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Darkness Walks
The Shadow People Among Us

by Jason Offutt

Trade Paperback, 204 Pages

$15.95, ISBN: 1933665378

Genre(s): Paranormal

They lurk in obscurity. Looming human figures, blacker than darkness. Millions across the globe see them. The unfortunate feel their touch. And some awake in horror to their red, unblinking stare. Join Jason Offutt, who has interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses, as he shines some light on the world of the Shadow People, viewing these beings through the lens of science, religion, and metaphysics. Are they ghosts, demons, hallucinations, or something else entirely?

Selected as one of the “Top Paranormal Books of 2010” by About.com

About the Author:

JASON OFFUTT is a writer and college journalism instructor. At various times in his career, he has also been a newspaper editor, general assignment reporter, photographer, newspaper consultant, bartender, farm hand, and the mayor of a small Midwestern town. His books include Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots, and a collection of parenting humor entitled On Being Dad. (He has been named humor writer of the year multiple times by the Missouri Press Association.) He lives with his wife and children in Maryville, Missouri.

Follow Offutt's blog: From the Shadows


EXCERPT:

In the gray world of our homes after the sun goes down, we sometimes glimpse the black shapes of people – or animals – moving through our bedrooms, our hallways, our waking nightmares. They walk, they stare, and sometimes … they talk. They are the Shadow People, and I’ve found stories about them from across North America, England, Portugal, South Africa, Australia, and other parts of our planet. 

Out of these stories have emerged eight general categories of Shadow People: 

• Benign Shadows
• Shadows of Terror
• Red-Eyed Shadows,
• Noisy Shadows
• Angry Hooded Shadows
• Shadows that Attack
• Shadow Cats
• and The Hat Man. 

These categories often overlap. Some terrifying Shadow People have red eyes, some don’t. Some Hat Men are ominous, some are not. Some Angry Hooded Shadows seem to paralyze you and sometimes attack, others simply seem to acknowledge your presence before they make their way through your house and disappear through a wall. But what they are is a mystery. Are these Shadow People ghosts? Demons? Reflections from a parallel dimension? Space aliens? Or, as with Ebenezer Scrooge’s ghosts, maybe “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”

Although experts in the paranormal – and science – offer numerous explanations for these Shadow People, all, or none, may be valid. Whatever these entities are, the uncountable number of geographically separated people who have encountered these dark beings know they are real because they have reported seeing, hearing, feeling, and fearing these walking Shadows – like Margot Davies of Seattle. Davies moved into a house just east of Seattle in 2002 and, from early on she knew something wasn’t quite right about the house.

“The third night in the house, some relatives came to stay the night,” she said. “Later the next morning my aunt took me aside and said she sensed something in the house the previous night.”

Nothing bothered her until she began modeling in 2005 and started seeing a dark figure in her home. “Quite often I began to see a dark shape of person near the door of the den out of the corner of my eye,” she said. At first she dismissed these sightings as a trick of mind until she was sitting in her hot tub one night in November 2007. “I glanced in the living room window and there was a dark Shadow in front of the lamp staring at me,” she said. “At first I thought someone was in the house, but then how could they be dark in front of a bright lamp?”

As soon as this man-shaped Shadow realized she was looking at it, it quickly moved from the window through the living room wall, remerged in the kitchen then disappeared towards the den.

“I ran inside dripping wet, checked the house and no one was inside,” she said. “I never said anything to anyone.”


CONTENTS

Foreword by Brad Steiger  9 

Introduction  11 

1. The Mystery of Shadow People 13 

2. The Science of Shadow People 23 

3. The Metaphysics of Shadow People 35 

4. Benign Shadows  49 

5. Negative Shadows  65 

6. Red Eyed Shadows  77 

7. Buzzing Shadows  87 

8. Angry, Hooded Shadows  93 

9. Shadows that Attack 105 

10. When Children See Shadows 117 

11. Cats And Other Shadow Animals 127 

12. The Hat Man 139 

13. Ouija Boards and Other Invitations to Shadows 151 

14. Other Explanations 163 

15. Kaci’s Cry for Help 177 

16. Getting Rid of Shadows  183 

Afterword 197 

Sources 201

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What they're saying:

From the Foreword by Brad Steiger: “Jason Offutt’s excellent study of the phenomenon presents us with the most thorough and complete work yet written regarding the mysterious beings that we have come to call collectively, the Shadow People…Jason may not have any ultimate answers, but no one has done a better job of defining who or what these shades might be.”

 

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