It’s the middle of the night. You’re sound asleep when suddenly - youreyes pop open. You’re not sure why - you didn’t heara noise - but you feel… something. Is it in the air? Your room does feel colder than usual. You look around your room. Nothing. Relief washes over you and you start to closeyour eyes when - there is something there! A shadow in the corner. Something that wasn’t there before. You can’t quite make it out, but it lookshuman. It’s so dark you can’t tell. You pull the blankets up just below your eyes.
It must just be a weird shadow, right? Or your brain playing tricks on you? You close your eyes and count to three, youknow when you open them it will be gone. One, two, three. Phew, it’s gone. NO! It’s in the other corner now and it’scoming towards you! It’s eyes open, glowing red in the darkand staring right at you. You’re so scared you can’t scream. You can barely move.
It’s getting closer and closer you reachout and just in time you hit the switch on your lamp and see… Your coat rack. You laugh to yourself. It does look a little like a person in thedark. And maybe the eyes you saw were just lightsreflecting in from the street outside.
You do a quiet search, just to make sure there’snothing in your room, but you can’t shake the feeling that a few minutes ago, you weren’talone. It’s not going to be easy to fall asleepagain, but you assume you’re safe. The strange shadow person at the corner ofyour room begins to fade from your mind. But you can’t help but feel like that it’snot the last you’ve seen of it...
It’s a week later when you’re on the bushome. It’s been a long day, and you’re verytired, trying to keep awake but you keep dozing off when then, out of the corner of your eye,there it is. On the side of the road you see the same shadowyfigure that was in your room, glowing eyes looking right into yours.
The bus is moving fast, and you only havea second to glimpse its before it disappears, but your heart is pounding. You try to put it out of your mind but thereit is again on the side of the road! Is it following you? Or is there more than one of these shadowythings chasing you? You don’t want to keep looking, afraid ofwhat you’ll find, so you close your eyes and wait for your stop.
As you get off, you don’t see anything aroundyou, but you’re not taking any chances as you run to your home. Who are these shadow people? Or more accurately, what are they? Are you just hallucinating and seeing themwhen you’re tired, or is something more sinister going on? You’re definitely not going to sleep anytime soon, so you turn all the lights on and get on the internet to research.
You google “Shadow People” and start clickingthrough the results. You’re not sure what you’re hoping tofind, but you learn that you’re definitely not alone, lots of people report seeing these things, which is good, since it means you’re not losing your mind. And the reports aren’t new either.
You feel your chest get tight as you see thatpeople have been talking about shadow people for hundreds of years, with these mysteriouscreatures appearing in countless religions, legends, and belief systems. There’s lots of different theories, butwhatever they are, people have been scared of them for a very long time.
You’re starting to feel a little betteractually, knowing that you aren’t alone in having seen them, when you click on a websiteand your heart nearly stops. There staring back at you, is a picture ofthe shadow person from your room. So what are the Shadow People? Not many mainstream media outlets have talkedabout them or the possibility that they are real, usually dismissing them as urban legends,but there’s no shortage of information on alternative radio devoted to cryptozoologyand the supernatural.
The Shadow People first broke into the sortof mainstream in 2001 on the conspiracy theory-centered radio show Coast to Coast AM, when Art Bellintroduced the concept with Native American elder Harley “SwiftDeer” Reagan. Bell decided to spice up the show by invitinglisteners to submit their own shadow people stories - and was stunned when hundreds ofpeople wrote in, sending drawings of the supernatural shadow beings they had supposedly encountered.
Drawings are eerily similar to the being you yourselfencountered multiple times. The Shadow People gained a new investigator only a few months later, when paranormal investigator Heidi Hollis published her first book on ShadowPeople. Hollis went further than Bell and Reagan,who normally portrayed the Shadow People as neutral entities. Hollis argued that they were hostile alienentities that were stalking us, and claimed they could flicker in and out of peripheralvision, getting close enough to jump on people’s chests and choke them..
Many people say they feel a strong hostileenergy from these beings, and believe them to be angry spirits from beyond the grave,stalking the living, while others think they might be the psychic remnants of inhabitantsfrom another dimension - and that they are either trying to make first contact with us,or trying to warn us about something.
A theory advanced by the late paranormal writerand researcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley is that they’re something else entirely - a supernaturalbeing known as a Djinn. These creatures frequently appear in MiddleEastern mythology and are more commonly known as genies - yes, the kind that grants wishes. But Djinns aren’t bound to a lamp or a bottleand are filled with magical energy. These shape-shifting beings can take any formthey want, and many believe the shadow people are remnants of Djinns from ancient times.
Whether they’re a genie spirit or from anotherdimension on a spirited journey, the abundance of evidence from shadow people is quite disturbing. The internet is full of stories of peoplerecounting their experiences with shadow people.
Paranormal investigator Chad Stambaugh evenclaims to have captured video footage of shadow people, but the footage is blurry and inconclusive. A still photograph of a basement in the supposedlyhaunted Gaslight Inn in Indianapolis shows a creeping black mass in an otherwise brightlylit room.
The most disturbing story of the shadow peoplecomes from the sleep study GR16 which was supposedly conducted in 1971 at Camden College.
A brief clip claiming to be from the studyshows a group of people who said they were haunted by shadow people in their dreams. The experiment aimed to track their brainpatterns, but, according to the story, something went horribly wrong, and the shadow peoplekilled the subjects.
But no records of this study exist beyondsome unsubstantiated video clips. The more you look into the Shadow People,the more you’re left with questions and no answers. One of the strangest elements of shadow peopleis how closely one person's description matches that of others.
They’re almost all the same - a shadowy,vaguely human-like figure lurking just far enough away from the person that it can’tbe made out clearly.
Many people report glowing red or yellow eyesstaring at them. Some of the shadows look more like an amorphousblob, as in the case of the famous phantom at the Gaslight Inn, which resembled a creepingmass slowly expanding over the basement.
But many others report a clearer, more disturbingfigure which has come to be known as the Hat Man.
This is a distinctly humanoid figure, dressedin a black three-piece suit, wearing a black hat. His eyes glow red, and he holds a pocket watchthat he occasionally checks - as if he’s waiting for something... or someone.
He’s very tall, at least six feet, but he’salso been described as being up to ten feet tall. Many people believe the Hat Man could be linkedto the popular urban legend Slender Man, another abnormally tall, sharp-dressed monster withties to supernatural terror. Most people thankfully only encounter theshadow people for brief moments, seeing them out of the corner of their eye or in the darkcorners of rooms, only for them to disappear when the light falls on them.
But some people have had longer and far moreterrifying experiences that suggest there may be some truth to these encounters. Author Daniel Pinchbeck, a paranormal expertreported that he began seeing other-dimensional beings that resembled the shadow people.
Pinchbeck believes that he was able to seeinto another dimension, and that somehow these creatures came back with him - haunting himfor weeks before they stopped and he was able to return to his normal life. But not everyone believes that the shadowpeople are a supernatural entity.
Scientists who have analyzed the sightingspropose a much more down-to-earth explanation - that these shadow beings are a product ofour mind playing tricks on us. The most common times for people to see shadowpeople are when they’re under intense emotion, isolated, or very tired.
The mind is experiencing heightened stressat this point, so mundane things, like a coat rack or a shadow, become a potential threat. Sleep paralysis, which is where the body’smotor functions take longer to wake up than the mind, also causes hallucinations thatcan take the form of shadowy, demonic figures and may be the origin of the mysterious figures.
Two more factors that might be influencingshadow people sightings include sleep deprivation and addiction. Dr. Jack Potts has studied those addictedto substances that keep them in a heightened state of awareness and keep them from fallingasleep, and he observed that they became paranoid and conspiratorial.
They kept reporting hallucinations of peoplefollowing them, and believed them to be supernatural beings that posed a danger to them.
While descriptions of these beings varied,many of them matched up with the descriptions we see over and over for shadow people. Potts believes the shadow people are our body’snatural reaction to stress, albeit a terrifying one, rather than a true supernatural phenomenon.
But if that was the case, why have so manypeople, even those who have no substance abuse issues or bouts of sleep paralysis, seeminglyspotted them out of nowhere? One thing’s for sure, the Shadow Peoplehave captured the attention of everyone who loves ghost stories and paranormal phenomena. These mysterious creatures have shown up incountless movies and TV shows, with perhaps the most famous appearance being in an episodeof the rebooted The Twilight Zone in 1985.
In the episode, titled “The Shadow Man”,the Shadow Person lived under the bed of a teenage boy and was a danger to everyone besideshim - until the twist ending.
The 2013 film Shadow People spun out of thelegendary GR16 sleep study, dramatizing it with terrifying results. And plenty of popular video games have youencounter the shadow people as enemies, giving gamers a brief taste of these terrifying beingswithout letting them get too close - we hope. Sightings go back decades, and hundreds ofpeople are giving very similar reports of encounters just like the ones you experienced.
But as you give up on your internet investigationfor the evening, what still hasn’t been answered for you is whether this is somethingmundane, or truly a supernatural encounter. Was your mind playing tricks on you, or arethere actually otherworldly beings stalking you? It’s late, and you have an early start tomorrowso you turn off the lights and get into bed.
Your eyes are heavy and you can feel yourselfdrifting off to sleep when your eyes fall on the corner of the room again. Is that your coat rack, or something else? “No” you tell yourself “it’s justthe coatrack… or is it?” Is it a shadow person, or just your mind playingtricks on you? You pull the covers over your head and decideit’s best not knowing. “Well” you think, “maybe just a peak.” You slowly lower the covers and open youreyes. You will yourself to roll over and look atthe coatrack in the corner. As you turn your head you see it.
Two glowing red eyes, inches away from yourface. Looking for more videos on unexplained phenomena? Check out “New Video Evidence that ProvesGhosts Are Real”. Or check out “Horrifying Unsolved InternetMysteries” for more on the darkest secrets of the web. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you nexttime!
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