The Shadow Man Cometh
I’m as rational as the next person, and even I’ve seen him. That means you might one day see him, too.
I grew up and went to college, a bright, fresh-faced young lady all set to complete a pre-Veterinary Bachelor’s Degree at OSU so that I could become a large animal veterinarian.
It didn’t work out that way; I met my husband and pursued a career in a different field, but the point I want to make is that
I love science.
I, Könchok, am a rational woman. I understand the value of science and grew up learning everything about it, including the scientific method itself. I believe in rational things that can be rationally proven. I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy, and by this time in my life I know the truth about Santa (sorry, kiddos).
But that didn’t save me — the rational one, the studious one, the one who absorbs zoology like sea stars filtering saltwater — from encountering what some are calling the ‘Hat Shadow Man’.
It doesn’t seem possible, does it?
The Shadow Man isn’t really real… right?
Let me tell you what happened one night.
On a dim October night in 2017, I’d woken up sometime after 12AM and found I couldn’t get back to sleep.
We live in a small ranch home in rural Ohio, and my husband and I keep our sleeping mattress in the living room. The children were still in bed and all the family pets were quiet, so I sat up for a while and listened to one of the new podcasts I was following with my phone and ear-buds.
After about forty minutes of this my eye-lids were finally feeling droopy again, but I also noticed something different.
Just to my left, in the space between the mattress and the wall (that was my side of the mat), I began to have an extremely unsettling feeling. It was exactly the type of feeling you get when you feel you’re being watched, but one thing made it creepier: it felt — well, negative. I didn’t just feel that I was being watched by some weirdo. It was like that invisible weirdo wanted to do something to me.
Something terrifying.
So I reverted to a tactic I hadn’t used since I was at least ten years old: I burrowed down into the mattress and covered my whole head with the blanket.
There, I thought with satisfaction. That’ll do. And this does feel better.
I don’t remember dreaming that night.
Sometime between that super-fine filament separating the universe of dreaming and coming back into the waking world, my consciousness shot out of sleep like an ethereal torpedo. There, paused with its back against the left wall, stood the Hat Shadow Man.
It looked at me, and I looked at it.
The feelings emanating from it were as stark as if they’d been a brick wall. This Shadow Man, with no discernible features other than a menacing stance and vague orange tint, loomed down on me and projected a mixture of revulsion, hatred, and severe distaste all at once. The cow-boy-style hat perched on its head — slightly askance — only served to amplify the toxic emotion that was digging into my bones.
Suffice it for me to say to the reader that I’d never experienced such intense hatred. I’d have thought that such hateful energy would be literally possible, even from the coldest, most-soulless madman on the planet. What I was feeling at that moment was somehow a hundred times worse that what I might feel being pursued by this hypothetical mad-man. It was like nothing I’ever ever felt before or ever felt since. In fact, I would’ve happily run into the ‘safety’ of said mad-man rather than endure that creature’s malevolent gaze (that’s obviously an extreme example, but it’s the only way I can think of to convey the quality of my fear that night).
I have never used illicit drugs, and neither do I drink. I was clear-headed, not dizzy from sleep.
I blinked, and then suddenly it was over: the terrifying Hat Shadow Man had disappeared, and the presence was gone.
I can state with certainty I was not just dreaming about a menacing shadow man. I remember very clearly the foreboding feeling of something negative in the air that night before lying back down and pulling the covers over my head.
Once the morning dawned clear and bright, I told almost everyone in the family about the malicious entity. They seemed concerned, but they also didn’t seem to understand my fear, dismissing the experience as a mere ‘nightmare’ that I should get over and forget about.
Such was the quality of terror that night that even when the sun did come up, I remained secretly afraid. Internally, I trembled all the time, and I was afraid to be left alone in the house even during day-light hours. My mind was constantly dredging up images of the awful, hatted thing I had seen, continually going back to it, ferreting it out and re-playing its nastiness front-and-center.
Naturally, the nights were worse; I was petrified at the thought of meeting that horrendous boogey-man shadow again. Doubts came and went. The Hat Shadow man had only revealed itself to me, not my family. My husband and children had been safe from it. Even the animals, who are normally highly-sensitive to supernatural energies (at least, they are in the movies) had been undisturbed that night. Why had it chosen only me? Did it know the special misery of a person’s suffering while everyone else in her life could blissfully maintain their obliviousness?
Readers, I maintained that every-day fear and trembling for months. That doesn’t seem like a long time, but it is when you’re afraid to go to sleep. I prayed with fervor, avoided looking at anything scary on the TV, and studiously counted mantras on my mala beads.
Thankfully, the Shadow Man has never appeared to me again. I’m not sure why it chose our home to make an appearance, but I’m happy to say that it seemed to have just been passing through.
The crisis of COVID has caused tens of millions of people to have dark, disturbing, dreams. Not all (or even most) of them are necessarily about shadow people, but I think it’s important to point out that there is more to human and zoological life than the ‘physical’ things we do every day: eating, shopping, cleaning, and so forth. The scientific method, which I had studied fervently since my college days, is a solid method — but it can’t pinpoint everything. Beyond claiming that emotion, deviancies, thought and dreams are somehow connected to the brain and the way its neurons both function and fire, science seems to have little to do with shadow men other than refer the issue to psychology.
Many theorists have proposed that the appearance of shadow people or other terrifying night specters are part of a condition known as sleep-paralysis. That may be true for some, but for me it is problematic. I have never experienced sleep-paralysis, and on the night in question I didn’t feel impaired in any way.
All perception is valid, but the Buddha taught his followers that most perception is actually false. It is that false perception that causes us and other sentient beings to suffer. For me, the blanket ‘dismissal’ of all things terrifying and ethereal is the dismissal of a huge chunk of human experience. We’ve all had bad dreams, and many have encountered more frightening things than I did that night. What good does it do to simply wave these experiences away as if they mean nothing? What healing can be gleaned from that?
Fortunately, attitudes are beginning to change, and I am heartened by new research into this field such as that described in this article by Psychology Today.
For me, the Hat Shadow Man came and went. I’ve made my peace with that, and neither my family nor I have any more troubling incidents to report. But the experience taught me that anything is possible.
While he may not be able to physically harm us, or drag us out of our beds and screaming into the night, I believe that the boogey-man is real.
As long as we fail to understand him (and, ultimately ourselves), he will still make appearances. It can happen to anyone.
It happened to me.
