SHADOW PEOPLE stalk my family...
As a child my mysterious visitors had TERRIFIED ME. Now I found I WASN’T ALONE...
Sshhh, it’s just a nightmare,’ Mum tried to reassure me, after my cries of terror had woken her in the small hours, yet again. ‘Go back to sleep.
I’ll leave the landing light on for you.’
But after Mum went back to bed I was too afraid to close my eyes. Once more I’d seen them – the featureless, silhouetted figures that regularly wandered round my room at night.
Although I shared a bedroom with my big sister, Tamsin, she never seemed to see our strange visitors.
It was only me who lay awake and terrified each night as one or sometimes two humanshaped shadows paced back and forth by my bed.
They never interacted with me or even seemed to notice me and finally, when I was about six, the nightly terror went away. Either the shadowy figures stopped coming, or else I stopped being able to see them. I still sometimes felt someone or something around me, smelt unexplained smells or heard unexplained sounds. But it seemed my nightly torment was over.
I never forgot the shadows though. As I grew up I often wondered what or who the dark figures had been, reading everything I could get my hands on about ghosts and the paranormal. I never came across an experience that sounded exactly like mine though.
Until one day in my early twenties when I was having Sunday lunch round my folks and my big brother, Treve, mentioned the ‘shadow people’ he’d apparently often seen in his bedroom as a child.
My head snapped up.
‘What do you mean by shadow people?’ I asked.
The more he spoke, the clearer it became that he’d seen the same dark figures as I had as a child.
‘I used to see them against my bedroom wall all the time,’ he explained.
Treve’s seven years older than me and we’d never talked about our individual odd experiences before. I’d had no idea that he too had gone through what I had.
Clearly the figures hadn’t been nightmares or figments of my imagination. They’d been real.
Oddly, Treve had seen them in our first house, which we’d moved from before I was two, while I’d experienced them in our next home, so it didn’t seem as if it was the house that was to blame for the apparitions, it was more to do with Treve and me.
Just as with me, the shadows hadn’t interacted with Treve at all, simply moving around his room as he watched.
The internet hadn’t really been a thing the last time I’d tried to do any kind of research into what I’d experienced. Now, back at home, I typed ‘Shadow People’ into Google and, to my surprise, there were loads of results. It wasn’t just Treve and me, people all over the world had seen what we had.
There were loads of theories about what ‘Shadow People’ might be, from ordinary spooks who were lost or trapped on this plane, unable to accept their new Spirit nature, or taking on a darker form, to time travellers, beings from an alternate dimension or even aliens!
I was intrigued and pleased to find out I wasn’t alone and to have some answers at last and I assumed that was that.
Until a few years later when my husband, Craig, came downstairs after our daughter Kaia’s bath one morning.
‘Kaia’s freaking out about a dark man in her room!’ Craig said.
Kaia was two and a half at the time – around the age of my first memories of the shadow people...
After that, Kaia often talked about ‘the old man’ in her bedroom and she regularly called out for me at the same time – between 3.20 and
Kaia often talked about ‘the old man’
3.30am in the morning – to tell me he was there.
Once she reckoned he was sitting up on the curtain pole!
Unlike me, she saw him downstairs too, once showing me with her pointed finger exactly where he was as he moved from room to room.
There were other odd things too. Although no one in the house smoked, we’d often smell burnt matches or cigarette smoke on the stairs and when we redecorated we found scorch marks under the ceiling tiles in our bedroom...
When we asked the neighbours they didn’t know anything about a fire in the building. It remained a mystery.
We left that house when Kaia was seven. By that age I’d stopped seeing apparitions.
But Kaia continued to see things as she grew, and not just shadows either. One day it was a sailor standing at the bottom of our stairs, another time a little girl in a white dress with a muddy hem, then a ‘faceless’ child in a yellow dress and red cardie.
She’s now 14 and continues to experience regular visitations from the other side.
I think she might have a strong gift. Recently, with one Victorian gentleman, she was somehow able to switch from her perspective to his, seeing herself on her bed, through his eyes for a few seconds before switching back.
I don’t think our home is actually haunted. It’s more that Kaia has a heightened awareness of any spirits who pass through.
Unlike me, Kaia is unafraid of what she sees. When she wants to be left alone she just orders the figures to go – and apparently they do!
She’s currently not interested in developing her abilities any
further and because neither the shadow people nor the more traditional spirits communicate with us, we still don’t know why our family sees them – and what, if anything, they want.
But now even Mum agrees there might be something in what Treve, Kaia and I have all experienced.
I don’t know if
there is something special about our family that means so many of us have seen unearthly figures, but I’d love to know.
Maybe one day we’ll get some real answers...