Shadow People

People who report shadow people describe something darker than the dark: a flat, featureless silhouette of a person, seen sliding across a doorway, peering round a corner or – most frighteningly – standing at the foot of the bed. Some see a tall figure in a brimmed hat, the so-called Hat Man; others a hooded shape, or a small crouching figure. Most accounts share the same emotions: a sudden certainty of not being alone, and a deep, wordless dread.

The idea of a dark visitor in the bedroom is ancient, but the phrase “shadow people” is recent. It spread through late-night American radio: Coast to Coast AM, then hosted by Art Bell, devoted its first long discussion to the subject on 12 April 2001, and listeners called in with their own encounters. The author Heidi Hollis, who published her first book on the subject that year, became a regular guest, and internet forums did the rest. The Hat Man became a recognisable character in its own right in the late 2000s.

Most researchers who study these reports point first to sleep paralysis, a brief state in which the mind wakes while the body is still held in the muscle paralysis of REM sleep. A 2011 systematic review in Sleep Medicine Reviews by Brian Sharpless and Jacques Barber, pooling 35 studies and more than 36,000 people, estimated that about 7.6 percent of the general population have had at least one episode, rising to around 28 percent of students and 32 percent of psychiatric patients. The Canadian psychologist J. Allan Cheyne, who surveyed thousands of sufferers at the University of Waterloo, found that the hallucinations fall into recurring patterns. The most common he called the “Intruder”: a sensed presence in the room that may take shape as a dark, faceless figure, often with footsteps, whispers or the feeling of the mattress sinking. A second, the “Incubus”, adds pressure on the chest and difficulty breathing.

That template appears across cultures, under many names. The folklorist David Hufford’s 1982 study The Terror That Comes in the Night began with the “Old Hag” of Newfoundland, said to sit on sleepers’ chests; Japanese speakers call the experience kanashibari, “metal binding”; and Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare, with its demon squatting on a sleeping woman, has become the emblem of the condition. Neuroscience has added a striking clue. In 2006 Olaf Blanke’s team in Lausanne reported in Nature that electrically stimulating the left temporoparietal junction of an epilepsy patient made her feel a shadowy person close behind her, copying her posture – an illusion of the brain’s own body map.

Not every report happens in bed. Figures glimpsed in peripheral vision can be pareidolia – the brain’s habit of seeing people in shadows and shapes – especially when someone is tired, anxious or already primed by a frightening story. Shadow figures are also widely reported after prolonged sleep deprivation and with deliriant substances such as high doses of the antihistamine diphenhydramine. For many people the experience is real and terrifying, and doctors take recurrent sleep paralysis seriously: it is linked with disrupted sleep, stress and anxiety disorders, and it can be treated.

A black, featureless human silhouette, sometimes wearing a brimmed hat or hood; a figure standing over the bed or in a doorway; movement darting at the edge of vision; an overwhelming sense of a hostile presence, often with paralysis, chest pressure, buzzing or footsteps.

Most often in bedrooms, on falling asleep or waking, and when the sleeper is lying on their back; also in dim hallways and at the edge of sight. Reports cluster among people who are sleep-deprived, stressed or keeping irregular hours.

Shadow people are a staple of paranormal radio, podcasts and online forums, and of Rodney Ascher’s documentary The Nightmare (2015), in which sleep paralysis sufferers describe their visitors. The Hat Man has become an internet character in his own right. Folk traditions of the same experience include the Old Hag of Newfoundland, Japanese kanashibari and many others around the world.