To: obiwan@ghosts.org
From: imee@one.net.au
Date: May 26, 2001
Subject: Shadow Ghost
Location: Indeterminate
This story a part of Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
Hi all! I’ve been subscribing to this newsgroup for a while now, that I thought it’s about time to share my own experience.
When I was in my early teens, I had a bedroom with a big window and my bed was right beside it. One night I woke up to the sound of heavy breathing just outside my window and thought I saw a shadow duck for cover. I could still hear the heavy breathing, so I knew whoever it was, was still around. Being curious and thinking it might be a burglar, I wanted to look out of the window to see who it was. I knew I was relatively safe, since there were bars/grills and screens fitted to our windows, so I looked out. I couldn’t see anyone around… I tried to think rationally: there might be a couple going for it just around the corner or there might be a dog giving birth outside (imagine a dog doing la maz ) or there might be burglar. I knew I wasn’t fooling myself because I was getting scared and there was clearly no sign of any body outside! So I did the most logical thing I could think of -- pull the covers over my head and try to go back to sleep.
The following night, I was still scared so I made plans to sleep in the lounge room where there’s a big TV to try and keep my mind off the previous night’s events. Plus, we had two dogs at the time that sleep there! At this stage, I still haven’t told anyone about it. I thought, I’ll just get through tonight… nothing will happen… things will go back to normal and I won’t be scared any more.
Our lounge room certainly felt safer to me than my room, until I laid down on the sofa and realised that it was right next to the biggest window in the house. The window is facing the street and there are street lights that shine in even when the lights are turned off, which helped me calm down a bit and, eventually, go to sleep.
I woke up in the middle of the night, again. This time there were no sounds of heavy breathing, which was a good start… I had a look around the room just to make sure the dogs are fairly close by. The fan was on and it blew the light curtains away from the window… and there it was…. A tall shadow of a man just standing there. I tried to stay calm, and pretend I’m still asleep. (in case it’s a burglar, I didn’t want it to know I’m awake) I turned to face the window and pulled my blanket so that my face was under it’s shadow, then tried to see who this man behind the shadow is. It was really strange because I can see through the shadow which was cast on the fly screen, but there was no one out there. I stared at it for a few minutes, thinking if it’s a ghost it’ll go away… it didn’t. I looked around for any trees, branches, bushes or anything that might’ve cause the shadow, but I’ve got a clear view of the streetlights… nobody, nothing there… By this time, I realise that the shadow seems too tall to be an average man (about 7-8 ft and no one in our area is that tall – we’d have noticed!)… I thought that it’s probably floating on air and this scared me all the more…
I called out to my mom 5 times (I was counting), I thought any sane burglar or ghost would go once they know you’re calling for back up… it didn’t. It just hovered there! On the sixth call my mom finally got up and I heard her footsteps coming. I looked back at the shadow it started to move sideways, floating to the right side of the window until it was gone by the time my mom got to the lounge room. Since I couldn’t make sense of what happened, so I just told her that there might be a burglar because I just saw a shadow outside. She turned on all the lights outside to see if anyone was around or running away. I wasn’t surprised to hear that there was no one out there.
This was my first brush with the unexplained and I still don’t know what it was that I saw or what exactly happened. I’ve had other experiences since and met other people with similar experiences. (A group of friends from a nursing college told me they once heard heavy breathing then saw a shadow on the walls of a well lit room, I told them about my experience afterwards and it was the first time ever that I spoke about it)
If there’s anyone around who might have any ideas, theories or similar experiences, please don’t hesitate to email me.
Maria