Shadow People: Terrifying, Yet Harmless Darting Figures?

You are lying in bed, comfortable and exhausted from a long day. Click ...you reach over and turn out the lamp on your nightstand. The nightlight in the bathroom is shining dimly into the doorway of your bedroom, you begin to drift off to sleep...then you see it. A dark, pitch black shadow has flown into your room from the hallway...seemingly floating above the foot of your bed...staring down at you. You want to move and scream, but you can't. This frightening image has left you speechless, waiting for death to overcome your physical being...waiting for the life to be sucked from your body...

But nothing happens. The shadow person made a looming and frightening appearance for less than a minute and then disappeared...into thin air! Did you see red eyes glaring at you from within the mass of this dark creature? Michelle Belanger, the author of Haunting Experiences: Encounters with the Otherworldy, describes these occurrences as "Shadow People" hauntings. The odd thing about these shadow people is that they seem so evil when they appear, but all they seem to do is to observe...examine us.

Shadow people are said to usually appear in a person's peripheral vision, darting away upon being seen; however, there are rare circumstances when people have come face to face with the shadow people. They are also known as shadow men and shadow folk. Their main motive thus far recorded in history has been to simply watch...watch us...watch how we act or how we function. No one is too sure just yet, though there are theories that we will discuss in this hub.

Michelle Belanger's book tells of a few of her psychic friends' experiences in which they were visited by the shadow people, and these observers did not hide in the corners of her friends' peripheral vision...but rather watched her friends out in the open! One thing I find particularly interesting about shadow people is that many people have reported seeing them with red or yellow eyes and always in the wee hours of the morning. Three AM seems to be a common pattern of time in which eye-sightings of shadow people frequently occur. These shadow beings have been known to haunt a particular person as opposed to a specific house or building, and even more intriguing is the fact that many of these "hauntings" last for a short period of time and then cease to recur.

Usually these people of the shadows have the silhouette of a person; however, on other occasions they have appeared as dark blobs or mists...ominously filling an otherwise somewhat-lit room or place. Some of the shadow people, when in human silhouette form, have been seen wearing a fedora hat (like the shadow man to the right) or even a hooded cloak, of sorts. The belief and recorded accounts of shadow people are not limited to one region or country...they seem to make their presence known all across the world. There are whole forums online dedicated to give witnesses the ability to share their supernatural experiences with others who have gone through the same terror.

Though these beings have been described by many paranormal investigators and witnesses as "evil", there has really been no direct contact of a shadow person with a human being, out of malice or anger. In fact, most of the time these beings do not physically touch their "victims" at all...if you could even call them "victims". I prefer to use the term "witnesses" since no harm has come to the shadow peoples' spotters.

I found one account of a young man who claims to have spoken to the shadow man at the top of his stairs, simply asking the shadowy figure what it wanted with him. The shadow figure replied that he wouldn't hurt him and that he just wanted to "watch." Michelle Belanger's account with the shadow people seem to back up this man's experience with the fact that these beings seem to be merely observing us in our daily lives...usually when we are not paying attention, during sleep or being occupied with the TV or computer.

But what are the shadow people and why do they want to "observe" us?

Many theories circulate the Internet and paranormal world as to what shadow people actually are. Possibly the most logical and believable explanation is simply that they are a figment of our over-active and hyper-sensitive imaginations. Psychologists usually tie this paranormal experience into this category of logic...which would typically make the most sense. Pareidolia is a term that could be referenced when speaking of the sightings of shadow people. This is a term that describes the experience of seeing something that is not actually there. A typical example is seeing a face in the clouds, or a shadowy figure in the corner of one's vision.

Hypnogajah is another commonly-spoken theory of these supernatural sightings. This is the waking-dreaming state in which one is between wake and sleep, literally. Being that I am a frequent hypnogajah dreamer, I know how real these dreams can feel. It's sort of like when you are just falling asleep and you have a quick little dream that you are walking in a parking lot...and then your leg falls into a pothole. In reality, your leg jerks and you wake up...realizing that that very real experience was merely a dream. This is hypnogajah. In my hub, Personal Hauntings: The Stalker Spirit and Territorial Ghost in Florida (link below), I describe being "stalked" by a spirit...feeling psychically attacked for a period of about a month. At the time that I wrote this hub, I had never heard of shadow people...nor had I heard that these beings seem to appear to people while in a state of hypnogajah. My feelings of being "stalked" or "watched" and paralyzed upon waking seem to add up to the experiences that many others have had of these shadow people in a state of dreaming. Do I believe that shadow people are dreams? I don't know.

Other blase and predictable theories say that the shadow men are ghosts or demons. My problem with that theory is that these beings seem to be totally different in nature when compared to ghosts or even demons. Though many people who have seen shadow people claim that they are "evil", I think that this ignorance can be chalked up to the fact that what people don't understand they feel is bad. As far as I've read and seen, these beings are not innately malicious and really do seem to just "observe" us in our daily actions...usually while we are sleeping or during times when we wouldn't notice them...like watching TV or writing on the computer.

A more intriguing theory is shadow people are actually travelers from another dimension or a parallel universe and that they are here to gain knowledge and information about us and our dimension. This is an interesting theory to be further explored in the future by paranormal investigators and quantum physics.

So we've talked of different theories on the origins of these eerie dark figures...but that doesn't answer the question or provide us with a resolution...or peace of mind to this dark mystery. Perhaps we'll never find out what the shadow people are or even if they exist in reality. Perhaps we will never make contact with these shadowy beings...or maybe one of us will this very night!