Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages.  Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see the faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever it was you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real, and alive.  And pretty soon, she realizes that one of them has become aware that she can see it -- and it starts to stalk her.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as the static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is fun reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor.  I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my puppy Jethro, and he clearly had no idea, because he's got an even shorter attention span than I do.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an ability to stay focused longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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The shadow knows

One of the most terrifying sleep-related phenomena is sleep paralysis.

I say this only from hearing about the experiences of others; I have never had it happen to me.  But the people I've talked to who have had episodes of sleep paralysis relate being wide awake and conscious, but unable to move -- often along with some odd sensory experiences -- such as feelings of being watched or having someone in the room; hissing, humming, or sizzling noises; a tingling in the extremities that feels like a mild electric shock; a feeling of being suffocated; and (understandably) the emotions of fear and panic.

The reason all of this comes up is an article that appeared over at the site Mysterious Universe about "Shadow People."  The piece was by Nick Redfern, whose name should be familiar to anyone who is an aficionado of cryptozoology; Redfern has been involved in a number of investigations of the paranormal, and is the author of books such as The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, Shapeshifters: Morphing Monsters and Changing Cryptids, The Real Men in Black, The New World Order Book, and a variety of other titles I encourage you to peruse.

So Redfern has a pretty obvious bias, here, which is why I was already primed to view his piece on the Shadow People with a bit of a jaundiced eye.  Let me let him speak for himself, though.  Redfern tells us that there are these entities that we should all be on the lookout for, and then tells us the following:

Jason Offutt is an expert on the Shadow People, and the author of a 2009 book on the subject titled Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us.  He says there are eight different kinds of Shadow People – at least, they are the ones we know about.  He labels them as Benign Shadows, Shadows of Terror, Red-Eyed Shadows, Noisy Shadows, Angry Hooded Shadows, Shadows that Attack, Shadow Cats, and the Hat Man.

Shadow Cats?  Why only cats?  Cats, in my experience, are already conceited enough that they don't need another feather in their caps.  Of course, the positive side is that Shadow Cats wouldn't be very threatening. The cats I've owned specialized in two behaviors: Sitting Around Looking Bored, and Moving Closer To Where We Are So We'll Appreciate How Bored They Are.  If their Shadow versions are no more motivated, it's hard to see why you'd even care they were around, since Shadow Cats presumably don't eat, drink, or use a litter box.  They'd kind of be a low-impact paranormal home décor item.

On the other hand, I'm just as glad there are no Shadow Dogs, because then we'd have yet another source of the really obnoxious noise that dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, a sound my wife calls "glopping."  Our three dogs glop enough, there's no need for additional glopping from the spirit world.

But then there's "Hat Man."  On first glance, that seemed fairly non-threatening, but Redfern tells us that Hat Man is the scariest one on the list:

I sat and listened at my table [at a conference, speaking to an attendee] as he told me how, back in July of this year, he had three experiences with the Hat Man – and which were pretty much all identical – and which were very familiar to me.  He woke up in the early hours of the morning to a horrific vision: the outside wall of his bedroom was displaying a terrifying image of a large city on fire, with significant portions of it in ruins.  It was none other than Chicago.  The sky was dark and millions were dead.  Circling high above what was left of the city was a large, human-like entity with huge wings.  And stood [sic] next to the guy, as he watched this apocalyptic scenario unravel from his bed, was the Hat Man, his old-style fedora hat positioned firmly on his head.  The doomsday-like picture lasted for a minute or two, making it clear to the witness that a Third World War had begun.  On two more occasions in the same month, a near-identical situation played out.  It’s hardly surprising that the man was still concerned by all this when we chatted at the weekend.

So he talked to some other people, and more than one person mentioned seeing Hat Man, and always associated with images of doom and destruction.  Toward the end, he mentions the fact that one of the people who'd seen Hat Man suffered from sleep paralysis... which kind of made me go, "Aha."

In a paper by Walther and Schulz back in 2004 entitled, "Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis: Polysomnographic and Clinical Findings," it was found that people who suffered from sleep paralysis showed abnormal patterns of REM and non-REM sleep, and (most interestingly) fragmentation of REM.  REM, you probably know, is associated with dreaming; suppressing or disturbing REM causes a whole host of problems, up to and including hallucination.  Another paper -- Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, in 1999, "Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare" -- has another interesting clue, which is that during sleep paralysis, cholinergic neurons (the neural bundles that promote wakefulness and REM) are hyperactive, whereas the serotonergic neurons (ones that initiate relaxation and a sense of well-being) are inhibited.  This implies that the mind becomes wakeful, but emotionally uneasy, before the brain-body connection comes back online.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem here is that if you're in sleep paralysis, or the related phenomenon of hypnagogic experiences (dreams in light sleep), what you are perceiving is not reflective of reality.  So as creepy as Shadow People are -- not to mention "Hat Man" -- I'm pretty certain that what we've got here is a visual hallucination experienced during a dream state.

Not sure about the Shadow Cats, though.  I still don't see how that'd work.  Given my luck at trying to get cats comply with simple rules such as "Stay The Hell Off The Kitchen Counter," my guess is that even feline hallucinations wouldn't want to cooperate.  If you expected them to show up and scare some poor dude who was just trying to get a good night's sleep, they'd probably balk because it wasn't their idea.  Shadow Dogs, on the other hand, would be happy to climb on the sleeping dude's bed and glop right next to his ear.  They're just helpful that way.

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Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages. Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do yard chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery, which is scheduled to come out in a collection called A Quartet for Diverse Instruments in the summer of 2021.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is well worth reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor. I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my dog, and he clearly had no idea.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an attention span longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Oarfish, earthquakes, and shadow people

I'm perpetually astonished at how little it takes to get the woo-woos going.

I suppose, though, that's the definition of confirmation bias -- taking thin evidence (or skimpy anecdote) as incontrovertible support for what you already believed.  Me, I try to approach stuff with more caution -- I'm not perfect, but I do my best when confronted with a strange or intriguing story to stop and think, "Wait a moment, how do I know this is true... and means what people are saying it means?"

I ran into two particularly good examples of that yesterday.  In the first, we have people saying that the appearance of three dead oarfish in coastal Japan is indicative that they're in for a major undersea earthquake and tsunami.  Now, there's no doubt that seeing an oarfish would make you sit up and take notice; they live in deep waters and are usually only seen when they're dead or dying, and can get up to eleven meters long.  (Yes, I double-checked that statistic, and it's correct.)

American servicemen displaying a dead oarfish they found off the coast of California in 1996 [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I suppose it's no wonder that people stop and say, "Okay, that's weird," when they see one.  But oarfish are not uncommon, despite seldom being seen; and there are lots of cases of dead oarfish washing up on shore that were not followed by geological catastrophes.   "I have around twenty specimens of this fish in my collection so it’s not a very rare species, but I believe these fish tend to rise to the surface when their physical condition is poor, rising on water currents, which is why they are so often dead when they are found," said Hiroyuki Motomura, professor of ichthyology at Kagoshima University.  "The link to reports of seismic activity goes back many, many years, but there is no scientific evidence of a connection so I don’t think people need to worry."

Which, of course, will have precisely zero effect on the woo-woos.  What the hell does some silly scientist know about, um, science?  There will be an earthquake, you'll see!  (Of course, it helps that the oarfish were found on the coast of Japan, because Japan is -- stick with me, here -- a freakin' earthquake zone.)

The other story comes from a perusal of some twelve million documents that were declassified two years ago by the CIA.  This started all the conspiracy theorists sifting through them, because of course if the CIA wanted to keep an evil conspiracy secret, the first thing they'd do is declassify all the files surrounding it.  But even the wooiest woo-woo takes a while to go through twelve million files, so it was only a couple of weeks ago that we found out that in the files were photographs of...

... "shadow people."

We're told about how spooky and eerie these photographs are, and how they could be aliens or ghosts, or connected to MKUltra or the Illuminati or god alone knows what else.  "The silhouettes are composed of visual noise, almost like television static," we're told, "and have empty voids where their faces should be."  There were two of them, we find out, and each silhouette has a number on it -- 1569 on one, 1572 on the other.

I thought, "Okay, that does sound pretty creepy."  And naturally, I wanted to see the images myself.  So I clicked the link, and here's what I saw:

And I said -- this is a direct quote -- "You have got to be fucking kidding me right now."

This isn't a photograph, it's a drawing.  And not even a very good one.  (In the interest of rigorous research, I looked at the other one, which is identical except for saying "1572" and facing the other direction.)  It is mildly curious that these would be in CIA files, although I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the CIA people stuck 'em in there when they declassified the files in order to watch the woo-woos leap about and make excited little squeaking noises.

Which is exactly what happened.

The universe is a wonderful, complex, intriguing, mysterious place.  There is plenty to investigate, plenty to be amazed at, without making shit up or stretching pieces of observable evidence to the snapping point.  So let's all calm down a little, okay?  I'm sure Japan will eventually have another major earthquake (cf. my previous comment about earthquake zones), and I'm also sure there'll be weird random things in the CIA files, whether or not my surmise about people sticking them in deliberately to stir the pot turns out to be true.  But grabbing those little pieces of data and running off the cliff with them is not advisable.

Confirmation bias, unfortunately, makes a terrible parachute.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.

The shadow knows

One of the most terrifying sleep-related phenomena is sleep paralysis.

I say this only from hearing about the experiences of others; I have never had it happen to me.  But the people I've talked to who have had episodes of sleep paralysis relate being wide awake and conscious, but unable to move -- often along with some odd sensory experiences -- such as feelings of being watched or having someone in the room; hissing, humming, or sizzling noises; a tingling in the extremities that feels like a mild electric shock; a feeling of being suffocated; and (understandably) the emotions of fear and panic.

The reason all of this comes up is an article that appeared over at the site Mysterious Universe last week about "shadow people."  The piece was by Nick Redfern, whose name should be familiar to anyone who is an aficionado of cryptozoology; Redfern has been involved in a number of investigations of the paranormal, and is the author of books such as The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, Shapeshifters: Morphing Monsters and Changing Cryptids, The Real Men in Black, The New World Order Book, and a variety of other titles I encourage you to peruse.

So Redfern has a pretty obvious bias, here, which is why I was already primed to view his piece on the Shadow People with a bit of a jaundiced eye.  Let me let him speak for himself, though.  Redfern tells us that there are these entities that we should all be on the lookout for, and then tells us the following:

Jason Offutt is an expert on the Shadow People, and the author of a 2009 book on the subject titled Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us.  He says there are eight different kinds of Shadow People – at least, they are the ones we know about.  He labels them as Benign Shadows, Shadows of Terror, Red-Eyed Shadows, Noisy Shadows, Angry Hooded Shadows, Shadows that Attack, Shadow Cats, and the Hat Man.

Shadow Cats?  Why only cats?  Cats, in my experience, are already conceited enough that they don't need another feather in their caps.  Of course, the positive side is that Shadow Cats wouldn't be very threatening.  My cats specialized in two behaviors: Sitting Around Looking Bored, and Moving Closer To Where We Are So We'll Appreciate How Bored They Are.  If their Shadow versions are no more motivated, it's hard to see why you'd even care they were around, since Shadow Cats presumably don't eat, drink, or use a litter box.  They'd kind of be a low-impact paranormal home décor item.

On the other hand, I'm just as glad there are no Shadow Dogs, because then we'd have yet another source of the really obnoxious noise that dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, a sound my wife calls "glopping."  Our two dogs glop enough, there's no need for additional glopping from the spirit world.

But then there's "Hat Man."  On first glance, that seemed fairly non-threatening, but Redfern tells us that Hat Man is the scariest one on the list:

I sat and listened at my table [at a conference, speaking to an attendee] as he told me how, back in July of this year, he had three experiences with the Hat Man – and which were pretty much all identical – and which were very familiar to me.  He woke up in the early hours of the morning to a horrific vision: the outside wall of his bedroom was displaying a terrifying image of a large city on fire, with significant portions of it in ruins. It was none other than Chicago.  The sky was dark and millions were dead.  Circling high above what was left of the city was a large, human-like entity with huge wings.  And stood [sic] next to the guy, as he watched this apocalyptic scenario unravel from his bed, was the Hat Man, his old-style fedora hat positioned firmly on his head.  The doomsday-like picture lasted for a minute or two, making it clear to the witness that a Third World War had begun.  On two more occasions in the same month, a near-identical situation played out.  It’s hardly surprising that the man was still concerned by all this when we chatted at the weekend.

So he talked to some other people, and more than one person mentioned seeing Hat Man, and always associated with images of doom and destruction.  Toward the end, he mentions the fact that one of the people who'd seen Hat Man suffered from sleep paralysis... which kind of made me go, "Aha."

In a paper by Walther and Schulz back in 2004 entitled, "Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis: Polysomnographic and Clinical Findings," it was found that people who suffered from sleep paralysis showed abnormal patterns of REM and non-REM sleep, and (most interestingly) fragmentation of REM.  REM, you probably know, is associated with dreaming; suppressing or disturbing REM causes a whole host of problems, up to and including hallucination.  Another paper -- Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, in 1999, "Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare" -- has another interesting clue, which is that during sleep paralysis, cholinergic neurons (the neural bundles that promote wakefulness and REM) are hyperactive, whereas the serotonergic neurons (ones that initiate relaxation and a sense of well-being) are inhibited.  This implies that the mind becomes wakeful, but emotionally uneasy, before the brain-body connection comes back online.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem here is that if you're in sleep paralysis, or the related phenomenon of hypnagogic experiences (dreams in light sleep), what you are perceiving is not reflective of reality.  So as creepy as Shadow People are -- not to mention "Hat Man" -- I'm pretty certain that what we've got here is a visual hallucination experienced during a dream state.

Not sure about the Shadow Cats, though.  I still don't see how that'd work.  Given my luck at trying to get my cats comply with rules such as "Stay The Hell Off The Kitchen Counter," my guess is that even feline hallucinations wouldn't want to cooperate.  If you expected them to show up and scare some poor dude who was just trying to get a good night's sleep, they'd probably balk because it wasn't their idea.  Shadow Dogs, on the other hand, would be happy to climb on the sleeping dude's bed and glop right next to his ear.  They're just helpful that way.