Here’s one person’s firsthand account of their encounter with a Shadow Man. I’ve known this person for ages, and they’re about as down-to-earth as they come. They’re not the type to see monsters under the bed or ghosts in the closet. So, when they told me about their Shadow Person experience, it really caught my attention:
“From around age 10 until my early teens, I had some seriously creepy run-ins with what I now realize was a Shadow Man. These spooky encounters always happened at night when I’d wake up from sleep with the whole house totally silent, probably in those wee hours after midnight. It went down like this maybe 20 times or more over those years.
“Each time, I’d wake up with this really uneasy feeling like someone or something was just standing at the end of my bed. At first, I’d force my eyes open, despite being scared, only to be met with the sight of this towering, hooded shadowy figure looming over me. That image is still so vivid in my mind; I can pretty much see it now.
“This thing never said a word, never touched me, but I was overwhelmed with this intense dread and fear for my life. The vibe in the room would just change, like all sound was being sucked out of it, but I could sense its presence, its breath filling up the space. I wasn’t dreaming; I could hear all the normal nighttime sounds – bugs chirping in summer, cars passing by, trains, rain if it was storming. But cutting through all that was this silent, ominous presence that felt so menacing and threatening.
“After those first few times, I stopped opening my eyes, convinced that if I did, I would literally die. I’m not kidding, I truly believed that – the sheer terror I felt was no joke, this was no friendly visitor. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, the shadowy figure was burned into my mind. Often I’d drift back to sleep only to wake up again and sense it was back, that whole cycle of terror happening over and over in one night. Sometimes these encounters happened a lot, other times weeks would go by without anything, but it kept going until I was around 15, only popping up here and there after that, mostly stopping by high school.
“Before therapy, I looked into whether these “visitations” could have been my mind manifesting some unresolved trauma from my past. But my clear memories didn’t line up with that – I hadn’t repressed anything, so there was no need for a Shadow Man to confront it, you know?
“As I got older through my 20s to 40s, I tried to rationalize it all as just being in my head, some psychological thing, yet those vivid memories stuck around, feeling so hauntingly real. It wasn’t until I found other people’s accounts of similar experiences that I revisited my own with a more open mind to other explanations besides the psychological ones.
“Just thinking about it still gives me the chills. It was always the same entity, not multiple apparitions, and the thought of that thing is just as unsettling now as it was back then.”
If you would like to read more first-hand encounters with shadow people, you may want to check out the Shadow People Archives at shadowpeople.org.
