The Shadow Man

Even though people have encountered shadow people for centuries, it is only recently that it has become quite a mainstream paranormal topic.

The first memory I have of encountering shadow people was when I was 4 years old, I had no idea what they were but they didn’t frighten me. They’d always appear at around twilight time in a particular corner of our garden, one would appear for a split second and then vanish and then a few minutes later another would appear for a split second and it’d go on like that for a while. I was so accustomed to seeing them that I didn’t really think they were anything out of the ordinary. Eventually I mentioned it to my dad, he said he’d seen them too when he was young and that eventually I’d stop seeing them.

I stopped seeing the shadow people in our garden at around 6 years old. The cessation of my experiences with shadow people ended at around the same time that I began to question reality more. I think that at that age, children begin to develop an ability for critical thinking and as the mind changes and evolves, the ability to see otherworldly beings seems to end.

Not all paranormal experiences end during childhood. Many adults see shadow people but there seems to be a difference in how they’re perceived. Adults who have seen shadow people tend to have a more negative view of them. They often say that they could sense evil. It’s difficult to decide whether there are different types of shadow people, maybe we’ve been wrong to group all paranormal things that resemble a shadow as ‘shadow people’ some of them could be aliens, some could be time travelling beings and others could be something much more demonic. It is the latter category of shadow people that I want to talk about.

One warm summer evening in 2009, I got a call from a singer who was starting up a band, he’d heard I was a guitarist looking for a band and wanted me to come round for a jam. I turned up to his house the next day with my guitar, met the other band members and had a fun afternoon of playing music.

It all seemed well and good and although I was apprehensive about making a good first impression, there was something else that bothered me. His house was creepy! we were practicing in his dining room but when I went to use the upstairs bathroom, I felt uneasy, I didn’t like being alone in that house. At the time I didn’t think too much into it because I was more concerned about joining the band and music, but after being invited into the band, I began to notice more about that house.

It was probably a few months later when I actually saw something. I was in the kitchen making myself a cup of tea, the kitchen door was wide open and it led to the hallway which had the stairs and a door to the living room in it. In the corner of my eye, I saw a tall black thing walk quickly from the bottom of the stairs through to the living room. I could tell it wasn’t human, but regardless of this I checked the living room and there was no one there.

I saw the black thing in the corner of my eye a few times but I didn’t mention it to anyone as I thought I’d be laughed at. I’d seen things in the corner of my eye before and I think most people have. Most of the time it’s just your imagination, but this is different. You don’t only see it, you feel it.

When I started dating the singer, I told him about what I’d been seeing in his house. He said that his mother is a strict Christian who insists the house is blessed and can’t be haunted. I should mention here that it is his mother’s house but I didn’t really speak to her at first, it took a while to get to know here.

One day I was sat in the conservatory chatting to the rhythm guitarist we had at the time, he was facing the door which led to the kitchen. He was in the middle of talking when he suddenly stopped mid sentence, his face went pale. I asked what was wrong and he said he’d just seen a ghost. I asked him what it looked like and he described it as a tall black shadow. I mentioned that I’d seen it too but when the singer (now my boyfriend) came back from the shop he told us to stop being stupid and that if his mum heard us talking about it, she’d chuck us out.

His mother didn’t like anyone to discuss ghosts in her house and she wouldn’t even entertain the idea of her house being haunted, her son (my boyfriend) was very much the same in the early years.

I remember one night when it was just myself and my boyfriend in the house recording music in the dining room, I went to the kitchen to get a beer when I noticed a rattling sound. I looked around the kitchen and saw a bead necklace hanging from a door handle swinging from side to side. I assumed it must have been knocked somehow but as I watched it, it became more erratic and started swinging faster and became almost aggressive. I shouted for my boyfriend to come and look at it, as soon as he walked in and saw the swinging necklace, he grabbed it and flung it in a drawer and refused to discuss it. He has changed so much over the years, but I believe he didn’t see the shadow man like everyone else did because he refused to acknowledge things like that.

Years later, the singer and I began living together elsewhere but we still visited his mother in the house. Our bass player at the time had also moved into the house because he had nowhere to live. This is where the story gets weirder. I had told the bass player about the shadow man in the house so at the time I wasn’t sure if the events which happened next occurred because I’d filled him with paranoia, but the shadow man definitely seemed to get stronger as soon as he moved in.

Our bass player who was once a loud and energetic character became more and more withdrawn the longer he lived there. He confided in me one day that he’d heard someone shout ‘Fuck you’ loudly in his ear when walking down the stairs on numerous occasions and that he felt the shadow man was watching his every move. Even though I had seen the shadow man with my own eyes, I put his experiences down to his use of cannabis.

Regardless of my scepticism I remember we decided to ask the tarot for guidance, it didn’t really help that we kept drawing ‘the devil’ card in every reading. I took this as a sign that there was something a bit odd going on. Not long after he’d hit rock bottom, he left the house and the band. He had a lot going on in his head, but looking back now, I can’t help but think that the shadow man fed off his negativity and that if he remained in its presence much longer, it would have attached itself to him.

After some hard times recently, my boyfriend and I ended up having to move in with his mother, so as I write this I am in the domain of the shadow man. Nothing has changed, there is an oppressive atmosphere and I have seen the shadow man a few times but it’s always such a brief sighting that it’s hard to even describe it. My boyfriend has now also seen it.

The layout of the house has changed a little over the years. There’s a door that goes into the kitchen from the dining room and this door has some frosted glass that allows you to see into the kitchen. Whilst my boyfriend was recording some guitar for a song in his makeshift recording studio in the dining room, he saw what he thought was me walking into the kitchen. He saw it a few times in the corner of his eye, so he became quite distressed when he found that I was still in bed with a migraine and had not left the room. His mother was out so the only explanation was the shadow man.

Finally I have a kind of conclusion, or at least an explanation. One night I was sat downstairs talking with his mother about her journey to becoming a Christian and she told me something that she’d never mentioned before, it was something that could finally explain everything that had been going on.

I already knew that she used to dabble in the Occult as a teenager and that doing all of that had encouraged her to turn to God later in life. What she’d never mentioned before is that whist messing around performing rituals and séances, she had unwittingly conjured something evil into her life. She described it as a tall dark thing that would come into her bedroom at night and try to strangle her. She said that it had once tried to drown her in the bath. It wasn’t until she became a Christian that she stopped seeing it.

This could explain the origin of the shadow man but the unsettling thing is that although she claims to not see it anymore, everyone around her has. Believe it or not, I have tried to keep this post brief, but there have been a lot of other people who have encountered the shadow man in her house.

Maybe her belief in God has protected her from the shadow man but it has entered our reality and can’t leave. It could be looking for a new person to attach to, I believe it was trying to attach itself to our old bass player. I only hope that I am strong enough and positive enough to keep the shadow man from attaching itself to me.