From: name withheld by request
Subject: shadow things
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 01:58:45 -0700 (PDT)
To: shadowpeopleorg@comcast.net
Hello:
I just came across your site. Before today the only information I’ve gotten about shadow people has been through word of mouth, telling my own experiences and listening to others'. It never occurred to me to search the internet for stories about it.
I have had only experiences with two shadow people/creatures.
While I was growing up, I lived in a house that was 40 years old. The entire time I lived in that house the only good night of sleep I had were when I was spending the night at a friend’s or a relative's house, or, the year or so I spent sleeping in my grandmother's bedroom with her.
Every night after everyone had gone to bed, I would wake up to see a man-shaped shadow standing in front of my closet door. This was regardless of whether the door was open or not. The only visual description I can give of the man is that he was just... darker than the space around him. I felt that he was evil and watching me.
Every night when this occurred I would summon the courage to jump out of my bed (and the psychological safety of my blankets) and run down the hall to my parents' bedroom, where I would jump into their bed claiming nightmares (I was a very reticent child and it never occurred to me to actually tell my parents what was going on, but this might have been because my parents are engineers and would have sent me straight to a shrink instead of consoling me) and there I would sleep quite well.
One night when I was seven the same thing happened as usual, but when I ran to my parents' bedroom I found the door locked. I screamed and banged at the door for possibly as long as an hour while watching the shadow watch me from my open doorway. Eventually it left and I passed out there on the floor.
I found out in the morning that my parents had decided, without bothering to inform me, that I was too old to be sleeping in their bed and they were going to keep their door locked nightly.
With me unable to leave the room, the shadow man became more active. Rather than simply standing in the corner of the room, he would slowly advance toward me, sometimes standing at the foot of the bed, sometimes sitting on the foot of the bed, sometimes coming right up next to me and staring down at me, and at least twice, rising up into the air from the foot of the bed and hovering directly over me a foot or two from the ceiling. He never touched me but always seemed malevolent.
Later that year (at 7), I converted to Christianity, was baptized, and began to pray fervently to god and Jesus every night that the man would go away. It did nothing. (This may be one of the main reasons I converted back to atheism a couple years later.) I tried telling him to go away in a firm voice. This also did nothing.
The only other place in the house I ever felt uneasy was in the bathtub (there was no shower and only one bathroom), which was directly on the other side of the wall from my closet.
When I was 10 or 11, I asked my parents if anyone had ever died in the house. They said the realtor had mentioned an old man dying in the bathtub but hadn't much cared because they didn't believe in ghosts. While it would make sense to believe the shadow man was the same as the old man who died in the bathtub, I never got the sense that the shadow man was elderly or in fact human in any way. It did not seem like a thing that had ever lived. It felt ageless and as though it had never experienced any emotion other than hostility.
My family moved the summer before I started 7th grade, and I never saw it again.
My life calmed down a lot, in the supernatural sense, until I was 16. I was having a very difficult teenage experience, particularly with my parents, and spent most of my nights at friends' houses, which my parents did not mind in the least.
One night, I was sitting outside my best friend's house with her while she smoked a cigarette and bitched about government oppression and other typical teenage topics. Suddenly we heard a noise behind us and turned to see the small cement sewer cover fly upward and sewage spew out of the hole. this was about 3 feet behind us, and we ran into the middle of the street to get away from the possibility of being covered in whatever was coming out of that hole. We agreed it was weird and went inside.
Awhile later (how much later I can't recall) myself and my friend both looked at the front door simultaneously. I said something to the effect of "someone's at the door" and my friend got up to look through the peephole but said she couldn't see anyone. Both of us still felt someone was there though so we went to look at the entry from the kitchen window. what I saw was a column of swirling blackness -the same type of blackness of which the shadow man of my childhood was made. I turned to look at my friend. her face was blanched and she said "it's a demon." This statement I attribute to a combination of her Romanian upbringing (very superstitious) and the intense feeling of evil emanating from the thing (many times the intensity of the shadow man, who then seemed friendlier in comparison). My friend then grabbed a big box of salt from the pantry and walked around the house arm- in-arm with me while she poured salt under every door and window. She told me Romanians do this to keep evil from crossing through them. (I guess evil can't come in through a wall?) Anyhow, I guess it worked because the thing just stayed in the entryway all night. We stayed up all night too, just because falling asleep seemed like it might be the wrong thing to do. The thing disappeared at dawn, at which point my friend charged outside for a much- needed cigarette and I walked home. Suddenly home seemed safer than where I was, despite everything.
For half a year after that everywhere I went sewer and water type things exploded, often right before I arrived at any given location. many faucets and sprinklers were repaired around me and even one water main. But that was the last I saw of shadows.
I feel it may be important to mention that I have seen a lot of ghosts, and they have always seemed just like people to me, until I looked at them and they vanished after a second. They've never given me any feelings of terror or dread, though sometimes they are a little startling. (like the time I was going to the bathroom in a friend’s house two years ago and looked up to see some man in the doorway watching me pee. I asked my friend if he had ghosts and he said he had a bunch but that judging from the part of the house I’d come from, I had just encountered one of the several male ghosts who liked to watch women while they were naked or using the restroom. He said he could never keep a female roommate because of them. I then asked his current female roommate if she'd had any ghost encounters to which she replied that she knew she looked good naked but she thought it was rude for them to look.)
In short, no ghost I’ve encountered has ever had the slightest resemblance to a shadow creature. I know that many other people believe them to be the same, but I know they are not.
You may use all or part of this on your website and you may edit it in any way that you like, but please do not include my name. thanks for all the info in your site; it's very comforting to know
