FEBRUARY 2021

I had been living at this address with my room mates (my friend and his girlfriend) for over a year without any weirdness until one day when I got home from work. Their room and my room were in a half-basement with a landing leading to both. You would come down the stairs and there were two doors straight ahead leading to their room and my room, and a door to the left leading to the bathroom. Their room had a walk-through closet which connected to the bathroom, and they kept the door to the closet closed at most times.

As I got home, I went straight to my room as I usually did, and my buddy came down to say hi. His girlfriend, as usual, was at work, and he and the animals were all upstairs in the living room watching TV. As we were talking, I had casually looked into his room, where the light from the hall was landing on his wall when I saw a shadow pass along like someone was walking around in there.

I’m a veteran, and being the Mid-westerners we are, living in a less than nice part of town and remembering that someone a few blocks down had been murdered in a break in a month or two prior, I retrieved my gun while he kept an eye on his room, and then went in carefully, turning on the lights as I did, and nothing. No one in the closet, no one in the bathroom, and he would have seen someone leaving the bathroom on the other side. Nothing had been touched, nothing was missing. The only thing we had seen was a shadow of a man on the wall, and it hadn’t been either of us who had been standing there talking about the day. It wasn’t the shadow of anyone from outside, either, because it was around midnight and the only light entering his room had been from the hall where we had been. And we both saw it.

I knew about Shadow People, but had never seen one before. We were a little uneasy, but the night went on without further incident, and as humans are wont to do in the face of weirdness, we put it out of our minds with a gaming session or five, then went to bed. That wasn’t our last experience with it, though. Similar incidents happened over the following months.

One afternoon, I had had an earlier shift and got home earlier than usual. I was tired, but as someone approaching thirty and working a semi-manual labor job, I’m used to it. What I am not used to, however, is suddenly and rapidly being drained of all energy and involuntarily collapsing. Not into unconsciousness. Just collapsing. As if someone had removed all my muscles and I was just a loose bag of bone and tissue. You ever play with one of those toys as a kid that’s a string going though a bunch of blocks or something, but if you pull the string at the bottom it tightens into a figure, and if you let go of the string, it collapses? Yeah, like that.

I laid there for probably a good fifteen minutes before my buddy came down to say his usual “hi” and saw me just laying there. He worriedly asked if I was ok, and I told him that I collapsed and didn’t have the energy to move but was otherwise fine. I had run through math facts and other logic puzzles to check my mental faculties while I had been alone, and everything checked out. But I wasn’t exaggerating when I had told him I couldn’t move. I quite literally could not move a voluntary muscle. Not so much as my pinky toe. I was effectively paralyzed. He asked if I wanted him to call an ambulance, and I declined. I wasn’t in pain, and as far as I could tell, wasn’t in any immediate danger. I could still feel the floor beneath me where it was in contact with my body, and I could feel the temperature of the room like normal. I just couldn’t move. He sat there with me for maybe a half hour, and gradually I was able to regain movement, slowly at first, then able to sit up and drink a glass of water, and then finally stand up and walk around again. We didn’t know what had happened, and just chalked it up to weirdness.

Honestly, it wasn’t even until just now, typing this about the Shadow Person we had encountered in his room that I had even thought to connect the two incidents. I had collapsed just outside my room in the landing, right where we had been standing when we had seen the figure. I don’t know if they’re connected, but I figured I’d submit them together on the chance others have had similar experiences coincide.

Submitted by Isaac