Clear Light
Junior Acolyte
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2015
- Messages
- 54
I thought I'd share some experiences of "shadow people" encounters that occurred in my old family home. My grandparents had moved into the house in the late 1920s just after my father was born, and 33 years later I arrived into the world. Around six months later my grandfather passed away in the house after a long illness, leaving just my father, mother, grandmother and me until my brother was born a couple of years later. My folks had one bedroom and my nan had the other, while my brother and I slept in the box room. One night we had been put to bed and the boxroom door was left open so the light from the landing half illuminated the room. Laying in bed I became aware of a shadow moving across the wall at the bottom of my bed, a shadow of a figure wearing a hat. When it reached the middle of the wall, it stopped. At first, I thought it was one of my uncles checking in on us and expected them to appear in the doorway, but no. The shadow lingered for a while but then just seemed to fade away. Frightened, I ducked under the covers and dared not look to see if the shadow had returned. I remember seeing this shadow on a couple of other occasions, and in my childhood mind came up with the explanation that it was the spirit of my dead granddad checking in on me and my brother. Even so, I lived in fear of seeing that shadow and for many years after slept with my head sandwiched between two pillows in an attempt to avoid it. I tried to tell my parents about this terrifying shadow, but they just brushed it off as childish imagination. Then, a few years ago I was chatting with my brother and, out of the blue he said, "Do you remember the shadow in our bedroom?" I was a little shocked as I had assumed he was too young at the time to have registered it, but he described the entity exactly as I remembered it.
Fast forward half a century or so and I found myself living alone in the old family home, both my parents had died by this point and I was in the process of selling the place. During this time I would regularly see in the periphery of my vision a dark shadowy head peering around an open door. Of course, as soon as I looked directly at it, the shadow would duck back behind the door, only to resume peeping at me a short while later. This would happen in broad daylight and after dark, so I started to make sure to close the door so there would be nothing for the shadow to peep around to look at me. The house sold soon after, and I often wonder if the current residents ever encounter shadowy visitors.
I'm sure there are entirely reasonable explanations for these visual anomalies, but I was surprised to learn that reports of the Hat Man have been a relatively recent phenomenon, first surfacing in the late 1990s or 2000s, but it would appear that he's been lurking in the shadows for a while longer than that judging from my childhood encounters in the mid-1960s.
Fast forward half a century or so and I found myself living alone in the old family home, both my parents had died by this point and I was in the process of selling the place. During this time I would regularly see in the periphery of my vision a dark shadowy head peering around an open door. Of course, as soon as I looked directly at it, the shadow would duck back behind the door, only to resume peeping at me a short while later. This would happen in broad daylight and after dark, so I started to make sure to close the door so there would be nothing for the shadow to peep around to look at me. The house sold soon after, and I often wonder if the current residents ever encounter shadowy visitors.
I'm sure there are entirely reasonable explanations for these visual anomalies, but I was surprised to learn that reports of the Hat Man have been a relatively recent phenomenon, first surfacing in the late 1990s or 2000s, but it would appear that he's been lurking in the shadows for a while longer than that judging from my childhood encounters in the mid-1960s.
