A Fright in the Night
From the corner of your eye, you catch them.
Involuntarily frozen, you acknowledge a presence.
A dark shadow, briefly visible.
When you turn to face it, it vanishes before you can name it.
In your peripheral, it is factual. When focus is given, it seems abstract—an Illusion.
Denial and distrust set in questioning your truth. Was it real or imagined?
You shrug it off as a trick of the mind. Doubting what you witnessed. Blaming stress, sleeplessness, or an ailment of the eyes.
Sometimes, we notice them in the dark while waiting for sleep or waking from it.
An outline blacker than the darkness around you.
A voided shape you cannot identify.
Sometimes motionless. Sometimes it advances. Slowly. Methodically.
As your senses awaken, so does your fear.
If it happens often, you start to question your sanity. Are you losing your grip on reality, or was there an otherworldly being standing just out of view?
In the daylight, these instances are easily dismissed.
But in the dark, when the atmosphere feels communal, and in the silence, when your private space feels watched, it is not easy to reject that you are not the only form occupying this haven.
Known as shadow people, they seem to hover just out of view—a passing thought and then forgotten as you go about your life.
What if something other than your mind was toying with you?
Not imagination, but something picking at your lucidity. Providing evidence of existence beyond our comprehension, laughing when its form is retracted, leaving us with more questions than answers.
Often resembling dark, human-shaped figures in the low light or during the haze of waking states of sleep, as if part of a dream. Always leaving the unanswered questions to its authenticity.
Feeding the lingering feeling of intrusion and violation of being observed.
Unease and fear overcome you until the reassurance sets in that it was invented by imagination. A sigh of relief, then back to the normalcy of your busy existence.
Explanations range from hallucination, sleep paralysis, low light, peripheral vision misperception, stress, or fatigue.
In other circles, they are interpreted as omens, spirits, aliens, or entities of an unknown nature.
Malevolent or harmless depends on the state of the individual. To those who experience this, it is very real. Others write the account off as mysteries of the mind.
Any “Doctor Who” fan may find similarities between the shadow people and the aliens “The Silence” who first appear in the episode “The Impossible Astronaut” in the series.
They are not shadows, but when you see “The Silence”, you feel uneasiness and fear. Once you turn away from them, they are forgotten.
In the story, the only way to account for seeing them is to place a visual mark somewhere on the body, usually the arm, to record how many times they have been encountered.
Although the opposite is true in this example, as you can’t directly see shadow people, you only catch glimpses of them. Where “The Silence” is visible when seeing them, but they are forgotten once out of view.
Could this phenomenon of the shadow people be other beings observing humans for reasons only known to them, or do your eyes and mind enjoy the deception to betray your reality?
What experiences have you had with Shadow People?
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