Minnesota Woman Recounts Series of Paranormal Events Surrounding Shadow People

A Minnesota woman contacted the Singular Fortean Society recently to discuss a series of paranormal events involving shadow people had by her and her family over the course of the last eight years at their home in Rogers, a city roughly 10 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

The woman, who agreed to the use of her first name, Olga, spoke to lead investigator Tobias Wayland over the phone.

According to Olga, the strange experiences began eight years ago when she was 72 and her grandson, Toby, was four.

It’s only happened about four times, and for several years it hadn’t happened, until just recently it happened again. First off, I don’t believe in this stuff, I always believe there’s a reasonable explanation for everything. That’s always been my take on it. Most people see ghosts and this and that, and I think, there’s got to be a reasonable explanation.
I’m on the phone one evening at around 10 pm talking with someone, and I was sitting in my living room, which faces the entryway, or foyer, and off the foyer, there’s seven stairs going up and then seven stairs going down. It’s a multilevel house. I glanced up, and this black thing comes down the stairs. It’s shaped like a human, and my feeling was that it was male. I don’t know why I felt that way. It was about 5’7” or 5’8” and shaped like kind of a husky male. It actually reminded me of my late husband. I mean the shape, you know?
It just glided. It wasn’t walking, I didn’t see any feet or anything. Part of the wall would have hidden it anyway, but from the gait or way it was moving, it was gliding. It glided down the stairs and disappeared around the railing, and probably went down into the family room.
I saw no eyes. It wasn’t facing me, really, I was profile from it. It was solid. It seemed to me to be solid, because there’s a railing there and I didn’t see the railing through it. I couldn’t see anything through this thing. I didn’t see a shadow on the wall on the other side of it, either.
I tried to stay calm and finish my conversation. I quickly hung up and I thought, "Oh, Toby’s upstairs, and that’s where it came from."
So, I went and checked on Toby and he was sound asleep. He was just four years old. The hallway light was on. I left it on all night, and I’ve been leaving it on all night ever since. I went to bed, and the next morning [around 7 am] when I wake up, Toby’s jumping into bed with me. That’s not unusual, he would do that all the time. I have custody of him, his mother doesn’t live here with us.
So, I said, "Okay grandma’s getting up."
I had to go to the bathroom, so I walked across the room towards my bathroom. He’s right on my heels, and he jumps in there with me and slams the door. It kind of startled me. I didn’t want to put anything into his head, because right away I thought of what I’d seen the night before.
I asked, "Oh, how come you’re up so early?" I tried to be cheerful, because he looked really scared.
He said, "It was the door monster. The door monster woke me up."
I asked, "The door monster?"
He replied, "Yeah, the door monster."
I asked, "What did the door monster look like?"
"He was black," he said. He called it a he.
"And he had red eyes. He was staring at us." And that’s about all I got out of him. Then he was just repeating himself. I looked out of the bathroom towards my bedroom door, and of course there was nothing there.
That made me start believing. Why would he see the same thing I saw?

Olga told her son, Shawn, who was 52 at the time, but she said “he just kind of blew me off.”

That is until he had his own experience.

"Several weeks later, my son came running up from downstairs in the family room," said Olga. "He came running upstairs and said, ‘Oh my god, call somebody, we need to have a séance or something. We have a ghost or something in this house.’ I asked, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘I saw that black thing, and it moves really fast.’ He was all excited or upset about it, I’m not sure which. It was something we talked about for a while, but then it didn't show up again."

While Olga and Shawn haven’t seen any mysterious shadow people since that time, at least one other family member has.

"Only a couple of weeks before I contacted you, my great-grandson spent the night, and he’s about the same age as Toby," Olga said. "He stayed in the spare room, along with Toby. There are twin beds in there. The boys were each in a bed with a nightstand between them. [My great-grandson] had stayed over before, and he always wakes up at night. The next morning, he told me, ‘I saw something last night, grandma.’ I asked, ‘What did you see?’ I wasn’t expecting that, really, because we hadn’t seen the thing in a few years. He said, ‘It was black, shaped like a person.’ I asked him if he’d seen any facial features, and he said, ‘No, it looked like it was looking towards Toby. I didn’t see its face. It was standing in our doorway, watching Toby.’"

Olga said that her great-grandson had turned over in bed, and "he was kind of squinting. His eyes were kind of half-open and half-shut, and he said he saw this black thing. Then he opened his eyes wider and saw the shape, and then it just disappeared on him. He said it seemed to be looking at Toby and looking away from him, but it seemed to know he was looking at it because it just left."

"The thing, the shadow person, it doesn’t appear that often," she added. "It’s been years. So, it’s like it’s back."

Although her reaction to her own sighting left her puzzled, Olga admitted to being disturbed by the being or beings.

"I don’t understand my own reaction when I saw it. I don’t know how I even got to bed or got to sleep that night. Normally, I think I would have stayed up all night," she said. "What really bothers me is that it seemed to focus on my grandson. Right now, my instincts tell me it’s watching Toby for some reason. I wonder what interest this thing has in him."

Members of the family reported other unusual phenomena concurrent to the shadow person sightings, including strange, glowing orbs and phantom presences.

"We’ve only had [the shadow person sightings] happen four times, although other things have happened," Olga said. "My daughter said she saw an orb flying across our backyard. Toby said he saw one down in the family room, a white ball that went into the couch. My son said he saw a white ball with blue in the middle. I don’t know where that one flew to."

"My son is feeling someone sitting on his bed—the weight of someone sitting on his bed at night," she continued. "He’s been having these feelings that someone is in his room all the time at night. It’s just feelings, nothing he’s seen, but he says he’s actually felt the bed move down like someone is sitting on it. He also felt someone whack him on both of his feet, and he sat up immediately. He said it’s a good thing he had his pillow there, or his head would have hit the headboard or something."

According to Olga, the bedroom set in her son's room once belonged to a neighbor woman who passed away, leading her son to speculate that the presence might be related to some attachment she has with the furniture.

"He thinks it could be this guy’s wife, bugging him because he’s got the bedroom set now," she said.

Whether or not those experiences are related to the sightings of shadow people is open to interpretation, although Olga sees no reason why her home would be haunted.

"The house that we live in, I had this house built. This was a vacant lot—a farm field, before we lived here," she explained. "So, it can’t be from previous residents that I can think of. It was just a farmer’s field, until he sold his land into development."

Regardless, there does appear to be some significance to certain areas of the house. Olga noted that the shadowy being “hasn’t been seen in any other room than the hallway or the stairway,” and Toby refuses to sleep in his bedroom.

"He won’t sleep in his room anymore," she said. "He wants to sleep in [the spare room]. That room where his cousin and him were sleeping during the last sighting of this thing. That’s where he sleeps every night now. He won’t go back to his own room. I don’t know if it’s something to do with that room, but even before this happened, when I would put him to bed at night—we're talking two or three years old—he insisted I shut the closet door. He’s afraid of that closet in his room, and I really don’t know why. If he saw something there when he was little, I’m not sure. He’s never said why he wanted the closet door shut. I kind of feel like something must have happened when he was sleeping in that room, because that closet door always had to be shut at nighttime."

Olga said that one her daughters also felt uneasy about the closet in Toby’s bedroom.

"She’s always been leery of that closet," she said. "I never put it together, because I never paid too much attention to her being scared of that closet because it wasn’t her room anyway."

It’s unclear to Olga what, if anything, those feelings might have to do with the shadow people seen in her home, or what the nature of that phenomenon might be.

She does, however, suspect that the being or beings could be intelligent in some way.

"[The being] disappears really fast, like it doesn’t want to be seen," Olga said. "If it has a mind, I don’t know. It seems like the minute someone sees it, it takes off. I don’t know if it even knew I saw it, because it was coming down the stairs. It went down the stairs and around the railing and down again. I didn’t see any eyes or anything, I was sitting more on the side of it. I don’t know—if it is a real thing—if it even saw me."

Ultimately, the events experienced by Olga and her family remain a mystery, although they have served to expand her perspective.

"I’m to the point now where I’m thinking there may be other dimensions that we don’t see, except on an occasion like this," she said. "That’s the only thing I could think of, maybe it’s from another dimension or something. I don’t know."

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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