True Ghost Stories

Shadow people

June 23, 2014 |  22 comments
Image Credit: sxc.hu I've recounted this story many times in my life, and while most people listen with interest, even half-heartedly, the end result is always the same "Yeah, right". When I was about 18 months old, my family moved from their house and into the one I've lived in for the rest of my life. Funnily enough, my old house was on a road/street called Cemetery Road, and, of course, was right next to a Cemetery, but it wasn't until I was in the families new home that strange events occurred.

In those early years, it would be impossible for me to remember everything with such clarity, I was a young child, but the event I'm about to recall I remember with such crystal clearness I could be tricked into thinking it happened yesterday.

Now, my exact age, I am unsure of, but it would have been 4-6, at my best guess. I was sat at the bottom of my stairs while my mother was doing the ironing upstairs, I was looking around the house, waiting for my mother to finish and for us to go pick my sister up from school, it was sunny outside and I couldn't have expected what happened next. As I turned around from looking out my window next to the front door, I looked through the banister rails of my stairs towards my kitchen door. There, in the hall way, I spotted a "man". I say it was a "man" as it was the best way I could describe it as, and it wouldn't be for over a decade later that I would realise what I saw was not a ghost, but a Shadow Person. The "man" was standing, looking at me, with a Benedictine Monks robe on, which was the same colour they should be, brown. The robe hood was up, but instead of a face under the cowl, it was just blackness. Pure blackness. A shadow. I remember looking down at the man's feet and noticing nothing was there, no shadow, but I wasn't sure if it was covered by the robe or not at the time.

I remember staring for a few seconds before, and this is based purely on the testimony of my mother, I started talking to the "man". What I said, I don't know and it would require a lucky and great mental effort on my mother to remember. However, it was this exact talking that made my mother hurry out of the spare room where she was ironing (and I think she was carrying washing, I can't remember clearly enough) and for her to ask "Who are you talking to?" I turned to her, looking up the stairs, pointing to the direction of my kitchen doorway and saying "That man there". This caused my mother to come down the stairs, I turned back to look at the "man" but he/it was no longer there. My mother go half way down the stairs, saw nobody was there and asked "You didn't open the door, did you?" and I replied "I can't reach it" (it being the door bolt, but in reality I could have, but not without my mother hearing the noise, even with her 50% hearing).

So, we went to pick my sister up and I was sitting in the back of the car, when my sister got in my mother said to her "I think (my name) saw a ghost" and my sister sort of chuckled and didn't really care.

So, that would be the end to it, right? Well, not for me. However, the events I'm about to describe I can't remember as clearly, only that they happened and my mother and father both can attest to it happening and what I claimed happened in the following years. From the day onward, I would often be awoken, every night, by footsteps outside my door, on the landing, coming up the stairs and doors opening and closing. I would get out of bed, walk across the landing, then into my mother and fathers room, squeeze next to my mother and go to sleep (this often displaced by father, much to his anger). It happened so much my mother and I developed a way of communicating, because our walls were next to each other, but pretty far away in terms of walking distance, she told me to knock on the wall and wake her up if I was scared. I only remember doing it once or twice, I would usually get up and go into hers. However, I can't attest to being 'scared' when I did so, but whatever my emotions, I did get out of bed and into theirs.

This happened for a few months, eventually my father, a medical doctor, took me to my legal doctor (UK law) and he talked to me for awhile about what had happened, which resulted in him telling my parents "There is no way this child is making this up. He doesn't have the world knowledge to do so, it's too detailed" or words to that effect. This annoyed my father, I was a bright child, so it was dismissed as me being smart enough to fabricate such a tale. My mother, however, knew otherwise, for she had experienced at least twice, at the hospital she worked, two ghosts appearing before her, with one walking through a wall right in front of her. So it was incredibly comforting to know that somebody believed me.

This carried on for a few more years. One night, I went into my parents room, my dad got out in a huff and walked to the spare room, which was down the landing, past the stairs. He did so in darkness, but upon reaching the spare-room, he hit the landing light switch next to the doorway and refused to turn it off while he slept. He never explained why then and not the other times. However it was shortly after this event that my father, a religious man, brought in a Priest to bless the house. Myself and my family talked to the Priest for awhile before we blessed every room in the house and all the outside outbuildings.

This didn't stop the noises, the feelings of being watched, the "barging past" bump you got on the landing. I was the only one, to my knowledge, who experienced these. The last event was my loft/attic hatch, which is a pressure-lock system, meaning you have to apply pressure from below for it to lift out of it's latch and fall open... Opened on it's own outside my room one night. I was awake, so was my mother and sister (my father had left my home by now, family issues). From that day onward, I never experienced such events again. Well, I say that, but occasionally stuff has happened over the years, but nothing to the degree it was during those years.

I have talked to my mother about this part of my life many times. She believes that young people become extra sensitive to paranormal events which usually passes with age. However, there is one specific conversation topic which makes me shiver with goosebumps, even as I type this, that goes something like this:

"You would often say that you could hear doors opening, closing, banging" my mother would say "But, you would always tell me this by ending 'It's not a door of the house. It's not a door I recognise'"

It wasn't until over a decade after the end to the majority of these events that I happened to read up on the Shadow Person phenomenon. On one article it talks about them before explaining there are several kinds. There, in the list of types of Shadow Person, is one that wears a Monk's Robe.

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