Horror Stories

Flash Of Light And Shadow Man Next To Bed

A couple of years ago, I started noticing a very short, fast single flash of light once every few days or so in the dark bedroom at night when I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep. It was so fast I could never really see where it originated in the room, except a couple of times it seemed like it was near the closet or the closed bedroom door because I happened to be facing that direction when the flash happened and I thought I saw a bright pinpoint of light there (too fast to tell). Most of the times it happened my eyes were closed and I saw it as a bright flash through my eyelids.

This went on for a few months. I asked my husband if he ever noticed anything like that and he hadn't. However, one night the flash happened as we were getting ready for bed, when the master bathroom light was still on. My husband was standing right outside the master bathroom doorway in the bedroom with me when this fast light flashed and I immediately asked him (rather excitedly because it happened while we were both awake, and in a room lit by the light from the bathroom and both of our bedside lamps) if he'd seen it. He said, in a perplexed voice, that he had. I told him that was the flash I had been telling him about. He got a little disturbed by this, and tried to help me investigate possible sources.

We had blackout blinds on the bedroom window, so no external lights could get in that way. We had a smoke detector in the room, but it didn't have a light. We had no other light sources except the bedside lamps. We couldn't figure it out.

This flash didn't happen every night, and didn't have a periodic frequency. I did start to notice something though. It seemed like the next day after a night when I'd see a flash, my husband and I would be irritable with each other or squabble about something stupid. We'd take things the wrong way and just usually not have a great day. I never told my husband this observation. But, I started to make a huge effort the next day after I saw a flash to be less sensitive to things and more supportive of his part of our joint irritability because I thought that I could turn around any negative influences by being more positive. It seemed to work.

One other thing happened during this time frame. Something woke me up (could have been a flash of light but I don't remember) and I turned and looked at my husband's side of the bed. I saw a dark shadow of a man standing next to his head looking down at him. The room was very dark, but the bathroom is a little less dark because it doesn't have a complete blackout blind on the window and my husband's side is right next to the bathroom door. The man's outline had the bathroom doorway as a backdrop which is the reason I saw him. (Once I saw him, I could see him move away from the bed when he eventually did which I'll describe below, while away from the bathroom door.) He wasn't very tall. I'd place him at 5'2 or so. Something about the shape made me think it was a man.

When I turned and looked at him, he looked at me. His head slowly shifted and he stood utterly still. I out-stilled him though. I kept in position and looked him down. I started to think that it wasn't a man, but just some weird trick of the light/darkness. So I focused on a portion of his shoulder where it was outlined by the bathroom doorway and told myself that if that moved, it wasn't just a trick of the light. Sure enough he started to move casually away by turning his body towards the right and walking slowly towards the bedroom door. It even seemed like he was moving arms as he walked. He reached the bedroom door and disappeared. My husband slept peacefully through the entire event. After the shadow man left, I rolled back over and went to sleep. Strangely, this didn't scare me.

I only saw this shadow man this one time. As I thought about it the next day, I tried to find a way to blame it on my imagination. Questions came to my mind like, why did it go to the bedroom door instead of walking through the wall or, better yet, why didn't it just disappear? Why would it walk like a person to the door? The bottom line though was that I saw it while wide awake and thoughtful and it did look like a shadow man and it did leave at the door.

I ended up telling my husband about it a couple of days later. I debated whether or not to tell him because I didn't want to scare him. He scares really easily when it comes to these things, but I thought that it's best to know. He wasn't too upset by it.

The flashing lights stopped and there have been no more shadow man sightings. I would like to understand this, and would love to hear if anyone has a theory about this or a similar experience. Also, I'd like to know if there was something we may have been doing that caused this - I consider it kind of a bad time in our lives due to the negativity and I'd like to avoid something like this happening again.