I have only seen it once, but we have no name for it. I’m from China we have a rich culture of the unknown, but this is something different. Someone said that it might be a hallucination or imagination after watching horror movies like Nightmare on Elm Street or something else but it was very real and solid so I don’t think that’s what it was.
It happened when I was 6 or 7 years old, I remember that night the moon was so bright that I can see things clearly with lights turned off. I couldn’t sleep that night, so just laid sleepless. The door of my room is face the door of the bathroom. And between them is a long hallway. I remember that there was a tall man with a wide-brimmed black hat and long black coat that came from the living room wall on the right side. At first, I didn’t feel scared so I looked straight at him but he didn’t seem to realize that I was awake. I couldn’t see his face. He was like a silhouette. He stood in the bathroom in front of the mirror for a while like he was looking for something and walked straight to the left hallway towards my parents’ bedroom. I thought I heard my Mother whimper but I’m not sure. I laid there quietly to see if it came back, but it didn’t and I went back to sleep. The next morning, I talked to my Mother about it but she brushed me off like she didn’t want to talk about it and just said that I was just dreaming.
Now I’m 20 and have never forgotten about this. A few days before I found this website, I talked to my mother once again about it. She finally admitted that actually, she had a nightmare that night. In her dream there was a killer who was killing lots of people but no one could catch him because they couldn’t see his face. She felt he was looking for her, so she got up out of bed (In her dream) and hid behind her bedroom door. Suddenly, the killer found her and cut her neck with a machete and killed her. She said she then woke up from the nightmare with a cold neck and it was sore, it took a few days to go away. She was so scared about it she didn’t want to scare me more when I asked her about it as a child so she lied. But even after all these years I always believe what I saw was not a ghost, it was the hat man. I looked straight at it for at least a minute so I can not be wrong. Thank you for letting me tell my story here.