From: name withheld by request
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
Sent: Sun, Mar 22, 2009 05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Shadow person?
Hello there, there is a story I would like to tell about my experience. I am a university student in Canada, and I was living with my parents at the time of this incident. I have been searching on the Internet since then to try and figure out what it was, and a Shadow person is the closest theory I’ve found. Even then, it doesn’t seem to be the typical shadow being, as you’ll hear later, and today I’m still confused. This was written down to the best of my abilities, and I tried to be as accurate as possible. First you’ll need to know some background.
My house was built sometime in the early 1900's, most likely during the 1910's and no later. It has a concrete basement, and was insulated by horse hair. We still have the original floor boards and the original frame of the house. The third floor of our house was added in 1990 or 1991, the original house being only two stories. My father had been renovating the house before I was even born and is still renovating it today. We don’t have enough money to tear down the old parts and replace it with new, so my dad does the best he can, making sure nothing’s rotting, reinforcing walls and putting in insulation, that sort of thing. During his renovations we did find two artifacts in the walls, one was a medal from one of the wars (the gems that once adorned it had been pried off by its previous owner), and the other was a locket, with a black and white photo of a man inside. Both of these artifacts now reside in my care. In the summer of 2008 my father began working on the basement, which was to be turned into a rumpus room with a bathroom, electrical room (where all our internet, phone lines, cable and alarm systems were located) and a laundry room. The electrical room already existed and was finished when he decided to tear down a wall where the rumpus room would be.
First of all, I have never been afraid of the basement. I was afraid of going up the stairs from the basement when I was little, but only because the steps creaked in a way that sounded like someone was coming up behind you. I wouldn’t say our house is haunted, but I wouldn’t deny strange things have happened before. They just happened so rarely and infrequently, that we didn’t feel like there was a presence, and most of the time, I was the only one who noticed.
Death has never been a big deal in our family either and the idea of a ghost, while fictitious, wouldn’t be a real threat if they did exist. The idea of our dead neighbor, who was murdered coming back to haunt the house, would feel more like an aspect of nature than an unnatural perversion of life. I also love my house. It has a soul, like a person, but I have never ever felt threatened in my own home. Even in the basement I felt at peace. My dream, when I was younger, was to buy the house from my parents, because I have lived here all my life and I have known no other home.
The half finished laundry room was in the basement but I didn’t have to go down there until a few days after the wall had been torn down. I had been there the day it was torn down and helped move the debris outside but not once did I feel anything out of the ordinary. It was only later, when I was down there alone doing laundry in the small room, that I noticed a change. It felt like the entire basement had gotten darker, meaner; like I was some small defenseless animal in a very large, cold, dark forest. The laundry room is connected to a long hallway that leads to the stairs and that seemed to be the source of it. At the time, I shrugged it off. I am known for scaring myself over nothing especially if I had watched a scary show or read a few ghost stories. But this hallway didn’t feel right and I kept having the feeling like someone was there. I didn’t look down the hallway and stayed focused on my task, like when I do when I get scared. When I did turn and look down the hallway as I was leaving, nothing looked different and nothing felt different as I walked through the area where the feeling came from. As soon as I came up, I felt much better and dismissed it as nerves and forgot.
A few days later, I went back down to do laundry again. The feeling, which wasn’t there when I entered, gradually grew when I was in the laundry room, appearing in the hall once again. Nobody likes to be afraid for no reason, so I turned and looked down the hall. Have you ever gone to the eye doctor, and with his apparatus that you’re looking through, change the view of one eye? It looked like that, like one eye said there was something there and the other eye said there wasn’t. It looked like a shadowy blob, almost like a smoke but only 2D, like it was displayed against the end of the hallway. Then it was gone for a second It then reappeared, then disappeared in a flowing, ebbing motion. It didn’t move towards me or away and it happened so suddenly I wondered if I had seen it at all and my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. But I felt extremely threatened as I passed through that one spot, and each time I went down there, it got worse. The next time it took a form of a vague human shape, and I got the impression that it had a hood. It wasn’t long until it stopped disappearing while I was down there, and watched me as I did laundry. In a week it had advanced to the laundry room door, but wouldn’t enter. The furnace and electrical room is only 4 feet from the laundry room door on the opposite side from the hallway. By this time I only felt uncomfortable passing through it, but much more comfortable than being watched by it. It began to follow me to the stairs.
Around this time I spoke with my mother. In the past she displayed some sensitivity, so I thought maybe she knew about this. But she didn’t and laughed at me for being afraid of the basement, and refused to support my claims (although she did resist going down into the basement, so who knows?) My father laughs at the idea of ghosts; he’s more of the alien type, if anything. So I can’t say I have anyone to backup my claim. But here’s where things got really weird.
Not long after this the thing chased me up the stairs. It made a noise, nothing I can describe, almost like a moan, yelling and hissing all at once, but sounded so distant. I think it tried to grab me because it felt like something really disgusting touched my back. I remember running up the stairs as fast I could with the basket of laundry, turning around to look behind me after the doorway, and seeing it moving quickly up the stairs, only a few feet away. I dropped the basket, slammed the door shut, and jumped away, expecting it to come through the door. Luckily it never did, but that gave me the chills. The fact that it was stopped by a physical object confused me, and I kept trying to tell myself that it was all in my imagination, but I couldn’t explain what I had seen. It was so real, and my back felt like there was mud on it.
I was extremely concerned, since this thing tried to grab me, and it was trying to escape the basement. We don’t go down there often, so something in our basement, however menacing, we could deal with. But something in our home, around us all day? That made me very scared, and the fact that my parents wouldn’t believe me made me even more afraid.
It wasn’t long until I found the basement door open. Someone had left it open accidentally, as it is custom to always close it, and no one claimed responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a paranormal event, people in my house tend to deny any mistake and blame it on someone else. But it made me nervous, and a few minutes later my dread was confirmed. It was strolling through our house.
My parents never noticed anything. They went on business per usual, which in some respects I was glad for. The second thing I was glad for was I didn’t follow me around, staring at me like it did in the basement. By this time I had identified its eyes, which were tiny pinpricks of either white, or a hole in its substance. They never seemed to focus, but didn’t seem blind either. It walked around the house looking at things, as if gathering information on how to destroy us. Luckily it never got into my room because I always keep the door closed, and I never saw it in the kitchen, despite there being an open passage. I would round a corner and it would be in the room, or I would be in one room and it would pass by the door. Its final appearance was about 6 feet tall, and looked like it was wearing a cloak, or it was a cloak, or shroud. I’m not entirely sure if it had fingers on its arms, because the smaller the body part was, the fainter it was. It didn’t look like it had legs, but the shadow did reach the ground; it seemed to bob as it drifted, like it had legs under all that.
I have one particular memory that really made an impression on me. At the time I was on the third floor, which is our family room, big screen tv and all other types of media. I was absorbed by a particular program, blocking out the world when it felt like someone had yelled behind me. This brought me out of tv land and I saw it come up the stairs. As it did, the entire room got darker, and a bit colder, and a lot more menacing, as if it said “I know who you are, and I know how to kill you and everyone else here”. It didn’t stop to stare at me but went behind me and stopped five feet away from my chair in front of a mirror. Nothing showed up in the mirror, which makes me wonder if it was all in the head. But my favorite room in the entire house, the room that makes me so happy and peaceful, suddenly became a room I wanted burned to the ground, is evidence enough for me something was going on.
It’s no longer in our house today. It’s frolicking through our house lasted only 2 days before it escaped outside. In some ways I'm upset that it escaped, because now it is out there in the world creating fear. A few months after it escaped our next door neighbors (coincidently the house where our previous neighbor was murdered) told us their house was haunted. The children however did not seem to be aware, so I assume my shadow being didn’t slip into their house. They also claimed to have more of a poltergeist activity than what I had. In another way I was so relieved. I wasn’t afraid to go home anymore, in fact my house went back to what it was before; peaceful and loving. Throughout the whole ordeal, I was the only one who noticed anything, but it never appeared when I was with someone else. Just a few hours ago I finally found a reference of shadow people, which brought me to this page.
I would prefer that my name and email is not put on this story, but to be identified by "KS". If you, the moderator, have any comments, please send them back to me, as I would like to know if you have found any other cases of entities being contained by physical items. goosebumps. Once again, when I left the basement I felt so much better and lighter than I did down there.
