The Mysterious Shadow People

Shadow people are a very common visual hallucination for humans to have. They usually appear as a result of sleep deprivation, psychosis (especially stimulant psychosis), delirium, psychoactive substances, or sleep paralysis. During this experience, the subject perceives a patch of shadow in their peripheral vision or focused visual field to be a living, autonomous figure. This figure can be either humanoid or animal-like in appearance. A number of religions, legends, and belief systems describe shadowy spiritual beings or supernatural entities such as shades of the underworld, and various shadowy creatures have long been a staple of folklore and ghost stories.

Shadow people may converse with the person experiencing them or they may converse amongst each other - sometimes talking about the person going through the experience.

A very common example is like this from a woman named Tammy from North Dakota: 

‘About four years ago, I was renting the top half of an older house in North Dakota. I was in a deep sleep when I woke up screaming bloody murder. Over me, was a shadow person, hovering, hanging onto my wrist, trying to pull me out of my bed toward the ceiling. My husband had stayed up late and ran into the room scared by the screaming. What he saw was me, hysterical sitting halfway up in bed, with my left arm in the air like someone was pulling me. While he did not see a shadow person, he knew it wasn’t just a bad dream as I’ve never woke up screaming hysterically. I did not see a face, just a dark shape of what appeared to be a man. I felt sick to my stomach and a deep feeling of terror.

The next day, after a sleepless night, I found my gold medallion necklace in the bed, one side had Jesus and the other side was the Virgin Mary. What was odd was the clasp (which was tiny and hard to get on or off) was still closed and the chain was too short to pull over my head in my sleep. I don’t ever take my necklace off.

This confirmed in my mind that this experience was not just a hypnogogia theory, where a person is part way between sleep and waking, where you are conscious and in a dream like state and perceive images from subconscious that experience both visual hallucinations and a feeling of dread. While that theory may sound like a possibility in the scientific aspect, I can’t let go of the feeling that it was real, and how did the necklace get off my neck withthe clasp still hooked?

I still continue to see shadow people off and on, as soon as I turn off the light, before I am even asleep but I have not had any other physical experiences with them since.’It seems they typically come at night and often at the point of falling asleep or they are there standing over the victim as they wake, and although they very seldom cause any physical harm they nearly always cause absolute fear and some have theorised that they might be some sort of psychic vampire, feeding off of the fear of their victims.'

 

In 1974 in the West Yorkshire town of Pontefract in the United Kingdom, the Pritchard family began to experience what would become one of the best-known poltergeist events in the country and one that was immortalized in the movie When The Lights Go Out.

Another example of shadow beings and poltergeist is from a woman going by the name of “Karen” who says:

‘The night before my experience, I had been the target of poltergeist activity. I don’t mean the mischievous kind of poltergeist, the presence in my room was downright evil. That’s another story, but I do believe the events were related. The night I had my experience, I went out to the bathroom (this was in the middle of the night, around one or two am). As I walked into the kitchen (the bathroom is connected to the kitchen in my house, go figure), I was still jumpy because of the previous night. Therefore, I turned on every light on my way to the bathroom. When I walked into the kitchen and reached for the light, a shadow oozed out of the sink. I told myself it was just my

imagination until it turned around and came towards me. There were glowing red eyes glaring at me from the area the face should have been! The feeling I got was a definite presence of evil (again, like the night before). I screamed and ran out of the room, then spent the rest of the night in my parents’ room on the floor (I’m not ashamed to admit it, even if I was twenty at the time).’

Shadow people simply seem trapped in their former state and do not appear to advance in age, intellect, or in any aspect of their condition until they choose to turn to loved ones who are with them, who are attempting to bring them forward unto the light and life.

Sources:

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Shadow_people

https://thecuriousfortean.com/2017/06/17/shadow-people-a-brief-look-into-the-shadows/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_person

http://www.angelsghosts.com/shadow_people

Pic Source:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Shadowman-3.jpg