It’s the personal stories man…those are the ones that really do it for me. No matter if I’m reading the latest and greatest horror book that’s out there, reading the words from those who swear that they’ve experienced something so out of this world, that it made them feel like they were in the Twilight Zone, is what sends shivers down my body.

I received an email from Randy, who felt he needed to tell of his personal encounters with the strange. Disembodied voices, demons that sit in a balcony at night…and sleep paralysis. All these spooky things make for a good horror story. A true horror story? Who knows. But I have a feeling that Randy won’t be forgetting what he experienced as a child in a small village in Guyana.

This is gonna be a tl;dr.. I’m not exactly a masters of horror writer, so this isn’t really juicy. I’ve been reading this site these past few days, going from bottom to top about the paranormal. Stumbled upon it and hooked ever since. Right now I’m down to page 16. Anyways, I came across the shadow people stories and after that, I guess I have to get this out. This is not particularly about shadow people, though, and it’s gonna be pretty long-winded.
Before I came to the U.S, I used to live in a village in Guyana. Stories were about about local legends, and kids were always spooking each other. There was even a burial ground in the village, and people were afraid to walk at nights. I myself was always a little paranoid, and I hated coming home at nights from afterschool lessons when I’d have to walk alone. The trees just creeped me out.

Later one day, a lot of us had a hard time getting to school. You see, there are mini buses that go to town and drop people off, but sometimes, it’s hard to get a ride to town, so sometimes we have to walk all the way out of the village try to take buses from there. While I was walking on the road on one such day, I heard a voice say “hi”. At the same time I see black birds [Crows I guess] and I figure, maybe it was just the birds. Later when I get home and speak to one of my stepbrothers, I tell him about what I heard. He told me whenever I see those birds, just run away. Don’t know why. Just do it.

Then on one night, I’m home alone, watching t.v. I hated being alone in the house, and I didn’t really know why. Paranoia must be kicking in. I then get up to get some water near the kitchen door, and I hear a voice again, say “hi”. I close the door and pretend not to be spooked, but it had my heart going. I was thinking maybe those birds are right outside, or maybe it’s the house. This, I didn’t tell anyone. In later days, things would happen that led me to think maybe it was the house, as in, maybe it was haunted.

On one night, my brother told me he saw what he believed was a demon, sitting on what I’m going to call a “stump wall”. It’s basically like half of a wall, and there were two in the house. We were sleeping on the floor, behind the second, while the demon was probably on the first. I wasn’t awake, so I can’t know what he was talking about, only that he was spooked. Anyways, the day after it happens, he tells me about this thing that was perched on the wall, then climbed down and walked around. He said it looked significantly physically powerful, perhaps like a body builder, and he pulled the sheets over his face. I dismissed it and believed he was dreaming, finding it too strange to accept. I didn’t want to think about evil forces at work.

Some days later I even heard from my friend about “men in red robes” standing on out neighbour’s house. Usually, he worked for my dad and he would walk him home and pay him. He [My friend] was so scared, he ran faster than my dad could pedal. But that wouldn’t compare to the experience I would have later on.
This time, I sleep in the room with my mother and sister. That night I wake up, but I can’t move. In my right ear I can clearly feel something entering it, almost like pouring water. I can feel my mouth moving, but no words are coming out. This is all accompanied by a weird “whistling” noise and vibrations. I believe I’m under attack by some spirit, and I manage to fight it off. Now fully awake I, turned to my left, keeping my eyes closed. I hear the sound of a woman sobbing. Vroom! All those folktales come back. It seems to get louder and gravitate towards me, getting louder in the process and leave the room. I then open my eyes, and see a man, sitting there. You see the room has two bunk beds. I sleep on one, with my mom on the bottom, and no one uses the other bottom bunk. It’s always filled with clothes and other stuff, while my sister sleeps at the top. Even though light is coming into the room from the window, the figure is still black, and almost seems to be looking at me. He just sits where the ladder is, and I can’t bring myself to do anything about it. I just wait it out, and tell my dad about what happened. I don’t tell him about the man, but the strange occurance with my right ear and the paralysis. He tells me spirits were attacking me.

You see, my dad has some of the weirdest beliefs about the paranormal. He believes that if a person eats sugars, they will attract spirits to their body, claiming that the sugar becomes alcohol. Your body kind of forces your spirit to leave it, and then something else will try to take over. He claims this is why alcohol was named “spirits”. I don’t believe in this today, but at the time, it scared me enough to avoid candy and cake. He tells me of how he can see spirits, and I’d just look at him like he lost it. He’d tell me stories of how certain foods invite certain spirits, like how he unkowingly kept pork for a friend, and he started seeing spirits. He was pretty annoyed. My cousin [A female] then told me about how some dark figure grabbed her hair while she was taking a shower downstairs in our house, and she believed it to be my other cousin, who is well… Well he has a pretty dark complexion. But then this thing also chased her while she ran off, claiming after she gained distance looked back, it actually jumped towards her. I haven’t asked her about it again.

Later on. we moved to the U.S., and things didn’t exactly stop there. The same incident with me happens again. I wake up before my body can move. This time, I’m laying in the chair, and my mother is trying to wake me. I hear her and I know I can’t move. I’m just laying there like “I hear you! Just wait! I can’t move yet!”. It’s funny looking back on it now. Though no longer a believer in the sugar theory, I would still get spooked out by ghost stories my dad would have with friends when we were visiting. I even noticed one day he placed a glass of water near the top of the door. It must have been there for months. I asked about it, and he said it’s to keep out evil spirits. Okay.

Later on while we stayed there, I watched a documentary on sleep paralysis and a lot of things just clicked. I stopped believing in the sugar theory and instead just accepted that sleep paralysis just happens. We even watched a doctor Oz episode last year that briefly spoke about it, and even then he told me he can’t accept it.  I’m like, “what part of that doesn’t make sense?” He says “because it’s inconsistent. It doesn’t happen al the time.” I tell him it doesn’t really matter, because we don’t really know about it. I explain for weeks at a time I wouldn’t have any incidents, even when I consume sugar. It just seems to come and go on it’s own.

Another peculiar belief he threw at me is that humans are supposed to sleep differently from how they are buried. He claims bodies are buried east to west, or west to east, and we aren’t supposed to sleep like dead people. The night he told me about that just had to be a night I get sleep paralysis. But not just that. When I wake up, I look on the blind to see an imprint of what seems to be a skull. Oh boy. I grab the blind and shake it. Spooked, but not convinced, as I’d once seen what seemed be a little boy, pitch black, standing in my room, but when I moved my head closer, it was just an illusion created from the blind.

Another theory is that the moon influences the mind, or spirits. He claims that when the moon is closer, and especially more “full”, we are more spiritually vulnerable. His example is my sister, who alway seems to be acting up when the moon is out. I didn’t believe that though, instead citing he’s giving her a silly excuse instead of holding her responsible. I have to admit no one really knows what’s going on with her, so whatever.

These days he tells me there is another world around us, but we can’t interact with it. I’ve been pretty benign for the most part, with no strange occurances. I have heard sounds when we moved again to a new property, though. There are days when I’d hear a “sigh” like noise in my right ear. Another day, I heard someone sounding like my uncle in my left ear. I had a headphone in that ear, plugged into my mp3 player, which was plugged into my computer. It can’t be used in that state, so what I heard, I don’t know. Some other time before, I heard someone banging on the room while I was alone at night on the computer. It sounded like it was very close to me. It sounded like it happened in my head though.

Nowadays I’m more skeptical and also learned of Hypnagogia, which I attribute to my whistling noise. I can hear it faintly even now as I type this. It just creeps over me and seems to get more intense as I focus on it. Ususally, the sensation of something entering my right ear comes after. The other sounds I heard seem more “ominous” to me though, and I believe the village in general is haunted.

Anyway, to wrap it up, I looked up shadow men in 2009, and just when I was starting to forget about these things, I come across the stories about them. What I saw didn’t wear a hat, and honestly seemed to be half-naked, but it came back to me, along with my cousin’s experiences. Part of what drove me to write this is the idea that shadow people are connected to tragedies or foreshadow disasters. Like that pokemon Absol. Hopefully I’ll never see either of those again. I have indeed had bad things happen to me over the years I’ve been here since 2003, almost after I saw the shadow sitting on the bed. Today, my mother was hit by a vehicle. She’s okay, though. I don’t particularly believe these things are for that purpose though. That they cause happenings or foreshadow them. I’ve had a lot things happen to me now when I look back, and there was especially a time where I was depressed when I didn’t graduate from highschool. But I feel to go picking these things out and attributing them to the shadow people is a bit of a mistake. Almost like the way people invented gods to explain night and day.

I honestly never gave the shadow that much thought until I first discovered it in a A Haunting episode [“Ghost hunter”]. It was kind of insignificant until now I guess; I never really paid attention to it that night. I was more spooked about voices and running footsteps outside. Aside from all that, I’m never anxious about being alone despite the sounds. I came to the site to learn more about the paranormal. If ghosts existed, I wanted an explanation for how people are still “alive”. How they still see without eyes and things like that. I wanted to understand the physical aspect behind it, and I still l don’t. Guess I’ll only know when I’m dead. I liked what you wrote about the Doris case, and I do agree with it.