This is a more obscure story than those I’ve covered previously, I think, but it’s a personal favorite and I think it deserves to be better-known.
No specific content warnings, as this story doesn't contain any of the usual potential triggers found in creepypasta (death/suicide, gore, etc.); it's still plenty disturbing, but I don't think I have to warn for that when talking about horror stories.
“The Shredder Monkey”
Plot Summary
At the beginning of this story is an email sent from a contributor for a fringe science magazine to that magazine's editor. He says his friend tipped him off to a strange blog written by an Ariana Gomez, and, while the blog has since been taken down, he managed to save the entire thing beforehand. He hasn't been able to find the author of the blog on social media, and leaves it up to the editor to determine how legitimate this blogger's story is.
We then get into the story proper, which is told through Ariana's blog entries. She's a young woman writing about her personal experiences relating to something called the "shredder monkey."
The shredder monkey, as she describes it, is a purple cartoon monkey with a squarish body and spindly limbs, red eyes and nose, and no mouth. She can't seem to find anything about this character online and no one else seems to have heard of it, but she's had a few strange encounters related to this monkey and is writing this blog to share her story.
When Ariana was eight, she took a trip with her dad out to her aunt and uncle's timeshare on Lake Tahoe. Her whole extended family used to vacation there in the summer, and, because it was a timeshare and sometimes previous occupants wouldn't clean up after themselves, her dad was in the habit of driving out a day early to make sure things were in order. That summer, Ariana tagged along with her dad. She fell asleep in the car, and when she woke up they were stopped at some tiny gas station in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields of tall, yellowed grass. Her dad gave her a bit of money to go into the convenience store and buy snacks while he filled the tank.
The convenience store looked to be very old and was in poor condition, but otherwise seemed pretty typical... except that none of the snack foods were brands Ariana recognized. Most of them had packaging in languages she didn't understand, using unfamiliar alphabets. It weirded her out, but she was hungry, so she looked around until finding something with English packaging — a box of "Shredder Shocks" cereal, which she'd never heard of before but which otherwise looked like any other cereal marketed to children. It had games on the back of the box, and the packaging was decorated with the purple monkey described above. Around the time she picked up the box, Ariana thought she heard someone in the next aisle over, but saw no one when she went to look.
They got back on the road, and Ariana munched on the cereal (she says it was pretty good, sort of a mix between Lucky Charms and Wheat Thins) and tried to play the games on the back of the box. However, they were seemingly impossible; the maze game's entrance and exit didn't appear to connect, and the word search must have been a misprint as it contained nothing but the same series of letters over and over: GARD NWODR EH.
Ariana forgot about the strange cereal over the course of summer vacation, and the box of cereal somehow got lost along the way. On the drive back home, she kept an eye out for the little gas station but didn't spot it.
Nine years later, when she was a senior in high school, Ariana was at a toy store trying to find a present for her cousin's baby. While she was browsing the toys, a stuffed animal fell from somewhere and landed right in her path. It was the shredder monkey, looking just as it had on the cereal box from when she was eight. She didn't see any other shredder monkey toys on the shelves, and, when she asked the cashier about it, the cashier claimed ignorance and speculated that maybe it was left behind by another customer. Ariana ended up getting the toy for free, as it didn't even have tags attached. She held onto it.
Over the years since the gas station incident, Ariana had kept an eye out for Shredder Shocks cereal but had never seen it for sale anywhere. No one she asked about it had heard of it before, and internet searches turned up nothing relevant.
Three days prior to writing this blog post, Ariana, now twenty-two, was on the job as an EMT transporting an elderly patient, whom she calls "Henry," back to his nursing home. Henry is in his late nineties, can barely move his limbs, and in all the time she's worked with him has never spoken. Mentally, it seems the guy is entirely checked out. On that day, though, Henry spoke. He hoarsely whispered something that sounded like "New odor eigh guard," then sat bolt upright and yelled it, so loud and in such an unnatural voice that Ariana screamed herself. Afterwards, he slumped back into a reclining position and again became nonverbal.
Ariana was convinced that there was something familiar about the gibberish he'd uttered, and after digging through a bunch of her old things (she's living with her parents, and they're not the sort of people who throw things out much) she realized where she remembered it from. When she was eight and trying to solve the word search on the back of the Shredder Shocks box, she'd written down the series of repeating letters in the back of the Goosebumps book she'd been reading. NWODR EH GARD.
Of course, nothing about this makes any logical sense, but it still freaks Ariana the hell out. This is where her first blog post ends.
The second post, a week after the first, opens with the news that Henry has died. This in itself isn't weird, as Henry was 96 and in overall poor health, but when Ariana was in his old room at the nursing home she noticed drawings on the walls. The nurse attributed them to Henry's roommate, given Henry's lack of motor control, but Ariana recognized the odd squiggles — it looked just like the unfamiliar language she saw on some of the snack food packaging at that old gas station.
A week later, she posts again. Ariana reports that she hasn't been sleeping well thanks to a disturbing recurring dream where she's navigating a maze, but keeps running into dead ends. She's in some sort of golden field on a sunny summer day, and the walls of the maze are invisible. She keeps thinking she hears something behind her, and the last time she had the dream some sort of creature grabbed her shoulder right before she woke up.
Next blog post, again a week later, Ariana recounts an incredibly odd and vivid dream she had, the kind where you think you're awake. In the dream, she went into work but her coworkers were alarmed at the sight of her, and she was forcibly restrained and locked in an office while the authorities were contacted. A newspaper clipping in the office said that she had been sentenced to eight years in jail after driving home drunk from a house party and hitting a pedestrian, killing him. She woke up extremely disoriented, not realizing she had been dreaming the entire thing as it felt so real.
The strange thing here, Ariana says, is that she did attend a house party on the same day the dream article said she did, had a few drinks, thought she was probably okay to drive, but then thought better of it and ended up crashing there for the night. She also noticed a bruise on her shoulder after waking, which matched an injury she had gotten in the dream.
Two days later, Ariana is back with another blog post. The strange dreams are continuing; she had another one about being trapped in the maze, but saw something else there with her, a disturbing alien entity. Right before waking up, she saw something that looked like the shredder monkey reaching for her.
Ariana asked her dad about the trip to Tahoe when she was eight, and, while he remembered it well, even remembering the specific Goosebumps book she'd been reading, he says they didn't stop for gas on the way and that she was asleep for most of the drive.
Another two days go by. Ariana sees the shredder monkey while at work, standing on the sidewalk a short distance from her. It's at least as big as a person. She panics and runs to fetch a coworker, but by the time she does so the monkey is gone. Her coworkers seem to think she's losing it.
In her next blog entry, Ariana describes a variant of the maze dream she had where she was lucid, and the alien creature she saw before spoke to her. The thing, which called itself "Fifi," had an enlightening conversation with her. I'll do bullet points to quickly break down what Ariana learned from Fifi:
Ariana has the ability to travel between different planes of reality. Fifi does as well, and is from a plane well separated from our own. In Fifi's plane, those capable of this form of travel are trained since childhood to be able to do it consciously and effectively. Ariana, on the other hand, has no training and has been doing all her traveling unconsciously (such as the dream she had, where she made a different choice following the house party and wound up sentenced for vehicular manslaughter).
The shredder monkey is from a plane of reality far removed from both Ariana's and Fifi's, and managed to get ahold of Ariana by enticing her to eat the cereal — think Persephone with the pomegranate seeds, I guess. She's now linked to him and he can track her. Fifi tried to intervene before — she was the other being inside the convenience store the day Ariana bought the cereal, and she was the one who wrote the symbols on the walls in Henry's room. The convenience store itself was likely designed to lure in travelers from different planes by offering a wide variety of different foods that might appeal to them.
The shredder monkey wants to consume Ariana's essence, or something like that, in order to boost his own power. Since he's been able to materialize fully in Ariana's plane (the sighting at work), Ariana has to work quickly to try and evade him. Fifi tells her she has to learn to climb between planes.
Ariana wakes after this dream feeling like she at least has an idea what's going on now, even if it sounds totally crazy. She's determined to try and get away from the shredder monkey.
Ariana begins wearing a crucifix and carrying around a Bible, on the off-chance that the shredder monkey is scared of religious iconography. She spots him again at work, pressed against the window, writing something in the condensation. From his perspective, it would have read NWODR EH GARD, but from Ariana's it reads: DRAG HER DOWN.
After this, Ariana gets hard at work trying to figure out how to travel through planes of her own free will. She digs up a bunch of her childhood drawings, noticing that a lot of them depict her family as having more children (her parents had told her once that they'd considered having more kids, but decided against it), and quite a few of them depict herself interacting with people she's never met, some of whom don't quite seem human. Ariana realizes that as a child she must have been traveling between planes without knowing it. She thinks that it's possible the shredder monkey will give up on chasing her if she starts traveling again, that it'll revert to going after easier prey.
Ariana recounts managing to travel between planes again after clearing her mind and concentrating. She's now optimistic she might be able to escape the shredder monkey. Her blog ends here.
Next is another email — the editor from the fringe science mag writes back to the contributor, saying he was fascinated by the blog and has done some digging of his own. He contacted Ariana's college (she mentioned it by name once) and, while they have had several students by that name, none of them worked as an EMT. Looking into Ariana's job was more fruitful, as he was able to find her coworkers. None of them said they'd worked with an Ariana. He showed one coworker Ariana's blog, and he said he got an alarming sense of déjà vu while reading it, although he's still sure none of the events she describes ever happened and insists he doesn't know her.
Then, a friend of a friend contacted the editor about a strange post on a forum devoted to Persian cats. It's apparently from Ariana. She's frantic, not sure if anyone will be able to see her post. While traveling between planes, the shredder monkey intercepted her, and she ended up back in her own plane of reality — but all traces of her existence are gone, and no one can see her or interact with her.
The editor says that either this is an elaborate hoax, or Ariana was a real person who was essentially written out of existence by the shredder monkey, leaving nothing but a few digital traces of her behind — or, more frighteningly, perhaps it consumed her entire plane of reality, stranding what's left of her in a plane where she never existed. Signing off, he requests to be emailed the blog again as he's somehow lost the text.
Closing Thoughts
This almost feels more like a sci-fi story than a creepypasta. The idea of some beings possessing the ability to travel between alternate realities is a great concept, one that's been done in sci-fi before, but I've rarely seen it used primarily for its horror potential. For as complex an idea as this story uses, it manages to do so without bogging itself down with exposition — most of the expository worldbuilding is confined to the scene with Fifi, which only takes a few paragraphs to relate. My summary runs nearly as long as the story itself because every detail here counts, and there's nothing I could skip over for irrelevance. It's a very tightly written story, and yet it still leaves much of its horror implied rather than outright stated. Many other hapless plane-hoppers must have fallen victim to the shredder monkey, and we don't know any of their stories. Something like this could be going on around us all the time, and because victims are retroactively erased from existence, none of us would know about it. The shredder monkey is implied to come from a plane full of similar creatures, and it may very well not be the most dangerous thing its reality has to offer.
The best sci-fi horror works not by simply injecting science fiction themes into a horror story or vice versa, but by showing us the darker side of the themes sci-fi likes to explore. Much of sci-fi is about exploration and discovery; the logical flip side of that is that there's a ton of stuff we don't and can't know, because it's outside of our normal human experiences, and stuff like that tends to scare the daylights out of us. Possessing the ability to travel between alternate realities is a cool idea and could potentially make for a fun adventure story; however, if the traveler in question is being hunted down by something much more powerful than herself, and her only means of self-preservation is to blindly run away, it quickly becomes a survival horror narrative.
I've got nothing but praise for this story. The concept is clever, the storytelling is effective, and it isn't derivative of other creepypastas. It doesn't tie itself into a neat little bow at the end, but every unanswered question is unanswered for good reason — not knowing is scarier. While it may not come across in summary, this tale is genuinely unsettling, and that's a feat considering the villain is a garishly colored cartoon monkey.