This event happened to me around 1993-1994 in the State of Mexico, Mexico, when I was around 5 to 6 years old. During the evening, somewhere at night after 8:00pm when it was dark already, I was at my parent’s house probably playing with my 2-year older brother in the 2nd floor of a 2-story house. The house’s staircase has a U-shaped design. I remember I wanted to go downstairs, not sure if to head to the kitchen and grab some water. My brother was following behind me. All the lights in the first floor were off and the staircase light switch and lightbulb were faulty. I walked downstairs until reaching the 2nd or 3rd step where there was a 3-button light switch at the right of the staircase for the faulty stair lights, the hallway downstairs and outside the main door.

I always had trouble back then to determine what was the right switch to turn on the lights of the hallway. I remember putting my hand over the lights switch and then turning my head towards the hallway to see if the right light was turning on, still with one foot in one step and the other in the next one while I was going down, when I saw in the corner of my eye this man-shaped black silhouette next to a cornerback furniture on the wall right in front of me. I stopped dead there and might have taken like 1 or 2 seconds to scan what I was looking at until I realized what it was and paralyzed for maybe another 2 seconds in extreme terror. It was a shadow of a tall man, about 1.85 to 1.90 mts with glowing red eye sockets like a car’s tail lights, wearing a fedora hat and a long coat with a lifted top collar, which I think was holding something like a briefcase, formal dress pants and had no feet. There was actually a kind of uneven gradient or cloud turning from black to transparent where the feet should have been. Although the silhouette sensed like a 2D image with no detail in between other than its shape as like an actual shadow but with the extra eyes, the shadow was not projected over the wall or anything but instead floating like 30 cm separated from the wall and another 30 cm floating from the floor. My brother just stopped right behind me looking how I froze but didn’t see what I was looking at.

After that brief time that elapsed that felt longer after I went over and over that a thousand times in my head, I turned around and ran upstairs faster than I ever did, going to my parent’s bedroom and telling my mother, who was in the bathroom, with shock what I just saw. She was brushing her teeth when I reached and told her. I think she went down to see if something was there while I stayed upstairs explaining again my brother and my younger sister, who was at the common bathroom outside the main bedroom. But after my mother didn’t find anything, she tried to explain posible causes that I might have confused that with, like the reflection of a car projected from a window in the living room, even a cat or something else. My father never wore hats and we had none at home back then and nothing explains the perfect position of components to conform a shape that could look like what I described. Also my father was still coming back from work (he used to work until late).

I remember that event which happened while being awake brought me night terror for a couple of years and I couldn’t even go to the bathroom downstairs at night without asing someone to accompany me all the time if the other ones were being used. Also right after I had some recurrent nightmares. One where I saw as in a sequence a completely white view, then a furnace either new and silver-plated or a shattered and burned out one, then the white view starting showing black dots until turning completely black and then again the shattered furnace. Another nightmare where I saw a navy blue canvas instead with a white straight line showing in the middle and then a white capital letter L in the middle of that advancing slowly from left to right then followed by another capital L over and over again. Eventually, like at around 9 years old I stopped having those nightmares, but moments of night terror and other kind of nightmares persisted, peaking again when I was at high school and university with additional sleep paralysis accompanied or followed sometimes by a buzzing sound like electricity running in my head. I saw during those nightmares black creatures, crazy or deformed people and voices trying to scare me, and sometimes woking up to see small shadows moving on the ceiling and feeling very frightened, until I once started during those nightmares to punch those entities with anger for trying to scare me and seeing how they turned impotent.

Additionally, one night after returning from the university I sat in the bottom end of my bed and laid down while having a negative internal dialogue (I had depression) when suddenly an unrecognized voice replied to my thoughts like giving an answer, but I entirely forgot what that said just a few seconds after. Also, another night was having again negative thoughts when a voice in my head yelled a strong “No” and had me running downstairs to tell my mother again all scared. Finally, just to mention, I remember when I was a kid having recurrent thoughts about that many people around me, if not all, were actors testing me and/or giving me guidance.

It was until this present year 2022, at 34 years old when I saw a 9gag post asking people to tell their paranormal stories, when I stumbled across one reply in the comment section showing a picture of what I saw and a similar story, calling this figure the “Hat Man”. Always thought I was the only one who saw that and thought it was my mind playing tricks on me and just eventually gave it less importance and stopped thinking of that. But after digging for a while I was once again scared that and the following nights, felling shivers when in the darkness of night after turning the lights off to go to bed. I’m a married man with kind of a successful career raised by catholic parents, but not really into that or any other religion.