The Shadow Man Cometh
By: Brown Lotus
Tags: Bizarre, Mystery, Nightmare, Shadow Man, Supernatural

Hat Man image (photo courtesy of San Antonio Current)

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.

Photo courtesy of Fine Art America

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.

Photo courtesy of Verywell Mind

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.