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Shadow People

crypto said:
"Does anyone else ever see tiny, magnesium bright pin-pricks of light flying about their room at night when they are in bed? I do and I'd like to know what they are. They're all different colours and move about at a steady pace, not acvtually doing anything. What are they?"
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Erm i see pin pricks of light of all colours blue green red ect. I go no idea what they are only that i can always rember seeing them no mater where i have lived. Now in the countryside i still see them (no radio/phone masts nearby) although there is a train line goes past not a million miles away. oh and me front garden is an old graveyard. :D

Also just the other day my better half came up to me to tell me that she had seen a dark shadowy man walk accros our kitchen floor. Now this happened very quickly and i intend to investigate it but i find peoples minds are corrupted with what they are expected to "see". This is not deliberate, its a completly natural and we all do it one way or another (that clock in the tree trunk ect). Not sure if this is a gooly, shadowman, or mental breakdown yet but time will tell.
 
"i intend to investigate it but i find peoples minds are corrupted with what they are expected to "see". This is not deliberate, its a completly natural and we all do it one way or another (that clock in the tree trunk ect)."

Exactly - and it's an interesting Fortean phenomenon to see the number of people who are prepared to talk about sightings of 'shadow men' when this becomes a kind of recognised form of experience - before anybody mentioned it, maybe some of them would have just put it down to a visual 'blip'. Obviously not all, though...

The number of shadow men stories does seem to be growing - there's a lot on the 'it happened to me' bit of the forum, and for my money they're some of the most chilling stories. And the most believable, too.

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18166
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18491
are just a couple.

A fair amount of them seem to describe them as 'stick-like' or long-limbed, which is always eerie!

As for shadow cats, I can attest to the same experience. After staying up all night, I continually caught glimpses of black cats sneaking off out of the corner of my eye. I'm pretty damn sure it was exactly as Wintermute suggested: eyes see shadow, brain interprets 'cat' as nearest analogue.

Well, either that or the shadow people are coming... and they're bringing their pets!
 
i seen it ! i seen it !

3 things...
first ive occasionaly seen these shadow chaps, secondly this aint
the world as it is... its the way it seems.
thirdly, belief is a positive energy, add this to the negative stuff
that floats around... + and - creates.
so yeah, i reckon... if ya believe in it... its true in some form.
 
Shadow Man

This happened when I was about 5 years old.

I was lying in bed one evening and being a bit scared of the dark my parents used to keep the hall light on and the door between my bedroom and the hall open so I could have a clear view of the hall which was not particularly big but with the light on it was very well lit.

Suddenly a shadow of a man running appeared on one side of the wall in the hall and ran towards me along the wall. When it reached my parents room door which was open and the room dark, it just vanished. I don't know whether it just disappeared or went into the dark room.

I know I wasnt asleep as I had only just gone to bed. I call out for my mom & told her what I had seen but I think she just thought I had imagined it.

At the time we lived in a 3 story block of flats on the to floor - this must have been around 1974. One or two other strange things happened there including a scary UFO sighting which my mom & nan saw & still talk about today. I'll post that story in another thread.

So was it a ghost or something else? I only saw it that once.
 
There actually are some threads scattered throughout the site of an entity people see at night called, imaginatively enough, the Shadow Man.

Maybe do a search on Sleep Paralysis, or Night Hag, or Shadow Man, something should come up.

Be happy it didn't try to attack you, it's happened to some people.

-Fitz
 
Did it have on a hat? (This is a serious question, guys.)

(Please post the UFO story!)
 
Thanks Quixote for re-directing my post... i didn't realise that so many people have experienced shadow people.. it kind of makes me feel a little less crazy !

Sudi - It didn't have a hat ! Why do you ask?

I'll post the UFO story in the It Happened to Me section right now - however - it didn't happen to me it happened to my mom & nan.
 
Sudi - It didn't have a hat ! Why do you ask?
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The shadowman that I unfortunately experienced seemed to be wearing a broad-brimmed hat. The shadowman was just an inky black opaque shape, so there was no other defining features I could discern except the outline of its "body." He (I am certain it was male,) also seemed to be wearing a coat that fit like a trenchcoat. triangular--more narrow at the shoulders and broader towards the bottom. (I also saw a Flying Triangle....so this shape pops up in my paranormal experiences...hmmmnnnn...anyway...)

In reading through the redirected thread I see another post that fits the shadowman like I "saw" or dreamed. Some people describe it with a hat. Which I find extremely interesting that a group of people with diverse backgrounds would conjure up the same figure to scare the bejeezus out of them. (My experience was the most frightening of my life.)

It also seems that these shadowguys divide into two catagories: 1) The Sleep Paralysis/Fright catagory and 2) the wide awake scurrying in the corner of your visual field catagory.

Most experiencecers of the SP and night-fright catagory say it has only happened once. I hope that is true.

(NOW...on to the UFO post. :D Thanks for posting it so quickly.)
 
Strange about the hat. In German folklore, teh grim reaper is actually wearing a wide brimmed hat rather than a hood. I wonder if those shadow-people gave rise to that idea.

Also I have never seen a shadow being myself, but my mother-in-law seems to attract them regularily. She works in a mental hospital and has to walk very early in the morning through ground that used to be were the old part stood and is now build up by new houses. The first time on that route, she had the feeling there was someone behind her and from the corner of her eye she could see this figure which reminded her of the grim reaper (hooded version), it was pitch black and followed her for about 5min and freaked her out badly. Only about 2 weeks later on the same stretch, she felt a presence again but this time it wasn't as menacing. Also it didn't seem to be as dark black as the first one.
(She also had a ball of light floating in her room (after her one of her sons tragically died) and often feels something walking past her. She was also almost pushed down the stairs in Hampton court with nobody around and saw her dog bark at something that wasn't there).
 
Dingo666 said:
Strange about the hat. In German folklore, teh grim reaper is actually wearing a wide brimmed hat rather than a hood. I wonder if those shadow-people gave rise to that idea.
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When Odin went about the earth in disguise he wore a broad-brimmed hat, and Odin was a god associated with the dead and one of the names he was known by was Grim(nir).
 
(Ok. I can't get my Mac to pick the quotes properly....so... Dingo666 said: In German folklore, teh grim reaper is actually wearing a wide brimmed hat rather than a hood. I wonder if those shadow-people gave rise to that idea.


and Timble said:
When Odin went about the earth in disguise he wore a broad-brimmed hat, and Odin was a god associated with the dead and one of the names he was known by was Grim(nir).

After some time, I also began to relate the stereotyped "witch" characterization with the shadowman I saw. Since the other explanation was the "Night Hag" which was female.

Does anyone else know why witches have on broad-brimmed, pointy hats in drawings?
 
A few years ago we had a friend staying with us for a short time. Hubby and daughter had gone to bed one night leaving our friend and myself in the livingroom. All of a sudden this solid black figure walked past the open door. It looked like a person had been cut out of black paper. I could see it's arms and legs moving. Pretty alarmed, I checked to see if I hadn't just see hubby going towards the bathroom, and found that he was fast asleep. The friend hadn't seen a thing that time, but he used to tell me that he could see shadows moving about late at night when he knew no one was awake.
 
Che said:
....I opened my eyes to see a huge, hulking figure standing at the foot of my bed. My impression was that it was covered in eyes, though that seemed to be more of an impression than an actual visual. And the third was the same hulking figure, standing next to the head of my bed. It reached out and touched the right side of my face, and when I awoke the next morning, my right eye had swollen shut, my face was red and puffy on that side, and it felt as though that side of my face was suffering from a severe sunburn, or maybe a bad abrasion. The effects lasted about three days.
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Not to get goofy, but my suggestion is that you try and fight him. Kidding. What kind of apparation would do that to someone anyhow, it was definetly a negative entity.

I sometimes see a pink/red speck of light which is very very bright like reflecting tin foil. It appears somewhere off to the side, or i've seen it before directly where i was looking, and goes away in about a second. Does this go along with anyone elses things? Its not floaters, i can tell those apart cuz i have them too.
 
Human_84 asks:

I sometimes see a pink/red speck of light which is very very bright like reflecting tin foil. It appears somewhere off to the side, or i've seen it before directly where i was looking, and goes away in about a second. Does this go along with anyone elses things? Its not floaters, i can tell those apart cuz i have them too.
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I once asked an optometrist (not an opthalmologist, but a good optometrist, I think,) about those bright flashes. With me, they look like a tiny old-fashioned flashbulb going off. She said it actually is the floaters bumping into the retina at the back of your eye, and momentarily stimulating the optic nerve, and nothing to worry about.
 
sudi said:
Human_84 asks:

I sometimes see a pink/red speck of light which is very very bright like reflecting tin foil. It appears somewhere off to the side, or i've seen it before directly where i was looking, and goes away in about a second. Does this go along with anyone elses things? Its not floaters, i can tell those apart cuz i have them too.
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I once asked an optometrist (not an opthalmologist, but a good optometrist, I think,) about those bright flashes. With me, they look like a tiny old-fashioned flashbulb going off. She said it actually is the floaters bumping into the retina at the back of your eye, and momentarily stimulating the optic nerve, and nothing to worry about.
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Very interesting. Thanks for informing me on that. And I realize most people probably have them but just dont play attention.
 
Shadow Attack

Shadow Attack-A few years ago I was attacked by a shadow person. I awoke the next day thinking it was a bad dream, until I saw the black eye that it gave me. Being an artist I figured I would draw the incident for Coast listeners to get a better idea of how this went about.

--James
pics here- http://www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page909.html
 
The Shadow People

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?
- T.S. Eliot, "What the Thunder Said"
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giantrobot1 said:
"This seems exactly like a dream followed by a sleep paralysis episode. The latter bit about being held down and not being able to move or breath is a perfect textbook example of sleep paralysis/night hag."
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But as I read this the bedroom "shadow man's" choking attack on Don Richardson took place after Richardson had not only awakened but had performed the physical action of "pull[ing] back the [window] curtain" to check outside and look at the streetlight to see if he could find a physical source for the shadow. Wouldn't this argue against traditional SP?
 
Funnily enough I finished writing a short horror story based on my experiences of "shadow people" the other week there. And then this thread pops back up :) (PM me you ever want to read it)

I've seen and felt them quite a few times, though not recently. Sometimes they have taken a human form, and sometimes just a sort of nebulous blob of shadow with eyes. In either case they seemed to be formed of shadow darker than the shadow surrounding them. In all save one or two occasions they have been accompanied by a feeling of malevolant hatred and a sort of envious anger I think would be the best way to describe it.

In fact usually I tended to feel them before seeing them. I would feel like being watched and a feeling of malevolence etc would wash over me, I would turn and see the nebulous shape out of the norner of my eye, or the fleeting shadowy figure of a man that disappeared as I looked at it directly. They seemed to prefer angles, the corners or joins between wall and ceiling.
Once I walked into my bathroom and there was a shadowy figure of a man there (looking straight at it), who proptly disappeared. It scared the crap out of me but it did not feel the same as the others, almost felt like he was lost a little bit. Pretty sure I scared him just as much.

I tended to put them down to entities from somewhere close to our reality but slightly removed. For example on a scale of hell---us---heaven they would be a few levels below us, perhaps purgatory or something or even entirely inhuman creatures from a close dimension. Or my own mind, but I know a fair few people who have experienced these things so...I dont know.
 
mao: Can we all read it? Is it going to be published?

Also interesting you should say mention where you think they come from - quite a few people are suggesting similar things in a clash of Forteana/demonology and theoretical physics.

OldTimeRadio said:
giantrobot1 said:
"This seems exactly like a dream followed by a sleep paralysis episode. The latter bit about being held down and not being able to move or breath is a perfect textbook example of sleep paralysis/night hag."
Click to expand...

But as I read this the bedroom "shadow man's" choking attack on Don Richardson took place after Richardson had not only awakened but had performed the physical action of "pull[ing] back the [window] curtain" to check outside and look at the streetlight to see if he could find a physical source for the shadow. Wouldn't this argue against traditional SP?
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Nope.

Dig out my SP attack which involved a series of false awakenings.

I also knew a guy who had a weird series of (non-SP) false awakening dreams were he got out of bed, opened his curtains and found a body hanging outside his window. At which point he wakes up and opens his curtains to find a body hanging outside his window. At which point he woke up and was very reluctant to open his curtains.

Once you've been through this kind of thing you can see how utterly convincingly real such states.
 
Sure anybody can read it, and no its doubtful it will ever be published, far,far too short for one thing. It's just something I wrote for fun when I had some spare time one day. I am however writing a full length novel where they play a role as part of the antagonists that I hope to get published one day. (currently finishing off the last bit of a different full length fantasy novel then intend to tighten it up and try to get it published - hey, you never know. I've read some real dross that got published before!)

It's funny you mention a clash of Forteans, Demonology and Theoretical Physics - the more I read about current theories on theoretical physics and reality the more it seems to be edging towards a decisevly occult-styled viewpoint.
 
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