From: Name Withheld by Request
Subject: Eye Witness Account of Shadow Being Phenomena
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 05:09:19 -0400
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
I am more than a little skeptical of ghosts and the paranormal, but about 17 years ago I had an experience with a house that my father and I moved into in 1986. A few years ago I started noticing stories about "shadow people" and realized that some other people have had similar experiences. I would like to share this experience with anyone who can relate to it. You have my full permission to use this account in your web site. Please exclude my name and email address. This experience involved what I can only describe as "shadow beings".
When I first moved in I thought I saw one of the neighborhood children running into the house and down the hall. When I went to look for him there was no one there, all of the doors were closed, and there was no way out of the house in that direction. I didn't think anything of this at the time. As time passed I began seeing something in my peripheral vision, just outside of my direct view. But when I would turn to look at it, there would be nothing there. I always assumed that a car had driven down the road and just was casting an odd shadow.
Then, during the winter of 1987, something odd began happening. Very late at night, the television in the empty living room would turn on with the volume turned all of the way up (to a channel with empty static). The first time it happened, I opened the door to turn the television off. When I did this I thought I heard unintelligible chattering and footsteps. This frightened me so I left the television on and bolted back in my room. This only happened a few times over a period of 3 years.
First Encounter: Winter 1987
The first unmistakable encounter with a "shadow being" was sometime in late 1987. My door would mysteriously come ajar during the middle of the night. And I would have to get up and close it. This happened dozens of times. Then one night when I went to get up to close it I saw a tall shadow with a fedora hat standing on the other side of the door. It was blacker than the darkness around it, featureless and was staring right at me. Terrified, and feeling I had no place to run, I picked up a screw driver and lunged at the figure. As I did this it slipped into the wall to the right of me within a split second! It made no sound and went through a solid wall. I was so frightened I thought I was going to die.
After this I slept with kitchen knives hidden under my bed and put a 30 pound stack of encyclopedias in front of the door at night to keep the door from opening. In the few instances where I heard the television turn itself on in the middle of the night, I let my father handle it. My father never once accused me of turning the television set on, which I thought odd. He did ask me if I heard the television set come on in the middle of the night also, to reassure himself that he wasn't the only one who had heard it. A few times, I also remember hearing my dad down the hall apparently telling what he thought was me that it was too late at night and that he had to get to work in the morning. I got the distinct impression that after this happened a few times, he realized that it wasn't me.
He began sleeping in the den in 1989 rather than his own room (which happened to be right near the area where these shadows usually appeared). Other than hearing knocking on the wall between my room and the kitchen, and occasionally having objects on my shelves start shaking and sometimes being knocked off for what seemed like no reason, the disturbances stopped for awhile.
Second Encounter: Spring 1988
Then, sometime in 1988, I had the second encounter. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a shadow trying to move through the door. It sort of looked like an amorphous blob of smoke. At first I thought it was the neighbors cocketeil that had escaped from its cage, but then I realized that it was a black, violently grasping, skeletal hand. When I raised up out of bed the rest of the figure began coming through the door. I knocked on the wall and screamed for my father to come. He ran down the hall. The hand, arm and the rest of the figure yanked itself out of the door and the figure flew away. My father flung the door open. I told him I had seen something, but I couldn't really describe it. We went looking around the house to find some kind of animal because we had both seen "something".
Third Encounter: Winter 1988
I had my third experience in the winter of 1988. I became deathly ill with pneumonia. At this time I remember getting up in the middle of the night to go down the hall to use the bathroom and seeing, hanging upside down from the ceiling, what looked like the upper torso of a pitch black skeleton (with an unusually large head), waving its arms! I will NEVER FORGET THIS IMAGE. Again the figure was darker than the darkness around it. I turned the hall light on and it slipped up into the ceiling in a split second! I also remember at least two times in the 3 years I lived in the house, seeing a small figure, about 3 feet in height, with a hood on. It was always toward the back of the hall where my father's room is (where I had seen the figure of the child when I first moved into the house). As soon as I made eye contact with it, it would recede into the darkness by floating backward.
In 1989 my father and I moved out of the house. Since that time I believe it has been torn down. I have never experienced anything like this since that time. I can't explain these experiences. I don't believe in ghosts and do not exclude the possibility that the house may have been built in an area with a naturally strong or erratic electro-magnetic field that makes people hallucinate or that I just happened to have very vivid waking dreams while living in the house. All I know is that you couldn't pay me enough to move back into the place.
Note: There were a few facts that might help make the story more credible. Other people had seen shadow like figures in and around the house and described them to me without my telling them about my own experiences. Animals, like the neighbors dogs and cats, would not set foot on the property. I often saw the neighbor's dog growl at the front window of the house but she would never go near it. At least a couple of times I came home from riding my bike to see a friend knocking on my door asking to be let in as though he were convinced I was inside. When I told him there was no one home he said that he had seen someone in the house and thought it was me. When he realized it wasn't me he had seen in the house he turned sheet white.
The only advice I can offer anyone about a problem like this, is that whatever it is, it seems to be tied to a specific location. If you are seeing this sort of thing, just move. It only gets worse.
