Shadow People Explained

The end of October seems like a good time to talk about shadow people! Don’t click away! I’m not insane, nor do I believe it’s ghosts, aliens (well, I believe they probably exist somewhere, just not that they visit us), or alien ghosts. This is a sleep disorders blog, and this topic is about a kind of sleep disorder.

When I was a teenager, and saw what appeared to be a ghost, I thought I was going insane. It took me awhile to work up the courage to tell my mother, who explained what sleep paralysis was. Several months later, while wide awake, I saw a shadow person staring right at me from a few meters away, at the edge of the woods that surrounded our house. I’ve been looking for logical answers since then, and it has happened to me 2 more times since then.

As I mentioned in the poll before, I have a strong hypothesis about what causes people to see shadow people. But since researchers don’t want anything to do with something that might be perceived as supernatural by some, that’s all it is. I grow increasingly frustrated by this idiotic bias because I feel that too many things, that might be perceived as supernatural, have easier answers if we were just willing to investigate them.

Since no one else was going to do it, I decided that I had to after it happened a second time. The second was scarier by far. I was about to go to bed, and was just picking up some of my daughter’s toys when I saw a shadow person seated in my big comfy chair, less than a meter away, and I felt it was staring at me, ready to pounce. I scrunched my eyes shut, opened them, and it was gone. As I type this, I remember vividly how terrified I was, how frozen in fear, how my heart felt like it would leap from my chest. I had to know what was going on.

After pouring through hundreds of accounts online, keeping track of the ones that seemed credible, and then speaking to over 80 people throughout the years who have also seen shadow people, I had some ideas, but was missing a piece of the puzzle.

Then, earlier this year, it happened again. I saw another shadow person, face to face, standing less than 2 meters away from me. As the fear built, terror gripping my chest, unable to move or scream, it stood there. And then I felt myself begin to fall, and I caught myself, and then it was gone.

And it all just clicked into place.

I double-checked the interviews and other accounts to make sure. After speaking to many people who have seen them, I narrowed the group of people down to people who saw them while wide awake, were actually doing stuff (no chance they were dozing off and just dreaming normal dream-like things), were able to provide details on how they felt when seeing the shadow person, what it looked like, how they reacted, and who had seen the shadow person face-on. As in, staring right at it. I even re-interviewed some people after a few years, and their stories didn’t change.

In every instance of the above, and controlling for other issues, what I found was a pretty distinct pattern. They had all experienced sleep paralysis before (although most did not know what SP was, they described all the symptoms of an SP attack), they had all seen shadow people during regular sleep paralysis, and all had reported that they did not get enough sleep the night before, and described how they felt when they saw the shadow person as unable to move, had difficulty breathing, could not scream, and felt very afraid. Then, after a few seconds or what seemed to be minutes, the shadow person disappeared. The same was true for the 3 times in my life that I had seen them while ostensibly wide awake.

My hypothesis is that people who see shadow people are having some kind of sleep paralysis while perhaps experiencing microsleeps. Since we don’t know what causes sleep paralysis, it is difficult to get any confirmation other than what I have done: matching symptoms and situations in which a person who is prone to sleep paralysis is more likely to experience it with accounts of seeing shadow people. Once we figure out what causes sleep paralysis, and develop a treatment, I think we will also be able to prove the link between sleep paralysis and shadow people.