Creepypasta Stories

The Grey Man

When I was seventeen, my best friend Mike kept a YouTube channel for "Let's Play." He was a fan of old and not-so-well-known games, most of which he played on a pSX emulator on his laptop.

The channel wasn't particularly popular; he had about thirty subscribers, most of which were just his friends. I used to watch his videos for a few minutes when I got in from school to raise his views and help him out. He was as entertaining as any game commentator, I guess, but some channels just don't lift off.

We took the same chemistry class and sat next to each other in it every morning at school. One day, he asked me if I had heard of a game called LSD: Dream Emulator. I hadn't. He concluded that if I hadn't heard of it, it was definitely obscure enough for his channel.

He had uploaded some videos of it that night. It was a very peculiar game; the objective seemed to be only to walk around various Japanese environments, colliding with things that transported the player to other environments. Various animals and people glided through the game, usually taking no notice of the player, although there was one NPC known as the Grey Man.

He was, as the name would suggest, a grey man, in a hat and coat. He tended to appear without warning, and slide sullenly towards the player. If the player got too close, the screen would flash white and he would disappear. Each time this happened, Mike would gasp, then nervously laugh it off and continue playing.

The gameplay was divided up into days. Each day lasted only a few minutes, after which the player would be taken back to a menu and prompted to start a new dream. Mike played up to Day twelve over the course of a week, and had clearly enjoyed the game, as it was apparent in his videos. He seemed immersed in it, almost captivated by it. However, one night, he posted a bulletin on his YouTube channel stating:

"You know it's time to stop when the grey man pops up in your real dream :L what should I play next?"

I wasn't fazed by this casual joke, and he told me in chemistry the following morning that he was mainly stopping because he just wanted to play something new to him. I'd have recommended something, but an exam was nearing and I wanted to concentrate on my work. I suggested that he take a short break from YouTube and do the same. He agreed that this was a good idea, and we arranged to meet at his house that evening to revise.

Saddled with several chemistry textbooks, I walked through town that evening to his house. The lights were on, but there was no reply when I knocked. Out of politeness, I waited a minute before I knocked again. This time, it opened instantly. Mike stood in the doorway, his hair wet, looking extremely shaken. Without saying a word, he led me to his room, where various papers and books were spread across his desk. He seemed surprised to see them. After a few minutes of pretending to read while actually curious as to why he was so anxious and jumpy, I finally said, "What's wrong?" To which, he mumbled some incomprehensible response. My efforts continued until he finally confided in me.

He said that about ten minutes before I arrived, he had fallen asleep in the bath, and had a dream. He said that in the dream, he was drowning under the bathwater, completely paralyzed and unable to lift his head for air. The quivering silhouette of the Grey Man towered over the water, watching him. I sympathised that this may have caused a few seconds of distress when he woke up, but could not understand why he was still petrified. I tried to comfort him, but he sensed that I didn't understand, grabbed my shoulders and screamed at me, "It lasted for weeks! Ten minutes I was asleep, I was choking underwater in that dream for weeks and I wouldn't die!"

Mike grew increasingly distant after that. We exchanged no words in our chemistry lessons, and he began to look extremely unwell. His eyes became pink and sunken into his head, surrounded by purple rings. Over a week, his neat writing deteriorated into a careless scrawl, until he stopped writing completely and instead spent the duration of the lessons with his head buried in his hands.