The Gristers

Okay /x/, or whatever creepy board this makes its way on to -I put it here because I thought it’d get to the most people to whom it was relevant.

If you are one of those people who are inherently drawn to horror, you’re in real danger. I don’t know what it is exactly- I don’t pretend to know everything that’s going on, and in fact I, myself, used to be drawn to the more realistic, non-supernatural creepypastas. But… well, let me explain.

About a year ago, I was up at three in the morning, you know, that part of the night where you’re so deep into it it feels like it will never end. Anyway, I was up, clicking around, looking for a good creepypasta I hadn’t read before, really getting myself freaked out. You know the feeling, I’m sure. You LIKE the feeling. That’s the problem.

Anyway, I’m reading, and I hear a pattering sound coming from the kitchen. I had a cat, so I just assumed it was her. But then I glance on my bed, and my cat is there. Now I’ve been freaking myself out for a while here, so I was nearly trembling with fear as I opened my bedroom door. I live alone, in a single bedroom apartment, with just a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom. My bedroom door opens up on to the kitchen. It was pitch black, the moonlight gleaming off the linoleum. I strained my ears and listened. I heard nothing.

I admonished myself for being such a fucking pussy. It was just random house noises, right? Or maybe a fucking mouse in the walls. I was about to turn around and head back into my room when I heard it again. And I saw something scatter across the linoleum in the kitchen, heading for the bathroom.

It was small, but it was definitely not a rat. The limbs were way, way too long. The torso was far too high off the ground. And the way it moved… it moved quickly, but so awkwardly. In any other circumstance I might have laughed at it. As it was I was scared shitless.

So, you know, I basically freeze for like ten minutes. It was the size of the thing that convinced me to move. No matter how weird, or fucked up it was, it was so much smaller than me. It couldn’t have been that dangerous, right?

So I pop open the bathroom door. Before I turn on the light, I do a quick scan. Nothing. I flick the switch. I look around. Still nothing. I look on the ceiling, even. I throw the shower cutrain open. Nothing still.

What could it have been? My mind started inventing explanations. It definitely had four limbs… maybe it was a big ass spider who had lost four of its legs somehow? That could explain the awkward movement. It was good enough for me. I was about to go back to bed when I thoungt, on a whim, to use my broom to poke behind the toilet, between the wall and the base of the seat.

When I did, I hit something solid, and it scurried out. It looked like a tiny human.

It was pale white, pale as a maggot, with dirty gray streaks running along its skin. It moved on all fours, with long, thin fingers that grasped the ground. Its skull was completely bald and it had no eyes and the skin looked like it had been torn away from the lower half of its face, leaving the exposed teeth and gums. It looked up at me… well, pointed its face in my general direction, anyway, and then scurried, quick as fuck, up the side of the bath and down into the drain. It moved in quick bursts, like a spider, and climbed straight up smooth surfaces like one too.

After it disappeared down the drain, I just stood there, frozen, broom handle still in my hand, for a good five minutes.

I was scared shitless. I slowly backed out of the bathroom, and closed the door, and then stuffed a blanket in the crack between the floor and the door, fearing that it might come out.

Then I sat in my bed and wondered what I could do. I mean, it wasn’t like I could call the police. Or even tell any of my frinds. It’s not like they’d believe me.

So what did I do? I made a thread on /x/. This was quite a while ago, almost a year. You might even remember it. It wasn’t anything special, and it didn’t even get that many responses before falling of the boards. I guess people thought I was just joking, which really I would have thought the same thing- my thread, in retrospect, sounds exactly like the type of threads I hate. But besides from all the ‘OP is a fag’ and ‘SAGE’ responses, there was one other one.

"I’ve seen them too man email me", along with an email address that I’m not going to give out here.

So I email this kid, right? Right away he responds and we start up a conversation in IRC. He introduces himself as Jon, and basically tells me a very similar story -one night a few months ago, reading creepypasta, heard a noise, got up, saw the small pale man. His was a bit bigger -he said it was the size of a cat- but he also told me one other thing.

That I’d be seeing more of them. He said that ever since he saw the first one, he’s been seeing more and more of them -out everywhere, even in the street, during the day. They were everywhere, he said and once you notice the first one, it got a lot easier to see all the other ones. He had no idea what the were, and he hadn’t figured out their behavior yet. He said that usually when he saw them or heard them in his own home, he was reading creepypasta, so they usually freaked him out something awful -but, he said again, he had never actually seen them do anything terrible, just scurry out of sight. But, he said, some got pretty big, and not all of them looked exactly the same.

I still didn’t sleep that night.

But over the next week, and those that followed, I found that I did get used to them. I did see more of them. I’d glimpse them out of the corner of my eye, or see the retreating rear end of one crawling into a gutterpipe, or see their tiny faces staring out at the street from the sewers.

Some, it seemed weren’t even trying to hide. I live in Providence, Rhode Island, which is a small city. On my way to work one day (I take the bus) I was looking out the window and saw a pretty large one, as large as a medium-sized dog, trotting along the sidewalk. People were just walking by it. Actually, I think that a lot of people saw it as a dog. One man stopped to scratch its head.

I’d always email Jon and tell him about all the appearances I saw. I even tried to catch some on camera, but they always heard the mechanical whirring and darted away before my camera could take a picture. I told myself I’d have to take a picture of one of the bigger, slower ones.

But either way, as the weeks wore on, I became more and more used to them. Sure, they were as creepy as shit, and I could never sit down on the toilet and enjoy a long crap anymore because I was paranoid as fuck they’d climb up into the bowl and bite me on the asshole. But they weren’t really doing anything harmful. They unnerved the fuck out of me, but so did big spiders. I could live with them. Jon called them the Gristers, because he said they reminded him of the Grister meme on /x/ for some reason. I’m pretty sure he meant the Grifter meme, but the name ‘Grister’ stuck.

I continued my exchanges with Jon, but I noticed that he was becoming more and more tense. It was hard to tell over the text, but really that was the only way to put it. I just figured that once the novelty of a shared experience had worn off, we didn’t really have much to talk about. Jon wasn’t really my type -he was a steroid-pumping body builder in southern florida who lived with his mother.

But we started discussing Grister behavior, and he said his were starting to act a bit more differently than the ones I saw. He’d wake up at night and they’d be perched at the end of his bed, staring at him with their eyeless faces. They wouldn’t scurry away anymore. He said he woke up one time because one of them had actually started touching his face.

That seemed unnerving. This whole time I had been putting out inquiries on the internet to see if anyone else had experienced this phenomenon -I couldn’t be the only one. But no one came forward. On /x/, most of my threads about the subject got saged, so eventually I stopped asking. But I have an inquisitive mind. I wanted to know what these things did, what exactly they were. I even wanted to capture one. I left out food and mouse traps, but none of these things ever went for it.

My cat would notice them, though. She’d hiss at them, and even chased them a couple of times. All those times I had seen her do that and assumed she was being a dumbass cat, chasing at nothing.

One night, I was walking home from work alone -I work at a call center for a police charity, and my house is about six miles away. I’d had to stay late, so there was no bus to come pick me up, and I didn’t really have all that many friends, so I had to walk. Anyway, I was walking past some old, abandoned brick houses -creepy shit, let me tell you- when I heard some weird, low groan.

That’s when I happened to notice that there were a lot more gristers than usual here. They were mostly ignoring me, but they were scurrying in and around one particular brick house. The groaning sound seemed to be coming from the alley beside it.

Now, a lot of gristers was creepy enough, even without that low groaning noise. What made me decide to investigate? I don’t know. Morbid curiosity. I’m always looking for some creepy/gore stuff to post on the boards. I thought that maybe that the groaning was some kind of wounded animal.

So I approached the side of the house, noting that the windows were boarded up. The groaning… I should have known then it was no animal. It was a low, creaking, gurgling sound. It didn’t sound like any fucking animal I knew.

So I snuck down the alley, and when I saw what was making the noise, I nearly pissed myself.

It was a fat, humongous grister -at least eight feet wide, completely unable to move, with rolls of fat hanging down over its leg. It had no neck, just fourteen chins leading up to its macabre exposed jaw. Dirty drool ran down its chin to cover its obscenely huge belly. Smaller gristers crawled in and out of the rolls of its fat. It rubbed itself with a pudgy claw, making that groaning, gurgling sound, which seemed almost sexual.

It was terrible. I know it doesn’t sound like it -and objectively, I can think that a fat, cooing grister rubbing itself might sound pretty funny, actually. But in the presence of the thing, all I felt was a sick revulsion and disgust. But -BUT- I kept in mind one thing: that I had been looking for a picture of these things. So I busted out my cameraphone and snapped a picture.

I wish I hadn’t. If I hadn’t, I think maybe I could have lasted a little longer.

The minute I snapped the picture, the thing stopped groaning and swiveled its head toward me. All the gristers did, in fact. They all started hissing and screaming at me -a horrible fucking sound, like rusty nails on a chalkboard. I was thoroughly freaked out. To put things mildly, I lost my shit. I ran out of there as fast as I could. Ran all the way home. Gristers didn’t seem so harmless to me, now. That noise they had made was straight out of hell.

I didn’t feel safe with the lights off anymore. I flipped all the lights on, scaring the shit out of my napping cat. I slammed the bathroom door shut and stuffed a blanket around the cracks again. Then I sat down on my bed and looked at the picture I had taken.

There it was. Clear as day. That huge Grister. Just looking at it made me feel sick.

Of course I was going to post it on /x/.

I loaded it onto my computer and sent an email to Jon, with the subject “WILL YOU LOOK AT THIS FAT FUCK” Then I immediately came to /x/ and began typing up my thread. Explaining myself, explaining the gristers. Explaining the photograph. I was just getting ready to post when Jon sent me a message.

"Yo don’t show this shit to ANYONE"

I stopped. I replied to Jon, asking him what he was talking about.

He told me. He said that he thought he had figured out what was making the gristers around him more hostile. He said that he thought that when they figured out that you could see them, they started getting more aggressive. He showed me scratches he had all down his arm from them clawing at him at night. He said that he’d seen a lot more of the bigger ones hanging around his house at night. They watched him through his windows. They knew. They knew he could see them. And they didn’t like it.

And now, I was pretty sure they knew I could see them too.

So what did I do? In the end, I didn’t post the picture. I wasn’t TOO intimidated, but it probably saved a lot of you. I didn’t want to trigger anyone else into being able to see these guys if it had dangerous consequences down the road.

I didn’t notice any behaviour change right away. For a while, in fact. For about two weeks, the gristers acted just the same way they had before. I was beginning to thing that Jon’s problem was his own thing, and that the gristers didn’t know or didn’t care that I could see them.

And then things started happening so fast.

I woke up one night and there were four of them, just perched around my bed, staring at me. I freaked the fuck out and swept them away, and they just hissed that terrible noise at me and ran away.

I emailed this to Jon, who I hadn’t talked to otherwise. He didn’t respond. We hadn’t talked since I told him about the picture, and even rarely before then. After two days -during which the gristers began touching me in my sleep- I got an answer.

Jon was dead. His brother had the password to his email and was letting all his internet acquaintances know. He had commited suicide. Sliced open his wrists in the bathtub.

Jon didn’t seem like the type to commit suicide to me. Had things with the gristers really gotten that bad that they drove him to that? We didn’t really know each other very well, but he hadn’t mentioned anything to me. His brother said he hadn’t left a note. I gave him my condolences.

Now I had no one to talk to about this. I started looking online for more references or anything. All the while, the gristers were getting more and more aggressive. I’d look over my shoulder and there would be one or two on the windowsill, just staring at me. One time I opened the door to my apartment -I live on the third floor- and there was one about the size of a large dog staggering around at the bottom of the stairwell, pale face flashing in and out of the darkness, baring its teeth in a growl at me, pale limbs flashing as it bounded up the stairs. I slammed the door shut. I didn’t go to work that day.

Then I saw it on the news.

The house that I had seen the fatass grister at. I would have skipped right past the news story had I not seen the picture of the house.

The article was titled “EIGHT FOUND DEAD, THREE ALIVE IN ‘RAPE DUNGEON’ RAID.”

Apparently some sick fuck had been using the basement of one of those abandoned houses as a place to keep women prisoner and kill them when they felt like it. It was a terrible fucking story, but one of the things one of the survivors said really struck me.

"We were just so terrified all the time. We never knew when he was going to come in and decide to kill one of us. When he was going to really hurt us while raping us. We were just so terrified all the time."

Terrified all the time. And gristers had been all over the place. And when I first saw one, I had been reading creepypasta, and pretty freaked out. Same for Jon. Were these things drawn to fear?

Then I read that two of the survivors were being sent to a mental hospital for ‘hallucinations.’

Did they see the gristers?

I stopped sleeping. I didn’t want to wake up to those things staring at me. I stopped eating too. Whenever I wasn’t at work -which was more and more often, as I called out many times when I saw gristers bigger than a cat sniffing around my building for me -I was locked in my room, trying to hunt for information on the internet about these things. I just couldn’t find anyone who has actually seen them.

The gristers were getting more violent. They were starting to scratch me and bite me in those few scant hours that I actually did nod off to sleep. I’d always freak out and sweep them away, and they’d just hiss at me.

After about a week of this, I came home from work and found my cat dead. They had peeled all the skin away from her skull, giving her a look of shock. I quit my job. I cried for days. /x/, I don’t have many friends, and I really loved that cat.

They're not stupid /x/. They don’t talk, and they act differently from us, but they do have intelligence. I went out for food last week. It was the last time I will ever go out. I was sitting at the downtown bus station, shivering, looking all around me for gristers, when the bus approached. I got up to get on.

And out of nowhere a grister, the size of a normal human, just bent over and walking their weird, loping gait, slammed into the back of the woman next to me and threw her in front of the bus. She had no chance. I saw her slide under the wheels of the bus, I saw her blood and ruined organs squeezed out of her mouth like toothpaste. Everyone freaked out and panicked. As people rushed to her aid the grister turned toward me and grinned. I dropped my groceries and screamed, running back to my house, sobbing all the way.

They’re toying with me.

And that’s when I finally realized why there wasn’t anyone I could really talk to about gristers.

/x/, how many times, when peolpe commit suicide, do you hear it reported that they were “suffering from hallucinations”? Read the reports of people who have been in terrible, frightening situations. Like that rape dungeon, or a war. how many of them “suffer from hallucinations”? Sure, a lot of them are actual hallucinations.

Some of them are the gristers.

And eventually, they figure out that you can see them. And they start fucking with you. And I don’t think everyone who they ‘kill’ is driven to suicide. I don’t think Jon commited suicide. I think they’re smart. I think they know how to make something look like a suicide. You’ll hear about it sometimes. You’ll read in a report about how someone commited suicide, but something just isn’t quite right about it. Like a man who went out and bought a new couch, and then cut his wrists on it.

And /x/, I’m convinced there was nothing special about Jon and me. I don’t think there’s anything special about anyone who sees these things. I think you’re just more likely to see them when you’re really scared, since that’s when they’re drawn to you.

I can hear them right now. It’s about three in the morning. It sounds like a really big one is outside of my apartment door. It sounds like it’s trying to gnaw its way through the wood. And so I’m taking the easy way out. I’d rather have a nice sharp knife slice my arms open than have my skin torn by those teeth.

So please. This is my warning to you. Stop reading creepypasta. I know you love it. I know you love frightening yourself. But you’ve got to stop. Every time you read it -every time you get that feeling of dread in your stomach- you’re drawing the gristers to you.

And if you don’t stop reading, at least, please. Never check out those sounds in the house when you do.