Shadow People
I see floaters…
When I was around seven years old I started to see floaters. Normally when I was looking out of the window at a clear sky. Transparent balls and rods, connected up into what looked like atomic structures, and always falling, falling, from the top of my vision to the bottom, resisting any attempt to focus on them.
The adults in my life pooh-poohed the notion, being unaware of basic ocular medicine, and I eventually stopped passing comment and accepted these floaters as something only I could see (at this stage still thinking they were external to me). It would be decades before I would find out that they were a real thing (though quite normal and benign).
Perhaps for this reason, I didn’t dismiss my twelve-year-old daughter out of hand when she started talking about shadow people.
— I’ve seen five of them in the house, and another few at school. Sometimes they move about, but a lot of the time they just stand there
— I haven’t noticed them. Have you tried taking a picture?
— Of course, but nothing comes out. You know what’s weird? They can be standing right beside me and if I look in a mirror I can’t see them
— Like vampires?
— You’re making fun of me
— No. Like I said, I just haven’t seen them yet. Give me a shout when they appear and I’ll come and have a look
I didn’t need to wait too long. While finishing up some emails in the study that same night, I noticed a smudge in the air in front of the white door. I took off my glasses and cleaned them thoroughly, but it made no difference. I could now make out even more clearly that there was a blur in the air halfway between me and the exit, which I could see had the height of a person, taller than my daughter and shorter than me.
It wasn’t a scary presence, just a presence, and I walked over to check that I could wave my arm through it while feeling no resistance, no cold patch, nothing that would scream either physical being or ghost.
I tried talking to it, I tried listening to it, but there seemed to be no effective way of interacting. Had my daughter not been asleep by this time, I would have brought her down to take a look. I would have spared my wife the anxiety, even had she been awake. Needlessly, as it turned out. She had been seeing them for weeks and was sparing me the same shock.
After about half an hour it just wasn’t there any more, although I wasn’t aware of having taken my eyes off it in the interim.
I did the only rational thing anyone in my situation would do — consulted the internet. And quickly found that Will o’ the Wisp was already a meme. There had been sightings all over the world, though those reporting the sightings were still largely being treated as having a screw loose by the trolls. Their accounts tallied in all important respects with what I had seen, and I gleaned some extra details.
They didn’t seem to vary much in height, all being around the 5 foot 6 inch mark, and they were often seen in groups of three to four. For some reason they were regularly reported as congregating where people were dying, leading some to claim a supernatural provenance. Crosses and garlic were proving ineffective in driving them away from deathbeds.
Within a few weeks the sightings were mainstream, and even the most skeptical were seeking scientific answers as to who these visitors may be.
They were spotted in office buildings and car parks, in cinemas and at beaches, but continued to prove resistant to being captured by camera or film.
A few middle-eastern countries declared them haram, but didn’t have any measure of success in removing them from their streets and houses. Around the world, almost every way of destroying them, capturing them or sending them away was tried to no effect.
Finally, when neither flame throwers nor grenades could kill them off, when vacuum cleaners could not suck them up and boxes could not contain them, when they continued in their blithe indifference to the antics of humankind, the world sort of shrugged and forgot they were there.
Until, one day, all of a sudden…
Ha, just kidding. They are still to be seen everywhere, and no-one has any clearer idea where they came from or why, as you must be aware, unless you are reading this in some distant future from which they have disappeared.
Wise heads can sit on young shoulders, and my daughter, who first brought them to my attention, has her own views, which I find hard to dispute.
— Haven’t you noticed that they hang around people far less than they used to? They move around on their own or in groups and do their own thing. That’s just the same as how we couldn’t leave them alone to start with, and now no-one can be bothered with them. I think we are shadows in their world just the same as they are in ours. They started off trying to study us and then decided we just weren’t that important.
Many thanks for reading!
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