Shadow Man

On a beautiful Friday in April, our group of friends arrived at the lake house we rented for the weekend. There were eleven women, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, listening to music, and playing games. Most of us have known each other for over twenty years. We always bring lots of food and drink to these gatherings, share rides, and once we arrive at the house on Friday, we don’t leave the premises until around noon on Sunday.

The house we rented sleeps 12 people and has everything one could possibly require, many bathrooms, two refrigerators, a fully equipped kitchen, a pool table, a fire pit, several decks, and best of all, the constant-level lake touches the edges of the decks.

That night, we were treated to spectacular thunder and lightning. Text messages started to pour in from our families back home as they experienced damaging hail and straight-line winds. Our weather remained the same, with storms surrounding us but only a few spatters of light rain.

We moved indoors after dark and soon we were seated around the dining room table playing Left-Right-Center, a dice game played with quarters or dollar bills. Everyone was laughing and screaming at the dice and having a great time.

I was facing the kitchen, and to the left of the refrigerator, a brightly-lit hallway led back to three of the bedrooms. A movement at the end of that hallway caught my attention.

A man-sized shadow figure moved across the hall, from one bedroom to another.

The figure was dark, more than 6 feet tall, bulky but not overweight, and had no discernible features. Although he was all black (or charcoal) color, he somehow reminded me of the Blue Man Group. His head was smooth, no suggestion of hair or ears. No facial features, and no hat. I saw no hands or legs, just the shape of a man, perhaps in a long coat, moving quickly, almost floating, across the hall. The hair rose on the back of my neck and chills ran up and down my back and my arms.

The woman seated across from me immediately asked loudly, “What’s wrong? What did you see?” She later told me that I turned as white as a sheet of paper. Simultaneously, the woman on my left said, “I saw something dark move out of the corner of my eye! What did you see?”

I stuttered out that I saw a dark figure at the end of the hall, and immediately the woman on my right said, “The moment before you saw it, I felt the atmosphere in the house change. It went from being full of jovial energy with laughter and happiness to a total energy drain to a black hole.”

We all jumped up and ran to the end of the hall and checked the bedrooms, every closet, looked under every bed, and even pulled down the attic access and climbed the ladder and found nothing but spider webs and insulation and vents. Although there was no way for him to leave that area without going past us, we still went downstairs and checked the garage, laundry room, and the bedrooms and bathrooms. Someone remarked that it might have been a warning for us to lock up since we had left the downstairs unlocked and unattended. After some discussion we settled down and resumed our game and gradually the atmosphere returned to normal.

Interestingly enough, later that night, one of my friends and I slept in the bedroom from which the shadow man appeared. After our initial shock, I don’t think any of us felt particularly threatened by this apparition. I had an impression that he was not interested in us, and was perhaps even unaware of us.

There was some speculation afterward by one of the women who didn't see it that it was probably a reflection of lights across the water and so forth, but although I didn’t have much to say, and didn’t want to belabor the point, it wasn’t a trick of light or a reflection; it was a dark shape of a man in a place where he couldn’t be.