From: Kathryn
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2010 1:36:29 PM
Subject: myshadowencounter

I was young, 10 I think...I remember it was a strange night to start with. I had insomnia early on and insisted to sleep with the lights on because of the vivid night terrors I had as a younger child. However, I was getting older and braver, so I started sleeping with the lights off. It was at my Gido and Baba's farm house. My family goes often to visit, and that night we were staying. Being the only girl in the family, I got to have the main floor spare bedroom right by the kitchen, to myself.

As I crawled into bed, a deep but familiar feeling of fear and anxiety swelled inside. After a half hour of blankly staring at the old peeling walls and family portraits, I decided it was time to suck it up and turn out the lights. I fell asleep... However I was startled to wake. My eyes snapped open and I had to take a couple of deep breaths. I looked at the clock. 1:00am. Unsure and very unsettled I reasoned it was just my insomnia of being in an unfamiliar bed. I tried to go back to bed.

My slumber was again interrupted, but this time by a noise in the hall outside my door leading to the kitchen. Knowing that my Gido's room was across the hall from the one I was in, I tried to convince myself that the muffled shuffling noise down the hall was just him making his way to the kitchen for a glass of water. But I heard no taps, no water flow. And now the shuffling noise was growing in detail almost to the sound of a distant bonfire party. Very silent voices and almost chanting like noises, with drums. Then I saw through my slightly open door, a long figure pass by. I sat straight up then, not once taking my eyes from the door. Then came another, followed by another and another until 13 figures, passed by my door. They were shadows only, but long and all in what looked like the 'Reaper' cloaks to me, and some were carrying what I thought as torches like those tiki torches for around the fire.

I can only remember that at this point I was sort of in a coma trance. I could not speak, and even my thoughts I can not remember. As the line of shadows came to pass, the last and clearly the leader, stopped in my door way, turned and faced me head on. 'He' was tall, filled almost the whole door frame, and his face was very smoky, almost like an oil painting that is dripping. The eye sockets were very long ovals and they had only a light sick yellow glow. The rest of this face was just the black shadow that filled in the cloaked space. 'He' wore a long smoky, shadowy gray cloak. We held eye contact for a couple of solid seconds and then I remember hearing a deep voice in my head. It asked "Are you coming?". That was when the fear and all my emotions hit me and I was shaking and began to pray the Lords Prayer over and over again. The shadowed figure then reached out and pulled my door shut. KLICK... They were gone. I have not seen them since, it's been 12 years now.