Episode #23: Shadow People

 Join E.M. Moon as they discuss the phenomena that is Shadow People and listen to personal accounts from actual people as well as what science and folklore has to say on the subject.

What do you believe?

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Transcript

Shadow People

What exactly is a Shadow Person? Shadow People? Shadow mass or figure? I’m sure if you asked ten different people, you might get at least five different answers. It varies. But definitively, these entities are labeled as the perception of shadow as a living species, humanoid figure, sometimes interpreted as the presence of a spirit or other entity by believers in the paranormal or supernatural.

 Entities such as these aren’t a new phenomena. They have been spoken about throughout history and folklore in a number of religions, legends, and belief systems which describe supernatural entities such as shades of the underworld, and various shadowy creatures. These beings have long been a staple of folklore and ghost stories, such as the Islamic Jinn and the Choctaw Nalusa Chito. 

 The Jinn, or genies as most english speaking people have referred to them, are invisible creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabia and later in Islamic culture and beliefs. Like humans, they are accountable for their deeds and can be either believers (Muslims) or disbelievers (kafir), depending on whether they accept God's guidance. Since jinn are neither innately evil nor innately good, Islam acknowledged spirits from other religions and could adapt them during its expansion. Jinn are not a strictly Islamic concept; they may represent several pagan beliefs integrated into Islam. To assert a strict monotheism and the Islamic concept of tawhid (oneness of God), Islam denies all affinities between the jinn and God, thus placing the jinn parallel to humans, also subject to God's judgment and afterlife. The Quran condemns the pre-Islamic Arabian practice of worshipping or seeking protection from them.

Although usually invisible, jinn are supposed to be composed of thin and subtle bodies, and can change at will. They favor a cockroach, snake form, but can also choose to appear as scorpions, lizards, or as humans. They may even engage in sexual affairs with humans and produce offspring. If they are injured by someone, they usually seek revenge or possess the assailant's body, requiring exorcism. Jinn rarely meddle in human affairs, preferring to live with their own kind in tribes similar to those of pre-Islamic Arabia. 

Individual jinn have appeared on charms and talismans. They can be called upon for protection or magical aid, often under the leadership of a king. Many people who believe in jinn wear amulets to protect themselves against the assaults of the jinn, supposedly sent out by sorcerers and witches. A commonly held belief maintains that jinn cannot hurt someone who wears something with the name of God written upon it. While some Muslim scholars in the past had ambivalent attitudes towards jinn, contemporary Muslim scholarship increasingly associate jinn with idolatry. 

The Choctaw also have stories about shadow beings. The Nalusa Chito, also known as a Impa Shilup, was the soul-eater, a great black being. If individuals allowed evil thoughts or depression to enter their minds, Impa Shilup would creep inside them and eat their souls. Many people of the Choctaw Nation will not say his name, in fear of summoning the spirit. 

Nalusa Falaya (or long black being) resembled a man, but with very small eyes and long, pointed ears. He sometimes frightened hunters or transferred his power of doing harm. Some believed that the Nalusa Falaya preferred to approach men by sliding on his stomach like a snake. 

Hashok Okwa Hui'ga (Grass Water Drop) was believed to have a connection to what is termed will-o-the-wisp. Only its heart is visible, and that only at night. Hashok Okwa Hui'ga leads astray anyone who looks at it. 

It was also believed that every man had a shilombish (the outside shadow) which always followed him, and shilup (the inside shadow, or ghost) which after death goes to the land of ghosts. The shilombish was supposed to remain upon the earth, and wander restlessly about its former home, often moaning, to frighten its surviving friends. It tried to make them forsake the spot, and seek another place to live. It was also supposed to assume the form of a fox, or owl; and by barking like the one, and screeching like the other at night, cause great consternation, for the cry was considered ominous of bad things. The Choctaw could differentiate between the shilombish and the animals it imitates. When a fox barks, or an owl screeches, another fox or owl replies. But when the shilombish imitates the sound of either animal, no response is heard. The shadow-like beings would often stalk children of younger adult age. 

The Kashehotapolo is a creature that is neither man nor beast. While having the legs and hoofs of a deer, its body is that of a man. His head and face are small and shriveled, and it is said that a person who looks at it will be visited by evil. When hunters go near the swamps it inhabits, it sneaks behind them to call loudly before quickly fleeing. Although it does not harm man, it takes delight in their fright as it yells a sound that resembles a woman's scream. For that reason it was named Kashehotapolo (kasheho meaning "woman" and tapalo meaning "call"). 

But let’s get back to what most of us know of as Shadow People. The Coast to Coast AM late night radio talk show helped popularize modern beliefs in shadow entities. The first time the topic of shadow people was discussed at length on the show was April 12, 2001, when host Art Bell interviewed a man purporting to be a Native American elder, Thunder Strikes, who is also known as Harley "SwiftDeer" Reagan. During the show, listeners were encouraged to submit drawings of shadow people that they had seen and a large number of these drawings were immediately shared publicly on the website.

In October that year, Heidi Hollis published her first book on the topic of shadow people, and later became a regular guest on Coast to Coast. Hollis describes shadow people as dark silhouettes with human shapes and profiles that flicker in and out of peripheral vision, and claims that people have reported the figures attempting to "jump on their chest and choke them". She believes the figures to be negative aliens that can be repelled by various means, including invoking "the Name of Jesus".

Although participants in online discussion forums devoted to paranormal and supernatural topics describe them as menacing, other believers and paranormal authors do not agree whether shadow people are either evil, helpful, or neutral, and some even speculate that shadow people may be the extra-dimensional inhabitants of another universe. Some paranormal investigators and authors such as Chad Stambaugh claim to have recorded images of shadow people on video.

Shadow people feature in two episodes of ITV paranormal documentary series Extreme Ghost Stories, where the phenomenon is described as a "black mass".

The "Hat Man"

One example of a particular shadow person is the "Hat Man", who shares the characteristics of general shadow people but is named for a fedora or other brimmed hat on his head. Descriptions of the Hat Man date back to as early as the late 2000s. The Hat Man is commonly associated with sleep paralysis and the abuse of the antihistamine medicine diphenhydramine, commonly sold under the brand name Benadryl. He is typically described as having very little or no discernible features, although some witnesses have claimed they can "feel him staring" at them. But let’s not delve too deep into the Hat Man, as he could potentially encompass a whole episode himself…

Scientific explanations

Several physiological and psychological conditions can account for reported experiences of shadowy shapes seeming alive. A sleep paralysis sufferer may perceive a "shadowy or indistinct shape" approaching them when they lie awake paralyzed and become increasingly alarmed. 

A person experiencing heightened emotion, such as while walking alone on a dark night, may incorrectly perceive a patch of shadow as an attacker. 

Many methamphetamine addicts report the appearance of "shadow people" after prolonged periods of sleep deprivation. Psychiatrist Jack Potts suggests that methamphetamine usage adds a "conspiratorial component" to the sleep deprivation hallucinations. One interviewed subject said that "You don't see shadow dogs or shadow birds or shadow cars. You see shadow people. Standing in doorways, walking behind you, coming at you on the sidewalk." These hallucinations have been directly compared to the paranormal entities described in folklore. 

Shadow people are commonly reported by people under the effects of deliriant substances such as datura, diphenhydramine, and benzydamine. 

Finally, visual hallucinations, such as those caused by schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, may appear to be shadowy figures at the edge of peripheral vision.

Personal Accounts From the Interwebs

A question was posed on Quora several years ago, “Have you ever had an experience with "Shadow People?" What do you believe they are, exactly? Are there specific shadow people (with names or specific appearances)?”

Here are just a few responses, personal accounts by real people posted to the ever expansive internet.

Ian Bodhicypha Welch

I experienced a haunting in Seattle, WA in 2004 6y

 in 2004–2006 I lived in Seattle in a rental house with 2 other friends and my fiance at the time (not engaged any longer). We’ll call them Kristopher, John, and Samantha (fiance). We were all pretty rowdy, had parties often because we were local DJs, but we also worked good jobs as banquet servers and construction workers respectively. After living in this house for a year, we started to experience something strange and eventually all of the roomies (skeptics) confirmed reports of a haunting in the house. I first noticed this “shadow entity” after meditating in the garage, which was disconnected from the house and about ten feet from the back door. I was meditating and felt a presence which made the hair stand on my arms, I looked up and saw a shadow that was darker than the surrounding shadows on the wall and it freaked me out to the point where i ran inside as fast as possible.

 I didn’t tell anyone what I saw that night and let it go, thinking it was a weird sleep-deprived hallucination. A few days passed and I started to notice scratching in the walls in my bedroom, and what sounded like stomping upstairs in the attic. this was a one-story house built in the mid-1970’s I believe. I am pretty level-headed so I figured it was a raccoon or rats moving in. I had a slight feeling that whatever i saw in the garage was now in my house too but still kept quiet about it. Flash forward another few days and things got really bizarre! The knocking got louder, day and night, but mostly when someone was around to hear it and it wasn’t localized to just me and my own experience with it. My roommates complained of weird noises in their rooms, like clapping in the air around them (like if you were standing there, alone, and someone clapped their hands right next to your ears!)

 We jokingly started saying that there was a ghost in the house while still suspending belief in it. One night I was sitting on the couch, reading, and out of the corner of my eye i caught something walk by about 10 feet away but nobody else was home that day when i was there! My roommate Kristopher was just heading off to sleep one evening as my fiance Samantha and i were in the other room. Samantha and I began hearing scratching and a light knock at the walls by our heads while we laid there. I jokingly told whatever it was to “go bother someone else!” and we literally heard whatever it was scurry away and “walk” over to the other room. The next morning, Kristopher had left earlier for work than usual. He saw me later that day and asked if I heard anything that night? I told him no, nervously. He said as he was preparing to sleep that night, he locked his bedroom door and started to doze off. While almost asleep, he hears the door open and the sound of breathing coming right for him. The breathing came closer and louder toward his ear and he ran out of the house screaming. He moved out a week later and another friend, Josh, took his place.

 By now, with a new roommate in Kristopher’s old room, the haunting had become worse. Loud thumps in the walls, literal sounds of stomping around up in the attic too. We braved the moment and decided to go up for a look. Well, we climbed the drop-down ladder and poked our heads up into the attic. There was absolutely no space to move around up there. It was a crawl space attic and we immediately felt a weird vibe and dashed back down the ladder and closed the door. By now, we knew we had a ghost but the reality was I knew it was a “Shadow Person” based off of what I saw. Weirdly enough, it seemed to listen to me and not mess with me as much. WTF!? One night, a group of friends from our hometown, came up for a visit and we began talking about the ghost in the house. I was sitting on the mantle of the fireplace and we had NOT had a fire for at least 5 days. Just as we began speaking about the entity, the fire burst into flames at my back and i jumped across the room scared shit-less. This time 10 people witnessed that experience and we confirmed something was weird in the house.

 That’s not the crazy part, as my friend Josh who took Kristopher’s room, began acting weird over the course of a week. He started getting more depressed, drinking more, and the TL:DR version is that he hung himself in that very room at the end of his bender. The weird part was through a series of coincidence and text message, Kristopher and I received a call from our other roommate Jason, regarding Josh sending him a suicide text message, and we were able to make it there to the house in time to pull him off of the rope and have EMTs revive him after he had been dead for 6 minutes. Through some sort of strange coincidence, my next door neighbor was having a get together that I attended and I happened to meet a “good witch” or “white witch” as they are called. She agreed to come and cleanse the house for me which is what we did the very next day. We made a circle of candles, saged the place, and told that entity it was not welcome there any longer. I moved a week after that!

 Yes this story is true, and I still try and find explanations as to what it was and no I have not been haunted any longer by any weird entities. We all are believers now and unfortunately for my friend Kristopher, he still believes he is haunted by this being. He is a devout christian and does not usually believe in things like that either whereas I am a mystic, spiritually minded person who leaves it open to anything is possible.

Gary

45+ years of experience with entities and metaphysics. Author has 800 answers and 674.4K answer views 2y

 The following was written by a demonic being, who was bound to a body who posted it on the web back in 2013. I recently ran across it in my archives and thought it might be of interest to this specific question.

 While I can’t vouch for the information given, I can vouch that the demonic was genuine. (Along with many others who knew him personally.)

 QUOTE
 I personally know a lot of shadow people. I've done studies on them and interviewed them and such...so I suppose I'll share a bit of what I've discovered and see if it matches anything anyone else has observed.

 Most shadow entities (not deceased humans) feed on dead or stagnant energy, which is why they are usually found around hospitals, graveyards, around ill or dying individuals and generally in places that have had a lot of physical activity recently (after concerts is always a good one) where energy has built up close to the ground enough that it coalesces and doesn't 'soak into' the earth as quickly as it should. Because of the nature of the dead and stagnant energy they feed on, their own energy becomes tar-like and cold because of its density and weight, so that is one of the reasons for their dark appearance. I find that when I stretch out and refine their energy it looks more of a pale brown than black actually.

 There are also individuals who cloak themselves in energy that absorbs light rather than reflects it in order to maintain anonymity or simply so they are not noticed. Needless to say, a lot of them are up to no good.

 Individuals with lots of energy blockages and who are ill can also appear to be black or shadow-like because they drag in so much energy at any one time that light doesn't get time to reflect off them. Deceased individuals (earthbound, ghosts or whatever you'd like to call them) who are still working through old issues from their former lifetime can often appear this way until they have overcome that initial stage of pain and confusion...etc.

 Of course there are also spirits/entities that naturally have black energy too, but they often have a fuller and more dynamic appearance than shadows because black energy takes up a lot of space and can often reflect light and shadow and smaller details where shadow people/entities simply appear as indefinable 'blobs' or silhouettes with no features.

 (Of course, some shadow people are just figments of our imagination too. It's often hard to tell when something is in the corner of your eye to begin with... so there’s that possibility as well.)

 That about sums up the main points of my studies. Of course there is more, but those are the most common scenarios.

 As for personal experiences...

 I can’t say I have never been harassed by a shadow entity or person on occasion, but I find a lot of them are neutral and harmless (and not inherently evil or dangerous as a lot of people seem to think.) There's always that bad apple in any bunch it seems, even where spirits are concerned.

 UNQUOTE

John Young

Studied Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of TechnologyAuthor has 3.6K answers and 22.5M answer views 2y

 I know some people are skeptical that these things actually exist. Well, they do, at least they were documented during the US government’s AAWSAP program (“Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program”).

 This secret program ran from 2008 to 2010, and has been described at length in a recently published non-fiction book called “Skinwalkers at the Pentagon”, written by the operation’s two managers, Colm Kelleher and James Lacatsky, and a leading investigative journalist and longtime UFO researcher, George Knapp.

 The book documents an unexpected and in some ways disturbing link between UFOs, which the government now terms UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), and a number of kinds of bizarre paranormal events, one of which is what the authors refer to as shadow people.

Normally, we think of UFOs as nuts-and-bolts craft with super technology and operated by aliens. A major government project still coming to light discovered the story appears much stranger than that. There are undeniably UAPs in our atmosphere and even under the oceans; but they are often “co-located”, as the authors put it, with the most bizarre kinds of paranormal activities, including ‘shadow people’. But are these things real, or psychically induced hallucinations, or something even weirder - especially since some of them leave tracks?

 What I find compelling about the book is that the authors have top secret clearances and the manuscript had to be submitted to the US Defence Intelligence Agency for approval before it could be published. This is not some pop UFO book with little credibility, it is the voice of a $22 million research program funded by Congress through the efforts of Sen. Harry Reid.

 The paranormal phenomena were not what the team expected to encounter, but when these phenomena proved impossible to ignore, they decided that they ought to follow the data wherever it led.

 Many of the researchers, including all of the principle people, had bizarre and sometimes frightening encounters of a kind they refer to as “high strangeness”. Initially they experienced these things at a UFO hotbed in Utah, a rangeland property called Skinwalker Ranch. Their experiences typically mirrored stories that were told by people who had lived for decades in the Uintah Basin, where the ranch is located.

 The term ‘skinwalker’ itself comes from a Navaho legend about vindictive and evil medicine men who could transform themselves into seven-foot-tall beasts with wolves’ heads, who walked upright, had red eyes, and were otherwise nothing you would want to meet in a dark arroyo.

 Along with actually spotting this and some other kinds of unnatural creatures, team members experienced poltergeist type activity, objects being moved about even in locked rooms, creepy sounds, sharp temperature drops, disembodied voices or laughter, ‘trickster’ activity, brightly lit orbs floating in their vicinity then disappearing, “cones of silence” - and, on occasion, indistinct or ‘cloaked’ figures they referred to as shadow people.

 So how did these shadow people fit in? Many government and military personnel came to the project site, but when they returned to their homes 1,500 or 2,000 miles away, they, or their spouses and children, began experiencing these same kinds of high strangeness.

 They might hear heavy footsteps in the hallway outside their bedroom, or see skinwalker-like beasts outside in their yards glaring at them before stalking away - finding big canine footprints in the yard or snow the next morning. This might happen even to their teenaged children despite the officer having told them nothing about what was happening in Utah.

 Some heard knocks on their door but never found anyone there, or heard their spouse calling them, and hurried back to the house only to learn their spouse had never called them.

 And many of them woke in the morning to find shadow people at the foot of their beds.

 It should be pointed out also that this phenomenon is not only associated with Skinwalker Ranch. Pilots who come close to UAPs sometimes bring the same ‘something’ home with them - referred to as ‘hitchhikers’ - home with them. Even the pilot who coined the term “flying saucers” in Washington State in 1947, after flying near some unknown aerial vehicles near Mount Rainier before the Roswell incident, is known to have experienced paranormal phenomena.

 What does all of this mean? The study kept an open mind and attempted to understand, but whatever is behind the phenomenon seemed interested in stimulating human interest and keeping our attention, but not on providing answers.

 I heard one of the book’s authors, Colm Kelleher, speculate on a recent podcast on the subject in early February 2022.

 At best, he wonders whether the operators of the UAPs frequently encountered by militaries and pilots around the world might be from a civilisation far more advanced than our own, with a different order of intelligence entirely. This intelligence may be wary of communicating with us directly and impacting our development.

 To put it baldly, we are primitive and destructive enough now, and obviously ruining our own planet as it is, what wider destruction might we do given advanced technology?

 So they are (perhaps) giving us plenty of sightings of UAPs, and also providing us paranormal experiences that frequently seem to draw on our instinctive fears, to send us the message that we are not alone, that there are many things that we know nothing about. Maybe this is their way of planting the seed in our collective minds that we must broaden our worldviews enormously, but that we also many not like everything we are going to learn about the universe.

 The AAWSAP program was supposed to stay secret but somebody in the intelligence community leaked a memo from Senator Reid to the Secretary of Defence to a variety of politicians, and the word began to get out, including regarding the unsettling and alarming paranormal things the researchers were documenting.

 The fundamentalist Christian wing of the Republican Party, however, believed that the project was stirring up Satan, awakening daemons, and so on, and as soon as their party was in a position to do so, they put a stop to the research.

 Congress has taken in increased interest the past couple years in penetrating the secrecy around the whole subject of UFOs/UAPs. They required the Department of Defence to form a “UAP Task Force” and to release an unclassified report in June 2021, which was done.

 In the next year’s military funding bill, they passed the Gillibrand Amendment, which required a much larger and more comprehensive effort be undertaken to gather and analyse data about UAPs and begin getting to the bottom of it all.

 There are indications that Congress may have a real battle on their hands to force the US Air Force and other government branches to open up and share data with the Congress, the public, or even the office that is replacing the UAP Task Force. It may be years before they obtain (or force) real cooperation.

 Meantime, we are left to wonder - are poltergeists and shadow people actually real, based on the observations of the many credible witnesses documented by AAWSAP and written about in “Skinwalkers at the Pentagon”?

 Or does whatever extradimensional or interstellar civilisation is operating the UAPs telepathically read basic human fears and provide illusions, hallucinations, or in some cases technological ‘special effects’ that make these things seem real because WE believe or fear they are real?

 I suggest you read the book and marvel at the revelations regarding highly-placed officers and other credible witnesses waking up with shadow people in their bedrooms…

…or at least pay attention to the issue of UAPs in the news in the future. The US military now admits it has been seeing them around ships, planes, and nuclear facilities since the invention of the atomic bomb, and we may now be certain that they - and the US Air Force in particular - have been lying to the world for three-quarters of a century.

 There is already a civil war going on within the government as to who should control the nation’s secrets on this topic. It’s not yet clear who is going to win: the elected representatives of the people, or the bare handful of military and intelligence powerbrokers who control these secrets at present; they may be the real “shadow people” in our world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Paranormal/comments/1313h8/shadow_people/

Over on Redditt on an r/paranormal thread, about twelve years ago

Apotheosis91 posed a question as follows and got quite a few responses and tales from many a Redditter who had their own experiences with what they believed to be Shadow People.

Apotheosis91 asked:

Shadow People seem to be a very common paranormal experience, but I have never met another person who has had experiences with them. Have any of you encountered them? If so, what was their physiology/behaviour? Did you feel threatened? Do you have any theories on what they are or what their presence could mean? What's the best documentation you've seen? Are there any good articles on the subject? Basically I'm trying to get the ball rolling on one big shadows/shadow people thread. They've been a passion of mine for years and I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about them. 

In response, Agent17 replied

I've seen two in my life and both times freaked me the fuck out. The first time I was at my grandmothers house and sitting in a back bedroom which we referred to as the Nintendo room ( My Grandma has an old school NES with a ton of games. Anyways Im sitting there playing a game and I got that don't look behind you kind of feeling. I stand up to look behind me and in the room behind me there stood what looked like a tattered black bath robe floating in the air. The crazy part was and its still very vivid in my mind to day was how dark the blackness was. It was like staring into a can of black paint and the light creeping in from the shutters seemed to be absorbed by it. I just stood there frozen, think WTF is that and then it started floating towards me and I ran like a bat outta hell into the kitchen to tell my Grandmother what I saw and when we went back in there it was gone. The other time was at my parents house, It was late at night and I'm watching the telly. All the lights are off in the living room at this time. So Im watching TV and see movement in the dark out of the corner of my eye. In The hallway by the bathroom there stood a what looked like a black outline of a man in a raincoat and hat. It just stood there like it was watching me. I remember it had what looked like very faint red eyes, which were very unnerving. I kept it in my line of sight and reached for the lamp behind me. As soon as I pulled the cord it vanished. 

Will-o-the-wisp replied:

I have seen them several times in my life. 

First time i saw one I had sleep paralysis and it was standing there over me. When I awoke fear took me over I started yelling at it to go way. It leaned down to look at me and I got the impression that it did not want to scare me. It then moved around behind my head which freaked me out even more since it was now out of sight. My paralysis broke and I jumped up and went through the house looking for it and found nothing. There were some other odd things that happened in my earlier days, but I don't think they are worth mentioning in this contexts. 

A few times after that I literately stumbled onto them in the woods. Their actions indicated I took them by surprise and they quickly faded into the ground or into some flora. One time my shepherd actually tried to attack/get one. That was probably the single most unique experience I ever had. Every time I saw one like this I froze and went into a super-observation mode and watched them closely out of fear and curiosity. 

One time at college I woke and I saw one that quickly moved behind my head as soon as I opened my eyes. I got the impression that this was the same one I woke and found standing over me before (only a feeling, no way of knowing for sure). With out moving I said, "If you are not here to hurt me would you give me your hand" (or something like that). I saw a dark hand reach around on my left side just below my shoulder. I rolled over slightly and reached for it with my right hand and as soon as I felt the touch of the hand it was gone. 

I haven't seen them for a few year now, but I think I will eventually again at a certain point in my life; thats just a feeling I get and nothing more. I never saw eyes on the ones I saw and I never felt anything negative from them either. My father has indicated to me more than once he had seen things as well, but hasn't ever wanted to go into detail. 

Nowadays, I almost always sleep with a light on somewhere, because I get the feeling something may happen. That may seem childish, but I actually had an experience in pitch blackness only a few months ago. I have no way of knowing if that experience is in away related to the shadow people I have seen. I also have a daughter now, so I am not so thrilled about the possibility of exploring the unknown right now. 

From Kidthink

This is a great thread, OP! :) It makes me feel less crazy to read other people's experiences. I have 3 I would like to share, but I have other stories I plan on sharing when I am done procrastinating. 

I saw the first one when I was about 13. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was home alone. I was sitting at the computer desk in the middle of the living room, listening to music. I was drumming my hands on the desk and rocking out (haha) and spun around in a circle in my desk chair. As I spun, I saw it. It was a man on the left side of the room, standing in the doorway. I'd call him a Shadow Person because his body was entirely black and looked almost two-dimensional, but he had a face. He was a white guy who had tan skin, mutton chops and a top hat. He saw me look at him, crouched down, and darted across the living room (as I spun in my chair) and ran through the wall. I sat at the desk for another minute, trying to gather what had just happened, and then I went outside and sat on the porch for two hours while I waited for someone else to get home, because I was convinced he was hiding in the hallway closet. 

When I was maybe 15, I spent a lot of time hanging out at a creepy old OddFellow's home in the area - an older friend of mine lived on the premises as security, but the complex was really run-down and might as well have been an abandoned building. Anyways, he told us about this thing he called "Homeless Bobby"; he called it that because he had thought it was a homeless person living on the grounds, until he chased it into a room that had no other windows or doors, and there was no one in the room. This thing was so prominent that it was almost a rite of passage for you to see it when you hung out there. The very first night I went there, I followed my Security Guard friend when he went on his rounds. I saw Homeless Bobby almost immediately. It was dark and very late, but the lights were turned on in the only part of the building with electricity. We were walking outside, past a large bay window looking into a big, lit-up room - and Homeless Bobby just walked directly through the room. Like everyone else describes, he was extremely deep, dark black. Honestly, to describe the shape of him, he looked like a thinner version of Hagrid. Long, frizzy hair, long overcoat, and seriously at least 7 feet tall. (There are a lot of other stories about him.) 

The last one I saw, I was 16. I came home late from the OddFellows home, and for some reason I thought it would be awesome to sleep in my big closet, because I had recently cleared it out. It had sliding doors. I was laying in there on the floor, in a sleeping bag, with the door slid open. I woke up laying on my left side, facing the wall of the closet, and I was absolutely terrified. I tilted my head to the right and looked up into the top corner of the closet, and there was a massive, deep black mass. It had no face and didn't have a real shape, but I just knew it was staring at me. I got the feeling that if I tried to get up, it was going to slam the closet door. So I just laid there for probably 30 minutes, trying not to look at it, before it eventually faded away. 

Sorry for the long comment! 

Killerbarbie had their own experience, their story emcompassing the possibility that these entities may be more than just shadows…

The only time I ever had was when I lived on a Cree reserve in Northern Alberta. My family is native, but not Cree and this reserve and fairly recently (within the last 2 generations) been ripped apart by residential schools. My father was one of 7 RCMP officers in the area so we were regarded with caution and often hated. 

About 3 months after moving there we notice the coyotes had stopped howling near our house. Shortly after that we realized we had no animals near the house at all. No animal tracks, no birds, our family cat had disappeared. It was unsettling. Even the neighbours border collie avoided our property. 

My parents invited the Elders to visit, dinner and drinks, very friendly and informal. One of the Kihteh'ayah (Elders) brought my mom sage and sweet grass. Sage is smudged to clear bad energy and sweet grass is a piece offering. The Kihteh'ayah didn't say a thing to us the entire meal, but near the end of the visit stood on the back step and watched the darkness. I went to offer her tea when she pointed to the darkness. "They fight. They're unhappy." I could see what looked like jackals. They were built like greyhounds but the size of a great dane or wolfhound. They were pacing back and forth at the edge of our property line, they were angry. 

Kohkom came back a few days later and sat us down. She told us that some families were upset. We weren't Cree, yet living in Kikino (means our home), we were upsetting some less reputable people by enforcing laws of the government not of the reserve (Reserves have a right to self government to a degree but they still fall under most laws). She told us that some of the people had set the abcheenee (I'm sure I have spelled this wrong, but it's similar to the Iroquois Wendigo ) on our family. She spoke with the ka peyakoskânewihk (community/family) and they had come forward, apologetic. 

We smudged the property and I haven't seem them since. 

And lastly, Cold08 had an interesting tale to tell.

There was a time, when I was in college, where I had taken more classes than I should have and had a room to myself, and slowly lost most of my friends, so I do blame this on the stress and loneliness, but take from it what you will. 

I would see people standing in my peripheral vision. Most of the time it was just a person that was made up of the absence of light. They weren't shadows because they were three dimensional, it's more as if someone made a person out of whatever you make sunglasses out of but fuzzier. They were kind of like transparent men that light didn't pass through very well and they seemed to suck in the light around them as well. 

Whenever I was still, like when I was reading a book or using the computer, they would slowly materialize and become more and more defined until I looked at them and they would disappear. 

Then in early December they started to move. At first I only saw them move when my head was moving, like I'd be turning around in my chair, find I was looking directly at dark in the shape of a man and it would move off in the opposite direction. Shortly after that I could start to see them walk in front of me sometimes when I would lose focus with my eyes. Usually it was when I was looking at the computer, I would lose focus for a second and the shape of a 3D shadow head would pass between me an the monitor. The last development I had was when I would close my eyes for a moment and open them sometimes there would be a dark figure there that would fade away over the next second or so. Sometimes it would be inches from my face and sometimes it would be far away. Sometimes there would be more than one. Sometimes I could make out where eyes should be and a nose, but they never had mouths, and sometimes they would just be shadowy blobs. 

Then I went home for Christmas break and started hanging out with a friend from high school who never made it out of my home town. I had always been scared of drinking, but he brought me to a few bars and I found that my hallucinations disappeared when I drank. I drank for the next semester, and was eventually turned on to pot which did a good job of chasing the crazy away as well. Eventually I met the girl of my dreams, cut back the substance abuse, and now I very rarely have problems. I'm pretty sure that I was just going crazy and nothing paranormal happened, so take this with a grain of salt. 

The link to this thread will be posted in the notes for this episode so that you can read more encounters from people and decide for yourself about the validity of these shadowed entities.

Of course, like these things do, stories of Shadow People have leaked into popular culture and influenced many a show, movie, and book.

The Nightmare is a 2015 documentary that discusses the causes of sleep paralysis as seen through extensive interviews with participants, and the experiences are re-enacted by professional actors. It proposes that such cultural phenomena as alien abduction, the near death experience and shadow people can, in many cases, be attributed to sleep paralysis. The "real-life" horror film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26 and premiered in theatres on June 5. 

• Shadow people, described as "Shadow Men", feature prominently in the 2007 novel John Dies at the End. When they kill a person, that person is retroactively erased from existence, and history is rewritten as though they were never born.
• The 2013 horror film Shadow People depicts a fictional sleep study conducted during the 1970s in which patients report seeing shadowy intruders before dying in their sleep. The film follows a radio host and CDC investigator who research the story, and the story is claimed to be based on true events. 
• In a 2012 episode of A&E's Intervention series, the subject Skyler is plagued by "shadow people", sometimes called "phase people", and sprays a mist to unveil them in the refractions.[ He also builds weapons to fight them and alleges that they are using stolen technology to telepathically communicate with certain individuals. 
• In the online game Deep Sleep and its sequels, shadow people have existed since the dawn of the human race and lurk in lucid dreams. Players who realize that they are asleep can be paralyzed and possessed, and the character's dream self will be turned into a shadow person.
• An episode of the 1985 Twilight Zone series titled "The Shadow Man" dealt with a teenage boy who had a shadow person living under his bed. The episode portrayed the shadow man as fitting the "hat man" appearance commonly ascribed to shadow people and added to the mythology that shadow people can kill humans but will not harm those under whose beds they live. 
• In the 1998 video game LSD: Dream Emulator, a humanoid figure commonly known as the Gray Man may appear in some dreams, who, if touched, undoes all dream progress and erases saved flashback data. The figure, in both appearance and roles in dreams, is similar to that of the "Hat Man" phenomenon.

 So, what do you think Shadow People really are? Just our imagination? Sleep deprived hallucinations? An over medicated mind? Beings from another dimension? Demonic entities or ghostly apparitions? I’m not really sure I have an opinion myself. They could really be all of the above depending on the situation. Or they could just be the moniker we give to the unknown and the faceless until they have something better and more succinct to go by. I wish I had a better answer, but maybe it’s good to leave them in the shadows a bit, still somewhat shrouded in mystery. Maybe they don’t need a definitive name because then they have form and that’s when things can potentially get...dangerous.

 But don’t worry. I’m sure there’s nothing to fear when it comes to these potential creatures. Just like the Hat Man. Nothing scary there at all...right?