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I always loved Webkinz. I’ve played it since around 2007 and basically loved everything about it, so it’s safe to say that I was definitely a Webkinz kid.
When Ganz released Mazin’ Hamsters within the virtual world back in 2010, it almost felt like its own standalone game. It still seemed really fun, though, and I begged my parents to get me one of the plush hamsters so I could play it.
A few months after the game came out, I got my first hamster: Presto (the blue one). I was finally able to start playing.
As the years went by, I grew to love Mazin’ Hamsters just as much as everything else in Webkinz. I played in other people’s mazes and even created my own, I explored the Challenge Zones in the Hamster Hamlet until I had discovered every secret, and every day after school I would play Gift Grab and Key Craze before raking in Moolah from Moolah Mountain.
But then.. something strange happened.
It was early 2015. I was playing Gift Grab one afternoon when I saw something hiding behind a tree in the distance. It was all black and I couldn’t tell what it was, just that it didn’t look like it belonged in the game, so I ignored the gifts for a moment to get a closer look. However, when I started moving my hamster towards it, it disappeared.
‘Weird.’ I thought to myself, ‘It was probably just a glitch.’
I didn’t see what I originally thought was a glitch again while finishing up Gift Grab and it was quickly forgotten once I started doing the other daily activities. A week later, though, I saw it again. This time I was just aimlessly wandering around the Lagoon Zone because it had my favorite music in the Mazin’ Hamsters soundtrack. This time.. I actually saw what the “glitch” was…
In the Lagoon, there was this secret door you could open and behind it was a red Moolah coin. I always got that coin ever since I found out how the secret worked and this time was no different. However, after I opened the door and went to the secret room, I saw something kind of disturbing.
There was a completely black hamster standing next to the coin.
It had no visible features, making it look like some kind of shadow hamster, but I could still see that it was staring at me. Whether it was staring at my hamster, or directly at me, that I couldn’t tell. I realized this was probably the weird “glitch” I saw when playing Gift Grab a week prior and I once again tried to approach it against my better judgement. Just like last time, it immediately vanished.
I wasn’t sure what was going on. Did Ganz put this hamster in the game as a prank? Was it actually just a bug or a glitch? Whatever it was, I decided to give it a name and stop calling them an “it”.
I named them Void.
I kept seeing Void in random places in the game over the course of a few months. Their appearances became more and more frequent during the summer and I even started seeing them in mazes and Moolah Mountain. I tried to tell people about them, but no one believed me. Everyone thought I was just making up a Webkinz creepypasta like The Webkinz Killer or something. It didn’t help that Void would always disappear when I got too close or tried to get a screenshot or video recording of them, so I was never able to show any proof of their existence.
I eventually gave up trying to tell people about Void. It wasn’t a big deal anyway, they never actually did anything that scary…
…until that one fateful day.
I was doing a Zum Roundup challenge in the Forest Zone when I saw Void again. I mostly ignored them as they stood there and watched me, figuring that they’d just disappear again if I walked up to them. After completing the challenge I panned the game’s camera around so that it was facing my hamster with Void staring at me in the background.
Just for fun, even though I knew it probably wouldn’t work, I tried to take a screenshot of the moment. Taking a selfie with a spooky looking NPC (or, alternatively, taking a picture with said NPC photobombing it) sounded kind of funny to me. As I was about to take the screenshot, Void suddenly did something they had never done before.
They began running straight for my hamster.
Something in my mind told me not to let them get to me, so I scrambled to get my fingers on my keyboard’s arrow keys and tried to find the Forest’s exit. I almost made it to the exit, but somehow Void was faster than the normal walking speed and they caught up to me. My screen suddenly froze when they touched my hamster and the background music stopped before the whole game crashed.
I had to log back into Webkinz after that, as the crash fully closed my browser. I was worried about what I’d find because that was probably the scariest thing I had ever experienced in either Webkinz or Mazin’ Hamsters. Thankfully, my account and everything else looked normal, even Mazin’ Hamsters. Nothing was missing or glitched, which I was relieved to see.
Because I was still a little shaken up, I logged back out of Webkinz and was about to turn off my computer until I saw something on my desktop that wasn’t there before. It was.. a screenshot? I opened it and my eyes widened at what I saw.
It was a real, fully intact screenshot of my hamster with Void running towards them.
Mazin’ Hamsters was shut down soon after my last encounter with Void. Ganz stated that the reason was because of the Unity plugin not being supported anymore, but I didn’t think that was the whole truth.
The timing was just too convenient.
They definitely knew about Void and tried to prevent any actual damage by getting rid of everything.
I tried telling people about Void again and I even showed the screenshot that I found on my computer, but I was accused of editing the image. Even with what I thought was good proof, no one believed me.
I could only hope that if someone found the game’s code and tried to remake everything, that they would be careful and not accidentally unleash a potentially dangerous entity that Ganz tried to hide…