From: Melissa
To: shadowpeopleorg@comcast.net
Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2015 2:33:24 AM
Subject: Family shadow guy
My name is Melissa.
I grew up in an apartment complex in a suburb of New York City, where I lived with some cats and my mother in a 2-bedroom apartment. The bedrooms were upstairs and directly adjacent to one another; the doorways were only as far apart as the thickness of the wall that separated the rooms.
For my entire childhood (the 1970's through the early 1980's), I would see things out of the corner of my eye as I played in my room. Most usually, there would appear to be someone walking very quickly past my room in the hallway, and slipping into the door of my mother's room. If I looked up to see why my mother was walking by so quickly, there would be no one there, but I was left with the impression of the silhouette of a man in a trench-coat and fedora. As a kid, it reminded me of the black figure in the Spy-vs.-Spy feature in Mad magazine. Occasionally, I also would see something down low, at the bottom of the door frame, which I took to be a cat. We had one skinny black cat who liked to rub on the door frame as he came into the room, and I would look up, expecting to see him, but he would not be there. At the time, I either chalked it off as the cat having gone into my mother's room, or just "that thing I sometimes see". I had no sense of threat, or fear, so it really didn't concern me. Also, since I had seen this for as long as I could remember, I just assumed everyone saw it.
One day when I was maybe 9, I caught a glimpse of the low shadow out of the corner of my eye, and turned to call the cat - only to realize that cat was asleep on my bed. When I mentioned this to my mother later, and revealed that I also saw the man in the hat, she took me to an eye doctor! (He found everything normal, of course.) I stopped seeing these shadows in my early teens, and never mentioned them to anyone, mainly because there was nothing much to tell. It was such a frequent occurrence for me as a kid that it was really not notable, to me.
Years later, my mother had remarried, had a son, and moved to a different apartment in the same complex. I was in my early 30's and was at my mother's talking to my brother, who was in his teens at the time. Out of the blue, he asked me if I had ever seen anything "weird" in the apartment. I had only lived in that apartment for a year or two in my late teens before going to college, and I had never seen anything odd there, which I told him. When I asked why he was asking, he told me that he kept seeing a "shadow guy" out of the corner of his eye, slipping past his door. At the same time, we said "He wears a trench coat and a fedora!" and then got seriously creeped out. That freaked-out feeling only intensified when - thanks to the internet - I stumbled across a picture someone had drawn of MY SHADOW GUY!
I have no idea what all this means, or who - or what - they are. I have never seen the fedora man again. I do, however, sometimes see shadows in odd corners of rooms, always slipping just out of the range of my vision if I turn to look, particularly up at the corners where the walls meet the ceilings, in certain rooms. This happens regardless of house, and regardless of time of day, lighting, etc. They do not seem malevolent, but they also do not seem...nice. I get the feeling I should ignore them, so I try to do just that.
If anyone else has had similar experiences and thinks they're nuts, maybe reading this will help!
