Object Class: Keter
What It Does: Periodically visits a random person on Earth, compelling all who see it to aid it in finding and capturing its chosen target. Upon reaching the target, captures them under the sheet it wears, securing them in a presumably extremely painful way.
Why It Gets Its Classification: Per the file, “It comes and goes whenever it feels like it, and if it ever decided it didn’t want to come back to its containment cell, we have literally no way of forcing it.”
There is nothing the Foundation can do to prevent its active hunting phases. If it targets you, you will die.
Even worse, it is entirely impossible to plot to do it harm. You cannot ask someone to kill it for you, cannot try to attack it yourself, cannot even try to set in motion of chain of events that might end in its demise. You will always be compelled never to harm it, and even to actively protect it.
Article Rating: 7.5/10
Existential Crisis Level: 2/10
Painful Death? Yes.
Scare Factor: 6/10
I went back and forth with the rankings on this one. On the one hand, the odds of you being chosen out of everyone on Earth is incredibly, incredibly slim. But on the other hand, all it takes is some bad luck and you could find yourself being targeted by this thing, and no one can save you. In fact, everyone around you will be compelled to turn against you.
The first audio log in this article is a good example of why that particular effect is as terrifying and grim as it is. You could, after all, find yourself condemned to a horrible death for reasons no one understands other than that it seems to be entirely random, and your last thoughts could be that your friends and family helped this strange creature to kill you.
That can’t feel good.
It’s lower on the list because I wouldn’t consider it something that gives me much of an existential crisis of any kind, and the very low odds of being targeted means that The Guest is not quite as scary as many of the others on this list. Nonetheless, the article for it is really well done, particularly the two audio logs, both of which give you a really good idea of what this SCP is like and why it absolutely suuuuucks.
It’s not known what exactly the creature does to you when it captures you, but since the file notes that the sounds of distress imply that it must be “extremely painful,” it’s perhaps best left to the imagination.