Previously: “The Girl In 402.”
If you’re a fan of John Carpenter’s The Thing, you’ll probably dig this week’s creepypasta. “Fleshgait,” written by Creepypasta Wiki user EmpyrealInvective and first published at the end of 2016, tells the story of a group of friends who head out for a multi-day hike and end up with… a bit more than they bargained for.
One of the things I like so much about “Fleshgait” is the effort put into making it feel real. It’s set in an actual national park (Gila National Forest in New Mexico, about 230 miles southwest of Albuquerque), on an actual hiking trail in that park (the Gila Loop Trail) — and, in true internet horror fashion, even includes links out to actual sources of information about that park and that trail.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
One of these sources — the one about the trail itself — is, alas, no longer live, though for the curious, here’s where the link used to go, preserved via the Wayback Machine. More updated information on the Gila Loop Trail can be found at AllTrails and other similar hiking and backpacking resources.
I seem to have missed the memo on fleshgaits, as the term was new to me when I first encountered this story. If you, too, aren’t terribly — or at all — familiar with it, good news: There are some solid explainers out there days, including a terrifically in-depth video from folklorist and historian Aidan Mattis over at his YouTube channel, The Lore Lodge. As Mattis puts it, the fleshgait is probably best described as “something of a naturally generated folk monster created through works of fiction… based largely on other legendary creatures like the Wendigo, the Skinwalker, and the Goatman.”
From where I’m sitting, the fleshgait also looks a little like a proposed answer to longstanding and absolutely justified criticisms of creepypasta’s tendency to appropriate Native beliefs and terminology, so there’s also that. To be perfectly honest, it seems sort of like an imperfect solution to me; on the one hand, at least it’s not misusing or fictionalizing actual terms anymore, but on the other, I’m not sure stripping the context away entirely solves any problems either. However, as I’m not Native, I can’t speak to the issue with anything remotely resembling authority or lived experience, so any thoughts I might have on the matter should definitely be taken with a very large grain of salt.
In any event, I do think “Fleshgait” is still an enormously effective story that gets at something deeper than just “o no scary monster.” Find an excerpt below, and read the full story over at the Creepypasta Wiki.
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Months later I can remember all of them, down to the slightest idiosyncrasies and quirks. They were my friends and they’re gone now. There’s a hole in my life where they were. Sometimes I’ll remember something they said or did and it’ll hit me like a ton of bricks. They’re gone now and I’m only left with memories of them. I’m sorry for being maudlin and bringing everyone down, but I think this is the only way I can really introduce my story and explain why I feel like I have to type this out. I think that writing this is the only way I can learn to accept that. I’ll try to keep these downer tendencies to myself as I’m writing all of this down, but I can’t make promises.
I know that being the third wheel in a group can be a terrible thing, but I can think of something worse, being the fifth wheel. If you’re the third wheel, that makes your group a semi-functional tricycle. If you’re the fifth wheel, you’re left as some obscure car from the fifties that no one remembers or cares about. Imagine not being able to follow the in-jokes and shared history of one couple and multiply that by two. Getting stuck as the fifth wheel is twice as bad. That was the frame of mind I had as we all piled into Ian’s car to go to Gila National Forest for our hike.
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Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photo via Joshua Woroniecki/Pexels]
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