From: hugbunney
To: shadowpeopleorg@comcast.net
Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2015 11:03:02 AM
Subject: My experience with Shadow Men

I started seeing the shadows of men wearing hats when I was four. At first, my parents thought I was just being scared of the dark. I’d get up in the middle of the night to get in their bed but sometimes the shadow men were between my room and theirs and I was too scared to go. They tried hard to convince me that the shadow men were just shadows of normal things and that, often, regular things just look scary in the dark but we could never find the causes of the shadow men and I knew they weren't shadows of other things. They were too consistently the same, for one. They'd be there, watching, and then they would go. Clearly shadows of men wearing a hat and overcoat as men did during the forties and fifties. I was born in 1956.

There was one time, when we were living in a housekeeping cottage temporarily. We had moved from Colorado to Connecticut. My dad was out so I was just with my mother that evening when she had turned all the lights off to prepare for bed. Our cottage had a front door that had a large window pane in it with a shade drawn. A light pole across the drive made the area in front of the cottage well lit but still there was a shadow cast on the shade that looked like someone wearing a hat was standing in front of the door. My mom refused to look out having turned all the lights in the cottage off and then upon seeing the shadow. No one had knocked. I did look out and even though the shadow was still being cast no one was there and nothing could have produced the shadow. Eventually, it left.

The last time one showed up, I might have been eight. We lived in a two story house in Canon City, Co that had a small window in the foyer along the wall the stairs went up. We had not been home long when my parents wanted me to go upstairs to bed but I saw the shadow of someone looking through the window and yelled for my dad who also saw the same thing. He ran out the door to try to catch whoever it was but it couldn’t have been a normal person as the window would have been too high for someone standing outside to have been able to look in. My dad didn’t find anyone and then we moved again.

In each of the locations where I had seen a shadow man, the houses were eventually knocked down. Through those years, I might have seen shadow men four to six times but that would have covered four to six different locations so I was disturbed to find out all the houses were no longer standing. One was an entire apartment complex.

I was a very ill child. By rights I should not have lived to adulthood. I was treated by a well-known cancer research center (that I now can find nothing on) although my problem wasn't cancer. I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder when I was four which culminated with surgery to remove a cyst from my neck when I was eight. After which everything was allowed to run it's natural course. As I mentioned I wasn't expected to live past 10, something I wasn’t told until I turned 11. I find it interesting that this period between 4 and 8 years old, from when I was diagnosed and treatment ended, was during which we were watched by the shadow men.

However, my mother did develop throat cancer for which she was treated with radiation as well as surgery the year I was 8. Years later, my dad also had been diagnosed with throat cancer. When my mother was 85 she was again diagnosed with cancer. Kidney cancer this time and she died of it two years later.

I should explain that my parents divorced when I was nine and my mother moved us back to Connecticut and I didn't really have contact with my dad again. He continued to live in Colorado until his death. I was unaware of his medical history until after my mother passed. When she died, which was in 2008, I had found out that my dad had actually died in 1989…from kidney cancer. This is another odd relationship filled with coincidences that doesn’t seem reasonable to believe.

Was the shadow men the only odd occurrence? No, but they never did return… or at least they never made their presence known again. Through the intervening years, I can say there have been times when I've come home and known someone had been there. Nothings ever missing or even moved. Still, it's a feeling of a room just now empty and I find myself wondering.