Why do only people who believe see "shadow people"?

[gelatin]

It seems that there are several explanations for why someone would see what is commonly referred to as a "shadow person". The wikipedia article states some good ones, and these are things that could affect anyone. However, it seems to me that it only happens to woo believers, which I find kind of strange. Is it that non-believers just write it off immediately and never discuss it?

I am 31, but I saw something when I was around 17. It was probably around 9 or 10 o'clock at night, and I was doing homework in my room. I was not extremely tired (although I can not recall how much or how little sleep I may have been getting at the time), nor had I ever done any drugs. I had come down the stairs from my well-lit attic bedroom and all the lights were off in the rest of the house below. I closed my bedroom door behind me, went to the kitchen and grabbed something from the fridge. I opened the door to my bedroom/attic, and at the top of the stairs was a black figure. It was just as is usually described, pure black (I recall it's form blocking the view of a window), and it was definitely in a form similar to that of a person.

It lingered for a few seconds and its entire body darted to the right (its left), where the stairwell wall blocked my view of it. The entire form moved, meaning that it did not step to the right. Here's the rub: I can distinctly recall the sound it made as it moved to the right. My room was carpeted and it made a noise as if it "scooted" on the carpet. I can't explain that one. Auditory hallucination, maybe.

I stood there for a maybe a minute, but I was not scared in the least bit and I made my way upstairs. And of course nothing was up there. I resided in that room for many years afterwards, and never saw or heard anything else out of the ordinary.

This is my only experience with something that would be considered to be "paranormal". I don't think it was, and it could have been any of the more sensible explanations, electromagnetic fields being the most likely I suppose.

Anyways, I'm a non-believer now, I wasn't necessarily when I was 17, but it really wasn't something I ever really thought about then. It's made me curious as to why these sort of experiences don't happen to more people considering the explanantions.

Any thoughts?

 

[Denver]

Any chance it was of similar shape to the fridge lightbulb?

One reason that I've heard given for unbelievers not seeing these things, is that their negative energy somehow drives the entities away (or perhaps the positive energy of the believers attracts them). A simpler explanation is that its dark, your eyes are trying to constantly adjust and pick out "differences" in the darkness, and you brain turns differences into shapes.

In the end, its just an anecdote, like a million others, with no other evidence. Video would be nice in these cases.

 

[gelatin]

Yea, I've thought about the fridge light thing. And that is a possibility, but to me that would cause a dark circular image (maybe?) when I opened the door to the lit room. Perhaps not. It could be chalked up to the firdge light, sure.

I'm not trying to portray my story as evidence of anything, I'm just using it start a conversation on something I find to be fascinating. Has anyone else myabe had a similar experience at all?

 

[Fnord]

I played futbol ("soccer") as a teenager. After one particularly nasty head-on collision, I began to see "Shadow People." It was later determined that a blood vessel in my eye had ruptured, and that the shadow I saw was actually a small clot floating around in my eyeball. Now that I'm in my fifties, I see more of these "floaters" as I get older. They are naturally-ocurring. Even though some people would swear that they see "Shadow People" (or "Ghosts"), I would suggest that they first have their eyes examined for internal debris, scratches on the cornea, or othe aberrations.

 

[Ysidro]

Believer: "OMG, a Shadow Person! AIIEE!"

Non-believer: "Huh, I wonder what that shadow was caused by. That was weird."

 

[Brattus]

Your remembering something that happened 14 years ago. A memory that shares space with 14 years of scifi and horror movies, books and stories you've seen or picked up along the way.
Perhaps your memory of that time has become a bit out of focus to what really occurred?
Like going back to a place you were at as a teenager and being amazed at how much smaller it is than you remembered.

 

[gelatin]

Yea yea, my experience could be a lot of things, and maybe I am misremembering the event. Regardless, my primary interest is in why these types of things tend to happen to people who believe it to be supernatural, but they tend to rarely ever happen to those who do not believe in such things. If there is a scientific explanation, then why aren't these events being reported more evenly throughout those who do and do not believe? Does that make sense? Is it just that no one talks about it?

I guess it's not really an answerable question, but those are the best kind.

 

[Brattus]

Believer: "OMG, a Shadow Person! AIIEE!"

Non-believer: "Huh, I wonder what that shadow was caused by. That was weird."

I believe this post gives you the answer you seek then.

 

[jasonpatterson]

I suppose that there are two explanations that make sense. The first, and the one that doesn't require us to explain an entirely new class of phenomena, is the response that was given above is the usual one for skeptics/believers.

The second is that people who are able to see these things tend to believe in them. I don't think that this is true, but it would explain the difference. The idea would be much like a color vision test. Only those with color vision can distinguish the number in the pattern of orange and green dots, so they are the only ones who see it.

Not surprisingly, I'm in favor of the former over the latter...

I wonder if it could have been your own shadow cast from the fridge light (or perhaps a passing car or some other changing light source.) That would explain the human form and might explain the sliding movement of the person as well, depending on the layout of the lights in the area. I just tried this in the doorway to my classroom and it definitely looked like my shadow slid across the wall when one of the two light sources that were illuminating the wall was blocked.

 

[bickerer]

I think that all of us (skeptics and believers) see things that are inexplicable, but the believers "rational explanation" is that it must be something supernatural. The answer to the question in the OP is that it isn't only believers who SEE these things, but it is only believers that attribute them to ghosties and ghoulies and bigfeet. The rest of us look for other causes, such as the ones that have already been listed, and, really, are much much more likely. I recall quite clearly seeing fairies dancing on a basement windowsill when I was about 6, but in hindsight, I'm pretty sure that it was a trick of the dimming evening light, coupled with being a sleepy 6 year old, and perhaps too much ice cream before bed. I would NEVER trot that story out as my personal and ridiculously far-fetched proof of fairies, but a more superstitious person might.

 

[Gagglegnash]

Hi

I hit a ghost with my car, once. Really.

Being who and what I am, I went back after I stopped to figure out what had caused the event.

There was snow, tiny spherical... uhhh... flakes for lack of a better word, falling in a strictly delimited sheet about 18 inches thick across the road and nearby fields. What I had seen was my misaligned headlight shining up and to the left of my direction along the road illuminating the bits of snow falling across the road.

To this day, I can still remember the girl's face and gown.

How did that happen?

The brain is designed to make sense of stuff. In the absence of actual stuff, it's likely to fill in details from a common pool of similar entities from similar situations. In this case, my brain 'projected' a face and cloths onto the 'girl' I was about to run down with my car.

Instant ghost.

Seeing a shape in the dark, late at night, after coming in from a more brightly lit place? One explanation is the area of the eye where the optic nerve and a mess of blood vessels enter the eye. This large, spidery, hairy-looking area looks that way because the vessels obscure the seeing-businessey bits of the retina below them. it's also off to the side of the fovea, where you do most of your seeing, so if you try to look straight at it, it will swing away just as quickly as you move your eye.

(From the Vision and the Eye Image Gallery of the U. Florida website)


Add to this that people are right-eyed, or left-eyed, and you get the general direction in which it will swing.

Your brain knows that there can't be an abstract, spidery, hairy entity standing at the top of your stairs (where you know there is a large, human-sized area full of nothing in particular through which you have recently walked) so it fills in details from your experiences, which means, human sized, capable of moving there by itself since you didn't put it there, and fairly ominous what with all that fuzzy hair and arms and things.

Unless your experiences differ significantly from other humans, that means another human. Instant Shadow Man... errr... Shadow Woman... Shadow Person... whatever.

As for the sound, people experience similar things all the time. You see something move and you hear typical house noise (creaks, clicks, water running in pipes, etc.) and suddenly you know that you have a rat in your roon large enough to move the thing you saw move.

Now, in this particular case, what our exemplar (let's call him Bob) actually saw move was a bit of paper in a draft, just coming out of his blind spot, and what Bob heard was a bit of a clunk from his house settling. His brain, knowing that he was alone in the house, added those details up to a rat large enough to move the bookcase on top of which the paper lay.

AAAIIIEEE! GIANT SUMATRAN RAT!!

Why?

There used to be three kinds of people in the world (and probably still are). One type, upon seeing and hearing something odd, ignored it, the second type had their attention instantly drawn to it, and the third pulled a Rincewind and immediately departed the area in all due haste... and maybe a bit more than that.

Of the three, when faced with an actual threat, only the latter two tended to survive long enough to reproduce. You are the progeny of the second type and have apparently inherited their survivey tendencies so your brain is set up to filter unknown stimuli looking for the largest practical threat.

You're a survivor. Enjoy!

 

[gelatin]

Actually I was walking from a dark room into a lit room, but it's probably all the same.

 

[Mainiac]

I see things out of the corners of my eyes all the time, it's happening more the older I get (I'm 45 now). It started to happen about 5 years ago and I never thought it was anything paranormal. It only happens when I move my eyes rapidly from side to side (such as looking from left to right) and when it's dark (at home in the evening for example). It's just old eyes, but to my brain it looks like dark "forms". If I was inclined to do such a thing, I could call them shadow people.

I never recall having this happen when I was younger, which is opposite from your experience.

 

[gelatin]

Also, I was looking straight up the stairs at what I perceived to be a completely black mass right in front of me. This definitely was not out of the corner of my eye or anything like that. And although the whole ordeal only lasted seconds (maybe 10 or 15, not sure) it was long enough to register without much of a question.

I gotta chalk it up to bad wiring in the attic. I really don't know.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Believer: "OMG, a Shadow Person! AIIEE!"

Non-believer: "Huh, I wonder what that shadow was caused by. That was weird."

And this, my friends, is purty much the entire story, not just of shadow people, but of:

Believer: "OMG, an NDE! There is an afterlife!"

Non-believer: "Huh, my brain sure did some weird things while I was having surgery."

~~ Paul

 

[Ysidro]

And this, my friends, is purty much the entire story, not just of shadow people, but of:

Believer: "OMG, an NDE! There is an afterlife!"

Non-believer: "Huh, my brain sure did some weird things while I was having surgery."

~~ Paul

'zactly. Some folks have made up their mind as soon as they experience something. Others are willing to put explanation on the back burner, pending more data.

 

[jasonpatterson]

I see things out of the corners of my eyes all the time, it's happening more the older I get (I'm 45 now). It started to happen about 5 years ago and I never thought it was anything paranormal. It only happens when I move my eyes rapidly from side to side (such as looking from left to right) and when it's dark (at home in the evening for example). It's just old eyes, but to my brain it looks like dark "forms". If I was inclined to do such a thing, I could call them shadow people.

I never recall having this happen when I was younger, which is opposite from your experience.

Have you visited an optometrist lately? Just a suggestion in case the floaters in your eyes are a sign of some sort of preventable deterioration going on. I get them all the time, have since I was a kid. Looking back and forth rapidly stirs them up from where they've settled at the bottom of your eyes. The same thing should happen if you stare downward for a while then look up at the sky.

 

[dingogirl]

My 8 year old sees shadow people. She also saw a headless man once. She's so scared she won't sleep in her room at night, even though she knows it's not real. She's a normal child and isn't religious or spiritual.

 

[Brattus]

My 8 year old sees shadow people. She also saw a headless man once. She's so scared she won't sleep in her room at night, even though she knows it's not real. She's a normal child and isn't religious or spiritual.

AWW To have the imagination of an 8 year old again.
You just have to love the minds of children.

 

[Sparhawk]

The best I've seen is driving home one night from the inlaws, my wife and I both observed a white ghostly body, floating about 5 feet off the ground, moving out of a side street and towards us.
I stopped the car dead in the middle of the road, neither my wife or I said a word. As it got close it began to be clearer what it was ...

A teenager with blond hair and a white hoodie jacket and pants riding a ... wait for it ...
PENNY-FARTHING!

Weird and unusual yes, a ghost no.