Shadow People - Unpleasant Dreams 3

Shadow People. What are they? We discuss these mysterious entities on this week’s edition of Unpleasant Dreams!

Cassandra Harold is your host.

EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold. Jim Harold is our Executive Producer.

Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media.

Further Reading

Want to spend some time curled up with a book or your kindle and getting terrified? Here are some great books to start with:

The Paranormal Researcher’s Guide to Shadow People by Charis Branson

The Hat Man: The True Story of Evil Encounters by Heidi Hollis

The Hatman and the Shadow People by Dominic Kelly

Shadow People: Who are they and where did they come from? By Dr. Terry King

Is browsing websites more your deal? I recommend the following sites to start with:

http://www.shadowpeople.org/

https://www.thoughtco.com/shadow-people-2596772

https://www.ranker.com/list/what-are-shadow-people/brandon-michaels

Of course, you can find true tales of shadow people and other creatures on Jim Harold’s Campfire podcast

You can find EM Hilker’s full article that this podcast was based upon HERE and a transcript of the podcast version below:

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Shadow People: Darker than the night itself, moving silently in the shadows. They skulk furtively in the periphery of your vision, sometimes lurking darkly at the foot of a sleeping person’s bed, sometimes watching almost unnoticed from a corner of the room. They are enigmatic in more ways than simply the obvious. There is little agreement in the paranormal community on who they are, what they want, where they come from, and why they’re here; in fact, there isn’t much in the way of agreement on what constitutes a Shadow Person in the first place.

There are, of course, agreed upon characteristics. They are nearly always humanoid in form (though there are reports of them in the form of cats, spiders, and other small creatures). They are even blacker than the surrounding darkness, such that they appear to be distinct three dimensional figures even in an unlit room. They almost always appear initially out of the corner of the eye before moving into full view. In some, though not all, cases they may have red eyes, glowing like embers in the dark.

Many researchers have attempted to sort through the varying accounts and traits of shadow people by breaking them down into categories: Rosemary Ellen Guiley divided them into seven classifications based on their role or intention (sentinels, lurkers, minding-their-own-business, predators, visitors, omens, and haunters); Dr. Terry King demarcates five categories based on appearance (humanoid, hat man, animals, black smoke, red-eyed), and Heidi Hollis, who was the originator of the term “Shadow People,” famously demonstrates the difference between regular Shadow People and The Hatman in her book of the same name.

These classifications are useful for study, to begin to wrap our collective head around what Shadow People are or what they are not. However, classification in and of itself does not and CAN not go very far in solving the mystery. Certainly it highlights the potential for there to be an entire society of shadow people, as diverse as human society or perhaps even as diverse as our own class, mammalia. We need to delve deeper than mere classification, perhaps even back through time itself.

As difficult as it is to categorize and define what makes an entity a Shadow Person, it’s equally difficult to say when the phenomenon began. The history of shadow people can be told briefly, if only because it came about in modern day in such an explosion of reports. Certainly Shadow People entered the zeitgeist in 2001 after they were discussed on the ...