Creepy Story 5.

This is one of the best corroborated of the stories, and yet possibly the most mysterious. It happened in the house I lived in before this one. I was living there with Helen and Penny, the dog.

One day Helen and I had a wedding to attend which was going to take all day, so we asked a friend of ours who lived in a nearby village to come over at lunchtime and feed Penny. When we saw her next, she said she wouldn’t want to do it again because she’d been frightened by mysterious shadows on the wall running up beside the starircase. I thought nothing of it because I knew that the tree standing in the courtyard often threw shadows on that wall around the middle of the day.

Not long afterwards, I was sitting at my office desk in one of the upstairs rooms. It was around midnight or 1 am. My office door was standing half open and the landing beyond was unlit except for the spill light coming up from the hall. It had a blank area of wall that ran at right angles to the inside of the door frame. My eye was caught by a movement, and I looked to see what appeared to be a shadow, approximately the size and shape of a human, moving across the wall. I got up to seek an explanation, but could find none. Helen was asleep in bed the other side of a closed door, and Penny was asleep on her blanket downstairs. I had been sitting still in my office at the time, and the house was otherwise empty.

I put it down to some odd aberration and chose to ignore it. I thought about it next day, though, and studied the area looking for a cause. I had spent ten years as both a landscape and studio photographer, and had a good understanding of how light and shadow works. There was simply no way a shadow could have been cast on the wall in those circumstances, much less a moving one.

Two nights later I saw another one, but in a different place. It was about the same time of night and I went downstairs to fetch something. Half way down I stopped. Another ‘shadow’ similar to the first was moving across the hall carpet. It reached the bottom of the stairs and disappeared. And before you wonder, no it couldn’t have been my shadow; the lighting conditions precluded that possibility. I looked at Penny who was watching me from the far corner of the hall, and she seemed quite unconcerned.

I decided not to tell Helen about these mysterious shadows. She was already a bit spooked by the sudden, intense flashes of light we sometimes saw in that house, and I didn’t want to worry her further. Instead, I made the occurrences the beginning of a story and extended the whole thing into a fictional narrative which Helen read. A couple of weeks later, she came to me looking slightly worried and said ‘We’ve got shadows.’ She’d seen the same thing I had, and only then did I confess that the story had been based on my own sightings.

So what were they? It stands to reason that a true shadow can only be caused by something physical interposed between a light source and an illuminated surface. There had been nothing physical to explain them, and the dog hadn’t reacted at all. So what causes a dark patch to move along a wall one day and a carpet the other – a patch roughly the size and shape of a human? At least two of us saw them, maybe three.