The Mysterious Shadow People: What Are They?

Sorry to be bringing back an old topic, if I am, but I'm looking for information relating to a possible war coming up, most likely involving an orginization called the Guardians and definitely involving the shadow creatures.


Anybody know anything? I'd rather correspond via email... so... Send one to [email protected] if you do.



[edit on 1-12-2004 by maroe]

I totally agree with the idea that our minds maybe able to project these thoughts onto our vision, like say an illusion of sorts. I dont know where i stand on ghosts, i think just because there is lots of sightings does not necessirly always lead to the theory of 'it must be true therefore'.

Or it could be that the a portion of the mind is working in playback mode? I find it commonly occurs to me with sounds where I'm beng called by my wife or son, and I find I'm mistaken.

i sort of agree with that thought but people have said that they have been attacked by these shadow people myself i haven't but if they can do that i dont think they can be a looping entity of history.

Those pictures are very strange and really knda erie. As far as I know I beleive the shadow people are an Indian tribe in south america. But from the pictures I beleive what you have seen is a poltergiest or an accual demon. Something very bad once happened in that house for either of those to appear. You need to find out the address of the residence and see if something bad happened in the past.

hi! this is my very first post on this site, I was looking for other people's experiences with shadow like figures/people. I've had an experience with one (i think) when i was ~7.

One night, when i was already put to bed, my parents were still downstairs, so it must not have been super late. Anyways, i got up and went outside my room and looked to my parents room - down the hall to my right. and i saw something my height that was completely black, it was a thick black like velvet or something, but it was 3D and it was peeking out of my parents dark room. i clearly remember it's hand being on the outside of the door. it didn't have any visible features, but a really round head and sort of stocky arms and legs. we must have stood there looking at eachother for maybe 10 seconds, and i got a feeling that it was smiling at me (except it had no mouth, just felt sort of coy and playful).
i wasn't scared at all at the time, so i walked towards it. then it ran away into my parents room and it was completely dark in the room so i didn't see how it left.
after it ran away i guess fear kicked in and i started screaming, my mom even remembers having to check her room like 10 times to make sure nothing was there.
freaky thing is, a couple months later my younger brother told me he saw something in his room that matched my description, but i hadn't told him about what i saw. i havent' seen it since.

i did see soemthing else, like a foggy cloud float over the loft that goes over the living room, i saw it slowly drift away into the wall. but it didn't have eyes, and it felt friendly too.

i saw a lot of weird things when i was little that can probably be attributed to a very vivid imagination, but the little black person i saw is one of my strongest memories from childhood and was definately not something i just imagined.

I am glad I have never wittnessed one.


*Z*

Originally posted by TheBandit795
Well I experienced one once during a sleep paralysis. It could've been a hallucination and it could've been real. Anything science doesn't understand though, is labelled a hallucination.
But one thing is for sure!!! My *$#$@! bed dented in as if somebody was walking on it. I felt two footsteps, one to my right and then one to my left.

What you had wasn't a "shadow men", it was a night hag /psychic vampire attack.

These are my experiences. They were originally in BTS, but at the time, I didn't know the difference between BTS and ATS. I'll try to keep it limited to the useful or interesting bits.

They first visited me when I was only a few years old. I don�t remember, exactly, and my parents refuse to recall it ever happening. I was laying in bed, in the middle of the night, when I woke up to find a strange man inside my bedroom. I screamed for my mom and dad, and the man stepped forward, knocking over a small lamp that served as a dim nightlight at the base. Then the whole room went dark. Mom and Dad came sleepily into the room, opening my door, and turned on the room-light. There was no one in the room but us. Only a broken lamp gave any indication of the intruder. The Shadow Person had not exited through the window, unless he also managed to close the blinds behind him and re-lock the burglar bars. I had a habit of sneaking out of my room at night. and as such, my parents put a lock on the outside of my door. And before you ask, he wasn�t hiding anywhere in the room, either, or the closet, or under the bed. As to where he went, I don�t know. My parents said it was just a nightmare I had, and the lamp just fell over in my sleep. In fact, they said, it probably caused the nightmare in the first place. This could be, and for the longest time, I believed it, until it happened again...

The second time was back when I was in college school. Some friends and I were sharing a joint out in the woods near our apartments one weekend night, and it appeared in the trees off in the distance. There we were, having a few laughs, passing it around, when something rustles the branches in the trees. Everyone gets real quiet, because we thought it might be a cop. We�re staring at the trees, and there�s a figure there, just watching us. Everyone starts getting real nervous, and now we�re wondering if it�s actually a person there, or not because it�s not moving, and the shadows do funny things to the eyes sometimes. Then it just sort of melts away and the rustling comes closer. The grass was fairly tall, maybe waist-height, and something was moving towards us through it.
�Is that a dog?� One of my friends, Tara, asked, worried. No one was moving. If it was just a dog, that left us without the worry of it being arrested, only mauled. Someone else, Keane, suggested it might be a wolf. Then it stood up, and I nearly shat myself, because it was the same creature that visited me in my bedroom over a decade previously. I�m not sure which of us ran fastest, because none of us saw much of anything but a blur till we got back to Tara�s apartment.
Everyone was saying things like �Oh my god, what the hell was that?� Elizabeth, another friend, threw up. Everybody was pale as a sheet. Even Keane, mister I-want-to-be-H.R.-Geiger-himself was shaking he was scared so bad. We all were. Just to be sure we wouldn�t influence each other, we wrote down what we saw, and read it aloud. All of us saw the same thing: a figure, with smooth, black, slightly iridescent skin, with no facial features. Some of us saw a little more, but as I'm trying to take a fairly scientific approach to this, I'll avoid the metaphysics.

The third time occurred a couple of years later, when I had a room in a student co-op that was so small, there was barely even room to change my mind. Seriously, though, there was room for a mattress, a chest of drawers, and one chair, but at least one leg of the chair had to rest on the mattress. God, I hated that room. I hated the whole house. There was a flea problem, but because it was a hippy commune, they refused to use anything serious to get rid of the fleas. They would try things like herbs to try and get them out of the den. To a degree, it worked, except my room was right next to the den� Sorry, I�m rambling. Anyway, I awoke one night to find one by the door. I was exhausted, and scared. I tried to scream, but I couldn�t. My eyes were so heavy, and I was so tired. I started to fall back asleep. As I drifted towards unconsciousness my eyes fluttered open and I saw then that it was now on the foot of my bed, leaning over my legs, with one hand on the wall, and the other reaching towards me. Then my throat managed to wake up enough to let out what my friends described later as a primal yell, and I made the lights come on. I don't mean I flipped a switch, or did a "clap-on-clap-off-the-clapper" thing, I mean that suddenly every light in the house turned on, as I was howling. I was still in bed, the nearest electrical outlet was by the door to my glorified closet, but as I live and breath, every light in that house turned on to the brightest setting, and the creature disappeared. I managed to get the rest of my muscles working, and ran out of the room. Gabe, who had also been there that night in the woods, was staying in the same co-op, met me in the den. He was always kinda odd, fit in perfectly with the hippy crowd, but a very good friend. Kind of spacey, actually. I�ve always accepted the metaphysical with a sort of resigned attitude, but he dwells in it. Sometimes I wonder if it�s just so much BS, but he believes whereas I accept. You know what I mean? Anyway, Gabe comes with me to the room, as I�m telling him the story, and I�m pacing back and forth. �You say he had one hand on the wall?� Gabe said, as I took Murgatroyd, my pet python, out of her cage. �Yeah,� I said. �I don�t know if the other hand was reaching towards me or what.� Then he turns around and says �I think he was reaching for you.� And I ask �why do you say that?� and he says, airily, that there�s a bloody handprint on the wall. I take a look, and sure enough, it�s right there, where the creature's hand was. The fingers were too long. I don't recall there being a thumb. At one point I had a photo, but the ravages of the last decade worth of moving constantly lost it along the way.

The fourth incident was probably the most disturbing. I was dating a woman with three kids. I honestly don�t remember their names now, but at the time, I was like their father. Their old man had been very physically abusive to them and their mom, and the lot of them didn�t even realize it wasn�t their fault. Had he not driven off the road one night, he might be beating them to this day. I didn�t piece all this together till much later, but while I was dating her, I noticed they all pretty much took suggestions from me like they were orders.
Her kids were wild and violent, but also very obedient to me. Their mother, Starla, couldn�t manage to keep them under control without screaming, but all I had to do was open my mouth, and it was a completely different transformation. It was, slightly disconcerting as I was raised in a family of independent thinkers. We all respected our father, and obeyed both parents, so it was something I would naturally expect of a child to a parent. But I wasn�t his parent. I wasn�t even married to his mother. I was just the boyfriend she had. I�m sure she wanted it to be more, but as you�ll soon understand, it didn�t work out. One of her kids, though, was really weird. He drew lots of monsters, things like rabbits with bloody fangs and bat wings. He said they lived in the trees outside their apartment. I think his name was Adam.
Anyway, Adam rarely spoke, except to tell me about the monsters. He never told anyone else about them. I guess it�s because when he spoke, I listened, instead of assuring him that they were just in his imagination. I�d ask his questions about them. It�s a totally different story when you have your own monsters to deal with.
Well, the boys had a thing about sneaking in to try and watch Starla and I try to get intimate. It struck me as sick, and wrong, but she just took it with the good-natured disposition of someone resigned to kids being kids. One night when I was staying over, I heard one of the boys begin to scream. I was out the door in a heartbeat, and saw Adam curled into a little ball by the door to the boys� bedroom. He was pitching a fit, and pointing at me. I assumed right away he�d seen his mother and I, so I sat down to try and explain it to him, but he just kept crying.
�It�s okay,� I said. �I wasn�t hurting her. I�d never hurt any of you. When a man and a woman love� when they are grown up� ummm�� I was trying to think of a way to explain the birds and the bees to him when he cries out �I don�t care that you and momma were sexin�, he shouts, �just make the Black Men leave!� It felt like he�d struck me, and I realized he was pointing behind me, not at me. I turned around, expecting an attack from the burglar, and flicked the hall-light on. It was empty. I turned back towards Adam and asked �What black man? Where?� and he shakes his head. �Not a black man,� he said, between sniffles, �The Black Men. They started showing up when you did.
Memories came back, and I thought I was going to throw up. Starla asked if everything was okay, and I told her it was fine, that Adam was just having a nightmare, and I was going to make him some chocolate milk. Instead, I got him his crayons and some paper. �Draw them for me, please,� I asked. Adam was a remarkably talented artist at his age. Given another few years, and some formal training, he could have been a comic-book artist. When he finished drawing the Black Men, I did throw up, right there in the sink. I'd never before said a single word regarding the Shadow People, yet he'd drawn them with perfect accuracy.

The following is a list of what traits I've found to be common among them:

1. Affects Solid Objects - I've personally witnessed them affect solid objects (in one case a lamp, in another, tall grass). This implies a physical, as opposed to an incorporeal body.
   
   
2. Can Block Light - When seen against a dimly lit background, (such as a window, at night) they appear as a silhouette. Others have reported seeing them as only a literal shadow, on the wall, with no apparent source. Either way, this implies that light does not pass through them, nor does it bend around them.
   
   
3. Appears and Disappears Silently and Quickly - Infocomm is to be credited with "The Speed of Dark" in reference to grues. In that, grues can move as fast as darkness can retreat from the light. Whether or not the Shadow People are fast, or otherwise able to simply make themselves unseeable, this sort of behavior is typical of predators in nature.
   
   
4. Generally appear to be attached to a particular place or person - Though I didn't actually know this to be true, overall, of Shadow People sightings, it makes sense from Adam's words to me in my fourth encounter.
   
   
5. Usually solitary, rarely seen in groups - when they are seen in groups, it's generally large groups. One person related seeing a line of hundreds of them. From Adam's recount, it appeared that there were at least eight or so...
   
   
6. Most of the time, act as silent observers - Not much comment on this. In two of my encounters, the shadow person was advancing towards me. In the other two, they were merely observing.
   
   
7. Seem to vanish entirely in average or bright light. - They also, presumably, disappear in total darkness, but then again, that could just be because it's hard to see -anything- in total darkness. Regardless, once the light gets turned on, they're gone.
   
   
8. Unlimited, Geographically - My own encounters happened in Houston, Austin, and Seattle. Other people from around the world are beginning to share their stories. Unlike the leprechauns of Ireland, or other more localized folklore, these appear to happen worldwide.
   
   
9. Generally visible only to people who claim to be "sensative to (paranorma/preternatural/supernatural/etc) phenomena" - Whether or not they can only be seen by the "energy sensitive" among us, or if some people are just paying more attention to the shadows, I'm not sure. It could just be that someone who thinks they can cast a spell is more prone to believe their eyes than someone who thinks nothing "special" exists.
   
   
10. Never armed - I didn't really think about this till now, but I've never seen one armed, and I've never even heard of one being armed. In fact, I've never even heard of one carrying anything. In fact, most people (myself included) have never even seen them wear clothes.
    

Now, considering these 10 things, one can reasonably conclude a few things.

First, it would appear that the "skin" (or bodysuits) of Shadow People would is some sort of high-speed, very effective camouflage. This would allow for a physical body, would appear as a silhouette against an illuminated background, and would cast a shadow while not appearing to come from anywhere. It would also allow for a quick disappearance, and would explain why they are usually only visible in shadow, and even then, not very well (odd lighting can render good camo ineffective at close range due to the angle of the light and shadows). This would also explain why most people cannot see them, as camo is made to fool the casual observer, but will sometimes fail to conceal under close scrutiny (or lighting conditions).

I re-iterate, this is merely conjecture--an idea that can reasonably and logically tie the evidence together. So, if the cammo idea is assumed valid, then it would seem that the Shadow People we see are probably some sort of reconnaisance or scout unit. This would explain why they seem attracted to particular people or places, why they are usually solitary, and why they generally act as silent observers. It would also explain why they are hidden the majority of the time, and always opt to "disappear" before too much detail can be discerned.

So... I guess...they are a scout that wears extremely effective cammo?

That's the best guess I can infer, based off current knowledge. Hence my desire to know other's details in this matter.

What a load of Codswallop

in those stories you are either going by something a child sees in the dark (and the drawing of a shadow person is very vague..) , or they are drug related.

[edit on 31-12-2004 by waltzonthesun]

I understand your responses. I wouldn't believe me either, to tell the truth.

"Well I experienced one once during a sleep paralysis."


Not sure if anyone's mentioned this already but if you experienced this shadowman in a sleep paralysis then it wasn't real, it was as you rightly said an hallucination caused by the same part of your brain that shows you the visual part of your dreams.

I've also seen a "shadowman" in a bout of sleep paralysis (usually happens to me when i go to sleep on my back). I was still awake on a matress on the living floor at my mum's flat when i was younger, and I saw this shadowperson swiftly come through the door - then I woke up with a jolt and realised i wasn't truly awake, i was "in-between" but it seemed at the time i was still awake and had never drifted off - which i must have done.

Sleep paralysis is a very interesting phenomen worthy of some study, not too sure about these shadowpeople though...

I'm sure jung would have had a thing or two to say about the sighting of shadow people.




V

thelibra: I can see why you're this month's TWAT; congratulations.

I'm not going to comment on the pictures because they look too easily fakeable to me to be credible evidence, even if they're genuine. I've got a hypothesis (or possible suggestion for future research) that might be worth looking into...

I went to a Jesuit high school and like most Jesuit high schools there's a mandatory freshman year religion class; like you'd expect it was basically a quick introduction to Catholicism, including basic doctrine, etc...it doubled as most of a confirmation class for those either not yet confirmed or interested in conversion. At my school it was taught by a really old and scrappy guy -- he was about 60 or 70, but even that old looked like he could win a boxing match against just about anyone, and he had a no-nonsense kind of personality: a sense of humor, sure, but he acted as though he didn't have time to deal with anything but the truth, and he was always really plainspoken.

At the end of each week in that class we had a question-and-answer session in which he answered questions that had been dropped in the question box earlier in the week; I'm sure you can imagine that most of them were silly teenage boy questions, but the guy answered them all with total seriousness, and his answers had a strong combination of authoritativeness and sincerity that gave him an air of telling the unvarnished truth as he knew it.

Towards the end of the semester someone asked him about exorcisms and so forth, and his answer really surprised me; it's been years and years, but a summary would go like this:

i) exorcisms are still in demand (some low double digit number in NYC per year, for example)
ii) he'd personally performed a few
iii) in so doing he'd seen stuff that was absolutely terrifying, for lack of a better way to put it
iv) no, he didn't want to talk about the details

I've spent the time talking about the guy's character because if it had been pretty much anyone else but him who said that, I would've laughed out of the room, but coming from him I had to take it seriously. Like I said in iv), he didn't want to talk about it, and after I had no luck prying more information out of him I figured I'd respect his wishes, and stopped bothering him about it.

---

What's the point of this? Valhall's and xenophon's descriptions of shadow people basically being evil enough not to want to talk about it, and someone's (the thread's blurring a bit in my mind) comment that the shadow people seemed to want to find a home rang some bells...I have to wonder whether:

i) there's any connection between the phenomenom of (demonic) possession (which is pretty broadly shared across most cultures) and shadow people...maybe the shadow people are looking for someone to possess, and 'sensitives' of some sort can see them in the act
ii) there's any connection between the phenomenom of 'shadow people' and the legendary doppelgangers, evil copies of people who try to kill and take over the life of the original person...this is less direct a similarity, but if thelibra's sense that the shadow person is attached to a particular person is right there's a bit of a similarity here

and think that a good place to start researching might be any or all of the following:

i) older ethnographic literature, looking for descriptions of possessions and exorcisms
ii) if you can get them, older (800-900ad preferable to later) works on catholic exorcisms or, ideally, acquire permission to go through the Vatican archives looking for actual accounts of exorcisms, etc...

The Catholic angle is basically because the Catholic church has been around for two thousand years and keeps extensive records of pretty much everything it does; I don't know the first thing about how you'd go about getting permission to look through their exorcism literature, but I'd guess for the moment the Church's got in its possession the single largest collection of reasonably thorough historical records of possession and/or exorcism. The older 'adventures among the natives' kind of books from the 1800s or so are also probably a good source for looking into the experiences with possession and/or exorcism practices of other peoples...it's a time period when European scholars were very curious about the rest of the world, very credulous -- a double-edged sword for this sort of investigation, unfortunately -- and a time before many of the world's other cultures had disappeared or been damaged/absorbed/whathaveyou.

Since I can't claim direct experience with the shadow person stuff I can't say if this approach would go anywhere or not, but it really sounds like the experience of these two phenomena -- shadow people and possession/exorcism -- are rather similar, and if they're related phenomena then those of you with direct experience might be able to discover something useful in historical accounts.

Hope this helps.

Simple Truth I havn't had any experiences with shadow people
myself, but I can remember about a year ago coast to coast am, had something on them nearly every second week, and seemed to be the
in thing there for a while, if you wanted to know more about them,
maybe go to the C2C website and do a search for them.

Sorry just havn't had time tonight to go through all the posts, so I
apologize if anyone else has mentioned it.

Originally posted by thelibra
I understand your responses. I wouldn't believe me either, to tell the truth.

Im usually not an easy one to scare, but you scared the crap out of me with that story. And now Im going to bed.. Yikes!

Ok lets all get this straight theses shadow people are not ghosts or wisp of smoke and those photos are not what they look like in anyway....
The shadow men are those tall dark figures that you see out of the corner of your eye in the corner of the room or on a street corner .....
Bringing up the topic to shadow people brings up the idea of the sprit world.....
There are only a few creatures in folklore that could be them and the only one that could make that much sense is that they are a type of demon....

I've seen them. What I've seen are the type you see out of the corner of your eye. It's always when I'm alone and on my computer. I'll just be sitting here and notice a dark moving thing out of the corner of my eye. When I turn to see what it is, it's gone.

I have no idea what they could be and all theories I've heard are just as good as the next.

I am scared to go to bed or turn off the lights let alone look away from my computer.

Why does this topic frighten me? I've never had any experiences but the thought alone makes me not want to live if I have to experience one of these.

I usually need "solid proof" (personally) but this seems so different. I don't get it.

Any ideas anyone??

It isn't smoke. Smoke gets that dark when it is real thick. Other than that it is simply grey colored. I don't think they are shadow people. Dark spirits or spirits that haven't been around people. She did a smart thing with her computer camera. Beats baseless claims.

Ive had experiences like some of yours before, here is a link because I dont feel like typing it up again (I am new to forums, forgive me for mistakes)



www.abovetopsecret.com...'