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I just saw a Shadow Person

  
 
Fritz K Driftwood
03:06 / 19.10.05
Ugh...my roommate saw it as well. It moved across the hallway wall and into my roommate's office. We had been talking and I said "What was that?", and he said "You saw it too?"

It looked like a shadow moving across the wall, but there was no light that was moving (from the street or the tv, or whatever) that could have thrown a shadow the way this moved.

I've never seen a ghost or shadow person before, and I've lived in places that if any place was going to be haunted, these places would have. My mom's old house in Montana was a former hospital! My apartment before this one, the women who lived there before me did a murder/suicide thing! Nothing until tonight, and now I'm totally creeped out.

I occasionally get things out of the corner of my eye, when I am in the MUNI station or someplace public, but those are just little things. I always assumed that they where some flavor of gnome (since I'm underground) or pixie ('cause they are small), but this was human sized and an actual shadow. Once again...ugh!

My partner, when I called him, immediately tried to start an argument with me about whether I had seen a ghost or a shadow person. Didn't look like no ghost to me!
 
 
toughest, fastest, fatest
06:33 / 19.10.05
i've never seen a shadow person, seen loads of pixies and gnomes though, normally when tired - i assume it's flashbacks in my case, as i've done a lot of psychedelics.
 
 
Mmothra
14:43 / 19.10.05
Aw, I'm jealous. Our house in Noe Valley is hopelessly unattractive to anything even vaguely spooky, no matter what I do.

So what now? Banish or establish contact?
 
 
beautifultoxin
07:49 / 20.10.05
I used to see them, but never since I moved to San Francisco -- only in New England, around a fairly notorious abandoned mental hospital and the surrounding college grounds. A few women I had formed a working group with also reported seeing them -- like the "PED XING" man come to life.

Ours -- East Coast Snobs, not at all -- seemed to chill out with offerings of -- really -- Boones $2 malt liquor, hot dogs, Cheetoes, and the like. Was it all college-aged projection? Maybe, but I've never seen with my eyes any otherworldly being so distinctly and had it corroborated by so many others.

(What would Noe Valley be haunted by, anyway? The Ghosts Of Lesbian Mom's Dogs' Past? I'm ignorant of a lot of SF ghost stories, with the exception of Barbary Coast lore.)
 
 
All Acting Regiment
08:47 / 20.10.05
I swear I once saw a malevolent face staring up from a deep pool of water, when I was a kid. It was angry, and uncomprehending, and actually quite horrific, especially as the crate I was standing on as a stepping stone was starting to sink and the current was going too fast for comfort.

This pool was in a wild area at the back of a church; off to the left there was a high embankment that was the back of the churchyard, and it had been eroded, sending a few gravestones tumbling down to shatter in the stream that ran directly below. Other odd stuff used to turn up down there: there were no fish in the stream or the pool, but once there was a bush all tied up in fishing wire, the barbed kind.
 
 
Chiropteran
13:01 / 20.10.05
I woke up with a "shadow person" standing over me, once several years ago (the opaque silhouette was free-standing, not against a wall). I was too tired to be terribly frightened, and I had the sleep-logged idea that if I covered its light-source (which allowed it to differentiate from the surrounding darkness and take substance) and then aggressively ignored it ("they live on fear"), it would go away. I did both, and fell asleep again. In the morning, I woke up significantly more disconcerted than I had been during the experience.

Whether it was some inhuman "mud shadow" or a too-human "night-walker" (courtesy of local occult politickers - there was a precedent for that sort of thing), or a hypnogogic hallucination or outright dream, I can't say.

I did later see other shadowy figures flitting about (or, distressingly, reflected behind me in mirrors) when I was in my most consistent period of daily LBRP-ing. The Golden Dawn group I was in correspondence with at the time said that it was pretty typical for neophytes to draw that kind of attention from "astral nasties," but that they were harmless except as a distraction (or if they became the focus of obsession). The usual advice was to ignore them and direct one's attention more fully into the ritual itself.
 
 
*
18:17 / 20.10.05
I was about to say I don't tend to see stuff, but that isn't really true— If I look, I can see what looks like thicker air where an area is more active. But that's all, and it's hardly enough to go on.

I have seen one thing though. Woke up from a sound sleep with some bugger on top of me "throttling" me. Hadn't been dreaming. I physically had difficulty breathing, which isn't something I'm prone to. It really pissed me off. I'm sure the fucker was just trying to get my attention. It succeeded, too; I threw it off me, woke my partner (not quite intentionally, but I wasn't in any mood to be quiet and considerate), and we warded the room really tight before I went back to sleep. What the being looked like was indistinct and shadow colored, but definitely 3-dimensional and definitely opaque.

Apparently a NCP has to be really determined to get me to see it; otherwise I'm effectively blind.
 
 
LVX23
19:08 / 20.10.05
When I was around 18 or 19 a friend and I were out at night exploring this new development. It was up on a small mesa with scattered construction and a lot of open space. Up the dirt road and to the right there was one of the first model homes being built. Across the road from the house to the left was a very steep incline going up about 25 feet.

We were standing down the road looking at the house about 50 feet away. In front of the house we both noticed what looked like two very large black dogs sort of circling each other. It was night but there was a lot of light. Suddenly, they both bounded across the road in big leaps, then up the very steep slope in 1 or 2 more leaps. They moved very quickly and covered far more ground than a dog ever could. Our impression was that the two creatures looked and acted much more like panthers than dogs.

This was in suburban Southern California. Not too many panthers there lurking around construction sites that I know of.
 
 
Earlier than I thought
20:09 / 20.10.05
I've only seen these buggers when waking up suddenly. I'd dismiss them as waking dreams, only my partner tends to wake around the same time and say "what the fuck is that?" which rather puts a damper on one's evening.
I've seen a shadow cat very clearly whilst fully awake, which was touching and strangely amusing, in that it moved in the guilty way that a cat does when it really doesn't want to get spotted.
 
 
*
20:29 / 20.10.05
LVX, a friend and former working partner of mine, with much better eyesight than me, used to describe shadow dogs which he called "territorials." They were all over the place in the small area of Central Florida we used to patrol. They stayed in an extremely narrow area and would simply prowl around until someone stepped into the boundary of whatever seemed to be defined as their space, and then they would attack— usually just 'hitting' one of us hard enough to knock us backward out of the space.
 
 
Fritz K Driftwood
04:49 / 21.10.05
Yikes! I would avoid most of these situations if I could.

Lepidopteran - I do the LBRP everyday, and have been for about a year now. This is the first "weird" thing that I have seen, and my roomie is not magickally inclined at all. I don't know if that means anything or not.

Mmothra - I didn't feel threatened by it. Felt more like it was "passing through" and through my apartment was the shortest route. Have started to cast my banishings a little farther out though...

id entity - I've read about people who have experienced entities sitting on their chest and choking them. The entity often appears as a crone, or less often as a very old man.

LVX23 - I will post my faery/dog/dolphin story when I have time in the next couple of days.

I guess that while I would be freaked out if I had seen a ghost, at least I have a place for ghosts in my world view. Shadow people, while interesting to read about, don't really make sense to me. I don't just don't get (grok) them.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:08 / 21.10.05
Previous discussion about Shadow People:
http://www.barbelith.com/topic/2147
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
10:38 / 21.10.05
Gotta say this thread makes me feel a bit uncomfortable... Dunno, there's just a little too much uncritical acceptance going on here for my liking... I think threads like this have a lot to do with why many users of barbelith find the Temple forum inaccessible, confusing or laughable. It reads to me like anecdotal stories about vastly different subjective experiences of visual phenomena, shoehorned together to create a dubious and not particularly convincing narrative wherein there are such creatures as shadow people.

I think it bolsters the ego hugely, since we're obviously all great psychics and magicians to be able to see such shadowy beasts that are invisible to most, and clearly have incredibly strong magical auras for the shadow people to sit up and take notice of us. But it makes for a bit of a dead end conversation. It's interesting to hear people's anecdotes, up to a point, but I'd like to hear more of people's thoughts and analysis of these experiences rather than a homogenous, uncritical "yeah, shadow people, dude..." acceptance of what is going on here.

I've had weird stuff like this happen to me, but as to what was actually going on, I really couldn't say. I wouldn't like to automatically reach for the "spooky occult" explanation, because I think scepticism is crucial in magical practice if you are genuinely interested in trying to understand what is happening, rather than just immersing yourself in the cul-de-sac of ego-gratifying fantasy. I think that healthy scepticism about the weird areas we deal in is what makes the difference between a good magician and... I suppose, David Icke or somebody like that. The deluded UFO nut who unflinchingly accepts the most extraordinary hypothesis based on the flimsiest of evidence.

What do you think about this stuff? There's an awful lot of it, in all cultures, and part of it seems to be related to the strange overlap between dream and waking. For instance, a few of these accounts sound like classic examples of sleep paralysis - the so-called "Old Hag" experience, where you wake up with some entity on your chest pinning you down, also thought to be the factual basis for accounts of everything from succubi to alien abduction. Now as I understand it, the physiological explanation for this experience is that the muscles in your body go to sleep when you do, in order to stop you getting up and acting out the events of your dreams. Sleep paralysis is what happens when you wake up, but the muscles in your body are still asleep and you scarily don't have conscious control of them for a minute or so. Panic sets in and you can't move or feel as if something is sitting on your chest and pinning you down.

I went through a phase of this happening quite regularly a few years back, and I think the phenomena is supposed to be related to stress. What I find interesting though is the ubiquitous presence of an entity. It's almost as if your liminal state between sleeping and waking allows "entities" out of your dreams to manifest visibly in your bedroom for a couple of minutes. I'd hesitate to say that there is necessarily anything "supernatural" going on there, or that these "entities" have any form of objective validity, consciousness or agenda of their own, beyond being just... dreamstuff... for want of a better word. But the whole area is quite interesting.

I would perhaps relate it to the mysteries of Yesod, which is probably best thought of not as a spooky realm or cosmic dimension from a Fantastic Four comic, but simply a term for the very real and very interesting territories of dream, fantasy and imagination that are a huge and not particularly well understood aspect of our day-to-day lives. Looking at the Tree of Life, the sphere of Yesod is the bridge between the physical world of matter and the other Sephiroth of the Tree that collectively comprise something we might call GOD, or the Soul or the Universe. For magicians, the mysteries of Yesod (dream, imagination, visualisation, etc..) are essential tools of the trade. It's not that "it's all in our imagination", but that logistically the imagination is the aspect of consciousness that gives us access to and a means of communion with the wider mysteries of the universe/soul/GOD/etc... Just as Yesod is the Sephiroth that connects Malkuth to all of the other Spheres of the Tree of Life. Again, it's interesting that the path between Malkuth and Yesod is The Universe - which does seem to hint at the role that dreams and imagination play as an essential engine, or possibly filter, by which we experience the Universe writ large. Again, nothing necessarily spooky or supernatural about this - it could well be considered a poetic language for talking about something we experience every moment of every day.

Not sure exactly what I'm grasping towards with this, but maybe it would be profitable to look at some of these weird phenomena, such as "shadow people" in terms of that liminal space between waking consciousness and the territories of dream. Just a thought really. I think it's more interesting to examine these experiences more closely, and speculate a bit more widely, than it is to just uncritically accept that there is such a thing as a secret race of "shadow people", which we have all seen, thus making us special.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
11:13 / 21.10.05
I've had this kind of thing happen (sleep paralysis, hag phenomena, weight on chest, Nameless Horror in room ect), but I've never percieved the "visitor" as a Shadow Person™. Instead, the visual componant of the experience has been a robed figure, or an animal of some freakish kind. I'm not terribly familiar with or interested in shadow people, but for as long as I can remember I've lapped up stories about ghosts and hauntings, both fictional and purportedly true, which tend to feature cowled monks and animals.

This would figure if the visual componant of such an experience is informed to an extent by the psychological and cultural makeup of the witness, as has been suggested by various people in respect of supposed alien encounters.

This still leaves us with the question of who or what might be hiding behind the shadow or under the robes...
 
 
Chiropteran
13:30 / 21.10.05
I think it bolsters the ego hugely, since we're obviously all great psychics and magicians to be able to see such shadowy beasts that are invisible to most, and clearly have incredibly strong magical auras for the shadow people to sit up and take notice of us.

Well, not so much, since these (broad) types of experiences are very common among people who have no other particular interest in the occult (etc.). The attitude you describe is an easy trap to fall into, though, which is why the GD group I mentioned before cautioned students against paying too much attention to the phenomenon. It is not, they made it clear, a "sign of success" - quite the opposite, in fact, if you let it distract you.

Whether the apparent "entities" have any objective existence is a question we have to consider for any non-material being we work with. For practical purposes, and acute relief, it may be enough to know that "hags" (for example) often do respond to traditional folk-magic protections (Bible or open scissors under bed, sleeping with windows closed and a bowl of water and salt or a sieve by the head of the bed, etc.). The problem gets dealt with on its own terms, and the skeptic goes to work after a good night's sleep.

As for "uncritical acceptance," people are just describing their experiences (and covering a pretty wide field of 'shadowy presences,' too), but I haven't noticed anyone being too definitive about the "reality" of the whatever-underlies-whatever-was-happening. Maybe we can take the anecdotes as "pre-critical" and start from there?

Dang, I've got more to say but I've got a meeting. Back later.
 
 
Axolotl
14:00 / 21.10.05
I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents here as a non-temple poster: I've experienced what Gypsy called the "Old Hag" experience a few times. The first time it happened I was absolutely terrified as I woke up, unable to move, with what I can only describe as a presence lurking in the top corner of my room. A very scary experience, but one that I was able to explain away once I did some research as the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Now that I know this, when it does happen it is far less scary.
This is obviously different from some the experiences cited here. I'd also like to make it absolutely clear I am not seeking to dismiss anyone's experiences, but I thought I'd put it in as an example of it happening to someone not involved in the occult.
 
 
Earlier than I thought
14:31 / 21.10.05
Ah well, fair points all. I would have definitely written my 'bedroom visitor' off immediately if there hadn't been the odd incident of multiple witnesses (that's two, before anyone starts conjecturing about my sleeping habits). I remain somewhat unconvinced, but it's an interesting coincidence.
Now that cat, on the other hand; that was bloody well there in full view.
 
 
*
17:51 / 21.10.05
As for "uncritical acceptance," people are just describing their experiences (and covering a pretty wide field of 'shadowy presences,' too), but I haven't noticed anyone being too definitive about the "reality" of the whatever-underlies-whatever-was-happening. Maybe we can take the anecdotes as "pre-critical" and start from there?

That was pretty much my intention.

In the absence of that information actually mattering to me, which it does much less often than one might think, I'm not really worried about whether the "entities" I experience are "actually real." There are almost no tests for this which actually discount neuro-psychological fabrication, so I tend to "act as if" when action seems to be called for and maintain a position of agnosticism once the situation is dealt with. If the thread meanders into debunking mystical hogwash, that's fine by me.
 
 
Dead Megatron
21:30 / 21.10.05
I was never a person to see things, I am more one to feel things in my skin and bones (and, most of all, my tongue... go figure). Man, do I envy you guys, I'd love to actually see something. That would really put an end to my periodic crisis of faith.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
21:35 / 21.10.05
Ha bloody ha! Never put an end to mine...
 
 
LVX23
22:36 / 21.10.05
It reads to me like anecdotal stories about vastly different subjective experiences of visual phenomena, shoehorned together to create a dubious and not particularly convincing narrative wherein there are such creatures as shadow people.

Hmm... Kinda sounds like magick to me. And mine were shadow dogs.
 
 
LVX23
22:42 / 21.10.05
I went through a phase of this happening quite regularly a few years back, and I think the phenomena is supposed to be related to stress.

I think it's a natural part of the path. You enter a phase of obsessing about your own personal story that's evolving around you, getting weirder and weirder as it reinforces itself through willed experience. Creating a solid magickal belief system starts to become akin to a vast conspiracy. It seems so real and meaningful until the experiences start to move so quickly that you can't keep up. You end up square in the crossroads between illumination and madness. Madness dives deeper and deeper into obsessing about the personal myth that's now become global. Illumination is the sudden realization that all perspectives are ultimately theoretical and subjective. Perceive the data, find a pattern, give it meaning, and move on.
 
 
Colonel Kadmon
00:30 / 24.10.05
Magic - for me - is fundamentally about the relationship between an individual mind and collective reality.

No-one is denying that you experienced these things, but if you are saying that these are objective beings, it seems unlikely. What is their purpose? Why and how should such a thing exist?

If, on the other hand, they are aspects of your mind - sounds to me like the effects of stress rather than magic. My wife (who doesn't practise magic) has experienced similar things. I (who do, including extended periods of LBRP practice) never have, despite also being told about "astral nasties". Truth is, I'd love such a thing to happen, or any kind of hallucination, but it never has, no matter how many rituals I do or drugs I take. The difference - teacher training.
 
 
Evil Scientist
13:58 / 24.10.05
They stayed in an extremely narrow area and would simply prowl around until someone stepped into the boundary of whatever seemed to be defined as their space, and then they would attack— usually just 'hitting' one of us hard enough to knock us backward out of the space.

Going back to these shadow dogs. Was this a continuous event? Or only once or twice. As there was an actual physical component to the phenomena? Did you try and investigate them any further? You say "hitting", what did it feel like? More details if'n you please.
 
 
Unconditional Love
14:10 / 24.10.05
Have you ever thought somethings might just lose there shadow and it goes wandering off on its own.

Pity all those lost shadows looking for there owners.
 
 
Unconditional Love
15:25 / 24.10.05
I feel kinda sorry for them really, they probably try to wake you up, because maybe you know there owner, poor little shadows.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
08:09 / 25.10.05
Apache?
 
 
*
15:35 / 25.10.05
I wouldn't say continuous, more like regular. We didn't encounter them every single time we went out looking for troub— er, investigating disturbances, but it was remarkable if we didn't see even one. No physical component was perceptible to me, although as I said if they hit one of us— Gryphon, almost invariably, probably because he was always, er, most actively defensive, but P. and C. were hit once or twice as well, IIRC— the person they hit would be rocked or even be knocked a step or two backward. I don't know what this felt like from personal experience; Gryphon described it as a physical sensation like something large and heavy impacting him in the chest or back. Nothing sharp and no real pain, but definite force.

"Dog" in this case is more a description of how they were functioning than what they looked like. Gryphon described them as vague, dark creatures which seemed quadrupedal, and they were territorial, so we ended up thinking of them as dogs.
 
  
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