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Why I Think Shadow People are Real
Part I — Classic Literature

For the first installment, I point out this excerpt from Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick."

This occurs early in the novel. The story’s narrator, Ishmael, likens the sensation of waking up with Queequeg’s arm around him to a mysterious event from his childhood:


For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.

When I first read Moby-Dick, I was already familiar with websites dedicated to paranormal encounters and Coast-to-Coast AM. Melville’s description includes many of the common details found in children’s encounters with shadow people: the child waking up in the night and perceiving a figure near them, the figure holding the child’s hand, and the child feeling too afraid to move.

Melville writes about this mysterious event with a direct simplicity. Much of his writing is based on his own experiences, so I assume this uncommon event is something that happened to him. As an adult, he could have dismissed this memory with a mundane explanation — it could have been a dream or one of his parents visiting him. But he doesn’t. He experienced something that was real to him and he can’t explain it.

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Popol Vuh’s soundtrack has been a favorite of mine for almost 30 years. i never tire of it. so beautiful.

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Excellent copy of the original Nosferatu, the first, and my favorite, Dracula adaptation. 100 years old this past March, it’s still an outstanding film. This is the same restored print as the Kino edition, but the intertitles are in the original German. It does have English subtitles, though.

Joe Bob says check it out. (No really. I was just watching this on The Last Drive-In.)

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Why I Think Shadow People are Real
Part II — Celebrity Endorsements

Despite his corny stage name and generally clean-cut appearance, Orson Bean led an interesting and sometimes experimental life. This left him many stories to tell, and he loved telling stories about himself. Anyone who has seen “Tattletales” is aware of this.

I’m going to paraphrase a story he told on a talk show in the mid-90s, during the Dr. Quinn phase of his career. I don’t remember who’s talk show it was — there were so many of them at the time.

It’s a serious story, but he told it in a humorous manner. He described it as a ghost story, but no, what he saw was a shadow person. I have searched for a clip of this story on YouTube, but cannot find it.

The story comes from Bean’s time living in Australia with his then-wife Carolyn Maxwell. They had just bought a house, and had been living in it for about two weeks.

One night, he and his wife were getting ready for bed. She was in the bathroom, he was lying on the bed absentmindedly watching television. While lying there he became aware of a dark transparent figure walking across the room. It went out the bedroom door and continued down the hall.

At that moment his wife came out of the bathroom and saw on the bed, staring out the door with a look of disbelief on his face. She asked, “have you seen it, too?”

Apparently she had seen this figure walking through the house a few times in the past two weeks, but dismissed it as just her imagination.

He concluded the story by saying they packed their bags that night, left the house and never went back.

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I saw this some years ago at a “New Sounds Live” event. As part of John Schaefer’s introduction, describing Murnau and the film, he said:

It’s hard sometimes to know exactly what to make of this movie, but it is undeniably creepy. But what do you expect from a movie about real estate.

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If you can, get a copy of “Gumbo Ya-Ya”; there are dark-men stories (and others, it’s a great book) of Lousiana.

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The Damned (LĂ -bas) by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Translation by Terry Hale

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Love your avatar, btw.

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Thanks.

Tis Fantomas, The Elegant Menace:

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He reminds me of DC’s The Phantom Stranger.

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I loved it.

You didn’t even mention the middle of film music video:

A true work of art:
https://tubitv.com/movies/585500?utm_source=justwatch-feed&tracking=justwatch-feed

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Oh that was music?

It’s the work of the Devil. Leave it alone!

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Why I Think Shadow People are Real
Part III — Second-Hand Knowledge

As I’ve said before, I’ve never seen a shadow person and I don’t ever want to, but I know someone who did.

First, let me explain that there is a subset of shadow person sighting that involve “the Hat Man.” This is a shadow person who is perceived to be wearing a hat. Why this is, I can only speculate. Perhaps there are only two shadow working people world-wide, and one of them likes to wear a hat.

For a time in the mid-2000s I was friends with a woman, or perhaps I was dating her. That’s a story for another time. She and I had some things in common. For example, she lived for a while in Minneapolis to study art as had I. She was then working at Macy’s in New York, and that’s where we met.

Another thing was we had in common was a connection to the small town of Ashland, Wisconsin. She had grown up there in the 80s, as had my father 40 years earlier. It was interesting, I told her, to hear her reference some of the same locations my father did.

She was always an enthusiastic talker, and one evening on Montague Street she told me about her friends’ usual hangout during her high school years. Outside of town there was a disused railroad track in a cut where they would meet after school. There they would do whatever stuff bored teenagers do in small town America.

Then she went on.

“And, you know, there was this weirdest thing we would always see down there. There was this dark figure — you couldn’t see any details, just dark — and it would climb to the top of one of those towers, you know, they have beside the tracks. And it would try to jump across to the other side. We would always run towards it to try to get to it, to see it up close, but when we got there it was always gone.”

I was dumbfounded. Her story sounded very similar to other stories of shadow people witnessed by adults: A dark figure in a natural setting. A repetitive task out in the open. Disappearing when people try to get a closer look.

Before I could say anything she continued.

“And it was always wearing this hat. You know, one of those old-timey hats, with the brim on it.”

At this point I broke in. “You saw the hat man!” She had no idea what I was talking about. I explained the shadow person phenomenon to her. She had never heard of them before.

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I’ll have to get out my copy of “Haunted Heartland” again. I’ve not read it in a long time. It covers IL, IN, IA, KS, MI, MN, MO, NE, OH, and WI. I recommend it.

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I saw this phenomena maybe a half dozen times in my life. It’s basically an out-of-body-like experience when you get kind of stuck between sleep and waking for a short bit and you see a shadow version of a generic person superimposed on what your open eyes are looking at. But it’s dim and scary and makes you come to in a panic a few seconds after opening your eyes and seeing it. Sort of a sleep-paralysis ass-backward sleepwalking thing.

Sorry, not really scary and maybe not what you’re talking about.

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