My daughter wanted to watch scary movies this weekend. It got us talking about something that used to scare me as a child, and being in the right mood last night to research such things, we checked up on it. That's when things got really weird.
First of all, when I was a kid on at least 3 occasions I saw a shadowy figure moving in the dark in my room. The figure had a long coat on and a hat with a brim. It would move back and forth between my closet and the door. Once I watched it go behind the door and wait. I was terrified, but I managed to get out of bed and turn on the light. There was nothing there.
One night I had a friend sleeping over. We were on the top bed of a bunk bed and I was laying awake watching this silhouette moving along the far end of my room. And then it moved up to the bed. It stood by my bed, face to face, inches away. I could see no facial features and it made no sound at all, but I could see the outline clearly. And then it reached for my neck.
It grabbed my pillow and began tugging on it and I sat up in terror and tried to get away. It was then I saw that my friend had grabbed my pillow in his sleep and was pulling it. Absolutely crazy timing for him to do that. The absolute scariest thing from my childhood!
So I tell my children about this and the theories start flying. Ghost, demon, negative energy being (they know surprisingly much about such things it turns out). So I google "shadowy figure in a hat" kind of as a joke.
I got a chill when dozens of pages came up, about people from all over the world, reporting seeing a shadowy silhouette figure in a trench coat and wide-brimmed hat, moving silently in the darkness, and occasionally trying to choke its victims. How weird is that?
So first the weird thought that these things could be real (!), but it must surely be some kind of neurological phenomenum programmed into our brains. But that's really weird too -- how is it so specific? That so many people saw exactly what I saw, shadowy figure in trench coat and hat, watching and then trying to choke me? That's pretty damn specific.
Any of you seen "the hat man"?