Harold and the hat man
on his head and it looked as if he had on some kind of long overcoat. The silhouette had the appearance of the images you see if you close your eyes and apply pressure to your eyeballs, but quite dark. I told my mother about him (she didn’t see anything) and after that I used to call him ‘Mister Nobody’. I never saw anything like this again, but what stuck in my mind was that this was a strangely two-dimensional figure. Caroline – FTMB I have a close friend named Harold. We have known each other for about 30 years. He and I, at one point, had some very strange encounters with the Ouija board; although the following experience had nothing to do with our Ouija experiences, I mention it as being illustrative of the fact that Harold and I have had more than one shared paranormal experience. When we were first introduced by a mutual friend, it was as though we had known each for years. We have always been very close. The paranormal encounter that I consider the most frightening of my life was also simultaneously experienced by Harold, in slightly different form, but with the major elements of the experience coinciding.
About 25 years ago, while I was living at my parents’ house, I awoke one morning to see my bedroom door opening. Immediately, I thought, with distinct clarity, “My father is coming in to empty the trash can.” As the door opened more widely, and I didn’t see my father enter the room, I realised that something else was going on, and I began to panic, thinking someone had broken into the house. I believed myself to be fully awake, not dreaming.
As I became increasingly aware that someone dangerous was about to enter the room, I also realised that I was lying on my back and could not move. I then saw a black two-dimensional, shadowed outline of a man in what appeared to be a pointy-looking trench coat and pointy, rimmed hat enter the room.
I have never been more frightened in my life. I somehow knew, as the figure made its way towards me in the bed, that it was going to do something to my neck and kill me. Along with the paralysis, this thought was excruciatingly horrific. As the figure, the most malevolent-feeling thing I have ever experienced, got to the side of my bed, near my neck, I ‘woke up’. The room, as I looked around, was just as it had looked moments before during the ‘dream’, with shadows and early morning light exactly as I had ‘seen’ them moments before. As bad as the experience was, I filed it under ‘nightmares beyond all nightmares’ and pretty much forgot about it.