Haunting Encounters with the Shadow People

In the world of ghosts and hauntings, there are a variety of different species of ghouls and ghosts. Restless spirits, poltergeists, wandering ghosts stuck in another time - the world of hauntings runs the gamut of the odd. One denizen of this realm is the Shadow People, which are usually described as perfectly pitch-black entities appearing as two- or three-dimensional shadows. Sometimes humanoid in shape, at other times more animalistic or even more like amorphous blobs, Shadow People seem to populate their own little corner of the paranormal, and here we will look at a range of cases of such enigmatic entities. 

One very persistent quality of Shadow Person reports is that they often appear to people at night when they are in their rooms or lying in bed. A report from the site cvltnation illustrates this well, with a witness who shares that he and his wife live in a rather unassuming doublewide mobile home that by all accounts seems to have become a hotbed of Shadow Person activity. On this particular evening, while his wife slept soundly beside him, the witness found himself oddly unable to fall asleep, and that was when some weird things would happen. The witness explains:

“While lying there unable to sleep, I became aware of a presence and suddenly and silently a figure moved through our bedroom door and proceeded parallel to our bed. Then rounding the corner of our bed took up a fixed position at the foot of our bed. I was aware that this entity was conscious of us and was intently watching us as we lay there. The entity can best be described as a something that had the appearance of black smoke or a shadow, however it was more material that either of these but less material than a real person.

The most odd thing about this is my lack of fear. Although I was acutely aware of this being and the fact it was not of this earth as we perceive it, it did not seem to arouse any fear response in me, I would say it aroused a feeling that would fit somewhere between “creepy, awed, and curiosity especially considering the fact that it was aware of me as I was aware of it. After some time I almost convinced myself that I was imagining it but then I became aware of the fact that my wife was no longer breathing like she was asleep but was breathing almost silently. I then said “Honey you awake? ” to which she answered “Yes.”

Then I said “do you see anything?” Expecting her reply to be “what do you mean?” but much to my surprise she said “You mean that thing standing at the foot of the bed?” At this time I did become somewhat “nervous”. We laid there for about 10 minuets and then it was gone. It just over a period of about 10 seconds became less solid and our perception of it’s presence became weaker until it just wasn’t there any more. Then it was as if it had never been there. Nothing like this has happened since and the only evidence it ever existed is my wife’s and my memories of it.”

Strange, indeed. There is another bedroom report from Reddit user “VigoVonDoom,” who says this happened when he was a child while living in a house he describes as “rife with shadow people.” He says:

“I lived in a house as a kid up until I was 8 that was rife with shadow people. Almost nightly they would be in and around my room, sometimes just one and sometimes more than one. They would be in the doorways or peeking around them, at the foot of my bed, or creeping up the stairs. Sometimes they would talk to each other in frightening voices and one time I remember waking up to one sitting next to me on the edge of my bed, I assumed it was one of my parents and sat straight up and looked at it. One time, and this is crazy, one came at me and made me black out from terror while I was taking a bath in the tub when I was like 6 or 7. It was like a black mist entered the room and took shape next to me. All of this sounds crazy, but once we moved, I never had experienced anything like this again. It still gives me goosebumps thinking about it like 30 years later.”

From the site, My Haunted Life Too, is a report from a witness who grew up in an old country house, built near the start of the 1900s in SouthWestern Ontario, Canada. The strange events reportedly transpired during his teen years, at a time when he was bedridden with the flu. The witness recalls:

“I woke suddenly around 3am without explanation. Looking at my red-light digital alarm clock, I noticed the time and attempted to roll back over to get back to sleep. As I was beginning to nod off, I heard what I thought was one of my parents on the first set of stairs leading up to the second floor to our bedrooms. I listened for a moment and heard another creak in the stairs – typical sound of the 2nd from the bottom stair that I had come to memorize – and figured it was indeed my mom or dad coming up to check on me. I called out “Mom?” but got no response, then tried again “Dad” and again, got no reply. I continued to listen and heard another step being taken, which landed the person on the stairs onto the first landing of the staircase. Then, after a moment or two of silence, I heard the stereotypical groan of the first stair off the landing, as someone continued to make their way up to the second floor. Once again, becoming more confident in my understanding of the situation and the likelihood that one of my parents were coming up to check on me, I called to them once again – but got no response. All this time, I continued to hear the expected creaks and groans from the staircase that would be made as you ascend to the second floor. Finally, the creaks stopped, as I heard a thud of a footfall on the upstairs landing, followed by one step towards my bedroom, and then another.

So to continue further with the story – as I heard someone taking steps towards my bedroom door, I found myself feel frozen, either with subtle unacknowledged fright or anticipation of some sorts to see exactly who was coming up the stairs to my room at 3am. As if in the blink of an eye (I really don’t remember looking away at any point), I saw a tall cloaked man standing in my doorway in front of my open door, now covering the entirety of my white no-smoking poster hanging on the door. I laid there in silence, staring to try to understand what I was seeing: I could see no facial features, the entity or apparition or whatever it was rather solid seeming and dark, almost as if light was unable to escape the outline of the entity. I don’t know how or why I thought it was a man, but his silhouette was broad and tall, and how his, what seemed to be, cloak draped over his shoulders and how he wore his wide-brimmed hat just had a masculine aura to it. The man and I stared at one another for what seemed to be a solid minute until I was able to snap out of it and quickly spin around to flick on my bedside light. When I turned back to see what exactly I was looking at or who was standing in my door, nothing was there – my doorway was empty.”

In a similar vein to these reports is that of a witness who says:

“The first time I saw them was when I was sleeping late at night. At least I was trying to. I was awake but still very sleepy and my desk was just right next to my bed. It was a big old-fashioned house in middle of a Village also known as Brna – there was two of them – a supposed girl one with long hair and her body was all black and she was very close to me – inches away. She was under my desk. She kind of was way smaller than the one that was very slowly walking through the hallway between my room and my grandma's room. The smaller one would make a very FAST but extremely quiet move under the desk every 10 minutes. The bigger one would rarely move FAST, as I could see them perfectly fine they did not seem very physical they made no sound although I could hear the bigger one making some very weird noise for about 3 seconds but I felt as the more noise I make the more they are aware that I’m there. I think they can not see ANYTHING, but can hear extremely well. The more I made any kind of noise, the more they would get closer, so I just decided to remain quiet all the time and it worked.

I tried to make sure that this was not a dream so I quickly and super quietly took my phone, opened Minecraft on it and made a new world what I called “The Shadow People Are Real”. So then when I wake up in the morning and unlock my phone I would just open Minecraft and see if the world was still there, and there it was. The world was there and out of curiosity, I decided to open the world and there was a sign placed right in front of me. It said “indeed we are.” I was shocked because when I was researching the shadow people, it said nothing about manipulating technology, so I figured maybe they somehow unlocked my phone and did it themselves.

Years have passed and I still can see them. I somehow over the years started enjoying their company so I sometimes stayed up late only to try and have a chat with them. After a year of trying to figure out how to talk with them, I figured out a few ways. The easiest one was to leave them notes on a paper on my desk and they would actually sometimes reply to me but by using this method it would take a few WEEKS only to ask them 2 or 3 questions so I decided to use a way simpler way. I decided to use their manipulation of technology powers to my advantage so I would open chats with my old phone number and say “Hello, Shadow people” late at night and sometimes I would have long chats with them.”

Another creepy bedroom report comes from a witness named Ian Spike. In this case, the witness was not trying to fall asleep or just waking up but was rather just lying down waiting to be called for dinner. The witness says of the eerie encounter:

“The only light in the room was a small lamp that dimly illuminated a yellowish-orange glow. I wasn't doing anything, just thinking or maybe daydreaming. All of a sudden, I got the feeling that I was being observed, so I glanced to my right and saw someone watching me through the window. At first, I thought one of my male cousins had come to our house and tried to scare me, because it looked maybe around my age. His silhouette had a short, spiky hairstyle, similar to the ones sported by '90s boy bands. However, I couldn't see any features since he was completely dark.

I got up from the bed to see who it was, and he didn't run or disappear as I approached. We were about two feet away face-to-face, separated only by the window screen. I was even squinting to see details, but he was completely black. Distant light from neighboring houses hit the plants around him, but not even the whites of his eyes were visible. Strangely, the closer I got to him, the farther he moved away from view, as if he were slowly receding into the back of the window frame. His movements were so unnatural and perfectly in sync with mine, like a shadow. But unlike shadows, he wasn't two-dimensional. Annoyed and thinking someone was playing a trick on me, I quickly grabbed the bedroom door —which was only a step away—to catch whoever it was. I ran outside and bumped into my brother on his way to get some food from the main house. It couldn't have been him because he was in his early thirties at the time and had a different hairstyle, while the mystery person was a child or was simply small in stature.

I asked my brother if he had seen anyone running away, and he said he didn't. There were bushes in our unlit backyard, but none thick enough where someone could hide. Additionally, no intruder could have possibly jumped over the tall fence that quickly without being noticed by my brother or me. The realization of a possible supernatural encounter hit me late. It was only after searching the backyard with a flashlight and finding no one that I got the goosebumps. Up to this day, I still think about that experience and wonder who or what it could have been.”

Was it just his own shadow or something more ominous? Bedrooms are certainly not the only places where Shadow People have been reported. A report on Reddit comes from a witness who says this happened during a “haunted hike” with friends in a secluded rural area not far from their homes. On this particular night, there was a bright full moon, giving them plenty of good visibility and they ambled about trying to spook each other. The witness explains what happened as follows:

“Quite a few things happened on the buildup to the actual encounter. But my friend saw one shadow figure that was only an upper torso come out of a tree in the full moonlight, and then as it approached him from the grove of trees it came out of, another figure came out of that one, and moved up the trail through the brush, and he heard it going through. He ran back to our group and grabbed the girls with us that night and started yelling at them to run, that “there’s more than one!” I brought up the rear to make sure no one fell behind and we weren’t being followed, and as we crossed a bridge that was no more than 10 feet above a creek bed, I felt we were being watched and I could see us from the creekbed as we ran across. I have this sixth sense I guess where if someone or something is watching me, I can see myself through their eyes, and that’s what I saw. I stopped midway across and I had to know what was watching us that night, and that’s when I saw it. It was standing the the creekbed, fully illuminated by the moonlight. It was the outline of a person, pitch black, with no discernible features at all. Just pitch black, I guess maybe it was a bit distorted on the edges? I don’t really know. But it wasn’t a shadow of something because I can see it standing between the rocks in the creek bed. I didn’t feel like it was evil. It just felt like we weren’t supposed to be there that night, maybe if we kept going up the trail something would have happened other than my friends being scared shitless. Anyways we made it back to the car and I asked my friend what he meant by “there’s more than one” (at this point I didn’t say what I had seen because who would believe me right?) and he said “I was standing there looking into the grove of trees I heard noises coming from, and this shadow thing came out of the tree but it was only shoulders and a head, but it was pitch black. And then another shadow ‘person’ I guess would be the best way to describe it came out from it and moved up the trail, and that’s when I didn’t want to stick around and ran back to you guys.” I was freaked out because we saw the same exact thing, in different places, and I didn’t even tell him what I had seen yet. After I told him we were going nuts. It was the first and only time we had ever seen anything out there. We got back to school and the girls wanted us to walk them to their dorms, afterwards him and I went to get food and talked about it the rest of the night.”

In another report from My Haunted Life Too, we have a witness who on this evening was working after hours at a mall pet shop. His initial encounter is explained as follows:

“As I moved about the store, I became aware of a large, black shadow in the shape of a man. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and paced up and down the hallway of our clinic. I greeted him with a casual “G’day,” as I continued my work. The shadow kept its silent patrol, ignoring my attempts to engage. This sighting was later corroborated by one of our clients, a self-proclaimed psychic. She not only sensed the presence of the shadow figure but insisted the whole store was haunted. She was keen to feature The Foundry on a TV show about hauntings, but the building’s owners declined. The paranormal activity persisted: machines turning on and off by themselves, figures glimpsed walking about. While it wasn’t negatively impacting our business, it was becoming a nuisance for the staff. I decided it was time to clear the space.”

It would only get weirder from there, graduating to what seems to have been some sort of poltergeist activity. It began the following morning when the witness went back to the shop in the early morning hours to investigate and take the psychic’s advice on getting rid of the spirit. Things were already odd when it turned out that none of the electricity in the building worked. It stayed like this for some time before the power suddenly jumped back to life. Odd, but not truly paranormal yet. This would change. The witness explains:

“Alone in the store, I set about my task. I’d researched various methods: pouring sea salt in the corners of rooms, placing crystals, burning incense. I performed the usual invocations, hoping to clear out any unwanted entities. I’d asked the staff to stay away until I gave the all-clear.

Around 9 AM, I finished my work and sat at the reception desk to review appointments. An hour later, an eerie silence descended, as if the world had suddenly stopped. I felt paralyzed, rooted to my chair. Then, I heard it – a voice, right by my right ear, halfway between a whisper and a scream: “You’ll pay for this.”The words were barely out of the air when the front door of the store slammed shut with a bang that seemed to shake the entire building. The silence that followed was deafening. I sat there, my heart racing, processing what had just happened. It was the first time I’d felt truly rattled by my experiences at The Foundry.

Despite my efforts that day, it seemed clear that whatever presence or presences inhabited the old building weren’t planning on leaving quietly. The Foundry, with its long history dating back to the gold rush era, had accumulated more than just years – it had stories, maybe even souls, that weren’t ready to move on. I left the store that day with a newfound respect for the unseen. While I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d stirred up with my attempt at clearing the space, I knew one thing for certain: The Foundry’s mysteries ran deeper than I’d ever imagined.”

One thing that seems inextricably linked to the Shadow People phenomenon is the irrational fear and malevolence they seem to emanate, almost as if they are willfully trying to invoke terror in those who see them. Several cases that illustrate this well come from the files of paranormal researcher and author Stephen Wagner, who brings forth some reports that are inextricably linked to fear and foreboding. In one case, a witness called Manda seems to have conjured up Shadow People while playing around with a Ouija board with friends, which doesn't seem to be a good idea even in the best of times but here we are. She says of what happened thusly:

“I'm pretty sure the shadow people are demons. One night I was having a party and I had just gotten a Ouija board for my birthday. Everyone talked me into using it, so we started playing. Then weird stuff started happening. Shadow figures started to appear in my room -- a lot of shadow people. It wasn't any of our shadows; these were different. Some had red eyes. Then red orbs started coming through my room. We had made a protective circle and we all tried to stay in it. It got really cold in my room and we could all see our breath. If some of my friends couldn't see the shadow people, they could feel them.

There was an all-out evil feeling in the room. We all got too freaked out to move. We were just like, "Whoa!" Then one of the shadow people changed -- they got all scary looking. I could explain, but I don't want to go into detail. Let's just say Pumpkin Head (the demon guy from scary movies; no, his head is not a pumpkin.) So we screamed and finally ran out of the room. My parents thought we were crazy.

That night when we went to bed, my closets were glowing red and orbs were going through my room. We didn't go to sleep until, like, 5 a.m., and even then we only slept not even four hours. That was freaky, and stuff didn't die down for a while after that. That was the last time I used the Ouija board. I threw it somewhere deep down in one of my closets. Now I've only used Psychic Circle, and even that has consequences. I'm not allowed to use it anymore because of what happened to me, my friend and my mom. But that is another story for another time.”

Another frightening case from Wagner seems to involve not only Shadow People but also all manner of poltergeist-like activity. It started when the witness’ daughter started reporting strange things from her playroom, which happened to be situated in the dank basement below the house. The child complained that there were often things moving in the corner of her eye and that at least on one occasion she had seen a shadowy figure hovering near the ceiling.  The witness illustrates the strange series of events that followed:

“In later years, I had my floral workshop in the basement and saw them constantly. It got to the point where I would talk to them with my mind, not that they ever answered back. They were black. We saw them all over the basement, but mostly along one wall, and occasionally saw them along the same wall on the first floor and in the kitchen near the back door. We did not see them anywhere else in the house or elsewhere on the property. But even when we did not get a glimpse of them, we were aware when they were present. Some of them seemed to have an evil presence.

A few years after we moved in, I told them they were not welcome in the house and the evil presence seemed to go away. Still, we had an uneasy feeling about them. Not fear. We just accepted they were there, as several steps taken over the years to make them go away didn't work anyway. Only once after the evil ones were told they were not welcome was I aware they came back. And I am not sure if they were evil or just upset. I will explain later.

Only once did it see one clearly. But it happened in a split second and I did not see it from top to bottom. I was walking through the breakfast room into the kitchen. The kitchen light was on in the corner. It was by the back door in front of the stove. I was startled. I thought someone had come into the house. It all happened very fast. But the light from behind it did not pass through as it would a shadow. It was short and stocky and appeared as a silhouette of a person. It had a head (there were no discernible features, including no eyes) shoulders, arms, and a torso. It disappeared too fast to take note if it had legs or feet. I sensed it was as surprised as I was and did not intend to be seen.

Then our house caught fire. It was a major fire that started from a shorted TV along the wall of shadows in the den. We were out of the house six months while it was repaired. About a week after the fire, I stopped by right before dark to pick up a few things. As I came onto the back porch and looked through the six-foot hole where the picture window once was, I looked across the breakfast room at the basement doorway. I sensed three shadows near the doorway. It was almost dark outside, so I did not actually see them. I also got a very bad feeling about them and told them by thought that the evil ones were still not welcome in the house whether I was there or not. Then I turned and left without entering the house. I was quite rattled. Whether I had this feeling because I was also emotionally upset about the fire... I cannot say.

The next day, I went back and it seemed the house was full of shadows, although I only caught a glimpse of them, as usual, fleeing in the basement. And I am not sure I really saw them as there were no lights on down there and the only light was from the window-well windows. It was the only time I ever sensed that they tried to communicate. It seemed they were upset that we were not there because the house was all black, there was no light for them in the kitchen, and there were strangers in the house (the workers) every day. A few weeks later, burglars tried to steal the new appliances for the house. Everything was left in the kitchen by the back door. My daughters and I joked that they met up with the shadows and were scared off. Who knows?”

Yet another case that seems to showcase the malicious and menacing nature of these entities is that of a witness called “Barbara,” who said her house seemed to be veritably infested with shadow people. She says of it:

“I have been seeing something similar to shadow people for a long time now, although the shadows I see don't look like people exactly, and they are in the bottom corners of the house. I see them from the corner of my eye and they are smoky, but they are shapeless and dissipate as soon as I look head-on at them, usually around a corner.

I definitely get a malevolent feeling from them, though. I always believed them to be demons, and still do, as I don't believe in life after death or aliens and ghosts. I am seeing a psychiatrist for clinical depression and finally told him about it as it was bothering me. I told him I thought I was going crazy and, of course, he immediately put me on a psychotropic drug and wanted to know if I heard voices, too (which I thought was crazy!). I haven't been on the drug long enough to see if it will change my seeing them. Somehow I get the feeling just having told someone that I won't see them anymore, though. Would that be a placebo effect?”

What was going on here? Another ominous case comes to us from the site Phantoms and Monsters, starting with a terrifying ordeal experienced by witness “Carlos.” The witness has quite a lot of opinions on the Shadow People, claiming that they are of a demonic nature, that they enjoy terrorizing people, and that they often work in groups. Carlos explains of his own peculiar experiences:

“Most shadow people are not alone but have partners in crime. The shadows that terrorized me were never alone. Sometimes my bedroom would be filled with dozens, big and small. Some could touch me. These shadows would pinch me. It wasn't till I was maybe about age 9 that I finally told my parents about these entities and it caused quite a stir in my family. As usual my parents thought I was suffering from nightmares and suggested I eat less before bed time.

Without fail these Shadows returned every night. It wasn't until one night I couldn't stand hearing their laughter that I resisted their powers to make people catatonic or in a paralyzed state that the reality of the situation was no longer a joke to my Mother as my bed began to shake violently as if a giant hand was shaking it. I jumped out of bed and ran so fast that I don't even remember running to my Mom's room. I jumped on her bed in the dark and her bed started shaking too. She held me in her arms as she prayed out loud to God and slowly the shaking resided. By the end of the month we moved out of that home.

Now this is what I gathered from that experience. One; That house was extremely old. I don't know if that had anything to do with it. But there was a bad vibe there from day one. A lot of crazy things happened there with my family fighting all the time. Never in the history of my family had there been soo many arguments and cases of domestic violence and abuse. Two; besides fights and arguments there was a vibe of mischievousness. When I played in that house it was almost as if all of us were in some kind of altered state, like some kind of dimensional trance. A good example of this was the movie ET where the kid gets aroused in the class room and he starts releasing the frogs. Yeah! I can't remember the whole thing. Let's just put it this way, I guess I went through intense puberty there. I remember having bad thoughts all the time. I remember my best friend Diana flirting with me and acting mature, but only in the house. When we played outside she was a normal kid. I swear this house had some effect on people's feelings and whatnot. The strange thing is that I don't remember much of my childhood in the house as I remembered most of my childhood in school or playing outside. I remember being cruel to my pets. I was never like that but I became a bad kid in the house. Outside I was quite normal.

The strange thing is that we moved about 5 blocks away from that house into a new apartment and I thought things were back to being normal for almost half a year with no incidents. No fights between Mom and Dad, when we all got together it was fun again. I noticed it right away the vibe change. I noticed that the old house was really dark inside. Half a year passed when I had my last incident one night.

It was early, maybe 2:30am I had woke up to use the restroom and I was maybe about 10 years old. I remember laying down in the bed and getting comfortable when I felt my bed got shoved from one side. At first I stood still as I thought maybe it was an earthquake. It passed and I played it off as just my imagination. As I began to fall asleep I had the sensation of being cold and clammy so I covered up. I felt feverish and I felt a small pinch on one of my toes. I became frightened as I looked around in the dark and saw 3 black outlines around my bed. The Shadows were back!

I became paralyzed as I screamed for help, I'm still not sure if I did try but nothing came out or if I imagined screaming out. The point is, I was freaking screaming! I felt some cold weight on my chest as I came face-to-face with one of these entities. Still paralyzed it looked me right in the eye and this is what I saw. Its eyes were black as black velvet and evil looking, but the outside rim of its eyes was black line yellow line, black line yellow line all around the outside perimeter of its eye in a pattern and it moved counterclockwise motion. Its two other Shadow friends had red and the other full yellow eyes. It was unreal as they all burst out in this wicked laughter and vanished and never bothered me like that again.”

Another witness called “Pema” describes being stalked by Shadow People and having multiple experiences of being menaced by them in the early 80's in Toronto, Canada.  She relates her experiences as follows:

“My experiences began with an event I will never forget when I was 16. It was summer and I had difficulty sleeping. This went on for one month approximately. Then one night I had fallen into a light sleep when I was violently awakened. I recall hearing a sound that I thought was an explosion and thinking that our stove must have exploded in the kitchen below me. I opened my eyes and looked around the room in the darkness but saw nothing to indicate anything was happening. Suddenly my bed began to shake violently up and down and it felt as though I was being electrocuted through my solar plexus. I couldn't move but I could see my feet moving as the bed was jumping up and down. Some objects rose up off my dresser and shot towards the bed I thought they would hit me as they approached with such speed. In fact, they stopped suddenly and began to swirl around in a counterclockwise direction above me and from the center of this swirl a bright white light appeared and some voices which were like high-pitched shrieks or nails on a blackboard said quite clearly. "The message we bring is to tell the people he is still alive." And then everything stopped suddenly. I was terrified and basically thought I would end up in a nut house. I remember shaking from fear so much I could barely get out of bed. I made my way to my mom's room to tell her about it at which point she assured me I was having nightmares. Say your prayers and go back to sleep she said. I returned to my room after an hour or more but I couldn't sleep. It was a long time before I could sleep there in fact.

The next event happened the following January. I was coming home very late one night and decided to take the short cut through the alley way by our street. I passed a parked van with windows all around and I saw a movement in the van which made me feel somehow by its shape, size and response that it was a doberman someone had left outside in their van. I kept walking but the thought pestered me that someone should leave their dog out in mid winter in the night. So I went back to the van cautiously peering in but there was nothing at all. Not even a cushion or anything hanging from the ceiling. Ok I thought I guess I imagined it. I happily kept walking home and when I was in the alley I suddenly heard footsteps behind me in the snow. I got a little freaked out and when I turned my head I didn't see anyone there. As I got to the end of the alleyway and turned onto my street I looked back to the entrance to see if anyone was following me. What I saw shocked and terrified me. There was a streetlight right at the corner and in the pool of its light was standing this enormous creature. It was at least 8 feet tall and huge. What struck me was that its form was completely black, there were no reflective surfaces on it whatsoever. In fact the light was shining directly on it and it seemed to absorb that light. It had large things on its head which I took to be horns or ears and its fingers ended in points like claws and the feet as well. Its eyes were red completely and staring right at me. I don't think my feet touched the ground I ran so fast.

After that experience I had a few others with the same creature. Another night I came home late again and I fell onto my bed after shutting the door just wanting to fall asleep. My cat was in the bed with me when we both heard a voice laughing in the room. A masculine voice. My cat freaked out and ran to the door scratching and miaowing loudly to get out, I opened the door and she took off. I just didn't want to believe anything was in there with me so I pointedly turned my back to the rest of the room and went to sleep. Another night I turned over and opened my eyes early in the morning and there was the same creature, smaller though, standing in front of my closet staring at me. I recall I got really mad and told it to eff off and turned around and went back to sleep. Meanwhile, my brother had seen the exact same creature but his had yellow eyes. He confided the story to me years later when we had left the house and had no knowledge of my experiences. He told me he had awakened early one morning and found that he had left the light on in his room, thinking that he should get up and turn it off he turned onto his back and opened his eyes and there sitting on his bed's headboard was the same creature, talons on feet and hands, completely black with no reflective surfaces, but his was he said about 4 ft tall and squatting on the headboard staring at him with yellow eyes. He said he was terrified and decided not to turn off the light after all. I don't remember if he said it vanished quickly or if he shut his eyes and when he opened them it was gone. He said he never saw it again but had other strange experiences in that house.

One day we decided that we should trade rooms. So I moved all my stuff out to his room and vice versa. I teased him and said he'd have to share my room with a visitor but he was disbelieving. After I had moved to his room I had my last experience in that house that was in the shadow people realm. I woke up one night to a sound in my room like rustling. I was wide awake because I thought it might be a mouse. I switched on my lamp and looked toward the other end of the room but seeing and hearing nothing I lay down again with the light still on. I turned to look at the clock and saw that it was 2:20 am then I saw these two large globes of light beyond my night stand. I was frozen up on one elbow because I had been about to turn out my light again. They moved in a way that reminded me of balloons falling. The larger of the two was golden yellow in colour and the smaller was blue. They looked like spheres lit from within and emanating a misty light from their forms. I somehow could sense that they were intelligent. They knew that I was looking at them and they wanted me to see. The larger golden one floated almost majestically to the door whereupon it flattened to a pancake shape in under half a second and slipped under the door. The second smaller one followed along and did the same. I was very nervous and scared at that point but only because I had to go to the bathroom and this meant I had to go out into the hallway where they had vanished to. Our hallway was very dark and without a proper light as the house was old and not renovated very well. I waited for as long as I could which was about 15 minutes and then I cautiously opened my door and went. The hallway was pitch black so my plan was to inch my way to the bathroom with my back to the wall so nothing could sneak up on me and once I got there I could turn on the bathroom light to illuminate the hallway. I followed my plan through and as it turned out when I turned on the bathroom light it shone down onto the stairs and the first landing. In the light were two shadow people. I've only ever thought of them that way because there was no other way to describe them. They looked like shadows, only they were in the light. They didn't look like the other creatures I had seen, in fact they looked like people in the sense that they had a head and arms and legs and torso and hands. They threw up their hands as though in surprise, like I'd caught them unexpectedly and then they flew down the stairs without a sound. It took me a long time to come out of that bathroom as I didn't want to encounter any of these things again.”

There have been many theories as to what Shadow People might be. Ghosts, aliens, demons, shapeshifters, interdimensional interlopers - all have been bandied about as possible explanations for the phenomenon. In another theory, paranormal researcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley believes that the Shadow People are in fact shape-changing demonic entities from Middle Eastern folklore called the Djinn, mostly called Genies in the West. She has said of this idea:

“There were two major avenues, both involving Shadow People, dark and menacing humanoids I had been researching since 2004. I already knew a bit about the Djinn from earlier research in demonology. I noticed that many cases of persistent negative hauntings involved Shadow People, so I began probing for their true identity.

I discovered that many Shadow People experiencers are also ET experiencers, especially abductees. Through a long process, I concluded that Shadow People are a shape-shifted form taken by Djinn. Therefore, there is a profound connection between Djinn and bad hauntings and ET abductions. Furthermore, the footprints of the Djinn are evident throughout our mythologies about ancient aliens and gods. The picture that emerged is of a major Djinn involvement in all of our entity contact experiences throughout history.

Supposedly there are give-away signs. In old Djinn lore, they could not duplicate 100 percent of a human body, and usually their animal-like, hairy legs and feet gave them away. I have speculated that Shadow People wear hats and cowls to cover up imperfect heads. Some experiencers say the eyes of the human-shaped Djinn will shift to odd colors or a reptilian appearance. I believe the Djinn and other shape-shifters are among us every day, and we never know unless we have certain experiences with them.”

So what are we dealing with here? What are Shadow People and why do they almost seem to feed on our fears and anxiety? Are they aliens, Djinn, ghosts of some kind, evil spirits, interdimensional travelers, or merely figments of the imagination? It remains to be seen.