From: Richmond, Virginia
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 10:40:28 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: My Shadow person/Ghost story
We live in a smallish house built in 1963 that belonged to my husband before we were married and have 2 girls... 12 and 8. Neither child will sleep in her bedroom alone; neither will even walk down the hallway past the infamous "third bedroom" without the hall light on, unless I go with them. As toddlers, neither child wanted to sleep in that room and always cried to sleep with someone else until I got up and carried them to another room. Truthfully, I've never liked that room either - always felt like I was being watched, not in a sinister way but watched nonetheless.
All sorts of strange things have happened since we moved here in 1998... orbs in the living room; voices that are just out of range both down the hall and just outside in the driveway; both girls have been scared out of their wits by a black dog that growls at them but I cannot hear or see it (to the point that the youngest will not stay in the kitchen alone 'cause the dog growls at her from the utility room); I've seen the figure of a small blonde-haired girl running from their room across the hall into our room who woke me up one night - me thinking that it was our youngest coming to crawl into my bed - only to turn into a hideously ugly troll sort of thing that scared the puddin' out of me then disappeared (I was awake with insomnia when that happened); I've been alone in the house with the girls playing across the street and heard a child's voice call out "mommy...?" from their bedroom making me think that one of them had come home; both children have been playing in the spare room when it was a playroom and been told to hush by an older woman's voice and both have answered what they thought was me calling to them by name from the kitchen more than once; I've turned off the t.v. in the bedroom and come back to find that it's on; several times I've been working in a room and had the feeling that a man had walked up and was standing in the doorway waiting to speak, I turned, expecting to see my husband, to find noone; the rooms get cold for no particular reason - the whole room, not just a spot....and that's just a little bit of the usual freaky stuff that happens in my life.
Our oldest was sitting at the dinner table one evening and stopped mid-bite then totally freaked out claiming that she had seen a floating head with a wispy tail sort of thing (like a balloon on a fuzzy string) come out of the third bedroom which is now being used for storage (since the girls will not play in there with what we call the "haunted dresser" as the woman's voice came into the house with that particular piece of furniture after I purchased it from a junk store). She insists that it was a demon because it had the face of a demon and that a demon is in that room and she will absolutely not go into it or past it alone. I've tried to assure her that ghosts of that sort don't look "normal" because of the time-space distortion that occurs when the spirit is displaced from the body - sort of like looking at yourself in a big water bubble or a gazing ball - but she didn't buy it. Most of the time, I wake up in the middle of the night to find that she's turned her nightstand light on.
Ironically enough, I had an organizer come into the house last April to help me reorganize my kitchen who happened to be psychic. I was told that there was some sort of energy in that room but that it was of the light or from the light... I can't remember....and was nothing to be feared. Some sort of spirit guide connected to a wind chime that my Aunt Pat gave me for my first home of St. Christopher feeding the birds. She told me that I had no idea how lucky I was to even be alive right now..... She had no idea that I almost died the day after our youngest was born when my blood pressure dropped like a stone for no reason or that I'd had a premonition of death in childbirth before I was even pregnant. Nor was she aware that that was only the most-recent of my brushes with death.
Anyway back to the shadow figure, I was home alone last fall and was in the process of cleaning out the extra stuff to get ready for a neighborhood yard sale. What a better place to start than in the junk room, right? It was in the middle of the morning... 10:30 or so. We keep the window shade pulled down (cause you can't get to the window right now to open it) so I turned the ceiling light on and saw a shadow on the far wall that looked like that of an elf or a really big garden gnome seen in profile.... smallish - like 4 feet or so, gently pointed hat with no brim, pointed bearded chin and big nose.... standing just to the right of the window between the window and a book case that I have set at an angle in the corner slightly behind a box of stuffed animals. I have the recollection of an arm but cannot definitely remember seeing one. It appeared to notice that I'd seen it and ran across the wall into the closet.... moved rather, since there are so many boxes in there right now that I couldn't see any legs. It seemed to be between the stuff and the wall like a really thin piece of black paper and blocked out the burgundy window shade when it zipped by just as a solid object would. Pretty weird.
I haven't seen it since but neither have I tried to. I have heard rustling noises in there that the husband attributes to a mouse since we get mice from time to time even with a cat in the house and that's the perfect room for them to hide in. After checking out several sites about shadow people, I can conclude that 1) it was not caused by some problem with my peripheral vision since I was looking straight on at it, 2) it was not caused by my being in a waking-sleep state, 3) it was not a drug- or alcohol-induced hallucination since I'm not on any medications nor do I drink that early in the day, 4) I have no history of epilepsy or seizures, no extreme vision problems, no mental problems (schizophrenia, paranoia or delusions), no hallucination caused by sleep deprivation. So what was it???
Both of my parents have passed on. My mom was clairvoyant to some degree and had many prophetic dreams, as I do, that ended up coming true... well beyond the deja vu sort of thing. I believe both children have some ability since they can see and hear things that don't exist to others as I did from time to time when a child. I've managed, over the years, to suppress it since I couldn't handle the knowledge at the time - too scary - so most of what I get is through dreams. I don't know the extent of their abilities nor how/whether to nurture it. Their dad isn't a great believer in psychic ability or ghosts/paranormal entities even though he's had some experiences of his own here and insists that whatever is in the house isn't harmful and we shouldn't fear it but that doesn't stop the girls from being afraid. He used to hear the distant voices before we were married when he lived here alone and he used to hear someone walk into the back bath, run the water and shave at the sink...clanking the razor along the side of the sink and everything. Since it didn't interact with or scare him, it shouldn't bother them. And yet he dismisses the notion of his child seeing a floating head in the hall.
Could this little shadow person be the manifestation of stressful energy (there has been a LOT of stress and a LOT of extreme emotions here) or a subconscious manifestation of the girls' mental energies? I don't know. I hope that the girls are afraid of it only because they don't understand it and not because it's tried to scare or hurt them. Could something along the occult line have happened here before he bought the house? No telling since it was rental property for many years before he got it. Being brought up Catholic, I definitely believe that there's something else out there - both good and evil - that we cannot see. After finding your site, I plan to teach both children the Prayer to St. Michael for protection as prayer is the strongest weapon we have and I'm reconsidering bring them up as Catholic instead of Methodist or Baptist for their own spiritual protection.
Please withhold my name and email address as I don't want my friends-who-don't-know to think I'm a total nutcase. You can put "Richmond, Va" if you'd like since my city has a long history of paranormal events given its history. Our neighborhood is on land that was once a Civil War battlefield in Seven Pines which, I'm sure doesn't help any... especially since our youngest says she can see the dead soldiers come up out of the ground while she's on the playground at school.
