r/Creepystories

I was 247 pounds at my heaviest. I'm five foot four. Do the math.

I tried everything. Weight Watchers at nineteen. Keto at twenty-one. I did Orange Theory for eight months and lost eleven pounds and gained back fourteen. I tried fasting, macro tracking, a personal trainer who told me I just needed to "want it more." I wanted it. I wanted it so badly I used to lie in bed at night and dig my fingernails into my stomach fat, like I could just peel it off if I pressed hard enough.

Nothing worked. My body held onto weight like it was preparing for a famine that never came. My doctor said my bloodwork was fine. My thyroid was fine. My hormones were fine. I was just fat. That was the diagnosis. "Lifestyle changes." As if I hadn't been changing my lifestyle every six months since I was a teenager, chasing results that never showed up.

I stopped going out. I stopped dating. I stopped looking at myself in mirrors that showed anything below my shoulders. I wore black leggings and oversized hoodies and told myself this was fine, some people are just built like this, and I almost believed it.

Then I found the forum.

It was one of those private subreddits you need an invitation to join. A friend of a friend sent me the link. She'd lost thirty pounds in two months and she looked like a different person. When I asked what she was doing, she just DM'd me the URL and said "read the pinned post." The pinned post was about L-947. "Not a GLP-1 agonist. Works on mitochondrial uncoupling. Your body literally burns fat as heat. No muscle loss. No rebound. No diet changes required." The before and after photos were obscene. Women my size dropping forty, fifty, sixty pounds. Not over a year. Over weeks. Their faces stayed the same but their bodies dissolved. In a good way. In the way I'd been dreaming about since I was fifteen.

The thread had six hundred comments. Everyone was losing weight. Everyone felt amazing. The only side effect anyone mentioned was "vivid dreams" and "increased sensory awareness." One guy said colors looked brighter. A woman said she could hear her neighbor's TV through the wall, which she'd never noticed before. Someone else mentioned seeing movement in their peripheral vision but figured it was "probably just the increased alertness."

I ordered three vials that night. A hundred and eighty dollars including shipping from a supplier in Shenzhen. It arrived in a plain white box with a cold pack and a tiny glass vial of clear liquid. I reconstituted it with bacteriostatic water like I'd done with other peptides before. 250 micrograms before bed. Subcutaneous injection in the stomach. The needle was so thin I barely felt it.

I lost four pounds the first week. I wasn't dieting. I wasn't doing anything different. I was eating pasta and bread and ice cream and the weight was just falling off. My jeans were loose. My face looked different in the mirror. My coworker Janine asked if I'd gotten a haircut because I "looked different somehow."

The second week I lost seven pounds. I started seeing things in the corners of my eyes. Flickers. Shapes. A shadow that moved when nothing was there to cast it. I told myself it was the vivid dreams bleeding into my waking life. I told myself it was nothing.

The third week I lost nine pounds. I woke up at 3:17 AM to use the bathroom and there was a woman standing in the corner of my bedroom. Facing the wall. Her forehead almost touching the drywall. She was wearing a hospital gown. The kind that ties in the back. Her hair was wet. She was crying without making any sound. Tears running down her face, dripping off her chin, hitting the carpet with no noise and leaving no mark.

I screamed. I turned on the light. Nothing was there.

I stopped the peptide that night. Flushed the remaining vial down the toilet. I figured whatever was in it, it was doing something to my brain. Some kind of neurotoxicity. Hallucinations. I'd rather be fat than crazy.

The weight stayed off. But the visions didn't stop. They multiplied.

A man in a suit sitting on my couch at two in the morning, staring at a television that wasn't on, his hands folded in his lap like he was waiting for a program that would never start. A child in pajamas with a pattern I recognized from old Sears catalogs, standing in my kitchen facing the refrigerator, not moving, not blinking, just standing there for hours. An old woman bent over my bathroom sink, washing her hands in a basin that wasn't there, her fingers moving through empty air, the same motion over and over and over.

They were everywhere. Not just in my apartment. In the grocery store. In my office. On the street. People who looked normal at first glance but weren't. Their clothes were always wrong. Out of date by decades. Sometimes wet. Sometimes dirty. Sometimes torn in places that didn't make sense — a clean rip across the chest, a sleeve missing, a collar burned away. And their eyes. Their eyes were always fixed on something I couldn't see. Something far away. Something I didn't want to see.

I started to understand. The peptide hadn't just burned fat. It had burned something else. Some barrier. Some filter that keeps living people from seeing what's always been there. The dead. Not ghosts. Not spirits. Just the dead. Still here. Still going through the motions. Still standing in corners and sitting on couches and washing their hands in sinks that don't exist. Trapped in loops they couldn't escape.

And they couldn't see me. That was the one mercy. They were in their own world, a half-step out of phase with mine. I was a ghost to them.

Until last night.

I woke up at 3:17 AM. I didn't have to pee. I just woke up. And I knew. I could feel the weight of being looked at. The pressure of attention from things that haven't paid attention to anything in years. Decades. Longer.

I opened my eyes.

The woman in the hospital gown was in her corner. But she wasn't facing the wall anymore. She was facing me. Her head was tilted at an angle that was almost curious. Her wet hair was plastered to her cheeks. Her hospital gown hung open in the back and I could see the knobs of her spine pressing against her skin, each vertebra a small white mountain under a thin layer of something that wasn't quite skin anymore. She was looking at me. Not through me. Not past me.

At me.

I slammed my hand on the lamp switch. Light flooded the room. The corner was empty. Just the wall. Just the shadows from my dresser. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I sat there for a full minute, staring at the corner, telling myself it was a dream. A sleep paralysis thing. My brain misfiring. I turned the lamp off.

She was a foot closer. Not in the corner anymore. Standing at the foot of my bed. Her head still tilted. Her eyes still locked on mine. Her mouth was open now. Just slightly. Like she was about to speak. Like she was trying to remember how.

I turned the light on. Gone. The room was empty. My hands were shaking. I was breathing in these short little gasps that didn't feel like they were getting any oxygen. I stared at the spot where she'd been standing. The carpet wasn't wet. There was no sign she'd ever been there.

I don't know how long I sat there with the light on. Five minutes. Ten. Long enough for my heart to slow down. Long enough to almost convince myself I'd imagined the whole thing. I reached for my phone. I was going to call someone. Anyone. But it was 3:30 in the morning and who was I going to call? My mother? My ex-boyfriend who I hadn't spoken to in eight months? What was I going to say? "There's a dead woman in my bedroom and she's getting closer every time I turn off the light"?

I turned the lamp off.

She was at the side of my bed now. Two feet away. Close enough that I could smell her. Damp plaster. Old flowers. Something metallic underneath, like copper wire or old blood. Her hospital gown was brushing against my comforter. I could see the individual strands of her wet hair. I could see the cracks in her lips. I could see that her eyes weren't just looking at me anymore. They were hungry.

And behind her, in the doorway to my bedroom, there was a man. Tall. Thin. Wearing a suit that looked like it had been buried in mud. His face was in shadow but I could see the shape of his head. The angle of his shoulders. He was standing perfectly still. Waiting his turn.

I turned the light on. The room was empty. I was alone.

I left the light on. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them and stared at the doorway. The light felt thin. Weak. Like it wasn't really pushing the darkness back, just holding it at arm's length. But it was holding. That was enough.

I don't know how long I sat like that. Long enough for my heart to slow down. Long enough for the adrenaline to burn off and leave me hollow and exhausted. The lamp was still on. The room was still empty. The woman in the hospital gown was gone. The man in the doorway was gone. Maybe the light was enough. Maybe they couldn't cross into it. Maybe I was safe as long as I kept it on.

I'm writing this on my phone with the lamp on and my back against the headboard. My eyes are burning. My fingers are cramping. But I'm okay. I'm going to be okay. The light is on. The light is on and nothing can get me while the light is on.

I'm going to lay down now. Just for a minute. Just to rest my eyes. The lamp will stay on. I'll keep it on all night. I'll keep it on forever if I have to. I just need to close my eyes for a second. Just a second.

I laid down. I pulled the covers up to my chin. The lamp was glowing warm and yellow on my nightstand. I could see the light through my closed eyelids. Orange and safe. I felt my body start to relax. My breathing slowed. The tension in my shoulders started to unknot. I was okay. I was safe. The light was on.

The lamp clicked off.

Not a power outage. Not a burnt bulb. A click. The sound of a finger pressing the switch. Right next to my head.

And then I heard the footsteps. Bare feet on carpet. Running. Not walking. Not shuffling. Running. From the corner. From the doorway. From everywhere. Converging on my bed in the dark.

If you're reading this and you've heard of L-947 — if someone in a forum told you it changed their life, if you found a supplier and the price seems too good to be true, if you're holding a vial right now and wondering whether to inject it — don't. The weight you lose isn't worth what you'll gain. I lost forty-seven pounds in three weeks. I'd give anything to have it back. I'd give anything to be invisible again.

Because they know I can see them now. And they've been so lonely for so long.