A thing of dreams.

Marcus still wakes screaming in the night, the nightmare as fresh in his newly conscious mind as it was in sleep. However, the dreams aren’t as frequent as they were when he was younger, like the one he had at eight years old. “In the dream I was at my family reunion and there was a little boy maybe twelve years old, and he was chasing us around with a butcher knife,” Marcus said.

Marcus and his brother ran through this dream reunion, past relatives chatting and eating chicken and potato salad off paper plates, but no one else seemed to see this boy who chased them, this boy with pitch black eyes. Then the boy caught them. “He killed my brother and he came after me,” Marcus said. The knife-wielding, black-eyed twelve-year-old pounced on top of Marcus and raised the knife, still wet with his brother’s blood. “Right before he killed me I woke up.”

The dream fear clung to him like wet clothing, and Marcus realized he wasn’t alone. “Right on top of me sat the black-eyed boy from my dream,” Marcus said. “He was holding me down and I tried so hard to get away from him but I couldn’t move.”

The boy from the nightmare raised his hand and slapped Marcus’s left cheek. As the sting shot through him, Marcus sat up and the boy vanished. But Marcus knew the boy was real. “My cheek stung and I was crying so hard, and I was so afraid of what had happened.”

He tried wake his big sister, but she wouldn’t move, so he crawled in bed next to her and cried the rest of the night; he was too afraid to go back to sleep; years later, he’s still afraid. “I remember exactly what the boy looked like,” Marcus said. “He had auburn hair, was wearing a red, black and green-stripped sweater, and of course had completely black eyes.”

Lucid dreams, in which people seem to be awake during the dream state, sometimes bleed into consciousness. During sleep, our bodies become paralyzed so involuntary muscle movements don’t shake us awake. Sometimes in a deep REM sleep, when our dreams are the most vivid, we wake, and our dreams momentarily become reality. Then, sometimes, they actually are reality.

The darker side of dreams – Sleep paralysis

Lauren was sixteen years old when she met the dark man in a dream. “I was driving home from work and there was this other car that crossed the lane and made me wreck my car,” she said. “I heard sirens and looked over and saw him standing over me.” A tall, black shadow of a man loomed over her in the dream, his eyes red burned into hers. “Then I saw this really, really bright light then woke up.” That wasn’t the last time she saw the black shadow man.

She woke one night to find her bedroom bathed in darkness. Lauren usually slept with her television and a nightlight on because she always felt as if she were being watched. But that night her TV and night light were off. “I had one window and a little light was coming through so I could kinda see the shoulder and half the head of a tall shadow man with red glowing eyes just staring at me,” she said. “I laid there staring at his eyes not able to think or move or feel anything. It was like it had a trance on me or something.”

During this trance she couldn’t close her eyes. “I had a fan blowing right on my face and I never once blinked,” she said. “When I felt like I could move again I sat up never taking my eyes off of him, and when I sat up my eyes started to burn really bad and started to water, so I blinked.” When she opened her eyes again, the dark figure was gone, and she lay down and went back to sleep.

Lauren has seen it since, fleetingly. The shadow man occasionally flitters across the street only to disappear as she focuses on it. “When I see him its like time stops,” she said. “I can’t move, I can’t blink, I can’t do anything till he is gone.”

But her initial death dream brought on by this dark, sinister figure haunts her still. “I still don’t drive to this day,” she said. “In fear that I will die the way I did in my dream.”

When 20-year-old Walter woke, the red, glowing lights of his bedside alarm clock read 88:88. He quickly saw the clock wasn’t the only thing wrong in his room. “Standing above it was a man-sized black shadow with glowing red eyes,” Walter said. “I looked right at him, and was more confused then anything.”

Walter, now 28, has always been used to strange things in his room. During many nights as a small child, the thin blanket of light crawling into his room from nearby streetlights would slowly dim until he couldn’t see anything. Although he was too young to remember, family members told him this is when the voices came out. “At that time what I was told was imaginary friends would come and I’d talk to them,” he said. “Even now when I’m in a dark room it’s like I can still hear the whispers of others and even during times of danger there is always a voice that warns me to take action.”

But as far as he could remember, Walter had never seen the source of these voices until the night of the red-eyed shadow. “He leaned forward towards me and said, ‘They are watching you,’” Walter said. “He climbed back into the wall of my room, and my alarm clock turned off and resumed its regular time after that.”

They are watching you. Walter already knew that; he’s known it since he was 16. He just doesn’t know who “they” are. “When I was younger I always noticed I was being watched by several people in black vans or SUVs from a distance,” he said. “I know they were looking at me because as soon as I left the line of sight they packed up and left.”

These vehicles followed Walter everywhere. He saw them often around the school he attended, Banting Memorial High School in Alliston, Ontario, and on shopping trips to nearby Barrie, Ontario. “I noticed the same style cars that would stop by stores I was at and left when I was leaving,” he said. “No one got out while I was at the store. Just parked while I entered and drove off while I left.”

The drivers of the vehicles soon became brazen. Numerous times as Walter stood on a street corner waiting for the light to change, one of the black SUVs would make a full stop at a green light, looked Walter down, and drive off. “I even saw a flash once before it took off.”

Then came the day Walter tried to confront a driver. “I caught one watching me,” he said. Walter stepped behind a vehicle, momentarily out of view, and snuck close to the black SUV. Two people were with the vehicle, one sitting inside, the other standing outside holding a camera with a telephoto lens.

“They were dressed in somewhat leisure-style clothing. Black pants and a white shirt and had sunglasses on,” Walter said. “They noticed I was ten-ish feet away and threw everything in the car and booked it.” Walter thinks these people in the dark SUVs may be gone for good. “After the shadow figure told me they were watching me I haven’t been bugged by them to the best of my knowledge.”

Are these the mysterious Men in Black; strange darkly dressed, semi-human entities that have been reported harassing UFO witnesses since the modern UFO flap began in the 1940s? The men and vehicles Walter saw fit the description, but Walter has never encountered a UFO.

However, he has experienced something almost as strange. “I did noticed one thing that was going weird around me,” he said. “Lampposts would turn off while I was close to them and turn back on when I left their area, I even walked past some emergency fire lights and they turned on when I got too close.”

Street Light Interference, lights going on and off when people approach them, has been documented for decades. Although no one knows what causes the phenomenon, this happens to Walter, which brings us back to that night in his room, when the streetlights went dark, and the red-eyed shadow man spoke.

“I had no clue what the shadow entity was, but I always loved the dark, I feel at ease the darker the room is,” he said. “I even have a hard time during the day seeing since the sunlight burns my eyes. I kinda joke with my friends at times who I’ve told this to that he helped me out of kinsmanship.”

The ranch in small-town Texas stretches over 1,200 acres, and has been in Xiania’s family for more than 150 years. Her family runs Texas longhorn cattle and trains quarter horses on that ranch, and as they go about their daily routine, Xiania’s family doesn’t go it alone.

Xiania, now 24, grew up on the ranch with her parents, grandmother, and four older brothers, but those aren’t the only family members on the ranch. “There have been many deaths (there) over the years,” she said. “Great-great grandparents, aunts and uncles that died as children, and other family members.”

Many are buried at a far corner of the land in a cemetery littered with headstones; some that date back to the 1700s. “My grandmother and I have both seen the spirits of some of the deceased family members,” she said. “My grandmother has always said that they are only here to keep an eye on us and to make sure we are well. I personally don’t think that.”

She has reason to believe the dead aren’t friendly. “We would see shadows walking down the hall on the upstairs landing and my grandmother and I saw a woman who wears a long black Victorian-style dress with a high collar, long sleeves with short puff sleeves,” Xiania said. “Her hair is in a bun on top of her head and she always has a mean look on her face.”

Nothing frightened Xiania until something came into her room. “One evening I was in my bedroom doing homework,” she said. “I got a strange feeling that I was not alone in the room, and it had turned very cold.”

She looked up from her schoolwork and scanned the room. “I watched as a doll that was sitting on my bed went off onto the floor all by itself,” she said. “It did not fall off because it was in the middle of the bed and there was no way it could have just fallen off. I saw that doll lift up a little before it went off the bed.”

These increasingly ominous experiences escalated. Doors opened and closed throughout the house at night, items disappeared, and sinks would turn on by themselves.

Then one night while Xiania lay in bed, surrounded by the suffocating darkness of night, the presence grew personal. “Someone would whisper my name in my ear,” she said. “But there would be no one there. My name is not an easy one to say for someone who has never met me or spoken my name, but whoever it was that whispered in my ear spoke my name perfectly.”

Xiania is convinced the whisperer lingered in her room and hid in her closet. One of her cats, Jasper, began to grow nervous near the closet door. “Jasper would not go anywhere near my bedroom closet, and he always seemed cautious and scared when he was in my bedroom,” she said. “One day he disappeared and was never found.”

Other pets feared the closet. Her ferret Pierre, that was “into absolutely everything” refused to go near the closet when the door was open. One day it disappeared as well.

Visitations began to occur outside the ranch house. Riding alone searching for a lost calf, Xiania’s horse froze. “I saw a Native American man from about the 1800s or somewhere around there,” she said. The man wore only a breechcloth, his hair ran down to his waist; his legs disappeared below the knees.

“The Native American spirit stood there watching me for a few seconds and then he suddenly just disappeared,” Xiania said. “My horse is what they call bomb proof because it doesn’t matter what goes on around him he doesn’t get upset or afraid, but this day he was afraid and no matter what I did he refused to go near the area where the Indian was standing, and even after the Indian disappeared.”

Things became quiet at the ranch until 2011 when her brother’s then-girlfriend claimed she could talk with the dead. “(She) fancied herself a ghost hunter, and she wanted to do an investigation of our house and the surrounding area,” Xiania said. “I was very opposed to it, and so was my other brother.”

That didn’t seem to matter. One weekend when Xiania’s parents and grandmother were out of town, her brother’s girlfriend brought a ghost-hunting group to the ranch, equipped with digital cameras, a video camera, and audio recorders. After claiming to pick up scratchy EVPs, the girl produced a Ouija board and set it up in Xiania’s bedroom.

“This woman convinced my brother to let her and her crew use a Ouija board to talk to the spirits that are in the house,” Xiania said. “He reluctantly agreed but this I opposed completely. Our grandmother had told us stories about using what she called a door to the devil.”

As the girl asked questions, the planchette immediately began to move. “The first spirit they contacted was supposedly my great-great grandmother,” Xiania said. “They began speaking to another spirit or entity that was not related to the house in any way.”

Then the air in the room grew cold. “So cold we could see our breath in front of us, and it had been stifling hot in the room just minutes before,” Xiania said. “Then there was a very bad odor like rotten eggs or rotten meat.”

“What’s your name?” the girlfriend asked the board. The planchette skittered across the board, spelling out, ‘cannot tell you that.’

“What are you doing here?” she asked. The board spelled, ‘you called for me.’

“That started making everyone nervous,” Xiania said. “I was especially nervous as we were in my bedroom playing with this board and now strange things were really starting to happen.”

Frightened, Xiania sat on her bed, away from the small circle of people on the floor hovering over the board. “They had candles burning all over the place and it was spooky,” she said. “Every shadow was creepy, and it felt as though there was someone or something very bad in the room. The air seemed to get thick. That is the only way I can describe it.”

She looked away from the scene on the floor and stared out the window. She wished she hadn’t. A dead tree stands between the ranch house and an old barn nearby. The stooped shadow of a man stood beneath that tree, the light of the full moon casting no doubt on what she saw. “Then it turned into a dark almost black mist,” Xiania said. And it disappeared. She kept silent about what she’d seen.

“What do you want here?” her brother’s girlfriend asked the Ouija board, oblivious to what Xiania had witnessed. The planchette spelled ‘harm.’

“As soon as it spelled out that answer every candle in the room suddenly went out,” Xiania said. “There was no breeze or anything that could have blown the candles out.”

Frightened, the group packed up the equipment and the board and went home. Xiania soon discovered they’d left something in her room. “Not long after the night of the investigation things began happening that had not happened before,” she said. The smell of death permeated her bedroom, the family’s always-friendly housedogs became mean, and horses grew skittish.

“I was on my horse who had always been so gentle,” Xiania said. “Out of the blue my horse started bucking.” Xiania flew over the horse’s head and landed hard, air shooting her lungs. Still spooked, the jumping horse struck her helpless body. Xiania was rushed to the hospital where she stayed two months, regaining the use of her legs. While there, doctors diagnosed her with Fibromyalgia, a painful syndrome sometimes brought on by physical trauma.

During her hospital stay, the family gave their now-growling, biting dogs to a friend. Away from the ranch house, the pets immediately returned to their placid selves.

At home, Xiania’s health began to decline; she lost weight and had trouble sleeping. “My disease, the Fibromyalgia, was getting worse and it would be so bad at times that I could not get out of bed,” she said. “I had also started having some horrible nightmares of demons chasing me and doing terrible things to my parents and my brothers.”

She woke one night to find the shadow she’d seen by the tree standing at the foot of her bed. “At first he just stood there as though he was watching me sleep, but then it was like he noticed that I had seen him and he floated into the wall and was gone.”

Another night she woke from a fitful sleep to a burning pain on the back of her neck. “It was like my neck was on fire,” she said. She painfully got out of bed and went to the bathroom. “I put cold water on my neck and when I looked in the mirror I could see three scratches.” As she stared into the bathroom mirror, she saw a shadow move in her bedroom doorway.

Whatever was in the house began to leave more physical evidence. “The next morning we woke up to the sound of my mother father and brothers yelling,” she said. “On the kitchen floor was a huge feces. It looked like an elephant had been in the kitchen. It was the worst thing I had ever seen or smelled in my life, and this was not the last time we would find it.” The family would wake to find large piles of rancid feces in the kitchen, or on Xiania’s bedroom floor. No pet in the house could have produced something that size.

“My health continued to decline and was so bad that I moved out of my bedroom and onto the sofa in the television room where I would not have to go up or down the stairs,” she said. “My mother had to care for me full-time. I had lost so much weight.” Xiania at five feet tall and 110 pounds was down to 80 pounds. “It got so bad that my doctor finally put me in the hospital,” she said. “I started feeling better by the next day and started putting on weight and getting my strength back.”

Within a week she was home, but she quickly took ill again, and the pieces began to fall into place. “My brother told me that he thought whatever his now ex-girlfriend had called in with the Ouija board was what was making me ill,” she said. “He told me about some things that he had seen and heard since that night.”

Walking past her bedroom one night, he saw the large, dark figure standing over his sister’s bed. “He said that the dark thing was bent like an old person, and it looked like the fingers were very long,” she said. “He couldn’t make out any features but it was creepy and gave him a very bad feeling.” Her brother stepped into the bedroom and said, ‘Hey.’ The shadow being turned, looked at her brother, and disappeared.

Xiania and her brother convinced her parents to allow them to move out of the house. They reluctantly agreed, and her health quickly began to improve. “My brother and I have been living in our own little house just a couple of miles from our parent’s ranch for about a month, and so far I am doing fine,” she said. “I will always have the Fibromyalgia, and at times will have flare-ups that cause me to have pain all over my body, but it is nothing like what I felt when I was ill on the ranch.”

Xiania’s parents and grandparents seem to be immune to the dark entity that moved onto the ranch, and into Xiania’s room. She thinks it’s because they weren’t present for the Ouija board session.

Out of the house her brother began to open up about his own experiences. “He told me that he awoke a few times with something lying on top of him holding him down and making it difficult to breathe,” Xiania said.

Her brother also smelled the odor of death, and was attacked by wall hangings hurling themselves at him. “He started seeing the shadow man where ever he went in the house,” she said. “But he really started getting worried the night he saw the dark creature standing over me in my bed and that is when he started thinking about getting us both out of the house.”

Dreams have always influenced Kim Shong’s life, even before she was born. Growing up in a “semi-traditional” Asian household, Kim said her family has always been open to spirituality, which resulted in her name.

“My deceased grandfather came to my mother in her dream when she was pregnant with me, and had given me my name,” she said. “So we believe dreams and are open minded.”

Kim is sure her almost nightly lucid dreams are spiritual visits. Such as a series of dreams she had in junior high school involving a family friend.

“My mother’s closest friend stayed with us during her progressive stages in cancer and we were very close to her,” Kim said. “I dreamt of her passing through symbols in a dream and actually found out that day she had passed while I was in class.”

Traditionally, a family burns the dead’s possessions, such as clothing and pictures, to send them along to the afterlife. After her family did this, she again dreamed of her mother’s friend.

“I dreamt of a young woman who was in a yellow polka dotted dress with a white sun hat, but I couldn’t make out her face,” she said. “In the background was our apartment and full of boxes as if someone was moving.”

Deceased family members and friends have visited Kim in dreams before, and they always looked young and healthy, so she knew who the woman was. “It was my mother’s friend.”

The woman in the dream told Kim she didn’t want to leave. Kim’s dream-self simply smiled and told her she couldn’t stay there anymore. The woman said, “Okay,” and left. Kim has never seen her in her dreams again. But she still dreams, all the time.

“You might just write them off,” she said. “But I am convinced they’re more than just dreams.”

Some of these dreams are dark.

“I’ve had very strange things happened to me and for a long time,” she said. “I thought things were following me wherever we moved, like poltergeists or something, because I’ve had very bad nightmares, and strange things happening for a very long time.”

Like the shadows. Kim first experienced them one night in the apartment where she lived during her junior high school years. “I remember waking up and opening my eyes but everything was hazy and it felt like I was in maybe REM sleep, borderline conscious and unconscious,” she said. “When I first opened my eyes, I saw this very, very tall shadow.”

Through the dream haze, she could make out a thin figure, “like an elongated human,” standing in front of her bedroom door. The figure was so tall it reached the doorframe. “When I saw it, I didn’t panic or react,” she said. “I don’t remember how I felt but it wasn’t fear or shock. I think I was indifferent.”

She closed her eyes and opened them again, and the shadow had moved. It was closer. “The shadow was on the edge of my bed this time,” she said. “Then one last time I closed and opened my eyes and it was there next to me, on the side of the bed close to my face, just standing and looking down.”

She couldn’t see any detail in the entity’s face, nor its clothing. “I then just fell asleep and didn’t see it again,” she said. “It was not a threatening being and it didn’t seem malicious, it was just there.”

Although this shadow entity didn’t seem dangerous, the one from a visitation in 2011 did. “It was also in a dream-like state,” Kim said. “It was one of those paralyzing situations and yes, I’ve had my fair share of paralyzing dreams, but this was the strangest, and like nothing else I’ve had.”

Kim “woke” in her dream, seeing her surroundings exactly as they should be, although she was still asleep. “It was very lucid, so I thought I had woken up,” she said. “My room was dark as it normally would be at night, but there was like a purplish hue covering the room.”

Kim initially thought the purple glow was from the moon, but quickly dismissed it. The light didn’t come from the window, and moonlight isn’t purple. Then she noticed she wasn’t alone. “This dark, shadowed man was sitting on my bed, very close to me,” she said. “I didn’t get up, I just looked up at him.”

She lay in silence and stared at the dark, androgynous person next to her. Much like her first shadowy encounter, there were no visible features on the black figure; it was a silhouette, but she knew what it was. “I knew it was a man because of his voice,” Kim said. “He was talking to me, and I could hear him, but he didn’t have a face.”

Terror consumed her as she stared at this strange, silhouette sitting on her bed. Then it leaned close to her and spoke. “In a panicked, almost aggressive and hurried voice he says to me, ‘Don’t you know there are other dimensions?’”

Something inside told her to turn her head toward the wall her bed rested against. She didn’t expect what she saw. “There was this large round neat drawing or something on my wall with symbols inside of it,” she said. “I couldn’t make (the symbols) out though. It was large and covered the center of that wall. And as soon as he said those words, I was so scared.”

Then the shadow man leaned into the circle and disappeared. “I freaked out,” Kim said. “I tried to get up from my bed but I couldn’t move my body. I was panicking so much.”

Fear clawed at Kim. Her mother slept in the next room and she wanted nothing more at that moment than to wake her. “I tried to move my hand to hit the wall,” Kim said. “I was slamming my body and head into the wall to make as much noise as possible, and even tried screaming, but no noise came from it.”

Then she woke, really woke. “I jumped up straight from my bed and bolted to the living room screaming, promptly waking my mother up and her asking if I was okay,” Kim said. “I stood in front of her shocked but didn’t want to tell her because I didn’t want to scare her.”

Kim tried to process what she’d experienced, but couldn’t. The entity she’d seen was real to her, and so were its words. “It didn’t feel like a dream at all,” Kim said. “My heart was still beating rapidly. I think I was psychologically frightened. It’s kind of haunting.”

Don’t you know there are other dimensions? Kim still doesn’t know what that means. “It stuck in my mind ever since, ” she said. “Thinking about it is creepy. Until I started learning about shadow people (I didn’t think) it may be beings from different dimensions.”

Her lucid dreams continue every time she tries to sleep. She doesn’t like to do that anymore. “I’ve developed really bad insomnia and if I do happen to go to bed early, I always wake up at 3 a.m. like clockwork no matter how exhausted I am,” she said. “I don’t even bother sleeping at night anymore, but when I do sleep for those few hours before being jarred awake at 3 a.m., I feel my body vibrating and it gets me a bit nauseated and I get the feeling that somebody is there.”

Paranoia washes over her dream self until she actually wakes, but she knows being awake or asleep is irrelevant – her experiences are real. “I know it’s not nothing,” Kim said. “I know it’s more than just a dream.

The first thought that crossed Steven Paynter’s five-year-old mind was that someone had broken into the house in Bury, Greater Manchester, England. “Around 1986, my mother took me around the local estate to her friend’s house,” Paynter said. “I believed that she had been burgled because her kitchen – her entire kitchen – was covered, and I do mean covered, in big black handprints. Almost animal like.”

He didn’t say anything about the obvious black handprints, not until years later. “I mentioned the incident to my mother, what I saw. She looked at me and said, ‘nothing on the wall Steven.’” He didn’t know how that could be. The prints were there, and his mother’s friend said she saw shadows and the image of dark faces on the walls. His mother was immune. “There was nothing on the wall from her point of view.”

From that point, dark images have followed Paynter. The animal-like prints he saw when he was five have turned into entities. “I’ve seen a big black mass with red eyes always at my door,” he said. “The Hat Man always in the background, and typical shadow people just like our shadows on a sunny day.”

These “typical” shadow people have become so commonplace to Paynter; he’s given them a nickname, “Joeys.” He sees these “Joeys” mostly in his dreams, and his dreams are violent.

“Every time after this that I’ve encountered these beings I’ve always been in a sluggish state and able to see my body in bed,” he said. “Always I’ve been chased. They have blocked my doorways and tried to scratch or make physical contact with me.”

Doctors have told Paynter these dreams are caused by a sleep disorder, but he knows they’re not. When these entities appear to Paynter, the room seems to buzz with electricity, and he knows something is there.

“The situations are like an out of body experience,” he said. “I can see myself in bed.” At sixteen, he dreamt he was outside being chased through his garden, into the house, and onto his bed that started to envelope him. “I awoke but I couldn’t move. I felt like I’d just run the London Marathon. I had a cramp in my left leg.”

More recently, he’s discovered physical marks. “I have awoke usually feeling like I’ve been active all night. Muscles tense, aching, even fingers hurt,” he said. “On two occasions I’ve had small scratches on my side, my right side, always after an encounter.” During these encounters, his “Joeys” are the ones to approach him; the Hat Man simply stands in the background, watching.

None of these encounters, however, equal what Paynter calls “the attack.”

“It was around three years ago, I went to bed as normal and got my usual pre-attack buzzing, and I fell asleep,” he said. The next thing he knew he stood at the side of his bed looking at his body lying next to his then-girlfriend, his eyes frozen open. “I know instantly what’s going on and try and wake up. I panicked because I never have seen myself like that and thought I was dying.”

Paynter’s dream self turned and saw three shadow entities in his room, two “Joeys” and the Hat Man. “I’m now confused and scared more then usual.” One of the shadow entities lunged at Paynter, the other reached out to scratch him. As usual during this dream state, Paynter’s movements were slow, like he was moving under water, but Paynter, a jujitsu instructor, fought these entities nonetheless.

“I’ve never done it before or since but I went for them and they put up no resistance,” he said. Paynter wrestled with the shadow people, landing enough punches they retreated behind the Hat Man. “I then turned around and for the first time I saw a line, a silvery line like a tail almost from my back, then I awoke wet through, and heart going very fast.” He could still feel the shadow beings’ presence in the room, but he could no longer see them.

Paynter’s fingers were sore from the attack. When he checked his face in the mirror, the left side bore a slap mark.

Since the attack, the encounters, that occur every two weeks, have changed. “After the fight, all they do now is circle me,” he said. “That’s like you or I would to an object we never seen before.”

Paynter can’t accept the fact that these encounters aren’t real. “I’m told it’s my brain,” he said. “Science tells me it’s a fault with me, but my heart tells me it’s not and I don’t know how or what the hell is going on. I’m 31 now and I know I’m stuck with it, but I’d like an answer.”

He recently received one. When talking with an ex-girlfriend he’s still close to, she told him these encounters aren’t all in his head. “A few years ago I was in hospital with a bacteria infection and was very ill,” he said. “She told me something that she never mentioned before, so this is first time I ever heard of it.”

The night before she took Paynter to the hospital, he lay in bed sweating with a fever. Paynter began breathing heavily and she leaned over to wake him, but when she did, she saw something she didn’t expect. “She caught in the corner of her eye a large man, a shadow that was lit by the streetlight.” She blinked, but the shadow man was still there. She blinked again and it was gone.

Paynter awoke and said, “Did he scare you? Can’t even stop while I’m ill.” Due to the high fever, Paynter doesn’t remember that night, but that incident convinced his girlfriend his stories of shadow man attacks were real. “After that I never believed what the doctor said to you,” she told him. And she always kept the light on.

The old brick hospital sits amongst a sprawl of elegant buildings in the rolling green hills of Clay County Missouri. Constructed in 1923, it’s not the oldest structure on the properties of the Belvoir Winery, but it might be the most haunted.

Twenty-four-year-old Emily Krickle went on a guided ghost tour of the winery in November and the hospital quickly became uncomfortable.

“We were only allowed to go in the hallways,” she said. “The building was so old, that’s where the supporting beams were.”

The investigators from CREEPZ Ghost Commandos took the group to the second floor and set up motion sensors. CREEPZ conducts paranormal tours of the winery along with the team Paranormal Research Investigators.

“They talked to us about how psychics came in and said one (ghost) in the hallway was a lady who passed away in the hospital and liked to sing,” Krickle said. “In the opposite end of the hallway there is a mischievous man.”

A heavy feeling enveloped the group as it wandered one end of the dark hallway. Then a CREEPZ member brought out a white noise generator.

“They started asking questions. At first we didn’t hear anything,” Krickle said. “They said, ‘is it okay we’re here with you?’ Very clearly through the white noise we heard a ‘yes.’ They asked a couple of questions, but I don’t remember what they were because I was shocked.”

The oppressive feeling of the area became too much for one participant. “In my group there was a lady, upper 50s early 60s, she was there with her daughters,” Krickle said. “She sat down and said she was tired.”

After a few minutes on the floor, she stood, but Adam Tillery of CREEPZ knew something wasn’t right. “We hear a big thud in the background. It was her head on the wall,” Tillery said. “She was standing. Her eyes were rolling in her head.”

Tillery panned his flashlight over to the woman. As the harsh light bathed her face, Tillery and Krickle both saw the whites of the woman’s eyes. “She was sweating,” Krickle said. “She didn’t remember anything about it.”

The woman’s daughters escorted her outside, leaving five people in the second floor hallway. The now-smaller group quickly discovered it wasn’t alone.

“I asked one of the guys, ‘has that happened before?’” Krickle said. “He started to say it happened one other time, when down the hallway there was a deep growl.”

Everyone froze. “These ladies heard it. I heard it. About four feet away from us we heard a growl,” Tillery said. “At this time, it was, wow. What was that?”

After the growl, Tillery grew quiet and looked at the few members of the group. “He stopped talking and said, ‘I just want to make sure. You all heard that right?’” Krickle said.

Tillery asked if anyone wanted to walk down the hallway, and Krickle volunteered. “I actually walked down the hallway toward the mischievous man’s room,” she said. The farther she walked down the hall, the more oppressive the feeling became. “I said, ‘that’s okay, I don’t need to go any farther.”

Tillery was ready to go, too. “I wanted to stay and find out more,” he said. “But when it comes to a growl like that, it could be something powerful.”

Belvoir, French for “beautiful view,” began its life as the Reed Springs Hotel in 1887. The hotel sold to the organization the International Order of Odd Fellows in 1895. The Odd Fellows used the hotel as a place to care for orphans and the elderly until an accident in 1900.

“Something was frozen in the basement and they used blow torches and accidently burned it down,” Tillery said.

The Odd Fellows constructed a number of buildings on what was for years a 240-acre working farm, but only three of the historical buildings remain amongst a smattering of others. The administration building, the “old folks” building, and the hospital. Nearly 600 people are buried in the cemetery on the site; some of them may still be hanging around.

The night Krickle visited Belvoir it appears they were.

After the hospital, the group made their way to the administration building. “We went up to the third floor where they used to teach the orphans,” Krickle said. “The only thing we kind of found there was when we sang, ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ the meters would go off.” That was it for activity there, as well as the cemetery, however an outbuilding known as the “bunker” once used for food storage was a little more active.

“They said the orphans liked to hide there from doing chores,” Krickle said. “We were sitting in a semicircle; they got out dowsing rods.”

Krickle held the metal rods, some believe can be used to communicate with the dead, and asked questions. The rods moved on their own accord.

“If you’re here with friends, point out your friends,” Krickle said into the darkened room. “One rod went down the hallway, the other went to he corner.” She asked if the spirits wanted to play, and the rods moved again.

Krickle handed the rods to another member of the group who asked, “Do you think she’s pretty?” The rods signaled, “yes.”

“The lady who was with us said, ‘we have to leave, do you want to say goodbye?’” Krickle said. The rods signified ‘yes,’ then Krickle felt something she couldn’t explain rationally – a hug. “I was feeling a lot of pressure on my left side like someone is actually leaning into me and my arm was cold,” she said. “I thought that was pretty cool.”

Tillery said this sort of experience at the winery is normal. CREEPZ has been associated with the winery since February 2011 and has captured evidence of paranormal activity.

“Voices in the hospital. Laughing, singing. We’ve also caught strange noises throughout the old folks home,” he said. “One guy that was with us said he saw someone peeking around the corner, and he kind of freaked out.”

Visitors have also told CREEPZ they’ve seen apparitions and shadow people on the grounds. But the hospital is the paranormal centerpiece.

“There’s one of these hallways with double doors. Right in that area on one occasion it sounded like a really deep breath as we were getting ready to cross these double doors,” Tillery said. “Another time I was grabbed on my shoulders.”

The feeling, he said, is that of being watched, like something’s going to jump out at any minute.

“I had more things happen to me (at the winery) than any place in the Midwest,” Tillery said. “I’d say its one of the up coming paranormal hotspots. That’s a very spooky location.”

Rebecca was six years old in 1978 when something terrifying walked into her life.

“When I was a child I saw what I now know is called the Hat Man,” Rebecca said. “The Hat Man I saw spoke to me.”

Although she now lives in Florida, Rebecca grew up in Missouri, and spent parts of 1977 and 1978 in her grandmother’s house in Independence, Missouri.

“During this time in my life my mother, sister and I lived with my grandparents off and on due to our own circumstances and the fact that my grandfather was in and out of the hospital,” she said.

Rebecca remembers other relatives staying in her grandparents’ house at that time, taking the spare bedroom she usually shared with her sister. That night, Rebecca and her sister slept in her grandmother’s room, and soon discovered they weren’t alone.

“My sister and grandmother were sleeping in the bed like normal, and I was sleeping between the two of them with my head at the foot of the bed,” Rebecca said. “I had a terrible nightmare, one where the dresser drawers were opening and closing on their own and ghosts and clothing were flying out.”

Rebecca remembers her dreamself lying in the same place as her body slept.

“Most dreams are in other places, or familiar places, but never from the perspective of where you are actually sleeping,” she said. “I woke up from the dream very afraid.”

Terrified, she gently kicked, trying to wake her grandmother, but couldn’t rouse her.

“I debated getting up and finding my mom, but I would have had to walk past the dresser from my dream and decided that was too scary,” she said. “I turned my gaze away from the dresser and up to the window behind the headboard of the bed and that is where I saw the Man.”

The Man, a dark, looming figure, seemed to stand on the headboard, but Rebecca now wonders if the Man stood behind the headboard and was extremely tall.

“The Man was wearing a long flowing coat, a top hat and carried a cane,” Rebecca said. “He had no real features, but was a solid object that blocked the light from the window behind him. I was terrified because there was someone else in the room and because I recognized it as non-human.”

Rebecca and the Hat Man stared at one another for what could have been minutes, or seconds, when the figure lifted its arm and pointed at her.

“He said, ‘This is your last chance,’” Rebecca said. “His voice did not fill the room. The best way I can describe it is that it filled my head. The voice was flat with no residual sound, as if everything surrounding the words had been removed.”

After the Hat Man spoke those five cryptic words, he put down his arm and disappeared. She told her family of the encounter the next day, but they paid little attention.

“Little kids are always filled with stories that grown ups nod and smile while hearing,” she said. “I vaguely remember being afraid of grandma’s room for a while, but not much else following the incident.”

She didn’t bring up the Hat Man encounter again until her teens; this time her family listened.

“Everyone believed in ghosts, so it was another neat ghost story from a family member for everyone except my aunt,” she said. This is because her aunt has had more than one ghostly encounter, all eerily similar to her own. “She said she had seen the same man in that same house.”

Although the fear of her grandmother’s room has long since gone, along with the terror of that long ago moment when she met the Hat Man, one question remains.

“I’ve tried to figure out what, ‘This is your last chance,’ meant,” she said. “My grandfather died somewhere around this time, but I can not be certain if the Hat Man appeared before or after his death. I do know that grandpa was not in the house at the time, but he spent quite a bit of time in the hospital toward the end of his life. Was the Hat Man telling me this was my last chance to talk with him? I don’t know.”

Doom, gloom, and masterfully monstrous guitar riffs are among the hallmarks that heralded the coming of the Sabbath in Birmingham, England in 1969. The bleak, industrial grounds of the English town had proven fertile soil for the formation of a musical genre that would later become known as Heavy Metal, and its flagship performers were none other than Black Sabbath, the legendary rock group featuring the madman (and sometimes maddening) Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, Tony Iommi on guitar, Geezer Butler on bass, and Bill Ward pounding the pagan skins and cymbal crashes.

Stylistically, the band often featured darker themes, influenced by such things as classic horror of literature and film, as well as circumstantial anecdotes and stories shared by members of the band (for instance, the early Sabbath tune, “N.I.B.,” had often been thought to be an acronym for “Nativity in Black,” but instead had merely been a reference to drummer Bill Ward’s goatee, which resembled an ink pen nib to Osbourne). But among the stories underlying Sabbath songs, there were also a number of stories that involved real life encounters with strange entities and ghosts that inspired the band, which took place throughout Sabbath’s haunted travels around Europe and the rest of the world.

The album’s first album, the self-titled Black Sabbath, was released in February of 1970 on the appropriate date of Friday the 13th. Along with the dark mystique the band had hoped to create, early English releases of the album also featured an inverted cross with a poem drafted beneath it, helping to establish early on a connection with evil and the occult that would follow the band–and at times weight them with controversy–throughout their career. The artwork featured on the album cover itself is rather ghostly; a very psychedelic rendition of the Mapledurham watermill is featured in a still autumnscape, with dead limbs and bare trees visible in the foreground. Amidst the undergrowth is a witchy-looking figure in black, with dark, sunken eyes and pale skin. Though subtle, the imagery is indeed both haunting and truly creepy; and yet, the inspiration for the “figure in black” had indeed shared its own real life counterpart.

The group’s first album release not only shared the band’s name, but also the recording’s title track, which features the famous line, “figure in black stands before me.” Apparently, the story goes that this particular line of the song had been inspired by a frightening encounter Butler claimed to have had, in which he awoke suddenly from a horrific nightmare, only to find that a ghostly figure, clad entirely in black, had been standing near his bed as though observing him while he slept. Strangely, this particular brand of phenomenon is fairly common among those who experience ghostly encounters; years ago, I had asked an associate of mine what, if anything, really frightened him. His reply had been, simply, that he had always had experiences where he heard of people waking in the middle of the night, only to find a strange, dark figure standing before them, watching them. “Why do (ghosts) watch us when we sleep?” he asked. “That, to me, is a little unsettling.”

This would not be the only encounter with a strange, ghostly “figure in black” that the band members would report having. During the composition of the band’s 1973 album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Tony Iommi also claimed that he had witnessed a ghost in the armory of Clearwell Castle, in the Forest Of Dean. Later, during an interview with Guitarist Magazine, Iommi recounted his sighting of an apparition in a haunted castle:

We were setting up the gear in the dungeons and were the only people there. It was myself and Geezer, or myself and Ozzy, and we were walking down the hallway and we saw a cloaked figure coming towards us. We thought, who is that? It walked into a room, and we followed it to see who it was and there was nobody there… We told the people about it who owned the castle; we thought they’d think we were mad, but they just said, ‘Oh yes, that’s the castle ghost’.

Had it been some former resident of Clearwell Castle that the band had seen on this occasion? Or, could it have been the same strange “figure in black” that bassist Geezer Butler had described, which became the inspiration for the band’s eponymous first release? Though they likely were not one and the same, it is interesting to note the presence of these ghostly manifestations around the band, especially with their darker and often foreboding mixture of hard rock with the darker aspects of ritual and the occult.

“This scares me and I don’t know what it is. I have been seeing them since I was a little girl. Always outta the corner of my eye a tall black shadow. I always feel like something or someone is by me. Last night I went down to my bedroom. There it was. Standing next to my dresser. I ran upstairs crying to my mom. She went down and looked saying it was only ’cause I was overtired. But I KNOW what I saw. It was so scary. I don’t know what it is. I need all the help I can get!” – Jessica’s cry for help, 10, January 2010.

Tales of walking Shadows come from across the world. Some of these Shadow People wander through the periphery of our lives; others stay for years. People can rarely make out features of these darker-than-night, human shaped entities other than an occasional set of blazing red eyes. Shadow People often appear dressed as a Medieval monk, wearing a fedora, or bald and sexless. These entities may simply trek through our bedroom at night never to be seen again, while others may lurk in doorways, just watching, day after day. Still others attack with energy-draining fear.

What are they?

I’ve studied the Shadow People phenomena for the past decade, and have come to the conclusion the term “Shadow People” is a catchall for entities that exhibit certain characteristics – but their origins can be wildly different. Through research and personal experience, I’ve categorized these creatures by behavior.

Benign Shadows: Shadow People that seem to travel briefly through a person’s life. I saw these entities as a child. They appeared to walk with purpose through my room, never acknowledging me, and never straying from their path. I never felt an unholy fear, just the fear of watching a dark human-shaped trespasser walk past my bed.

Negative Shadows: Although these Shadow People tend to simply lurk, they are associated with a feeling of unnatural terror.

Red-Eyed Shadows: These entities are always negative, but stare at experiencers with blazing red eyes. Victims often say they feel this creature feed from their fear.

Hooded Shadows: Dressed as an ancient monk, people who encounter these Shadow People feel a deep rage bubbling behind the black cowl.

The Hat Man: This entity is the most curious. Dressed in a fedora, and sometimes appearing to wear an old-time business suit, the Hat Man appears to people in cultures across the planet.

Shadow People may be demonic entities, ghosts, inter-dimensional travelers, or other denizens of the dark realm we call the Unknown. Regardless of their label, Shadow People could very well be more than just one type of being. Brad Steiger, author of “Shadow World,” has studied the paranormal for more than 50 years and agrees – there are many possible explanations for Shadow People. “I would say that experiencers are seeing all of the above and giving them/it the name of Shadow People.”

Whatever these entities are, they’re shocking to those who see them.

A gray sheet of clouds stretched across the sky as 12-year-old Doug ran to the corner store. “It was overcast but not raining, and in the middle of the afternoon,” Doug said. The day was shadowless, and decades later he still doesn’t know what he saw on his way home from the store, arms laden with food. At first, he thought it was a friend. “As I approached the corner to turn onto my street, I saw something black sticking beyond the bushes in the front of my house,” Doug said. “I yelled, ‘Andre,’ and started running toward my driveway where the bushes are.”

The dark figure wasn’t his friend Andre. A black, man-shaped Shadow grew from behind the bushes in this quiet afternoon and began running toward Doug’s house. “After a few steps I saw the Shadow running down my driveway toward the back yard,” he said. “I ran up the driveway to the gate that leads to my back yard. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Doug stood at the gate as the black Shadow in the shape of a man ran across his yard and disappeared through a fence. “I was shocked,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This thing; what could it be? Why was it black when most stereotypical stories said that ghosts were white? Could this be demonic? Could it be like me, just a person?”

What did Doug see? A ghost? A demon? A dimensional traveler? Or was it all in his mind?

Science

“I’ve been visited by what I presume to be the same Shadow three times in my life, and the memories have haunted me ever since. When I was six, I saw it at my dad’s new house, towering over my bed. I couldn’t move, and I don’t remember what happened next. All I remember is trying to scream, but there was this horrible weight on my chest.” – Luke Purdy

Most of the Shadow People encounters I’ve collected over the years are readily explainable. The experiencer wakes to find a black, human figure standing in the doorway of their bedroom, or leaning over their bed, just watching. A tightness grips their chest like the weight of a person is upon them. They can’t breathe. Suddenly the choking eases, and the Shadow being is gone. This type of encounter is common, and psychology has a name for it – sleep paralysis.

April Haberyan, a psychology professor at Northwest Missouri State University, said most Shadow People encounters are probably the product of dreams. When people sleep and enter the REM phase, “it’s very common for them to see things,” Haberyan said. The fear, the paralysis, and the entities are normal. “There are hormones in REM sleep that paralyze the major muscle groups and it’s called paradoxical sleep,” she said. “(Although) this happens during REM, these people don’t stay asleep and the hormones are still in their bodies. It can last up to eight minutes and they feel pressure on their chest and can see people.” When the experiencer becomes fully awake, the Shadow Person encounter is over – all that’s left is the fear.

Other Shadow People encounters – as well as those of ghosts/UFOs/Bigfoot for that matter – can be attributed to the same trick of light and shadow that allows us to see faces in clouds and carpets. These sightings can also be from electrical stimulation to certain parts of the brain, or drugs. Chemist Rick Toomey said anything that throws off the chemical balance of the brain causes all sorts of problems. “All sensation is in the nervous system and it’s all chemistry,” he said. “If every neurotransmitter is chemistry, you can wreak havoc with that.”

However, many encounter Shadow People in full consciousness and full daylight, removing the logical, scientific answers, and leaving something terrible.

The Religious World

“My best friend, when he was a boy he was laying on his bed with the lights on. A shadowy figure emerged from his closet and moved towards his bedside. The Shadow being reached out a finger and touched my buddy’s leg. He screamed and the figure vanished, and his folks were there in moments. My friend’s father noticed that the closet door was open, and his parents knew he NEVER slept without it closed. The black spot on his leg remained visible for several years, but the Shadow being never returned. To this day my friend has no idea what happened, but he does know one thing – it was real.” – Paul Sycros

Although most reported Shadow People encounters involve an entity simply appearing and disappearing, many aren’t that innocent. Negative Shadows, Red-Eyed Shadows, and Hooded Shadows, all bring a feeling of horror when they step into someone’s life. These creatures are known by different names, demons, jinn, dark shadows, sgili, but their nature is the same.

Bishop James Long, pastor of St. Christopher Old Catholic Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has studied demonology for years and knows Shadow People well – to him they are something evil. “Shadow People must be taken seriously and they can be quite dangerous,” he said. “When a human spirit tries to manifest itself, its form is black, or otherwise known as Shadow. It is energy trying to manifest itself so that it can appear to have the physical characteristics it had when living on earth.” These entities can move, communicate, and attack, drawing energy from their human victim. “Certainly Shadows that attack are demonic in nature and should be avoided at all times,” Long said. “I would strongly encourage anyone who witnesses a dark Shadow to be careful.”

Cody Lilly’s family has encountered this type of Shadow for years, a black, human-shaped figure, featureless except for a wide-brimmed hat. “We called him the Cowboy because he kind of looked like the Marlboro man,” Lilly said. The Cowboy stepped into Lilly’s life his sophomore year of high school in Clarinda, Iowa, and visited almost nightly for two years, pacing about his room, waiting for something. The entity, with fiery red eyes, never spoke, and never approached him, but Lilly knew why it was there – it hungered. “It was feeding,” Lilly said, convinced the Cowboy was absorbing energy from his terror. “The first time I saw it I was completely incapacitated by how scared I was of it.”

Lilly soon went to college thirty miles south and the visits stopped until after graduation in 2011 when he moved to Nebraska. “My girlfriend that is now my fiancée is in Kansas City and I’m in Omaha. I was crashing with friends here,” he said. “My car started acting up, I’m in the process of looking for a job, finding an apartment, buying an engagement ring. I had a lot of stuff on my plate, which might have brought on what happened.” What happened was the Cowboy. “I’m sitting in my car on the phone with my mom. I don’t know much about cars, but my mom does.”

As Lilly described the car’s behavior to his mother, he noticed a movement in the corner of his right eye. Lilly turned toward the passenger side window and saw it – the Shadow Man that once tormented him in the night. The Cowboy. “It was full on. A Shadow Person in an old fedora,” Lilly said. “It was standing there. It leaned over like it’s bending to look at me.”

As Lilly stared in horror at this red-eyed Shadow Man in full daylight, the Cowboy reached out it’s arm and knocked on the car window. “It knocked two times,” Lilly said. “After it knocked it dissolved in my vision. It just showed up, knocked on my window and was gone.” Lilly wonders if the Cowboy wanted to let him know it was still around. “It’s been quite some time that I saw him,” he said. “I’m just kind of thinking he just showed up. I was feeling stressed out and I think he showed up just to feed on that.”

In Islam, the supernatural Jinn can be a companion, or a dark, Shadowy predator. “Jinns are invisible entities believed in by most all Muslims and Middle Eastern folklore,” said religion expert, Dashti Namaste. “Jinns get in and out of human spheres regularly, and it is believed that any human is able to make contact with a Jinn.” Although Jinn can be benevolent, some Jinn are wicked, appearing as dark figures that lurk in ruins and cemeteries, waiting for an unsuspecting human soul to stumble by. The wicked Jinn, much like the demons of Christianity, are deceivers and may present themselves as the ghost of a loved one to insert themselves into a human’s life.

Wahde, a Cherokee, said the nature of Shadow beings in the American Indian tradition are just as dark. “They’re humanoid shaped, but not proportionate to a normal person,” Wahde said. “Their appearance is more monstrous in nature.” These Shadow beings are the product of medicine men that have strayed from the path of healing. “There seem to be a classification of spiritual beings that are Shadow for the most part. These things can be manipulated by bad medicine or bad magic,” Wahde said. “They either take that form to attack other people, or they use some other spiritual being as a spiritual attack.” In the Cherokee language, these dark medicine people are sgili, or witch. “They’re still alive to some degree, but they’re not necessarily considered human.”

Ghosts

“I have a young boy shadow/spirit in my home. He appears as a solid black cutout-like figure. He is a prankster, too, but he’s NOT mean, or evil. He let’s us know he’s here at times by playing with the animals. Kittens, dogs, puppies, etc. PLAY, not mean. The dogs and puppies are wagging their tails. He moves my Barbies if he really wants my attention. And the other day he didn’t want the door to his room closed, so he opened it. He’s a good kid.” – Kim Tamsor

A family sees a black figure come down the stairs at the same time at night, turn into the kitchen and disappear. A dark man in an out-of-date suit walks through a child’s bedroom and down the hallway. Some Shadow People encounters – benign ones like these – could very well be disembodied spirits wandering the earth. D.H. Parsons, president of The Bliss-Parsons Institute of Metaphysics in Columbia, Missouri, has encountered many Shadow People while investigating a haunting. Although many fellow investigators consider Shadow People demonic, Parsons doesn’t necessarily agree. “My feeling is that a Shadow Person is another representation of a residual memory of a person who had such a strong personality in life, that a bit of their energy remained here in this dimension after their spirit crossed over,” Parsons said. “Most of the time the spirit beings are either friendly to us, or confused by us, or curious as to why we are there. But they have never done us any harm, not even the Shadows.”

Not so for eighteen-year-old Dave Stanfield. Stanfield didn’t expect something to be waiting for him in his room when he woke. Something was – something dark. A strange feeling pulled Stanfield from a deep sleep. As he lay in the gray room, staring at his bedroom wall, he saw it. “I woke for no reason, had no weird dreams, and I wasn’t groggy or half asleep,” he said. “My room was dark other than some stray beams coming through the blinds, and I could see a man, darker than the night like a void.”

The figure stood at the end of the bed. “I could only make out the silhouette of his head and shoulders. The rest of him just went straight to the floor,” Stanfield said. “There were no legs or feet. No red eyes, no facial features whatsoever.” Terrified, Stanfield slid low in bed, pulling the covers slowly over his face, watching the black, man-shaped figure standing over him until his blankets hid the horror from his view and Stanfield fell back to sleep.

Stanfield is now 29, and although he doesn’t know what this Shadow Being was, he knows he saw it – and it haunts him still. “Only in the past couple of years have I been able to find anything on the subject matter,” Stanfield said. “It’s almost like re-victimization when reading stories from other people that describe experiences like mine. I never knew it could be so widespread and am still dealing with the shock.”

But, as with Parsons’ encounters, this being didn’t harm Stanfield. At least not physically.

Interdimensional travelers

“Harmless. Just a watcher is all.” – Don Hall

Most Shadow People encounters are benign, a dark figure lingering in the corners of your life, watching. Could these entities simply be watching us from a realm barely removed from our own? Marie Jones, author of books exploring science and the paranormal, thinks other dimensions could be homes of Shadow People. “In my research into quantum and theoretical physics, I came across … concepts that really opened up the possibilities to me that entities from somewhere else could be coming here” Jones said.

One of these concepts is wrapped around different dimensions. “Theoretically, if these infinite other universes exist, we really should not physically be able to access them,” Jones said. “Yet even theoretical physicists entertain the thought that perhaps the laws of physics on the other side allow for some crossover.”

Clark Kent’s* grandfather died in 1977 and his grandmother moved to a small apartment leaving her old house empty. Shortly after, ten-year-old Kent’s family moved in. “My first friend in the new neighborhood was my next-door neighbor, Jim,” Kent said. “We are good friends to this day.” On a day in 1979, Kent invited Jim to his house to play Ping Pong – and it’s haunted him since.

That day after school, Kent and Jim had about two hours before Kent’s parents came home from work, which meant Ping Pong in the basement between peeks at the forbidden stash of Playboys in a dusty alcove. It was there Kent saw something he didn’t expect. “During our game, I was facing the alcove,” Kent said. “At a certain point, something caught my attention.” Standing in the alcove was the shadow of a man wearing a fedora.
“It was creepy, and I had to pause,” Kent said. “I could not figure out how any combination of the boxes could cast such a shadow. Then it moved.”

Kent stood at the Ping Pong table, staring at dark figure watching him from the alcove. He then quickly looked at Jim who was looking at him. “He realized I had seem something,” Kent said. “I was struck by the realization that no man was casting a shadow on the wall, the Shadow was solid and was not attached to any object. I turned and scrambled up the stairs with Jim right behind me.” At the top of the stairs, their breath coming fast and heavy, Kent slammed and latched the basement door, then “looked at Jim with wide eyes.”

Jim denied seeing the Shadow man that day and for nearly thirty years after. As the two met for a long needed reunion, Kent mentioned the Shadow Man in his basement. “Jim sunk into his chair and spoke in a whisper, ‘I’ll never forget that hat.’ I was stunned,” Kent said. Then he asked the same question he’d asked three decades ago, did you see it? “Yes, I did,” Jim told him. “I was scared.”

But did this entity, this watcher, step into Kent’s life from a parallel universe?

Although some physicists entertain the idea of these multiple universes, physicist David Richardson isn’t eager to join them. “I hate to bring this up in this context, but if there were extra dimensions … (Shadow People) might actually be people,” he said. “I’m skeptical of that, but it’s possible. We’re just starting to figure out that sort of stuff.”

Ghost? Demon? Jinn? Sgili? Traveler? Regardless of the nature of these entities, regardless of their intentions, the advice for each encounter is the same – proceed with caution.

*Yes, this person’s name is actually Clark Kent. Although bearing the name of Superman’s alter ego may be a burden to some, Kent said his name has netted him many free bottles of beer from strangers at taverns. Who doesn’t want to buy a drink for the Last Son of Krypton?

Follow Jason on Twitter @TheJasonOffutt

The images used in this post are for illustration purposes only.

They go by many names… but whether people may choose to call them ghosts, shadow people, entities, or denizens of the darkness, few who have encountered them would argue that there is any question to their existence… whatever “they” may be. Quite simply, barring any errors in identification that may transpire, they could only be considered “nonhumans” in our midst.

While the conventional model of what a “ghost” is supposed to be might lead some to categorize them more appropriately as “post-human entities” or something similar, the general idea that there are semi or altogether nonphysical “personages” in our midst has always been both intriguing and terrifying to us. And yet, reports of such high-strangeness encounters do seem to occur from time to time, with beings that seem to defy any kind of rational explanation.

A good example appeared in Roger Marsh’s UFO Examiner column recently, detailing a report with what could very easily be likened to a “Shadow Person” encounter that took place on a woman’s back porch in Tennessee. The witness described seeing a “human-shaped solid black, very dark black, being was standing on the other side of my deck. It was turned towards the field, leaning on the railings, and seemed to be looking into the field.” Once the “thing” turned to observe her, the woman claimed it backed away slowly, reminiscent of a cat stalking its prey, and disapeared behind the side of her house. It reportedly then appeared again, and peered at her from around the corner of the house, at which time the witness claimed she felt “threatened” by the strange manifestation.

Indeed, this odd tale fits well into the mythos surrounding Shadow People, which are a fairly recent phenomenon as recognized by this name. Some of the best among modern “classic” stories regarding these beings stem from Art Bell’s tenure as host of the late night radio program Coast to Coast AM, where Bell featured the subject quite often, along with listener stories (you can hear some of those stories by clicking here).

This thing looked like someone had concreted a very, very large man in a diving suit, bell helmet and all and contoured the head into the shoulders as if there were no neck, no facial features…only smooth grey (lavendar tinted from a nearby guard light)…a light, monochromatic color overall.

It stopped as if it had became aware of us and from where it stood; not yet reaching the driveway level in its course, it appeared that I was only looking at the thing from the waist up – almost 1/3 as tall as the 15 foot tree next to the trail and at least 3 feet across at the shoulders. The thing appeared to be potentially some 10 feet tall.

I froze where I was for a very brief moment and when I looked at Terry, he looked at me and I knew he had seen and was looking at what I was seeing. Two  cars could pass each other on this driveway and that was much too close to whatever that thing was for comfort and we bolted simultaneously for the car, which Bob had kept running. He hadn’t seen a thing. We drove away and never looked back – and lived to regret it.

Terry and I have talked about this incident many times and we’ll never know what that thing was; but, the only description I’ve had for it all these years is Golem -a mud man – because that’s exactly what it looked like – an enormous clay-like figure rising up from the dark before us – featureless, massive and unlike anything I’ve ever seen since that night.

The recent discovery of a Jupiter-sized “dark planet” in our Universe–the darkest known to exist to-date–has created something of a buzz among astronomers and cosmologists. Producing only what is described as a “faint red glow,” the curious giant’s orbit is close enough to its nearby sun that it should reflect far more visible light than scientists have been able to measure. In fact, the dark planet’s observable properties appear to indicate that its surface must be really, really dark; darker, in fact, than a huge mound of coal floating in space.

There are a number of reasons for why the planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is suspected of remaining so shadowy. The presence of light-absorbing chemicals on the surface, or even a generally high temperature within its atmosphere, might contribute to its mysterious absence of light. Wilder speculation might involve the presence of antimatter; since we know that on the quantum level, particles can display an apparently “opposite” aspect hinting at a universal symmetry of positives and negatives, extending the same idea to the greater material world presents us with the notion that areas of matter could, in theory, also exist in this negative state. Therefore, is it possible that an entire planet could exist in such an anti-material way?

Whether or not TrES-2b is in any way representative of such a supposed anti-material planet, the idea alone is worth considering. But taking this notion a bit further, could the same anti-material properties also be applied to living beings–or at very least, what we might call life-like beings–that could similarly exist in an anti matter state?

One Princeton University scientist, if only in passing (and slightly tongue-in-cheek), has in fact mentioned this recently. David S. Spiegel with the University’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences, was quoted in the International Business Times as he joked about what a physical exchange between beings from this realm and that of an anti-material existence might be like:

“We are made of matter. Matter and anti-matter annihilates. Therefore, please check your composition first before making contact with us.”

Indeed, the idea that space aliens composed of anti matter might be capable of annihilating us, despite having the best intentions, seems slightly troubling. Also of certain synchronistic interest is the fact that Spiegel, who co-authored a paper on alien life and evolution on other planets called, “Life might be rare despite its early emergence on Earth: a Bayesian analysis of the probability of abiogenesis,” was also involved with the discovery and measurement of the alleged “Dark Planet” TrES-2b. Seems Spiegel is the kind who wants to keep his fingers on the anti-material equation, so to speak.

The notion that life could exist in such strange and seemingly-impossible states seems daunting, if not outright ludicrous to many. But despite the hardships, life in the known material realm often occurs in very extreme and strange circumstances. In fact, there is an entire classification for such organisms known to exist on Earth, comprising what are called extremophiles. While the realm of extremophilia mostly is comprised of microbial critters and more primitive hold-overs from ancient times, their presence in locations where the extreme heat of lava ducts, deep-earth pressure, and other adversities would make things uninhabitable for most living creatures points to the resilient–if sometimes counter-intuitive–propensities for life’s emergence.

So maybe the idea that life could exist in both the material and anti-material sense isn’t all that strange and impossible after all. However, if Dr. Speigel is right in his assumptions that contact with such beings might cause us to collapse into one another and disappear, then perhaps we’d be well advised to leave things at a mere fascination with the subject.

I’ve heard plenty of frightening paranormal stories over the years, but none of them quite as frightening as what you are about to read. On February 7, 2010, I received a fascinating e-mail from a woman named Maria, telling me of a series of encounters she’d had with a sinister and parasitic entity – what she later identified as a “shadow person” – that came between her and her partner at the time. Her e-mail was appropriately titled “A Strange Story for You.”

So intriguing did I find Maria’s story that I replied to her the next day, asking for further information. It quickly became clear to me that Maria, a polite, intelligent and articulate person, was telling the truth. A 43 year-old service station manager currently living in Rosebud, VIC, Australia, Maria is no stranger to the paranormal – though, as she pointed out to me, “I don’t consider myself ‘psychic’ in the most common sense of the word.” She explains:

“I would definitely describe myself as ‘clairsentient’ as I usually feel the presence and emotions of entities much better than I see them. At times I see them in a dark, hazy form, but never as clearly as the ‘shadow person’ I wrote to you about. That was, thankfully, a one-off experience.”

So here it is – an account of Maria’s “shadow person” experience, taken, with permission, from her original e-mail:

“The reason I’m writing is to share with you a situation I found myself in 12 years ago. I’ll try not to bore you with too many trivial details, but please bear with me.

“In 1998 I left my home in Geelong, VIC, to travel around Australia. I got as far as Townsville, Nth QLD, where I met up with a friend named John. He’d been living in Townsville for about 12 months. I had known John through mutual friends in Geelong, and had always found him charming and intelligent. To cut a long story short, we began living together in a relationship.

“For the first couple of weeks everything was fine, as you would expect in such circumstances. Then, suddenly, there was a change in him that was completely unexpected and extremely unsettling. He had what I can only describe as a psychotic episode, and began accusing me of being unfaithful. I should point out that at the time he was smoking quite a bit of marijuana and drinking fairly heavily. That first night he was completely irrational, and scared the wits out of me. He wasn’t physically violent towards me, but was very cruel emotionally and mentally.

“I left the bedroom (where we had been arguing) and went into the dark lounge room to gather my thoughts. While I was sitting on the couch I heard a distinct laugh not far from me. I knew it wasn’t John as he was still ranting and raving in the bedroom. I then saw a tall (perhaps 7 ft) very dark shadow moving down the hall to the bedroom. Thinking that what I had heard and seen was perhaps caused by stress, I didn’t give it much thought. The situation had settled down somewhat by the time I went back to the bedroom, and I managed to go to sleep after a while.

“During the night I woke up needing to go to the toilet and got out of bed. When I opened the bedroom door I was confronted by a man standing in the doorway of the spare bedroom. I knew immediately that he wasn’t “real” (I’ve had a few “visits” from my brother, who died almost 20 years ago, and it always amazes me how there is no fear involved when I’ve seen him), but I was quite confused as to who he was and why he was standing outside our bedroom door. He was quite distinct, which was something new for me as I usually just see shadows.

“He was perhaps 6 ft tall with dark hair and bad teeth. The sneer on his face is something I’ll never forget. He asked me where I thought I was going. I told him I needed to go to the toilet, and he said I had better make it quick. It seems quite ridiculous to me now that I should have had to explain myself to some unknown entity, but it didn’t faze me in the slightest at the time. If anything, I was annoyed by the fact that I had to pass some weird sort of roadblock just to go to the toilet. Anyway, this began to happen regularly. Sometimes he would appear quite distinct, at other times he would just be a dark shadow. Always, though, he would demand to know where I was going.

“While this was going on at night, things were getting strange during the day. John was working close to home, and I was looking for a job. The “thing” would go to work with John, and I would feel the atmosphere in the house lighten, but then just as suddenly I would feel the presence back in the house and I’d know that I was either going to get an unexpected visit or phone call from John. He would burst through the front door and start looking in all the rooms, in the wardrobes, under the beds. It was so bizarre at times that I would wonder what the hell I was doing, but at the time I was completely isolated from my family and friends. In hindsight, I can’t believe I lived like that, but I felt trapped and very confused at the time.

“I didn’t know what the “thing” was. At first I thought it was something that had attached itself to me, and was trying to get rid of John, but eventually I realized that it was the other way around. It was keeping him under its control with drugs and alcohol. I started to think of it as the monkey on his back. I would often see it in shadow form standing behind him just before we had a huge argument. When I got a full-time job it would visit me at work, and I knew that when John came to pick me up after work we were going to have a fight. I was turning into a nervous wreck.

“In 2000, we moved back to Geelong. Things didn’t improve, and one day I came home from work to find the house empty. Apart from the kitchen utensils and crockery, everything else was gone, including the “thing.” I was upset of course, but also relieved, and started to pick up the pieces. Eventually John got back in touch and told me that he had gotten off the drugs and stopped drinking. We met up a few times to talk, and I was impressed by how well he looked and how I didn’t see or feel the “thing” around him anymore. After a few months he moved back in and things were going really well.

“Then one day John came home with drugs and the “thing” was back. We had a huge argument about the drugs. I was upset and crying, and I went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face. When I had my face down in the hand basin I suddenly had a feeling that John was behind me with a knife in his hand. I quickly lifted my face up, and in the mirror above the basin I saw the dark shadow behind me in the doorway (it was in broad daylight) and I ran into the lounge room where John was lying on the floor watching TV. He quickly looked around as I came into the room, and before I could say anything he asked me where my knife was. When I asked him what he meant, he told me that he had just gotten a feeling that I was standing behind him with a knife in my hand. When I thought about it later, I realized that if the lounge room wall wasn’t there, the “thing” had been standing directly behind both of us at that very moment. I was now very worried that someone might end up getting hurt.

“My brother’s wife had a friend in Hoppers Crossing who was a very successful psychic, so I went to see her for some advice. I had visited her a few times socially, and my impression of her was that she wasn’t easily intimidated, but the day I went to see her she got very spooked. She described the “thing” to me as the most evil thing she’d ever seen. It had her rattled, to the point where she cut our session short and almost pushed me out the front door. She told me that I needed someone more powerful than her to get rid of it. I have no doubt she smudged her house to within an inch of its life after I left!

“Not long after that I was at work and I got a phone call from John, accusing me for the hundredth time of seeing someone behind his back. I felt the “thing” in the room with me, and after John had abused me and hung up in my ear, I told it to take him and never come back. Sure enough, I got home to find the house empty again. It was so peaceful. After 5 traumatic years I couldn’t believe how nice it was to be rid of both of them. John got in touch after a few months to tell me that he was back on the straight and narrow, but I didn’t even bother to meet up with him. The best part is that I’ve never felt the presence again.

“Well, if you’ve got this far without hitting delete I’d just like to say thanks for reading this. I’ve often wondered whether it really was an evil spirit, or maybe I was seeing John’s addictions in another form. I just know that I never want to go through anything like it again.”

“Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together.” T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land.”

Being alone sucks, which is at least one explanation why Facebook, SETI  and God continue to attract large followings. Children too young for the internet often keep company with invisible companions, as do some adults who suffer from hallucinations brought on by a variety of mental and physical anomalies. Unfortunately, society tends to be suspicious of anyone over the age of seven hanging out with an imaginary friend, or talking to ghosts.

In a new book, “The Third Man Factor” by John Geiger, of the University of Toronto,  the Explorers Club, New York, and a governor of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, argues that perhaps those unseen pals could be our BFFs, “Imagine the impact on our lives if we could learn to access this feeling at will,” he says. “There could be no loneliness with so constant a companion. There could be no stress in life that we would ever again have to ­confront alone.”

Five years ago, Geiger first learned about the “third man factor” when he read a memoir by the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton about his ordeal during his famous Endurance mission and the “unseen presence” that, according to the explorer, had accompanied Shackleton and two other men on the last harrowing journey back to civilization.

“It seemed to me often that we were four not three,” Shackleton wrote in his memoir, South.

Geiger began to research the phenomena and found over 100 other testaments to the unseen “third man” that Mount Everest climber Doug Scott described as “the third man syndrome: imagining there is someone else walking beside you, a comforting presence telling you what to do next”.

• Charles Lindbergh on his solo flight across the ­Atlantic in 1927 described on-board “phantoms” during his 1927 attempt to make the first solo non-stop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris.  Struggling to stay awake during the 33-hour flight, he felt that his companions were friendly and helpful.
• After a department store collapsed in Seoul, Korea, in 1995, killing more than 300 people, a 19-year-old clerk, Park Seung-hyung, survived for 16 days in an air pocket beneath a crushed lift shaft. When rescued, she reported that a monk had appeared to her several times during her ordeal, giving her an apple and keeping her hope alive.
• The last man to walk out of the South Tower of the World Trade ­Center before it ­collapsed on 9/11.
• Fighting his way down stairs he felt he was being “guided”, with “an angel” urging him not to recoil from flames in a stairwell, but to run through them.

“Over the years,” Mr. Geiger writes, “the ­experience has ­occurred again and again, not only to 9/11 survivors, mountaineers, and ­divers, but also to ­polar explorers, ­prisoners of war, solo sailors, shipwreck ­survivors, aviators, and ­astronauts. All have ­escaped ­traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having experienced the close presence of a companion and helper.” Read an excerpt here.

So do we have guardian angels or are these “companions” nothing more than stress-induced hallucinations? Geiger doesn’t claim to have the answer:

“It is possibly even an evolutionary ­adaption,” he writes. “Imagine the advantage for ­primitive man, ­perhaps ­separated during a hunt, alone far from his tribal group, to have the guiding hand of a companion pointing the way home.”

However, Geiger found reports of the “factor” beyond the realm of high-risk explorers and others in survival mode.  He cites children experiencing ­real-seeming “imaginary friends,” while ­widows and widowers say that they feel the presence of a ­deceased spouse.

During the middle ages, hallucinations were not counted as a sign of madness.  It was just assumed your unseen pal was a demon and that you were possessed. Today we might call these demons shadow people, usually sinister or trickster entities often glimpsed out of a corner of the eye.  Science thinks it’s come up with an answer to the creepy feeling that somebody is close by.  Tests on a epileptic patient found that “these perceptions may have been due to a disturbance in the multisensory processing of body and self at the temporoparietal junction.”

Nonetheless,  no matter whether these unseen companions arise from a chemical reaction, evolution or are indeed voices from heaven or  beyond Geiger concludes they come in peace:

“The Third Man represents a real and potent force for survival and the ability to ­access this power is a factor, perhaps the most ­important factor, in determining who will succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds, and who will not.”

Read other reviews here and here.  Or, if you’re running for your life at the moment, maybe you can ask your good friend Harvey to read the book for you and tell you about it later.