Strange Shadows in the Night

Shadow people – shadow-like humanoid figures seen mostly in peripheral vision – are a well-known paranormal phenomenon. However, not all shadows appear human. Here are four creepy tales of oddly shaped shadows behaving in unnatural ways:

The Circular Shadow
In a recent thread on Reddit, one user described a “perfect, circular shadow” that hovered outside his window at night.

“It was free floating and wasn’t attached to anything. There’s nothing outside my window it could be attached to anyway,” he writes. “The thing moved in irregular patterns, including RIGHT ANGLES and pendulum movements. I have never been so terrified in my life, and it was there for over 45 minutes. I saw it one more time about a week later and now, a year later, I have to sleep with a thick blanket covering my window.”

The Shadow That Felt Wrong
Another user described a strange shadow that appeared in his daughter’s bedroom and the feelings of dread it inspired.

“I noticed a weird shadow in the corner of her room that was never there before,” he shares. “It was an odd, dog-shaped shadow, like the head and shoulders of a German Shepherd.”

At first, the man paid little attention to the shadow, but efforts to find its source left him both puzzled and unnerved. The man tried everything – turning off the lights, putting his hand in front of the venetian blinds, and examining ambient light sources – but he could find nothing to account for the eerie shadow.

“It was bizarre. But I still wasn’t terribly spooked,” he writes. “Then one night, I found myself sleeping in my daughter’s bed while she was away. At around three in the morning, my foot brushed the wall (near the shadow). For some reason, my body recoiled – as if some instinctive, visceral impulse was telling me not to touch it. I felt as if my subconscious, or something deeper and more primitive, was warning me about its true nature.”

The shadow disappeared a few days later, though nothing had changed in the room. The man never did figure out what caused the creepy shadow, though he hasn’t forgotten it.

“What the hell was it? What created it? Why did my body recoil when my foot brushed it? I’m a grown-ass man and I’m still perplexed by it.”

Darth Vader Returns
Readers of Ghosts and Ghouls have also submitted tales describing eerie shadows in the night.

In one story, a woman relates how her son once refused to sleep near the head of the bed. When she asked him why, he said he was afraid of “Darth Vader.” She thought it was an odd thing to say, but assumed he was imagining things. However, she soon saw what was upsetting her four-year-old child.

“One night I opened the door to check on my son, when I saw a weird shadow sliding across the wall,” she writes. “It moved from wall to another, from above my son’s bed to the wall just beside it.

At first, I thought the shadow came from a passing car, but my son’s room wasn’t near a road, and I’ve never seen a shadow move the way the one in his room did. It seemed to be consciously moving away from the light. I then realized it was the shadow that scared my son and that he had confused it with Darth Vader.”

Battle of the Shadows
In another odd tale, a reader describes the strange shadows that appeared on the back of her childhood home, shadows that appeared to be dueling with one another.

“We would see Indian shadows fighting on the back of the wall of the house at night. It was so weird,” she exclaims. “We would literally invite people over to watch. The weird thing is that the shadows were big – like someone was standing right there. In fact, if you stood against the wall, your shadow was just as big as the Indians shadows. They would fight around your shadow like you were not even there. So freaky!”

Rumor has it the reader’s housing development was built on an Indian burial ground, though residents never found any proof.

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[Ghosts and Ghouls]