal, right? Because I once accidentally launched a landing page from my pizza delivery receipt, but this looks worse.”

Jules ignored him and clicked.

The page loaded slowly, like dragging a wet sponge across an old CRT screen. It was grayscale, glitchy, with fonts that jittered between Times New Roman and something that might have once been Comic Sans before it took up smoking behind the gym.

A title blinked at the top of the screen:

Return to the Source.

Tess leaned closer. Her shoulder brushed Jules’s. He noticed, and in a brief moment, their old stairwell chemistry flared. Even now, even here.

But the moment passed. The page scrolled.

It was a gallery—if you could call it that. Dozens of links, each labelled with a designer’s name and studio. Tess gasped.

She pointed. “Marcus.D.88.”

Hannah clicked it before anyone could stop her.

The screen glitched. Then it began playing a grainy video—Marcus, in the very cabin, muttering over his keyboard. The audio was garbled, like someone whispering through a mouthful of binary. Behind him, something tall and angular moved in the shadows. Not quite human. Not quite real.

The screen went black.

Then:

Plugin Activated: Archive Mode

“Right,” said Benji, who had silently backed halfway toward the kitchen. “I vote we unplug everything, burn it all, and go live in a field. I’ll build a hut. I’ve got string.”

Tess, unnerved but focused, nodded toward Jules. “We need to fight this. Not just survive it. We need to overwrite whatever this is.”

“You mean… build something new?” he asked.

“No. Build something original.”

For a heartbeat, no one spoke.

Then Jules straightened. “Let’s design like it’s 1999. No templates. No shortcuts. Just blood, sweat and semicolons.”

Benji sniffled. “I’ll make tea.”

They gathered their laptops, except Marcus’s, which hissed like a disgruntled kettle. In the silence that followed, they felt the storm outside pause—as if the building itself was listening.

Chapter Six: Going Offline

They packed fast. The kind of fast you only get when you’ve either triggered a paranormal digital collapse or forgotten your wallet in Wetherspoons. Cords were yanked, drives pocketed, bookmarks left to their doom.

But the fog outside had grown thick as DNS errors. There was no road. No signal. Their phones were as useless as a designer’s degree in a stakeholder meeting.

Benji opened Google Maps. It laughed at him and redirected to something else entirely:

thearchive.squarespace.com

“Oh great,” he said. “We’ve gone full cursed subdomain. Should I try Bing?”

“No one’s ever tried Bing, Benji,” muttered Hannah.

The site was ancient, pixelated, haunted by deprecated fonts and looping GIFs of designers mid-scream. Every link led to a mangled portfolio, a corrupted case study. One client testimonial read:

“She redesigned our charity site. Now she haunts the donation form.”

Benji dropped his phone. “Nope. Nope dot com. With a forward slash panic.”

Tess’s face paled. “It’s a gallery. A curated feed of every designer it’s consumed. Template-9 isn’t a bug—it’s a parasite. It evolves by stealing. Templates. Layouts. Ideas.”

Jules stared at his screen, which now displayed nothing but a spinning loader and the phrase:

You are already archived.

Hannah let out a small whimper. Her gallery site had turned—each smiling client photo was now her face. Empty-eyed. Staring back. One blinked.

She ran.

Through the door. Into the fog.

They heard her footsteps fade. Then nothing.

Benji backed into the corner. “I swear if this ends in a popup asking me to subscribe to a newsletter—”

Tess turned to Jules. Her voice was calm, steady. “I think there’s still a way. If we build something that’s truly ours. No copy-paste. No references. No inspiration boards. Just... design.”

Jules met her eyes. “You mean the old way?”

“No,” she said. “The right way.”

A pause.

“Okay,” he nodded. “Let’s code like it’s the end of the world.”

Benji sighed. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

And outside, the fog swirled like a spinning preloader.

Chapter Seven: Revisions

Tess and Jules sat cross-legged on the cabin floor, the last working laptop glowing between them like a campfire for code. The others were gone. Just the two of them now—one reluctant leader, one reluctant flirt. And Benji, brewing emergency tea like a good lad in the background.

“We’ve got one shot,” Tess said. “We build something original. No templates. No fancy plugins. Just instinct.”

“Bit like our first client project,” Jules said. “Back when you still thought Comic Sans was ironic.”

Tess smirked. “Back when you thought romance meant emailing me moodboards.”

They grinned. Then typed.

Homepage: A single phrase in serif type.

About: A bio written in reverse Morse code, rendering Google Translate completely useless.

Services: Just one—Unpublish the evil.

Contact: A map leading to nowhere. The middle of a forest. Or maybe a field in Essex. No one would ever be sure.

The cursor blinked. The air thickened.

Jules reached to click ‘Publish.’

The button flickered between ‘Go Live’ and ‘Goodbye.’

He hovered. Then clicked.

A low hum filled the cabin. The screens blinked. The router stopped blinking—mercifully. Even Benji stopped mid-pour, holding a teabag above a chipped mug as the room filled with warm, golden silence.

Outside, the storm finally died.

The fog lifted.

CampPixel.org went live. Unbranded. Unbothered. Pure.

They exhaled.

Then, quietly, Tess bumped her shoulder against Jules’s. He didn’t pull away.

“I liked your tagline,” she said.

“I liked your layout structure,” he replied.

Benji appeared between them with three cups of tea.

“Right,” he said. “What’s next? Design an exorcism form?”

“Not today,” Tess smiled. “Today we rest.”

And for a few minutes, they did.

Chapter Eight: Cache Cleared

Sunlight poured through the windows like a blessing from a higher, less pixelated power. The storm was gone. The fog had vanished. Somewhere in the distance, birds chirped as though nothing had ever happened. Which, to the outside world, was technically true.

Inside, Camp Pixel had survived. Or at least, what was left of it.

Tess and Jules stood at the top of the gravel path, watching the last clouds retreat like embarrassed party guests. The air was fresh. Too fresh. Suspiciously fresh.

The old woman from the front desk reappeared, shuffling along as though she’d never left.

“Productive week?” she asked, eyes glinting with something older than broadband.

Tess nodded. “We built something new. Something that couldn’t be stolen.”

The woman’s lips twitched. “Very rare, that.”

She wandered off, humming something that sounded oddly like a dial-up tone in a minor key.

Later that day, Tess and Jules loaded their gear into the car—well, what gear remained. Benji had disappeared somewhere between the tea caddy and the fuse box, muttering about converting to analogue design using pasta shapes and a laminator.

As they drove down the hill, neither spoke for a while.

Then Jules said, “You know… if we survive the week, maybe we could finally grab that drink we keep not mentioning.”

Tess smiled without looking. “One condition: no laptops.”

“Deal. I’ll even switch off my phone.”

“My God,” she teased. “A man of commitment.”

Back in London, the site launched. CampPixel.org was clean. Bold. It had no analytics, no plugins, no third-party fonts. It did one thing, and did it perfectly: it stood alone.

Designers started sharing it. Some praised its purity. Others thought it was satire. A few tried to inspect the code.

Most left it alone.

Except one.

A junior designer named Riley. Fresh out of uni. Eager. Desperate to impress a client. He copied a snippet of hover code from the site’s footer—just a neat little underline animation.

His screen flickered.

The cursor locked.

And in the console, faintly:

"Welcome to Template-9" (displayed in browser console)

His webcam turned on.

He hadn’t opened it.

At first, he thought it was a prank. Then his project files started rearranging themselves. Testimonials changed tone. One read:

“Riley gave us the perfect site. Then he vanished.”

He unplugged his laptop. It stayed on.

Somewhere, deep in the Archive, a folder with his name zipped open. Riley.jpeg blinked into being.

And in a forgotten footer, one line of code changed colour.

Welcome to Template-9