`pdtren01` [Thread]

I'm a little late to this thread and fully expect this to get buried,
but here goes nothing.

My greatest friend, and for a time roommate, from graduate school (for
story purposes, "B") comes from a family that, for some inexplicable
reason, encounters unexplainable phenomena. We're talking grandparents,
aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Pretty big family, with some of the older
members referring to this propensity for seeing things as "the gift,"
though my friend would certainly dispute that it's much of a gift.

Now, I'm a pretty cynical guy. Everyone lies. There might be a small
handful of people in this world that I take completely at their word. B
is among them. I've rarely met anyone as forthright, honest . . . just a
good dude. Smart, a multitude of academic honors, officer in the
military, you name it. After we grew pretty close and he felt like I
wouldn't judge him, B told me about a handful of his experiences. This
is the one that stuck with me. I hope I can remember all the details.

When B was in his early teens, his grandmother was diagnosed with an
aggressive form of cancer. There was no treatment that she, at her
advanced age, could undergo and the doctors and family both knew the
most humane thing to do would be to give her heavy pain medication and
make her comfortable until the disease took its course, which wouldn't
take long. However B's grandfather absolutely refused to allow them to
give his wife pain medication. He never gave a reason, and though the
physicians and family were insistent, he got his way and she died in
what was, apparently, unfathomable pain. It was what happened after that
takes this story from mere tragedy to something that my mind unavoidably
goes to in those quiet times of the night.

Immediately after his grandmother passed, B's grandfather was, by all
indications, beset upon by . . . I'm not sure what. Neither was B. The
grandfather would thrash in his bed at night, terrified by things that,
at first, only he could see or hear. He would cry out at random
intervals as well. He spoke of the "things" climbing the walls of his
home and looking at him through the windows of his bedroom. Always
looking, never speaking or entering. This would be easy to dismiss if
not for the fact that B, who had volunteered to remain with his
grandfather at night in the early days after the grandmother's death,
could also hear them scrabbling up the walls at night, straining the old
wooden siding as they climbed. Naturally, this was the point in the
story that I put my big brain (sarcasm there, folks) to work. I
hypothesized that tree branches and wind or something similar were
making those sounds, but apparently the home sat on a barren lot.

After a few weeks of this, and over breakfast one morning, the
grandfather told B and some other family of something new that had
happened the afternoon prior. He described encountering three men in
dark suits who visited him in his room as he sat on his bed. They stood
in one specific corner of the room to the left of the foot of the bed
and accused him of a great transgression (presumably allowing his wife
to die in agony) saying "You know what you have done," and claiming that
he too would suffer before he was "allowed" to go.

Not long after that, B's grandfather had a stroke that left him
bedridden and unable to speak. He would never recover and died only a
few weeks later. Until he did, however, B recalled that his
grandfather's eyes never left the left hand corner of his bedroom. In
his final days of life, all his grandfather could do was stare at that
same corner with an expression of abject horror and mouth wordlessly.
There's no way to determine what he was trying to say, but one can
assume it was nothing pleasant.

Take all that for what you will, but I know B well enough to know that
he would not lie about something like this, especially where the death
of a relative was involved. All I know is that late at night sometimes I
have to force myself to keep my eyes out of the corner of my bedroom for
fear of what I too might see.

  [Thread]: https://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2hqjp8/stories_creepypasta_are_great_but_does_anyone/ckvmrxh/