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I’m sure that, once upon a time, you heard about the so-called “Benadryl Challenge,” and that it originally started on TikTok. I’ve never tried TikTok, but my intuition suggests I ought to share this alongside other articles about online phenomena.
This article is, of course, about drug abuse. Guess what? The “Benadryl Challenge” actually has online cultural roots going back much further than TikTok, sadly. They brush up against some of the worst online haunts of the 2000s, too.
I’m going to talk about my encounters with these people and places here. I won’t discuss any medical dangers in any level of detail. Those should be self-evident when you hear “700mg of Benadryl.” They are not something a layperson like myself can articulate. People just assume the risk is worth these horrible experiences people are having for some reason. They aren't, but hopefully you realize that already without my warning.
The culture, and in particular the early culture, surrounding this hasn’t been documented much, though. So I’m writing about it. Hopefully it will convince someone not to make a mistake, but we’ll see. This article draws heavily from an earlier one that was posted in a spiritual venue to which I no longer belong. Regardless, I stand by everything present in it, because this is true, real, did happen, is happening, and shouldn’t be a thing.
I have some knowledge about this topic, mostly because of a relative of mine. I won’t name them! They’re the only other 4channer to sprout from my family tree, curiously enough. Channers aren’t actually all that common, and the ones who get this deep are rare.
The above image is a reference to online legends and lore concerning Benadryl (also known as diphenhydramine or just DPH). If it doesn’t already make sense to you, it will by the time you’ve finished reading this article, unfortunately! Benadryl is a common allergy medication, also used as a sleeping pill. It’s sold in formulations of 25mg to 50mg, but the bottles (in America, at least), always looked huge.
The 25mg pills are distinctively bright pink. The 50mg ones are a deep blue. Pictures of both got posted on sites like 4chan and 420chan in the late 2000s. These chan-style sites copied the popular format of Japanese-language imageboards. They allowed a user to post a picture (typically paired with a message) anonymously. The sites included mechanisms for persistent identification called tripcodes, though they weren’t often used.
420chan was one of many, and a small player amongst tons of 4chan-esque sites. I can’t very well write an entire article on the implications of sites like those, but they were (and still are) very important culturally, especially in the West, even politically, and not exactly in positive ways.
I myself began visiting 4chan around the time it was created, though. It was just as awful back then in some ways, but tended to keep to itself. It was less political, or at very least, less broadly so. There was a lot of genuinely amusing content, too. Caturday still happened earnestly, and things like that. This was around the time of Chanology, too.
You’ve heard of Slenderman, right? The Backrooms? Many cultural phenomena like that began on chan sites around this time, actually. I can has… and all that. Few people want to admit it, but there was a trickle down effect from which memes invented in the niche corners of 4chan gained massive popularity. I just lost the game. Etc.
I particularly knew about stuff from the /x/ board on 4chan, because that was the one I visited. I discovered 420chan through threads on /x/ related to drugs, and links people (including a family member) ended up sending me.
/x/ was had a lot of lore. Slenderman and the Backrooms, of course, were central figures. The SCP Foundation was, as well. All were native to the site itself, it seemed? But amongst all the campy horror, I ran across some genuinely horrifying stuff on there, too.
Don’t get me wrong; despite all rumors to the contrary, 4chan is, and always has been, ruthless in moderation. You were not likely to see anything “deepweb” there. Nobody sold fentanyl or whatever on there or 420chan even. But sometimes there would be threads that focused on really, really strange, dangerous, sad or frightening things.
Like people overdosing on that pink allergy medication?
The channer legend held that a large enough dose of Benadryl transports you to a horrific hellscape know as Eiriel. Eiriel is inhabited by hostile shadow people. And strange translucent spiders.
Many also said they saw a being wearing a hat, who they uncreatively dubbed The Hatman. You may have heard of him in other meme contexts, but this is where the term, and the character, originated.
In these early legends, he’s described with no other distinctive features besides the hat, as a dark, shadowy looming figure. The undisputed ruler of Eiriel, the Hatman was formidable and terrifying, but also unknowable. Sometimes the Hatman acts as a sort of accusatory figure, engaging in a rapid-fire dialogue with the person, or threatens them verbally, but typically just looms with little to say.
Some people referenced actually encountering each other in Eiriel when they were both tripping. This vaguely reminds me of current legends about Mallworld and the Backrooms. It also reminds me of occultists mistaking their dreams and fantasies for real encounters. It makes me wonder why they didn’t just swap Discord names and message each other rather than meeting up in the dreamscape of Eiriel.
This began with people (mostly in their late teens or early twenties) taking what they called a “breakthrough” or “trip” dose of Benadryl, 700mg. If you’ve ever looked at a package of the stuff, you might know that the normal therapeutic dose is only 25-50mg, so joining the 700 Club (as they called it) was massive by comparison. I have no idea how the realization developed, but apparently 700mg is indeed a threshold of sorts, depending on metabolism, for these terrifying experiences.
In some cases, people would take even larger doses, up to a gram or more! I cannot give proper information about what happens to the body when people do this, because I’m not a medical professional. I’m just explaining what I saw people doing online. But let’s be realistic. I needn’t explain how dangerous this was.
Still, people would do it both to escape reality and for internet clout.
You'd think the latter impossible on a site like 420chan, but it did. The site’s infrastructure tried to make it less likely by randomly assigning tripcode names and things like that, but it still happened as it does everywhere.
There was an entire delirients board, called /del/ In practice, /del/ focused entirely on Benadryl, because there weren’t any other common (safe) delirients. On /del/ lot of people posted with tripcodes and names. People wanted their names and tripcodes to become part of the deep lore of the board itself, to post long “trip reports” that would be read and garner tons of replies.
Yeah, some folks would risk a stroke or heart attack (both of which can happen on those dosages) just to be able to post about it online and ask, “Am I a legend now?” You do grasp that everything on those sites made Benadryl trips sound like a horrific experience, right? People reported hallucinations of realistic spiders, hostile ghosts… all kinds of awful things. All watched over by that horrible shared delusion of the Hatman.
Sometimes, even on smaller doses, there’s mentions of hallucinations. They’d spend the entire trip trying to catch the spiders, not realizing they weren’t real. Allegedly, reading or typing becomes impossible after a certain dosage because vision gets blurry, so people would share this afterwards, or (rarely) during with massive typos. I remember seeing the typos and wondering if it was a matter of sight or coordination, and hoping to never find out.
Some folks had a small saying that went something like this. “Benadryl is such a horrible experience that the only people who do it regularly have lives even more horrible than the experience!” It might well have been true! The chans are not known for happy individuals. It makes sense that the drugs most popular in such an environment would be just terrible.
Nobody seemed happy in those places. Suffice to say, there was excitement, but no peace or contentment. Surely none were very happy in Eiriel, but I’m talking about sites like 420chan and 4chan as a whole, not just /del/.
Some folks wishfully compared Benadryl to psychedelics like LSD. But it’s not. Benadryl is a delirient. Where as on a dose of a psychedelic, you will likely be able to distinguish between hallucinations and reality, that barrier is removed with DPH. And, unlike something like LSD or DMT, I’ve never heard of anyone “coming back from Eiriel” with any kind of useful inner wisdom. Mostly just fear and nonsense about said hellscape of shared delusion. Why care about that?
My point? Lurking those sites scared me enough. Let allergy medicine be allergy medicine. Don’t try to trip on it, and certainly not online. What you see will be horrible. What you experience will be awful. Even your body will reportedly feel strange for days afterwards. With one person, I could even see changes in the way he walked. He didn’t realize until I pointed it out, and compared to the days when we saw each other after he didn’t trip on it the night before.
I’m far from against chemical autonomy of the individual (yes, let’s call it that). Still, why play around with something so obviously horrid? Why take such a risk (physically and mentally) when there are better things to occupy your time? I get that some people just do it because Benadryl is legal and easy to obtain compared to LSD or something, but the risk is not worth it. Especially if you hate spiders, or enjoy being, well, alive. People can and do often die trying to take “heroic” doses of Benadryl for kicks.
The person who coined the term “Eiriel” had a stroke during that particular trip. He was posting using a default tripcode paired with the auto-generated name “Sedric Lightbury,” ironically enough. That is to say, I find it ironic that the person who originated such a dark meme would be called Lightbury by the system. Unsure what happened to him afterwards. Another poster claimed Sedric had developed aphasia, but this remains unconfirmed, and is really nobody’s business and never was.
The bottom line? Benadryl may be great for allergies and occasional insomnia, but don’t take a massive dose hoping to astral project into the shadow realm and chill with ambiguous critters like the Hatman. It won’t be fun or enlightening, and you’ll probably come to realize that it’s not worth it. There are better drugs, if you’re dead-set on chemognosis or whatever…
This page was last updated on November 30th, 2025.