From: Amanda
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 5:36:47 AM
Subject: My Experience
Previous Title: Marked by Shadows and Breaking Free
I’m not precisely sure when I started having disturbing experiences while I slept, but I know they started young. I can remember strange things happening to me late at night as young as five although I’m not sure how dependable those memories are. I remember the bed would sometimes vibrate but only the mattress, and there would be occasional knocks on the outside walls of the house that sounded like a knock a person would make on a door, with long pauses in-between. The knocker would always knock near or around my window on the second floor. There was no balcony, overhang or roof that someone could have stood on to knock from. The wall was perfectly flat from the ground to the roof where my window was. This is when my family lived in Colorado Springs, CO in the 1980s.
It’s always possible it was a natural sound, an animal, the house settling. However, it always felt like there was something purposeful about the knocks. I didn’t start seeing shadows though, at least not that I can remember till about seven or eight.
My mother said she often found me asleep with my eyes open at that age.
The first shadow person or thing I remember, was knotted shaped like a tree trunk with smooth edges, crooked and bent yet, vaguely humanoid. It was ‘outlined’ in the door between my bed and the open door to the hallway. As a kid, I think I decided it was a witch at the time because it was twisted and wrong looking. It didn’t move from the hall. It was more like it was looking in on me. It came into sight, stopped then stared at me, or at least seemed to, though there were no eyes that I could make out, no face, just shadow around a shape.
I couldn’t move, just look, and the feeling I felt…it can only be described as dread. It wasn’t fear. It was worse than that, it was more like a really nasty sinking feeling that would press in almost like it has its own sound; that sound you hear when you tip upside down and the blood starts rushing into your ears. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t close my eyes or even open them wider to try and see better.
After that, it kept happening.
At first, the dark shapes that would approach me seemed to vary, though there was always that horrible sensation of something really nasty being in the room with me. I would sometime feel pressure pushing on me. The best way to describe it was like when you go to the doctor’s and the doctor presses his or her fingers against where your kidneys are and asks you if it hurts. It was that kind of uncomfortable, probing sensation except there was no sense of fingers or an object pressing into me, just the uncomfortable pressure.
There was another sense too. Sometimes it generally alerted me to the fact that something was about to happen. It felt like I would ‘drop’ a little, or ‘fall’ a little where I was lying. These visitations were sporadic. Sometimes they would happen a couple times a month and sometimes I would go months before another experience happened.
As a kid, I just told my parents I’d had bad dreams. They seemed to think it was a phase and didn’t worry about it and for some reason, I never elaborated. I’d learned the Lord’s Pray in Sunday School and recited it desperately in my head whenever the experiences started happening, thinking it might save me, but the prayer never worked for me. The feeling of dread only seemed to increase.
It’s strange, but it almost felt like there were different flavors to the experiences up into my teens, almost like I had a scent on me of some kind or had been marked in some way and these shadows were drawn to it. The experiences never ended with the shadows walking or moving away, it was more like the sense of them would recede then I would finally be able to move again, sit up, turn on the light or simply shut my eyes and curl up.
Then the experience changed. The shadows stopped being as varied and twisted and it was just one type of shadow that would come. This one was more man-shaped but fuzzy at the edges; soft, as if it wasn’t as solid as the real things casting shadows in my room. The feeling of dread changed too. It got worse and I started identifying it with just one shadow. I thought of ‘it’ as a ‘him’. It was more male-shaped than female to me.
Sometimes while paralyzed, I would only feel that uncomfortable sense of pressure pushing at me and that horrible sense of something being really, really, wrong but because of how I was lying, I couldn’t see where it was. If I lay sleeping facing the wall instead of sleeping on my back, I would feel a slow jabbing like presser push into my back near the soft spot between the skin and shoulder blade, just pushing and probing like it was trying to get in.
The experiences continued though Junior High and into High School; the frequency always varying. There were times I thought I was over whatever was happening to me and it would seem like I was free, then the experiences would start up again.
In my Junior year, my family moved to Longmont, CO and part of me hoped that whatever was stalking me in my sleep would go away. Months went by without anything bad happening while I slept and I prayed I’d grown out of it or left it behind. Then ‘he’ returned. Sometimes I would see the shape of it, moving subtly, or I could sense it behind me on the other side of the bed. I wouldn’t be able to move and that horrible feeling of dread would return. I no longer said the Lord’s prayer to try to ward it off. I’d given up on that. I decided I must have some strange sleeping disorder and no amount of prayer would help me. I also stopped going to church around that time.
My senior year I wrote him/it a letter and sealed it inside an envelope.
When I left for college at CU Boulder, my first year in the dorms were uneventful and again I thought perhaps I’d gotten over my problem whatever it was, and that finally I was free. No more night terrors, no more sleep paralysis. No more dread. My Sophomore year I moved to Paris France to study abroad and got a room in a large house that used to be a nunnery in the 12th District near the Bastille.
There I experienced something different from the shadow of the man. There the sleep paralysis returned but the feeling felt different, not as cloying. It still felt like a warning. I was still afraid, but the sense of something being truly and horribly wrong was gone. I would see something peek in on me. Just the vaguest shape/shadow of something, that I could only barely slit my eyes open to see. It didn’t make noises like a person would on those old creaky ancient floor boards of the house. I never heard a sound from it. I just saw it ‘seeing me’.
Having lived with that other sensation for so long, with ‘him’, I wasn’t as afraid, and though the peeking shadow persisted the whole time I was there. I wasn’t as fearful of going to sleep. The experience still felt frightening, but it didn’t feel as wrong somehow.
When I returned to the United States in Christmas of 2000, it wasn’t long before the other shadow returned. I had an apartment in Boulder by then. Every time the experiences would happen I would struggle to move, I would fight to move desperately, to speak, anything. It always felt like if I could do that, just break free, I could stop the experience from happening somehow.
I started doing research then. I spent hours in the University library reading about sleeping disorders, night terrors, medical diagnosis, symptoms, medications. I found a few chapters here and there that described the experiences I was having but over and over again the treatments offered and diagnosis given were vague and unhelpful with no treatment that could completely stop whatever was wrong. There were medications that sometimes help but could relieve the symptoms completely. One doctor wrote that sleeping sitting up reduced the symptoms in some patients. Mostly the research I found felt like interesting footnotes a doctor decided to comment on. One book however mentioned the old hag legends from Europe which peaked my interest. I put the medical books down and started sifting through superstition, myths, and various world religions instead.
The old hag legends from Europe described an all too familiar scenario for me: sleep paralyses, the feeling of being pressed down on, the sense of an evil presence in the room. And the old hag legend wasn’t the only similar myth I found. There were similar myths and superstitious beliefs throughout the world, Asia, Africa, South America… everywhere it seemed. The most disturbing accounts I read happened with the Hmong immigrants from Vietnam who left their home country at the end of the Vietnam war. Young men from the Hmong refugees had started having similar sleep paralysis experiences after leaving their homeland and during that time multiple, seemingly perfect, healthy, young men died from SUNDS, Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. They believed it was the dab tsog an evil spirit that comes in your sleep and robs you of breath. During a Dab Tsog attack you experience sleep paralysis while something presses heavily down upon your chest.
In these myths and folklore, I found a strange array of old wives’ tales and superstitious remedies for fighting of what were described as evil spirits or supernatural assaults. Since neither prayer nor medical advice had helped so far, I followed several of these remedies. I put a metal knife between my mattress and box spring to cut through the nightmare. Ideally, it should have been silver or cold iron, but neither of those things were readily available to me at the time. I also put a bowl of rose, sage and lavender water under my bed in a carefully cleansed bowl.
The shadow figure returned as ‘he’ always had, and as always, I couldn’t move. I could just see the shape of ‘him’ in the doorway; the hall light outlining his fuzzy edges and shadowed form. There’s never any hint of a face. This time, something had changed however, I don’t know if it was the water and the knife, or the fact that I’d not been as terrified in France and learned to bolster my courage, or simply all the research and reading I’d done perhaps boosting my self-confidence and determination, or if the simple power of belief helped me, but the last time I saw ‘him’, was that night. That night I fought to move as I always did, struggling to break free somehow, someway, and finally…finally I managed to speak. I told him, in not a very clear voice, it sounded like I had pudding in my mouth, “to go away”. It was the first time I’d ever managed to break any part of the paralysis. It was the first time I’d ever managed to speak. That is the only time I’ve ever seen one of the shadow shapes move back. The sense of him didn’t just recede. I watched ‘him’ move back and away. It left.
He/it had always felt the worse of any of the experiences I’ve had, that creeping sense of something wrong, that feeling of pure dread, but after that night ‘he’ never came back. I was twenty-two.
Since then, I’ve had other experiences of sleep paralysis and I’ve seen other shadows, but the sense of dread has lessened considerably. Somehow, I can always manage to move now or speak when it happens and that always seems to dissipate the experience. Afterward, I generally get up and move around, sometimes just to be sure I check the house for intruders.
I’ve seen other shadows that don’t come with the creepy nasty sense that ‘he’ did. Some of them have almost an edge of light around them, like there is a candle flame just behind them giving them a vague outline, though I can never make out a face. The experiences have dwindled dramatically. They have become rare and are no longer common occurrences in my life. It feels now more like these things sometimes come peeking in because they catch a whiff of an old scent on me and so come nosing around, but they don’t stay. I currently live in Denver. I’m thirty-five years old and no longer afraid of going to sleep.
