The Truth About Shadow People

This episode has vivid descriptions of sleep paralysis and other creepy nightly phenomena. Please take care while listening. It's a sunny afternoon and the sun is coming through an open window of a childhood bedroom. Sitting on their bunk beds are Kara and Sarah playing with their dolls without a care in the world. They were supposed to be alone, but they soon started getting the feeling that they weren't. Some dolls were on the floor near the door, and Kara as her sister Lugo picked them up, but Sarah doesn't move. She slowly shakes her head no, looking straight at the doorway. Now, Kara was confused and looks over to the door to see what her sister is looking at. And there, leaning into the doorway from the hall is a dark silhouette of a man. All she could see were the heads and the shoulders angled as if he was peeking inside the room. But remember, the sun is shining into the room and every everything is bright. Why is there a harsh man shaped shadow? Kara described the shape as an opaque black and completely two dimensional, just like a shadow in plain daylight. The shadow man was watching them. Now terrified, they told their mother, but the mom dismissed it, saying that they were just being silly. But yet the nightmare continued, and thirty years later, Kara still vividly remembers her experience, stating bluntly that even her sister would be able to describe the exact same silhouette they saw that day. This and other experiences are part of a book I use for research into shadow people. Now. I receive phone calls every week from people that have gone through seemingly impossible experiences, and this particular type of experience has always bothered me. The shadow people the things you see when you're about to go to sleep or when you wake up in the middle of the night, the ones that should live in darkness, and yet they seemed to be able to walk in proad daylight. This phenomenon has been the subject of scientific and medical studies over the years, every single one made to answer one question, who are the shadow people? My name is Edwin, and here's a horror story. It was two thousand and two and Margot Davies had just moved into a house east of Seattle. Things started to change pretty quickly when only on her third night there, her aunt asked to talk to her well to confess something. It seemed like she was afraid to even bring it up. She said that she had sensed something lurking in the home before, and Margo found it strange but left it at that. A few years later, Margo started catching glimpses of a dark human shape figure near the door of her den, just out of the corner of her eye. She kept rationalizing it, like I'm sure most of us would do. She was thinking that it was some type of trick of the mind. But then things changed. It was November two thousand and seven now, and Margault was sitting outside. She had hot toab outside of her house and that sounds pretty cool, and it was the warm water against the cool November air. Her living room was completely lit, so she could see inside. One of those times that she was looking in, when she glanced at the window, she saw a dark shadow right in front of a glowing lamp, just standing there, and it seemed to be staring at her. So she started to panic, and her first thought was that someone had broken in. But even then she was able to reason it out and admit to herself that even a physical intruder could not be able to stay as a pitch black silhouette when it was standing directly in front of a bright light. It was impossible. She wasn't, so I'm processing the horror yet. When the figure appeared to realize that she could see it, the shadow didn't run for the door, but instead moved super quickly directly through the solid living room wall. It came out of the kitchen and then vanished over the den, and Myrgo ran inside, dripping wet, and started searching the whole house. To her surprise, it was completely empty. Now she tried to keep this to herself, trying to act as if everything was normal, but that shadow would make another appearance. It happened when a cousin was staying the night and looked terrible. The next morning. Margot asked him what was wrong, and he was like, all right, something paralyzed me with fear of the night before a shadow was watching me in my bed before turning around and walking straight through the wall. In this account that I found in the book, Margot doesn't feel like this thing is evil or trying to harm her, but treats it more like a I don't know, an unwelcome guest. Still she freaks out a little bit when the shadow appears. Now, in this case, Margot's shadow was quiet and just observing. It would seem like all of them are like that, but some don't only stand around. Now, in the experience of Margo, we heard of shadows that go through walls and are unaffected by light. What are they? Ghosts, demons, reflections from apperil dimension, aliens. Now here's what I think, just off the bat. Here, if it were a trick of the light, you would expect shadows to be described as completely random in shape. But no, they are more than blobs of darkness, something that we've come to classify as shadow people. And all these stories that come in from all over the United States, Mexico, England and many other regions. You know what, They've even been divided into distinct species that keep popping up over and over again. The first there's the hat man. Witnesses that describe waking up paralyzed only to see a tall, silhouetted figure that stands at the foot of their bed. He's described wearing a long coat or jacket, sometimes a cape, and has a very distinct wide brimmed or old fashioned hat. Sometimes he just looks at you, while others he makes you feel pure dread. Then we have the angry hooded shadows, figures that are pure cloaked, kind of like the grim Reaper, but they don't just stand there and watch sleep, but rather appear to actively try to paralyze you before moving in to physically attack. But this one surprised me because this is the one that I've heard about the most. It's the red eyed shadows because they're different than most shadow people that are described as featureless voids or what people have told me that are darker than darkness. They say that these red eyed shadows glare paralyzed victims from the corners of rooms or from inside closets, with glowing, piercing red eyes. Sometimes they're associated with like evil entities or demons. Now I know what you're thinking here, red eyes how cliche, like the kind you see the trees have in the dark dark forest of fairy tales. But hey, when you're listening to someone's voice shake as they're telling you about their experiences, you begin to wonder if we're ignoring something that is haunting us, something that is actually there, and instead we choose to just make fun of it now, these species of shadow people overlap. Sometimes they come by with a strange technological buzzing or grinding noise. Sometimes they don't even make I don't know sense, like they don't look like a human. Sometimes they're even thought to be aliens. But some stuff that has personally been told to me is that sometimes they look like shadowy serpents or featureless blobs, dark spidery looking things crawling along the walls. And every once in a while you hear about ghostly shadow catlike figures. What are they? I mentioned earlier that people become paralyzed while sleeping, and it's hard to describe it unless you've actually experienced it, but it's like waking up completely conscious, but your body won't move. They're trapped in the dark, unable to move a single muscle or cry out for help. And then suddenly you realize that an evil presence is looking at you like a predator stalking its brain. Now here's how some victims themselves describe it. The presence was of a demonic nature, purest evil out to possess my soul. Or another that struggled to find the right words for this, saying that fear is not strong enough word for it. Terrified or panic might be a better choice. And it isn't a bad dream like you might be thinking. It feels real and worse than what most people have ever experienced while awake, with people claiming to be afraid for their souls. And it's this sensation, absolute dread, that is so unique that theologians and scholars have started to describe it as numinous, a word that means terror, accompanied by an inward shuddering that no earthly physical danger could possibly inspire. It's a helplessness so absolute that one victim described it as being like a man intentionally buried alive, trapped in a dark, cramped coffin with a vicious entity waiting just outside. Of course, all of these experiences are tied into how the victims themselves perceive them. So we're going to go from monsters and dark bedrooms to step into this cold and sterile light of a sleep lab laboratory. Let's see what scientists have to say about this. So it's time to get a little more I don't know rational, for lack of a better word. Medical science has an explanation for these entities that we see, and you've probably heard of this phenomenon before sleep paralysis. Sometimes in chronic cases they might call it recurrent isolated sleep paralysis, and it's a well known biological condition. Doctors assure us that the shadow in the corner of your room is not a demon, but a misfiring of your own neurology. Now, this is where we get a little bit technical, right, So to understand what's happening here, we have to understand how we sleep. Now, when we enter the stage of sleep known as rapid eye movement or RAM sleep, our brains become highly active and we begin to dream vividly. But if you're dreaming and you're running or fighting or thrashing around, which would be I don't know why you would be doing that in your dream, but we might hurt ourselves or someone who we might be sharing the bed with. So we evolve to have this safety switch where the brain triggers a state of complete muscle paralysis known as muscle antonia, where the major voluntary muscle groups are entirely locked down. But sometimes that switch glitches. Our mind wakes up completely and alert, but the body does not, so we have this type of paralysis of rem sleep, bleeding into reality. So when you open your eyes, you see your bedroom perfectly clear, but you can't move, not even turn your head. And then comes the suffocation. Because some muscles in your chest are also paralyzed, taking a deep breath becomes impossible. Apparently we don't normally do that in our sleep, So when the sleeper tries to breathe deeply, the muscles don't let you. And that simple inability makes us feel a crushing pressure on the chest, like a heavy weight or a monster sitting right on top of the rib cage. But if that's just a simple biological glitch, where did the shadows come from? A sleep researcher like Jay Allan Chain began looking at thousands of these terrifying encounters. They realize that hallucinations were not random chaotic nightmares, and there's this very specific reason for this nocturnal dread. They actually categorize it into a strict scientific framework known as a three factor model. Now this is chilling to me because scientists literally gave faces to these monsters. The first is an incubus factor. This is a physical assault. Because the sleeper's respiratory muscles are partially paralyzed, they experience of pressure on the chest, difficulty breathing, and even physical pain. The mind thinks of this as literally someone on top of us. This entity like the old hag climbing on top of the rib cage to crush the life out of us. The second is a vestibular motor factor. This is where the sensory signals become tangled up while the physical body remains locked down. The mind hallucinates bizarre, violent sensations of movement. People who suffer from this report tingling, spinning, falling, flying, or feeling like they're being dragged or floated out of their bodies. This next one I'm about to tell you about is what brings us shadow people straight out of the darkness. This is the one we're hearing about in the beginning of this episode. The intruder psychologists have come up with theories that say that when we wake up paralyzed and vulnerable in the dark, it triggers this hyper vigilant, defensive state in the mid brain. Now, this makes our ancient evolutionary predator detection system go into overdrive, and in the panic, we think we're trapped and begin to project an overwhelming sense of presence into the room. Now, this presence is always felt as malicious, observant, and deeply evil. And to make sense of this terror, the brain literally scares itself, making terrifying sounds in our minds, like hissing, buzzing, or footsteps approaching us. Then it connects to something visual, like a shadowy intruder standing in front of our bed. So basically we're making up the shadow people. So let's assume that the scientists are right for a second, and we're scarying ourselves here. We should be able to trigger this on command right now. In Los Sane, Switzerland, a team of researchers led by doctor Olaf Blank did exactly that. They were treating a twenty two year old student for epilepsy, probing her brain with electrodes to find out if her symptoms could be alleviated by surgery. So when doctors applied a mild electric current to her left temporal paietal junction, a specific area of the brain just about an inch above and behind the ear, the young woman suddenly turned her head. She said that she felt a strange sensation that someone was nearby, even though there was no one actually there. They kept playing around with the current and the encounter became worse. The patient began describing the presence as a shadow wrapped behind her back, mimicking her exact posture. The researchers asked the woman to sit and hug her knees, and she did, but right away noted that the man was now sitting as well and had clasped his arms around her. An experienced that she didn't like one bit, so when they asked her to lie down on her side, she felt the shadow lie down exactly beside her, taking her exact position in the bed. Doctor Blank and his team were able to induce this shadow person successfully, and they were astonished to find out that a simple switch in the brain could bring up a dark, invisible stalker. They concluded that an electrical stimulation was simply interfering with the brain's ability to put together sensory information. Instead caused an own body illusion, where the patient's mind projected a phantom double of herself in the room. Pretty cool, right, But now my question is, Okay, if these shadows are only internal glitches, why do victims that are separated by oceans, centuries, and cultures describe the exact same terrifying entities In ancient Assyria and Babylonia. Thousands of years before the birth of Christ, people feared the Allu. Now the Alu was a demon that hid itself in dark corners and caverns, slinking through the streets at night to find a sleeping victim. Ancient tablets describe it as an entity one that would throw itself heavily onto the sleeper, paralyzing them and stopping them from opening their eyes. To the ancient Greeks, the monster was known as efialties, which translates to leap. They associated these attacks with the woodland god Pan and his half human half goat entities. A visit from Pan and the dead of night brought an overwhelming sudden terror, which is the exact origin of our modern word panic. By the Middle Ages, the Christian Church had classified these dark intruders as the incubus and the succubists, demons that literally translate to lie upon and lie under. Have you ever heard of the infamous manual called Malius Meleficarum. In it, theologians warned that these entities willingly embraced a foul servitude to the devil, and that they roam around at night to terrify, the paralyzed and the helpless. Now there are hints of this everywhere, even in our words, like the word nightmare itself doesn't originally mean a bad dream. It comes from the Old Norse and Anglo Saxon word mara. Mara itself comes from the root marin, which means to crush, to pound, or to bruise. Now, the mirror was a supernatural female entity that lay on people's chest at night, not letting them breathe. Even Grendel from Beowulf, the cannibalistic devourer was referred to as a mayor, and it keeps going around the world a Newfoundland, for example, this entity is a dreaded old hag that leaves her paralyzed victims completely exhausted or hagridden, the exact origin of the word haggard. In Japan, the paralyzing shadow is the Kanashibadi, which is a ghost that leaves a sleeper feeling as though they are bound in metal. In the freezing Arctic, the Inuit suffered from the ukumbagivnik, a paralyzed state to where the soul is threatened by the invisible spirit. The world of the dead and for centuries, across all regions of the world, in every language, the story has been the same. Dark entity enters a room, it presses down on your chest and steals your breath. But okay, if you wake up and snap out of it, you survive. Right, Well, what if you don't. Let's look at that up next. It's a thing we kind of assume naturally. Let's say your kid tells you that there's a monster in the closet. We say that they'll be okay, that nothing's gonna happen to them. And if they tell you that they have a bad dream, well it was just a dream. It can't hurt you. But in the winter of nineteen eighty one, terrifying medical mystery began to unfold in the United States. One that goes completely against this is showed that shadows can in fact kill. Now. It all started with the mon refugees that they had recently fled the war torn jungles of loud, healthy young men were to sleep and never waking up again. In Portland, Oregon, the forty seven year old man went to bed after midnight, and soon his wife woke up to the sound of his loud breathing. He was struggling. She shook him, trying to wake them up, but in the moments the horror, she realized that he was completely unresponsive. She was dead. The medical examiners were baffled at the case. Autopsies revealed nothing. There were no toxins, no underlying disease, no rational causes for a healthy heart to stop beating in the dark. The phenomenon spread, claiming over a hundred lives and even getting a name, SONS Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal death syndrome. At its peak, the death rate from SONS among young among men for the same to the top five causes of natural death combined. Now. While Western doctors searched for a virus, the Mong refugees already knew what it was, the dabsab an evil nocturnal pressing spirit. The Moong victims describe the exact same terrifying ordeal that we've been talking about all this time, waking up paralyzed in the dead of night, unable to speak, as dark, heavy shaped climbed onto their beds and crushed their breath out of their lungs. A survivor who fought off this entity described the encounter like this, when the spirit comes, it presses down you feel so scared like you could die. And then he warned that if a victim does not get a shaman to intervene, the spirit may be very angry and sulk swamp can kill you. Now, the tragedy among the Mong refugees was that in flinging to the United States, their tightly knit clans were scattered and they lost access to their traditional shamans and spiritual rituals. They believe that their protective ancestors spirits have been left behind across the ocean, leaving them completely defenseless against the dav Sog. But how can a shadow, a supposed hallucination actually kill. Medical science eventually discovered this rare genetic condition that is inherited. It's called Brugatta syndrome, which can cause uncoordinated electrical activity in the heart during sleep. But this condition is often clinically silent and a person can live their entire life with it and never know It requires a trigger to become fatal. Now that's pretty scary as is. Researchers think that the absolute soul shattering terror of the Davsog attack the primal panic of being paralyzed and smothered by this demonic entity in the dark. Was that trigger. It is the ultimate catastrophic no sebo effect, I believes, so deeply ingrained and a terror so creepy that the mind literally scares the body to death. And the monk are not alone. Across Asia, other cultures know this lethal shadow. In Japan they fear the Pokuti, and the Philippines is the Bangun Gut, and in Thailand is a light Ti, the ghost that pushes you down. Now, the science tells us that the fear kill them, but the lore warns us of something way more sinister. If you wake up paralyzed and the fear is strong enough, the shadows aren't only going to watch, they will kill. If you ask a spiritualist, a shaman, or an occultist, they will tell you that the soul crushing dread induced by the shadow people isn't biological. It's not a glitch, but actually the entire point of the attack. So let's look at something a little more esoteric. In some traditions, when we go to sleep, our consciousness doesn't simply shut down. Instead, our non physical astral body partially breaks offf physical flesh. I guess like our actual body. Sleep paralysis in this perspective is a moment when you wake up trapped in that border between these two states, with physical and the astral body are not in phase yet, and in this state of consciousness, your psychic barriers are lowered and your soul is left completely exposed and vulnerable, and that's where the predators wait. In Tibetan Buddhism, these entities are known as preadus or hungry ghosts that are wretched earth bound souls, depicted with enormous, dissented bellies and thin, narrow limbs and their curse to exist in a state of constant suffering and insatiable appetite. Modern accultas refer to them as energy vampires. Now because they have no physical form, these lower astral parasites cannot eat physical food and instead must eat astral energy. They warned that these intense human emotions like fear and pain are the most potent source of this energy. So when the shadow man stands at the foot of your bed, where the hooded entity climbs onto your chest to crush the breath from your lungs, they're trying to induce a state of absolute paralyzing panic. They use their primal terror as a food source, eating your vital energy to stay alive in that creepy, shadowy existence. You know. I found this interesting too that by the late twentieth century, thousands of people started reporting a new kind of nightmare. They were waking up paralyzed in their beds, hearing strange technological buzzing or humming sounds, and sensing a presence of non human entities, some that put them in terrifying procedures, and that's what we often call alien abduction. Many researchers think that this mysterious paralysis, the overwhelming dread, and the shadowy bedside intruders are identical to the ancient attacks. Now the extraterrestrial visitors with large piercing eyes and telepathic minds are the modern version of it of the ancient incubus and the shadow people. So in a dark hood and a hat or with the face of an alien, the mechanisms are pretty much the same. They wait in those dark, silent spaces between being awake and asleep, waiting for us to slip out of phase because that's the only way that they can feed. For now we are left in the dark, caught between two realities. On one side, we have this cold, sterile comfort of modern science that tells us that shadow people are born entirely from our own minds, That these things are products of rempsleep that blend when we're awake, that crushing weight is an effect of our own minds paralyzing the chest muscles, that the shadow man is built on stress, sleep deprivation, and erratic misfiring of the temporal lobes. Then we have the shaman, the occultist, the experiencer, who offers a far more sinister warning. The twilight space between sleeping and waking is not a glitch, but like an entryway. They warn us that during sleep, the astral body is partially out of sink, and that leaves a soul exposed in some strange borderland, and in that borderland we are hunted. When we look at it like that, the entities that we see, the hat man, the hooded shadows, red eyed entities, or the old Hag, they are not hallucinations. They need our energy and paralyze us on purpose. So tonight you will go to sleep and may find yourself awake in the dead of night, Lying perfectly still on your back. You will try to move your arm, but it will be pinned. You will try to scream, but your throat will be locked, and the temperature will drive. And then from the darkest corner of your bedroom, a shadow, darker than the night itself will detach from the wall and start gliding towards your bed. Tell yourself then, that it's just biology. Tell yourself that all these things about an evolutionary misfire are happening, they're keeping your muscles asleep. Tell yourself that it's just a dream bleeding into the waking world. And let's just hope it works. And let's hope that it helps you survive the night, because that's much better than the alternative, the one where you aren't alone. That the shadow standing over you is real. After going through the research for this episode, some from this book it was called The Darkness Walks the People by Jason Offfoot, or also the book Phantasms of the Living by Gurne Meyers and Podmore. I just kept searching. I was looking for an answer for what happened with Margo, that woman who saw the shadow while she was outside of the house, you know, the unwelcome visitor, because she wasn't asleep then right, and you know what, the most convincing thing that I found was this thing called external hallucinations. Basically what we see as ghosts, they appear while we're completely awake. These include poultry, guys, elementals, earthbound spirits that operate outside of the observer's mind. So basically not quite one of these nighttime shadow figures, but a shadow figure. Nonetheless, I don't know what these ghost entities shadow figures that are out during the day have to do with anything, as in like in terms of are the ghosts, are the voids or what are they? That's the question that remains still after all this research, And instead we were guided into the sleep phenomena, you know, these things that we see while we're sleep being or that wake us up with this pressure and stuff that can actually kill. So I think she may have been seeing an actual external manifestation and not quite a shadow person the one that we see while we're sleeping. But thanks a lot either way for this idea for the episode. It really creeped me out, and it really like I had to dig in pretty deep into you know, clinical stuff and some of these old books. Really really cool that I found these PDFs let me know if you're interested in finding out more about these. That way I can send you links to you know, to the books that I've used for this research and everything. But I also to thank you Kay for another recommendation that I got for Borley Rectory in England and the Coral Castle by the one who who suggested this was Big Daddy FA six two. Really funny use her name. Also about the last Dutchman in the Superstition Mountains. This was submitted by Charles who sent it in. We actually have an episode on the Superstition Mountains already, but it's definitely worth a second look. There's a lot of stuff that I think we covered very very little of it too. There's so much the Superstition Mountains go deep. But anyway, thank you so much for that, and thank you for the comments. I'm about to reply to them right now. Anyway. This episode was written and produced by me Edwin Karrubiez and if you want to support the show, try out Scary Plus. You get to listen to these ad free and early when they become available. Link and info are on the description of this episode. Also, don't forget to tap follow. Please please please send in some stars, you know, those five star reviews over on Spotify and Apple podcast, because the reviews help us keep it going, and we need to show the algorithms there that you know, we're okay, like we're we're worth recommending, I guess. But anyway, don't forget to tap follow. That's also super super important. As always, thank you very much for listening, Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.