August has a particular hold on Whitby. In 1890, on the 8th of the month, an Irish holidaymaker named Abraham Stoker wandered into the town’s library and discovered the tale of a Wallachian prince known as the Devil — “Dracula”, in his native tongue.
Seven years later, in Stoker’s own book, August became the month a ship ran aground beneath Whitby’s eastern cliff. On board: Dracula as we know him, and with him, a gothic spell that still hangs over the town.
This August, that spell has conjured a new horror story, told this time not by a novelist, but by a ghoulish coven of TikTokers.
The facts, such as they are, run like this.
On Wednesday, 30 July, just after 7:15pm, a member of the public called North Yorkshire Police after seeing a man and woman in their 40s jump from the cliffs below Whitby Abbey. The next day, shortly before 1pm, a woman in her 60s fell from a cliff on the other side of town. Two days later, on Saturday 2 August, a woman in her 50s was found dead three miles away after another fall. The following afternoon, a man in his 30s was talked down from the clifftops above Whitby.
In other words, at the height of Whitby’s tourist season, four people fell to their deaths in as many days, with a fifth prevented from joining them.
In the days that followed, as the community mourned, local charities urged residents to “keep in mind families and loved ones of those” who had died, and to “avoid speculation before the facts are known”. The regional press, in response, ran brief reports about the incidents.
Online, however, and on TikTok in particular, speculation bloomed. With police declining to say more than that the deaths were not being treated as suspicious, a parade of true-crime and paranormal content creators turned their cameras on Whitby.
“We’re supposed to believe these deaths aren’t suspicious,” declared Carla, the Yorkshire-based creator of a viral video that racked up more than a million views and 50,000 likes. “That all four people accidentally fell or slipped. I’m not buying it.” Another video, shared more than a thousand times, was titled: “Reason to believe there’s a Yorkshire coast serial killer.”
In the comments, theories multiplied. Some fixated on the idea of a serial killer; others folded the deaths into a narrative of Britain’s “new crimewave”. Dozens announced they were now too afraid to visit Whitby. The next day, Carla hosted a live Q&A in which she explained that she had a degree in criminology.
Two weeks on, no serial killer has been found, and there is no indication of foul play. What has emerged instead is a more complicated story: about what happens when private tragedy collides with the content economy, and when a small seaside town becomes a backdrop for other people’s horror stories.
To tell it, I travelled to Whitby to speak with locals — and tracked down the TikTokers feasting on their trauma.
In the UK, reporting on suicide is bound by strict guidelines, both to spare families unnecessary distress and to reduce the risk of copycat behaviour. The cautionary example, still cited by media critics, is the coverage of dozens of suicides among young people in Bridgend, south Wales, in 2007 and 2008. Some reports speculated about “an internet suicide cult” and were accused of glamourising the deaths. At one point, police asked the media to stop covering the incidents altogether.
To prevent similar outcomes, journalists are encouraged to follow guidance from charities that support people at risk of suicide — most prominently, the Samaritans. Their advice is specific: avoid describing methods; do not name “hot spots”; steer clear of speculation about motives; resist sensationalist framing.
As a result, reporters, editors and even police statements often resort to euphemism. The word suicide is sidestepped in favour of saying a person “fell” to their death. To signal that they were not pushed, police often add the stock line: “The incident is not being treated as suspicious.”
At first, coverage of the Whitby deaths followed the usual pattern. In Yorkshire’s local media, reports carried long statements from police and charities, careful not to overstep. But as the story spread — largely through local titles owned by Reach, which circulates content between its outlets — inaccuracies crept in. A few hours after the fourth death, a story wrongly reporting “four deaths in three days” on Reach’s YorkshireLive website was republished in sister titles across the country, before being copied by the Metro and The Sun. MailOnline followed with a map of the incidents, but placed the fourth in the wrong spot: the caption correctly said Sandsend, a village up the coast, but the pin marked Whitby itself.
On TikTok, meanwhile, content creators were busy writing their scripts. The short-form video platform is now the most popular single source of news for teenagers in the UK, while roughly one in ten people of all ages use it for news.
In Whitby, locals told me how they — or their children or grandchildren — had watched videos about the incidents. In the comments on one TikTok, some residents tried to push back against the fear-mongering. “It ain’t suspicious,” one wrote. “How about people stop speculating and show the families some respect.”
Sara, known to her 350,000 TikTok followers as “sarasweirdworld”, has been posting for five years. Two years ago, the 33-year-old quit her job as a flight dispatcher at Teesside Airport — an hour’s drive from Whitby — to become a full-time creator. “It’s better than 12-hour shifts,” she says.
Once a TikTok creator reaches a certain — undisclosed — audience size, they can sign up to be paid through its Creator Reward Program. The amount depends on an opaque engagement-based metric called “RPM”, which factors in views, shares, and how long a viewer watches each video. “You can make thousands a month, easily,” Sara says. “A friend makes around £10,000, quite comfortably.” The work, she insists, is more involved than it looks: “A 30-second video could take four hours of research and scripting.”
Sara’s feed is heavy with true-crime stories — missing persons, murders — interspersed with occasional celebrity news. Earlier this year, she flew to New York to cover the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, where she talked her way into the courtroom. “I was the only UK TikToker in there,” she says proudly. She adds that the resulting videos covered the cost of her flights.
Sara’s fans appear heavily invested in her content. “If I’m covering a case, they’ll go on a mission to find all the law pages for me, all the case files, and send them over.” Their interest, she believes, stems from a decline in trust in legacy outlets. “The mainstream media don’t cover these stories — they rely on people like me to do that.” She cites a recent case in Alabama, involving an alleged paedophile ring, which she says went unreported by the American media. (The New York Times covered it here.)
Last Tuesday, Sara posted a video about Whitby titled: “4 bodies found on the bottom of the cliff in Whitby. Suspicious? 🤔”. In it, she describes the deaths, using the same incorrect map published by MailOnline. She ends by referring to the police statement: “How is this not suspicious?”
When I ask what she thinks police should say, given they are advised against drawing attention to suicides, she replies: “They could say the deaths are in no way linked.” When I point out the police have already said that several times, she claims she wasn’t aware.
I ask if her mistake is a result of the pressure to produce content at speed. “There’s pressure to create, yes — but I acknowledge where I’m wrong.” Yet a week later, she’s still to issue a correction. As we end the call, she says cheerily: “If you want any TikTok tips, hit me up.”
Sensationalism has a way of washing into Whitby. In 2021, Murdertown — a true-crime series fronted by One Show presenter Anita Rani — arrived to revisit a killing from nine years earlier. Currently, a book on “Whitby’s forgotten victims” sits atop Amazon’s “Pulp Thriller” bestseller list.
Yet for all its macabre associations, Whitby has largely escaped the decline that blights so many British seaside towns. There is poverty on the estates at the edge of town, but little of the severe deprivation that marks Blackpool to the west or Scarborough down the coast. Surrounded by moorland and buffeted by the North Sea, statistically, it is among the safest places in the UK.
Little appears to have changed since Stoker’s narrator Mina Harker first arrived. The old town’s houses are still “red-roofed” and “piled up one over the other”. Across the River Esk, the skeletal remains of Whitby Abbey still rise above the church that replaced it, along with a clifftop graveyard crowded with tombstones. The only addition is a sign on the church door: “Please do not ask staff where Dracula’s grave is. There isn’t one.”
Down in the town, amid the antique shops and the fug of fish-and-chip oil, Dracula is more tolerated. Children can buy ice cream drizzled in “vampire’s blood”. Shops sell vampiric Christmas ornaments. A “Dracula Experience” promises “female vampires with holographic nymphs”.
Kevin Dixon, now in his early 50s, grew up scrambling along Whitby’s cliffs, hunting for jet — the black gem he now sets into silver earrings and necklaces for a living. “After a storm, we’d go down to the beach and chisel at the fallen rock,” he says. In calmer weather, he would lower himself on a rope to mine it from the cliff face.
Like many shopkeepers, Kevin says the town has never been busier. “We’re open seven days a week,” he says, nodding to the crowd outside his door. The narrow street is jammed with tourists, most visiting for the day from elsewhere in the North East. “We make all our money in summer, then rest in the winter.”
No longer confined to the twice-yearly Goth Weekend, tourism has brought prosperity, but also strain. There is little parking in Whitby; two secondary schools were merged into one, allegedly to make way for a more tourist-focused development. “They didn’t have enough school lunches for everyone at the start,” Kevin says.
The biggest pressure is on housing. In 2021, Whitby recorded the second-highest house price rise of any UK coastal resort — 17% in a year, beaten only by Padstow in Cornwall. The following year, residents voted overwhelmingly for a rule that all new-build homes should be full-time primary residences. The council dismissed it as non-binding. Almost half the houses in the town are now second homes.
The result of this shift, as Alex Niven has noted, is that while Whitby may not seem like a traditional seaside “ghost town”, “the fact that both the owners and the workers in its economy increasingly live elsewhere means that its civic environment is, in one sense, just as hollowed-out”. Today, that shift is visible in the town’s slow drift towards a rootlessly gentrified resort. Alongside the fish and chip shops — one crowned the best in Britain by Rick Stein — are queues for two cafés selling gourmet Cornish pasties.
“We’re not going in there,” one local mother tells her son. “This isn’t fucking Cornwall — it’s Yorkshire.”
The parallels with Cornwall’s tourism crisis run deep. “The housing situation is impossible,” says Beth Brown who works in her family’s smokehouse, near the site of the first suicide. “People are being forced to move out — young people go away for university and can’t afford to come back. It’s the same problem as everywhere, but it doesn’t make it easier.”
Like many recent conversations in Whitby, ours turns to the recent deaths. Beth bristles. “The people behind those TikToks aren’t from here.” She points out that there were witnesses to the deaths, and calls the videos conspiratorial. Why are they being made? “To satisfy their egos.”
There’s a similar mood in the Whitby Fisherman’s Society — the quietest drinking hole in town. Tucked away in the old town’s warren, it offers £2 pints to members, a pool table, a dartboard, and plenty of empty chairs. The club is too weathered to appear postcards, but for its regulars — including the occasional fisherman — that’s part of the appeal.
“Everyone knows about the deaths and is upset,” says Tracy, the landlady. “It’s a shame that nobody knows what’s going on, but that’s no excuse for conspiracies.”
For the most part, though, her regulars have other concerns. Chris, in his 50s, is recovering from a stroke, which makes walking difficult. He has to take the bus from the edge of town: “But the last one’s at 5pm, and there’s nothing on Sundays.” Others complain about the lack of a dentist, or the fact that there are dozens of shops selling trinkets but no bank.
Even so, the conversation rarely stays downbeat. “We wouldn’t want to live anywhere else,” Tracy says.
Before I leave, she asks if I’ll write about the bar, and I promise I will. “Any publicity is good publicity,” she says, momentarily forgetting the videos we’d just discussed.
Their creators, meanwhile, left Whitby as quickly as they swarmed to it. Sara has moved on to a series about the world’s most haunted dolls, along with an update on Sean “Diddy” Combs being denied bail. Another, a man in his 20s with 600,000 TikTok followers, has started posting about human remains found on Blackpool beach.
In fact, the only user to post again about Whitby is Carla, no doubt chasing another 1.1 million views. Her focus, however, was not on the deaths, or her own factual errors, or the town itself. Instead, she berated a group of TikTokers who had stolen the audio from her viral video and shared it on their own channels.
“We are all here to make a bit of extra money,” she began, “but it takes nothing to come up with your own little spin on content.” At the very least, she says, they could have credited her.
As the video reaches its close, an exasperated Carla stares into the camera. “Am I a fucking idiot?” she asks. At the time of writing, the clip has 700 views.
Jacob Furedi is the editor of Dispatch.
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In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123.