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.