No one agrees on where the story began. Some say Zarzour was just a man in Morocco, a thief who once escaped the police by running faster than anyone thought humanly possible. Others swear he was never a man at all, but a shadow that learned how to wear a man’s skin.

The first story people share is always the same: police chased him one night through the narrow streets, and he ran at forty-eight kilometers per hour. That number spread like wildfire online. Memes mocked it. Videos exaggerated it. But hidden beneath the jokes, something darker began to surface. Witnesses insisted his legs bent in ways they shouldn’t, as if his joints had too many hinges. His eyes glowed in the dark alleys where no light should have reached.

On TikTok, the legend mutated. People claimed that if you watched certain clips of Zarzour too many times, you would see him outside your own window, standing still, waiting. A man in Tangier swore that after he laughed at one viral post, he woke up at night to the sound of footsteps running circles around his house—circles too fast to belong to a human.

Zarzour became a curse, a meme that grew teeth. Comments began to vanish from old videos, as if the platform itself tried to bury him. Still, the hashtag climbed, and with it came new stories: blurred images of a face stretched too wide, grainy footage of a figure sprinting down an empty street, and whispers that anyone who said his name three times in the mirror would hear scratching at their door.

No one knows if Zarzour was real, or if he was born out of fear and algorithms feeding on horror. But every month, another account vanishes after posting about him. Their last uploads always look the same: shaky camera footage, panting breath, and a dark figure running toward the lens at impossible speed.

Zarzour is no longer a man. He is a story that hunts the people who tell it. And if you’ve read this far, then maybe you’ve already heard the faint sound of footsteps behind you.