Here’s my Shadow Person story. I’ve been visited by a shadow person on and off for many years – starting in my adolescence. Big Hat Man always appears in my room, in the early hours. He’s usually not alone, either. My visitations from Big Hat always start the same. I wake up, or at least I believe I am awake – but I can’t move. If I’m lying on my side, the sun shines through the window onto the far wall, hot as High Summer, razor sharp and bright as a migraine. And there, standing in the pool of light, is Big Hat. I can only describe Big Hat as being a figure like The Shadow in the advertisements for a liqueur called Sandeman Port. Big Hat looks like this figure, and he is visible from the chest up – but only as a dark, knife-edge sharp shadow pasted to the wall. I find myself trying to will my body to move, but I am in utter fear of moving in case I should get to see what sort of a shape is casting this shadow. And then Big Hat’s friends come for me.
The Bedshakers. Bedshakers manifest as a vibration of the bed, undulating like the surface of bubbling porridge coming up to the boil with increasing violence of motion and an accompanying insectile buzzing roar of increasing volume. At some point, I do eventually manage to move. When I do so, I find myself getting up from my bed drenched with sweat. It’s usually darker and earlier than I thought it was, and sometimes the weather conditions are too cloudy for the sun to be seen at all, even if it was time for it to rise – so there’d be nothing to project that brilliant High Summer razor’s edge silhouette onto the wall at all. My last visit came a year or two ago, in my new flat – I’ve been here for four years, and it was as if Big Hat and his bed shaking army of minions had just dropped by to look round the place. Their presence felt almost like approval. God help me if that means Big Hat will be planning a return visit any time soon.
— Alex