Recently, I watched a documentary style video on Youtube about the “Shadow People Phenomenon.” I take those types of videos with a grain of salt, believing they’re more for entertainment than anything else.
But there were two details that I found rather troubling. The first one had to do with a witness describing a shadow person being like vapor. The second thing that really struck me was that there seems to be a strong correlation between sleep paralysis and the appearance of these shadowy figures.
These details resonated with me because I personally experienced something like this when I was 18 years old. I was just home from the hospital, recovering from reconstructive knee surgery (an injury I sustained in a football game). I had been on a morphine drip the day before, then downgraded to Demerol, then finally sent home with a bottle of Tylenol 3.
I was asleep in my bed when I suddenly woke, but found myself unable to move. Then, I watched a “smoky” figure walk right by the foot of my bed and disappear through the wall. There were even little plumes of smoke that trailed behind it, and lingered in the room momentarily after it had gone.
I chalked it up as a side effect of the pain killers I’d been popping like Tic Tacs. It seemed like a good, logical explanation. For the record, I’m gonna stick to that explanation. However, I will admit, the video I watched made me waiver for a second or two.
Anyway, I wrote a haiku to commemorate the bizarre hallucination I had all those years ago. Enjoy.
a silhouette walks
swiftly across my bedroom
leaving wisps of smoke
The Hawk Squawks 