From: anonymous
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2022 9:31 PM
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
Subject: Shadow people/hat man encounter

Hello! I was watching a video on YouTube about shadow people and thought that you might be interested in posting my experiences on your website. I've compiled them in this word document.

Thanks!

Okay, so I've been having experiences with "shadow people for a large portion of my life, and for a while I kind of dismissed them as hallucinations at first, I'm not so sure they are anymore. A couple of years back, 2019 to be exact, I had an intense episode involving a shadow person (more on that later), and decided to look it up, and I discovered that there are countless stories of people having similar encounters, some dating back hundreds of years. It was at this point that I started to think to myself that maybe these aren't just simple night terrors I had been having and maybe there's something more to them…

Throughout my life, I've moved around a lot. I don't think I've lived anywhere longer than seven or eight years at the most. It's not because of my parent's work, or because one of them was in the military but because my family has been fluctuating between lower middle class and poverty for all my life. For that reason, we've been constantly upgrading and downgrading our living conditions. This has, however, allowed me to get a good timeline for my nearly life-long encounters with "shadow people."

I've had far too many encounters with them for each and every story, but every encounter is very similar. I'd wake up some time in the night and see what I can only describe as black, humanoid figures standing around me in my bedroom. They all looked very similar, other than they'd be various sizes, and could all be described as if someone grabbed some department store mannequins, spray painted them a deep dark black, and placed them in my room as a prank.

The earliest memory I have is seeing them one night when I was sleeping in my grandparents' house, shortly after I had broken my nose in a car crash. I just remember waking up in the middle of the night, unable to move, and seeing four dark shadowy figures standing at the foot of the bed. This was the time my parents moved out of their second house and in with my grandparents for a short time, which means I was around three years old and thus places this memory at around 1993.

Most encounters with these are just like the one above. I'd wake up, either in the middle of the night or just as I'm about to drift off to sleep, and I'd find myself being fully paralyzed with anywhere from one to eight of these shadowy figures all standing in my line of sight. And as soon as I'd be able to move and I'd raise up to get a better look at these figures, they'd vanish. For the longest time, I'd never go a single week without having this happen at least once, and often it would happen either when there was a lot of noise happening that night, or if I happened to sleep on the couch. I still have episodes to this day, but they're not as frequent as they used to be, and as of the time of this writing, I haven't had a shadow person encounter of any kind since January 2022. And while I was terrified of these things at first, it became such a frequent thing for me that, during most encounters, I would simply go back to sleep. However, there were several encounters that still scare me to this day.

While most of my shadow person encounters were just as benign as in the paragraph above, again from the time my parents and I were living in the apartments (from mid-1993 to late 1996) up until 2019, I would occasionally have a very intense encounter with this unique shadow entity.

Just like with the others, I would wake up, completely frozen, but unlike with normal sleep paralysis, I would find myself unable to breathe, blink, or even move my eyes; it was a more complete and total paralysis than any of the other encounters, and it felt as if I had died. And while with the others, I would feel some amount of fear, most of that was from the fact that I wasn't able to move, and eventually this went away as I got used to it. With this one, I would be consumed by complete and utter terror. I honestly don't think anything in my entire life scared me as badly as these particular encounters with this singular entity. And unlike the other shadow people, he had a distinct shape. He was always around seven, maybe eight feet tall with broad shoulders and wearing a large overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat. The best way I could compare him to is the black crime watch caricatures on neighborhood watch signs, or for a more modern comparison, this "hat man" entity that has taken the internet by storm.

I very vividly remember seeing him just before we moved from those apartments to the brownish-grey two-story house, which puts the first encounter at around 1996. I remember jolting myself awake, like some people do when they dream about falling and doing a "hypnic jerk", when, I found myself completely paralyzed. I've almost always slept on my side, so I was facing my open doorway when I woke up. The hallway was off-center, so I had a clear view to the apartment front door, and right in the corner of the wall, between the front door and the window, was this entity, very tall and pitch dark, darker than the room he was standing in. It didn't have a face, but I still felt like it was staring me, like when someone stares at you with intent to hurt you. Then, the figure rotated, and he sort of floated out of my field of vision, and once he was out of sight, I could move again. I remember waking up and screaming, and then I got in trouble because I woke our neighbors up and they were very upset.

All the encounters I've ever had are very similar to this one. I'd wake up, be unable to move or even breathe or move my eyes, and this shadow man in a huge coat and hat would be standing dead-center of my field of vision, and I'd be overwhelmed with the worst sense of dread. I'd stare at him for maybe a second or two and he'd slowly turn and levitate out of my field of vision, and then it was like I'd be "freed" from my paralysis. I didn't ever scream anymore, though. I got in enough trouble the first time, and everyone else I've ever told would chastise me for "communing with demons" or some bullshit because I live in the Bible Belt, so up until my final year of encounters with this particular entity, I've never told anyone else.

So, fast-forward to 2019. Around this time, my encounters with this particular entity had taken a sharp increase to the point that I saw him nightly with my encounters all going just as I described above. By now, I had gotten really curious about dreams and their meaning and thinking that these "encounters" were some sort of nightmare. I started to look up information about this entity and disturbed to find that I wasn't the only one seeing him. I started journaling my dreams nightly. Going back and counting, in the year 2019 alone, I had 258 encounters with this "hat man", the majority of these encounters taking place in May of that year. This brings me to the last, and what I consider to be the most intense, of all of my hat man encounters.

At this point in my life, I had moved out of the place I was living at and had been renting a room from my grandparents since 2017.

August 12, 2019. That particular night, I had been doing some heavy lifting at work and pulled my back out so I took some pain medicine, laid on my back and went to bed early. At some point before 3:30 AM (that's the time I logged this entry into my dream journal, which at this point had become my hat man journal), I woke up with a hypnic jerk. And as usual, I was completely immobile and unable to breathe, only this time, I was lying on my back and this hat man entity stood beside my bed and leaned over me like some person checking if I was awake or not. This is the closest I've ever been to the hat man and I was able to get a good look at him. He looked like someone wearing a jet-black trench coat and hat, only, he had no face. His face was just a black void with no real discernible features: no nose, no eyes, no ears, or mouth. Kinda like someone wearing a skin-tight black morph suit. I remember feeling this strange pressure on my chest like someone had set a pile of clothes or a box on top of me. Then, as with all the other encounters, he straightened his back up, turned, and levitated out of my field of vision.

This time, I actually believed that there was some kind of intruder that had broken into the house wearing some kind of disguise but when the police got there, they couldn't find any way anyone of that size could've gotten in, and my grandparents didn't see anyone come in. And they were awake at that time and there was no way anyone could've gotten into or out of my room without them seeing anyone.

The weirdest part of that encounter is that, as of this writing, it was the very last time I have seen this hat man entity. Also, up until that point, my sleep paralysis and night terror episodes slowly began to decline. And I can't contribute this to less stress, as the last three years have been very tumultuous for me even more-so than when these encounters had begun to escalate. It's also only been the past couple of years that I've started to be more open about this experience and have been encouraged by reading so many stories of others who have had encounters with these shadow people and this hat man, which is exactly why I am sharing this piece with you today.

I still find myself doing some light research when I have some down-time, and I really hope one day, I and everyone else who has had these encounters, will get some kind of explanation of what these entities are, what they want and whether or not they mean us harm. I'm still not 100% certain that the regular shadow entities aren't just hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis but whatever this hat man entity is, I'm fairly certain that he, or it, is very real. I still lose just a little bit of sleep at night because, while part of me is curious to find out what he is, another part of me is very much terrified of seeing him again.