From: Brian
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 23:56:03 -0500
To: shadowpeopleorg@comcast.net
First off, I want to say that I am very skeptical of anything "paranormal," but I have seen too much to say for sure that none of this is real. I can't honestly claim that its all in my head. It may be, just I'm starting to seriously doubt that claim.
I guess I should start off at the beginning. As a child, I had an imaginary "friend" named Mr. Nobody. This "friend" has also appeared to my niece who lives 900 miles away. This shocked my brother who had forgotten about the apparition until his daughter claimed to have been haunted by Mr. Nobody. Then several years later my daughter, who I have adopted, started talking about a scary man who was following her around and hiding outside her window at night named, "Bob". I said, "Bob who?" She said, "Bob Nobody". I said,“What's Bob's last name?” She said his last name is ‘Nobody.’ She could never tell me what he looked like.
I don't know the relevance of all that but when I saw him as a kid, he scared the shit out of me. He was a tall thin man made of shadow. No features were visible. I saw Mr. Nobody from the age of 4 until the age of 8 (I think). I'm not sure when I stopped seeing Mr. Nobody but I do remember that I found that I could "will" him away. And after, that he stopped coming back as frequently.
Fast forward to when I was 16. I started seeing shadows out of the corner of my eyes. When I would turn my head, they would "smear" out of sight or disappear altogether. Regardless, it was all very fast. I saw most of these things while on the road. I have always sworn this off as birds, circling over head like they do over the hot roads, looking for road kill or gliding along on an updraft. But I could almost swear that these shadows do not follow the lay of the land. They are three-dimensional objects hovering just above the ground. Anyway, these shadows almost always jump in front of the car. I have also seen them in many other places, from kitchens to bathrooms, to McDonald's.
Then when I was 18, they started appearing in groups. Until this time, I had only seen them one at a time and had assumed that there was only one of them and I was the only one to see it. Also at this time, my then girlfriend was having sightings. I had been dating her for two years but we had never mentioned the sightings to each other. The only way I knew she had seen one was when we were driving to town and I saw one dart out in front of us. She was driving and she swerved to keep from hitting it. I turned and said, "Did you see that?" She said, "You saw it too?" I said, "Yeah". We both said 'shadow.'
Afterwards, she found a place to pull over; we told each other our stories. They were remarkably similar except she had never seen Mr. Nobody. The 'shadow' activity level began growing after that and I ended the relationship within a year. The sightings started to drop off.
I met my wife at college the next year. We started dating which eventually led to our marriage. Shortly after getting married, we moved into a trailer out in the country. That's when all 'manner of weirdness' began. We started hearing knocks at our front and back doors. Our front door was a sliding glass door and made a sound unique to these types of doors when knocked upon. There was never anybody there. Also, there were "paranormal" activities in our bedroom. It too had a sliding glass door, as well as a door leading out to the rest of the trailer. At night we would hear something in the walls running laps around the room. It would go clear around the room in about a second and continue this for about a dozen laps. It would pause for about 3 seconds and then start up again. This process would last for two to three hours, making it very hard to fall asleep.
Also there would be small tugging on our blanket from the foot of the bed. We were told that there was a squirrel living in the ceiling and we believed it for awhile. But then we started to question that. Our doors went floor to ceiling. How would a squirrel run through solid glass and an open doorway?
Then one Saturday morning, when our two daughters were away at their grandmother's house, we heard a little child crying for her mommy. I went to go check on my daughter out of instinct and found the room empty. The crying ceased. Then one night a few days/weeks later (don't remember how long) I saw a little girl in my daughter's room who looked like my daughter only with blonde hair instead of red. I called to her to ask what she was doing and my daughter who was beside me answered, "Why are you yelling?" The girl was gone when I turned back to look.
One night, I developed a bad fever and subsequentially, a condition call DKA (DKA, diabetic ketoacidosis), where your blood turns to acid. I lay in bed not being able to sleep when I noticed a third breathing pattern in the room. It was very dark as we were living in the country and I could not see or get up to turn the lights on. So I held my breath and listened. I heard my wife's slow breathing that I had become accustomed to and another huskier breathing that seemed to follow my wife's almost perfectly. Occasionally her breathing pattern would change and I could hear this other's more distinctly before it would change to match my wife's.
I went into the hospital the next day and didn't return for several days. I told my wife what I heard and she said to wake her if it happened again. That night it did and she hadn't fallen all the way asleep yet. I nudged her. We both heard the breathing and were thoroughly frightened.
Soon after, the landlord came over with his teenage son. When we asked him if anybody else had experienced anything weird. He kind of furrowed his brow and shook his head but his son's face was pale and he looked at his dad and said, "See?" We said, "What?” but the landlord wouldn't say anything more and wouldn't let his son either. Later we questioned the son and he said his sister used to rent the place and some "freaky shit" happened up there. He wouldn't say what though.
Shortly thereafter, my wife started seeing shadow people. I asked her how long she had been seeing them and she said as long as she could remember. I told her my story and we agreed that it was quite weird. Then one night, I was sitting on the couch reading when I saw a shadow out our front door. I assumed that we were getting company. I turned to look out the sliding glass doors and saw my wife doing the same thing. She was standing directly in front of the door about four feet away and I was at an angle about ten feet away. I saw a figure crouched outside that turned and rose to a height of seven feet. Then it lunged forward through the glass, through my wife and out the window/wall beside her (not sure, maybe both… I was on the other side of her). She screamed and fell back. Her account of the story is that she saw a figure crouching outside the door and as she looked at it, the figure's eyes focused on her. She says it "noticed her noticing it", and then it stood and took off (dispersed). Her description gives it much more substance while what I saw was slightly fuzzy; not hairy, but undefined on its edges. Also, I never saw the eyes but she did. She said they were ‘blood red.’ She said everything else was 'black but very defined'; like a very tall human. We began seeing them quite frequently and soon moved away.
The sightings continued, however, growing in frequency. We've had a third child since then. The children have never seen them and I hope they don't. We make it a point not to say anything about them around our children. We are concerned about the frequency of sightings. I am more concerned with the larger numbers that have been seen at a given time as this indicates their numbers may be growing. I am still open to the possibility that this is all manifesting in our heads (hope that's the case actually) but the evidence to the contrary is becoming overwhelming. I hope I haven't written too much or left anything out but I felt like I needed to get this off of my chest.
