Pretty much anything can become a meme if it’s iconic enough and memorable. The Emahgerd girl meme is still among the most popular ones on the internet. The meme shows an overly excited young girl with two ponytails and a distinctively ugly vest holding three of her favorite Goosebumps books. The most important part of the picture is her unique face expression with a visible retainer in her mouth. The girl on the photo is called Maggie Goldenberger and she is now a 29-year-old person not living off her unexpected internet fame. Before we tell you how the meme came to be, take a look at some of the best examples online.
Goldenberger was on a six-month trip in India when she suddenly found out about the Ermahgerd meme by visiting a random internet cafe. One of her friends told her about the picture circulating the web. Maggie was shocked to see her teenage self in what would soon become a world-famous meme. Her photo was combined with the words “Ermahgerd Gersberms.” These words represented the girl’s alleged retainer-impeded pronunciation of the sentence “Oh my God, Goosebumps.” Soon other versions of this meme surfaced, each one creating new preposterous situations.
The Ermahgerd meme officially appeared in March 2012, on Reddit, of course. It was combined with now-legendary caption and quickly gathered around 17,000 upvotes. It was obvious at the time that a new far-reaching meme was born. Thanks to YouTube and various other channels, the meme skyrocketed. Now, you would think that, because of all the popularity the girl in the photo, Maggie, would be incredibly rich but you’d be wrong. In fact, she tried really hard to distance herself from the meme and live a life of her own. It puzzles her that so many people on the web laugh at a young teenage girl with a retainer and silly face expression.
Nowadays, the original Ermahgerd girl works as a nurse and isn’t all that proud of the meme. In fact, she rarely mentions the meme to the people she meets because she doesn’t really want to be associated with it. Nowadays, she looks like a normal girl nearing her 30th birthday and people hardly recognize her by the meme. For now, she’s not planning to do anything with her internet fame and simply wants to dedicate herself to nursing.
Interestingly, back in 2012, when the meme first appeared, a lot of people wanted to know what R.L. Stine, the author of the Goosebumps books thought about the Ermahgerd meme. They asked him so much that he felt quite annoyed and unimpressed. Besides that, he thought that the meme actually ridiculed the readers and seemed quite inappropriate.
