From: name and email withheld by request
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
Sent: Thurs, April 16, 2009 2:23:58 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: My Shadow People Experience
I cannot remember exactly when I first began seeing shadow people, but I was very young. Probably around the first or second grade, maybe younger. I've only seen them at night and only at my parents' house in Massachusetts.
My bedroom in my parents house was one of two rooms in the upstairs part of the house. The two rooms were separated by a short landing at the top of the stairs and was basically a converted attic. I shared the room with my middle brother, with both of our beds being at the far end of the room on opposite walls. From our vantage point, we could see directly across the landing and into my youngest brother's bedroom across the way. My mother always kept our room doors open, so we could always see in there. She would turn the light off in the room at the bottom of the stairs and she would shut the shades on the windows in my room and the other bedroom.
I can remember staring into a dark corner in the 'other room' of my younger brother and seeing what looked like a dark outline of a person that was darker than the darkness around it. It had what looked to be faint red eyes. I remember straining my eyes and squinting to see if it was really there. It would just stand there and stare at me. The distance was probably about 15-20 feet. This happened quite frequently. Sometimes there would be more than one. Sometimes there would be a few tall ones and a short little guy in front of them. Sometimes there would be a "hat man" standing on the opposite side of the dresser at the end of my bed, just staring at me. All of them blacker than the darkness around them and all of them having red eyes. They would sometimes move closer to the door very quickly. I would tell myself that it was just my eyes playing tricks with my mind.
One night, when I was in the 6th grade, my friend slept over and we dragged a mattress into the middle of my room between my bed and my brother's. I noticed my friend was staring off into the other room and I asked him what he was looking at. He described exactly what I had been seeing for years. Then my brother, who was 3 years younger than me, said he had been seeing those things for years. I had never mentioned them to either my brother or my friend. At this point, I was half relieved that someone else could see them and I wasn't crazy, and half scared out of my mind that these things were really there.
It wasn't long after that that I found myself staring at them in the other room, my brother already asleep, and noticed for the first time that one of them had slowly crept across into the light that was coming in through the crack between the shade and the window frame. When it blocked the light, I yelled for my mother and closed my eyes until she turned on the light and ran up the stairs. Things got a little worse after that. They began moving into my room, especially the small one. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night and they'd be standing next to my bed or crouching on top of the dresser at the foot of my bed. My mother never did believe what my brother and I would tell her about these things we saw.
Eventually, I stopped seeing them as often and I ended up moving into my youngest brother's room, the room that I used to see them in. I was the oldest, so I got my own room and my two younger brothers had to share my old room. Rarely, I would see one staring at me from the end of my bed. I would be frozen in fear until I passed out. The frequency of the sightings became less and less, until the summer after I graduated from high school. I had gone down to the kitchen to get some water and when I came back up the stairs, I glanced into my brothers' room and saw a full grown shadow man standing in the middle of the room and staring right at me about 5 feet away. I kept going into my room and froze there, realizing what I had just saw. I looked back to see if it was really there and it was. I laid down in my bed frozen, and listened as he kept walking back and forth between my brother's room and my door way, then back again. I could actually hear the floor boards creaking.
After about an hour of this, I worked up the courage to just bolt downstairs with my pillow when I heard him move deep into my brothers' room. I didn't even look in there as I ran down the stairs. I went straight to the bathroom, flipped on the light, locked the door and slept in the tub. My mother found me there the next morning. When I told her the story, my youngest brother, who had never mentioned them before, said he was scared all night because he saw and heard it too. My middle brother had slept through the whole thing.
That was the last I saw of shadow people until I went home for a visit and stayed in my old room a couple of years ago. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the little guy standing there in the corner, just staring at me. That was the last time I saw one. To be honest, I didn't even know they had a name or that other people saw them. I accidentally came across a wikipedia entry for Shadow People a few days ago, and when I read the description the hairs on my arms stood up. Then I found your site. Reading some of the stories has really brought back some scary memories for me.
You may share my story but please keep my contact information confidential.
Thank You,
Paul
