Post by swampiewolfess on Jan 27, 2008 7:10:10 GMT -5
Hooded Beings
By Stephen Wagner
FATE Magazine - May 2005
You switch off the light and climb into bed. It's been a long, stressful day
and it feels good to be lying down beneath warm blankets. Your mind drifts
and you fall slowly, gently into a welcome sleep. Suddenly you are awakened,
not by any sound or light, but by a powerful feeling, an instinct. Something
is in the room with you.
There's something at the foot of the bed. A dark shape. It's difficult to
make it out in the dim light. It looks like a person. What is it? Your eyes
adjust and the figure becomes clearer now. It definitely has the shape of a
human being, but this is someone, something unknown. It's tall and seems to
be dressed in a long, dark cloak. Your terror builds as you realize that
this thing is really standing there in your room.
Although petrified, you try to sit up. As you do, the figure turns and fades
and disappears into the darkness.
You might be surprised to learn how many experiences similar to this one
have been reported over the years by people of all ages and from all walks
of life. Sightings of a hooded being seem to be a unique subset of the ghost
phenomenon. And although not all sightings or experiences are exactly the
same, the similarities outweigh the differences, perhaps indicating that
this is a special kind of ghost encounter.
Children Frightened
Like much ghost phenomena, the hooded beings tend to show up at night and
seem to have no reservations about appearing to small children and scaring
them out of their wits. Trisha, for example, was just five or six when she
had her encounter. She recalls that she woke up sometime during the night
and went to her parents bedroom. As she was climbing into the bed beside her
mother, she saw a man-sized robed figure standing at the foot of the bed,
just staring at her. It appeared to have a bald head, and its skin, where it
showed, glowed with a soft pink hue. She hurried under the covers and never
told her parents about the incident, in fact never told anyone until she
related the story to this author. "I have never forgotten the way the eyes
looked at me" she said.
Was it just a childhood imagining or the remnant of a dream? While it is
true that these beings often do materialize at bedsides, waking people from
their sleep, this is not always the case. Nine-year old Nick from San Pedro,
California, had just come home late with his mom. He was heading toward his
bedroom when he was stopped by the sight of a short, robed, hooded thing
staring at him. (As you see, these entities do a lot of staring, as if their
objective is simply to unnerve those they visit.) The eyes and face were
invisible deep within the hood. When Nick called his mother's attention to
it, the creature vanished.
In May 1996, on the night before her sixth birthday, Morgan seems to have
seen the same creature, and in very similar circumstances. It was the middle
of the night when she woke up needing to go to the bathroom. She headed down
the hallway past her brother's room toward her parents room, a staircase and
a window to the outside. Morgan said that on such trips to the bathroom at
night, she had a habit of glancing out this window as she passed. But on
this night, something was blocking it. Standing before the window was a
thing dressed in a black cloak and hood. Morgan was able to make out some of
its face, however. It had a greenish tinge, and its eyes, which exuded evil,
were blacker than all the black that surrounded them. The being was grinning
at her. "The most evil grin I have ever seen in all my life" Morgan called
it. "Whenever I moved, its eyes would follow me. It wanted to lure me into
something." Morgan ran to her parents room and woke her dad. When he came
into the hallway to investigate, it was gone.
When he was 12 years old, Lukas lived in a small house in Atlanta, Georgia.
The house was so small that he slept in a bunk bed in the family's living
room, and his brother had a bed in the adjacent laundry room. Lukas woke up
one night around midnight, sensing that something was not right. From his
top bunk, he could see into his brother's room, and there seemed to be
something sitting in a chair next to his brother's bed. He was sure he was
awake, but at first was unsure of what he was seeing. "All I could see was
what looked like a person wearing a hood (like a cloak) staring at my
brother" Lukas said. The room also being the laundry room, Lukas reasoned
that this was really just a pile of clothes and that his eyes were playing
tricks on him. But piles of clothes do not move by themselves. "It turned to
look at me" Lukas said. "I could not see any facial features...just evil
darkness".
And that wasn't the end of Lukas's frightening encounter. He lay down in his
bed, trembling with fear. He heard the spectre's chair move against the
wooden floor, then footsteps coming toward him. They started on the laundry
room's wooden floor and moved onto the carpeted floor of his room. He pulled
the covers up over his head, petrified. After what he thought was just a
short time, he mustered the courage to pull the covers down and confront the
being. When he did, however, not only was the hooded being gone, it was also
morning. Somehow, five or six hours had also vanished with the entity.
Multiple Apparitions
It could be debated whether children, like those in the stories above, are
more prone to imagine things than adults, or if they are actually more
sensitive to perceive things that adults often do not.
In any case, adults of varying ages also see these hooded beings, probably
just as often as children do. In fact, there are cases in which multiple
hooded beings have been seen at the same time. They donâ??t always travel
alone.
One case, remarkable in many respects, was related to me by a woman named
Lillith. A close friend of hers, who had a reputation for having a "wild
side" had recently passed away. Not long after, she would be awakened at
night by her bed shaking. This went on without explanation for several
months. Then one night, she said, her friend appeared to her in a most
surprising way. She was awakened by the feeling of someone nibbling at her
ear. She sat bolt upright in bed only to see her dead friend standing there
dressed in a robe, like a monk".
Frightened and shocked by his unwanted intimacy, she demanded that he go
away. Just then, the wall behind her friend's apparition seemed to open up,
revealing a scene of several monk-like figures walking slowly in a line,
following a "master". This leader called out to her friend, admonishing him
to rejoin the line, explaining to him that "our two worlds were not supposed
to meet". Lillith recalled feeling a profound sadness surrounding these
souls, sensing that they were doomed to wander for a long time before they
would be able to join those on a higher level.
Aaron was 17 when his bedroom was invaded by a horde of these creatures. He,
too, was awakened from a sound sleep, suddenly becoming aware of many small
figures in his living room, which adjoined his bedroom. "There were about
ten to twenty of them", Aaron recalled, "all about three feet tall and
wearing dark brown or black hooded robes". Aaron admitted that the
experience was very dream-like, and in that hazy state of mind he reached
over to his nightstand for what he thought was a gun. He aimed it at the
figures, then was brought to his senses by a beeping sound. "I found myself
sitting up in bed, phone receiver in hand, pointing it like a gun toward the
door," Aaron said. "The phone was beeping due to being off the hook."
Aaron's somewhat humorous anecdote forces us to consider the true nature of
these hooded-being experiences and the common thread that runs through all
of the stories we have related so far: they have all occurred at night when
the victims either had been asleep or were tired enough to crave sleep.
Are these experiences only dreams? Are the hooded beings an archetype from
the collective human unconscious?
Beings Observed Outdoors
This is almost certainly true in many cases. But perhaps not all. What are
we to think, for example, of instances in which these hooded beings are seen
outdoors (in other words when the witness is not in a dream-like state),
sometimes in daylight and by multiple witnesses?
In June 2001 at about 6:30 p.m., one witness had gone into the woods of his
property to spread feed for his pet guineas. He was stopped in his tracks
when he saw "a figure with a gray robe and small wings" walking across the
hillside. This was a large apparition, standing an estimated 20 feet tall
and carrying a mace. The witness claims he actually watched the Grim
Reaper-like figure turn and walk slowly away and out of sight.
It was nearing twilight in the fall of 1981 when Chris and a few of his
college mates thought it would be fun to explore a gutted old dorm building
that was scheduled to be torn down. It was Halloween and they were up for a
little fright in the dilapidated, graffiti-scarred building. They joked and
tried to startle one another in the creepy environment, then decided it
might be even scarier to go to the small cemetery near the woods just
outside the campus.
They passed through a rusted old chain link fence and walked among the
headstones of long-deceased college faculty and their families. Chris was
the first to sense something, a true eeriness he didn't feel in the old dorm
Then they heard the crunching of leaves and the rhythm of footsteps
somewhere in the distance. They assumed it was just another college friend
trying to scare them and laughed it off.
Chris heard the footsteps getting closer and strained his eyes in the
gathering darkness to see who or what it was. "Coming from the dark edge of
the woods" Chris said, "I saw it. Vague in shape, it was definitely cloaked
in black, head to foot."
No, this was not a costume-clad student on his way to a Halloween party. Its
movement and behavior ruled out that possibility. "It seemed to move in
spurts of speed and then, as though time fast-forwarded, it would be ahead
of my speed of sight, closer to me than before until it stopped at the
corner post of the fence. I blinked my eyes a few times, thinking my
contacts were the problem, but they weren't".
As he watched, this cloaked and hooded entity turned and faced Chris and his
friends. He could discern no arms, flesh, or eyes on the creature, and he
could not see any feet below its body, even though the hem of its garment
floated inches above the leaves and grass. Without a word, Chris turned and
ran as fast as he could toward the first lighted building that came into
view. He became aware that someone was running beside him. It was one of his
friends. He, too, had seen the hooded spectre.
A similar incident took place on another Halloween night in 1997 when Jacob
and his girlfriend were walking home after a football game. They decided to
take a path through a wooded area close to a quiet neighborhood. After about
20 minutes of walking and talking, Jacob said, "I suddenly noticed what
appeared to be a person about seven feet tall or more in an all-black robe
with a hood and a long cane". His first thought was that it was a character
in a "haunted trail" that the parents had created for the kids. But then the
creature floated in a quite inhuman manner into the middle of the path and
began moving toward the young couple. Jacob's girlfriend screamed at the
sight of it, and they both took off running.
An Enigma
What can we conclude from these tales of hooded beings? As with most ghost
phenomena, it's impossible to conclude anything definitively. . These
entities don't hang around long enough or appear with any reliability to
undergo scientific study or even a rudimentary, objective evaluation. All we
have are the eyewitness accounts. While it is reasonable to suspect that the
cloaked creatures glimpsed in the night out of a deep sleep might be part of
a waking dream or a figment of the unconscious, it is more difficult to
dismiss sightings under wide-awake conditions and with multiple witnesses.
Despite their appearance, these hooded beings don't actually seem to be any more threatening or evil than other kinds of apparitions, even if they are described as having eerie eyes and evil grins. Because their features are usually hidden within the cloak and hood, these beings, whether they are real or imagined, seem to represent a distinct level of mystery and the unknown
By Stephen Wagner
FATE Magazine - May 2005
You switch off the light and climb into bed. It's been a long, stressful day
and it feels good to be lying down beneath warm blankets. Your mind drifts
and you fall slowly, gently into a welcome sleep. Suddenly you are awakened,
not by any sound or light, but by a powerful feeling, an instinct. Something
is in the room with you.
There's something at the foot of the bed. A dark shape. It's difficult to
make it out in the dim light. It looks like a person. What is it? Your eyes
adjust and the figure becomes clearer now. It definitely has the shape of a
human being, but this is someone, something unknown. It's tall and seems to
be dressed in a long, dark cloak. Your terror builds as you realize that
this thing is really standing there in your room.
Although petrified, you try to sit up. As you do, the figure turns and fades
and disappears into the darkness.
You might be surprised to learn how many experiences similar to this one
have been reported over the years by people of all ages and from all walks
of life. Sightings of a hooded being seem to be a unique subset of the ghost
phenomenon. And although not all sightings or experiences are exactly the
same, the similarities outweigh the differences, perhaps indicating that
this is a special kind of ghost encounter.
Children Frightened
Like much ghost phenomena, the hooded beings tend to show up at night and
seem to have no reservations about appearing to small children and scaring
them out of their wits. Trisha, for example, was just five or six when she
had her encounter. She recalls that she woke up sometime during the night
and went to her parents bedroom. As she was climbing into the bed beside her
mother, she saw a man-sized robed figure standing at the foot of the bed,
just staring at her. It appeared to have a bald head, and its skin, where it
showed, glowed with a soft pink hue. She hurried under the covers and never
told her parents about the incident, in fact never told anyone until she
related the story to this author. "I have never forgotten the way the eyes
looked at me" she said.
Was it just a childhood imagining or the remnant of a dream? While it is
true that these beings often do materialize at bedsides, waking people from
their sleep, this is not always the case. Nine-year old Nick from San Pedro,
California, had just come home late with his mom. He was heading toward his
bedroom when he was stopped by the sight of a short, robed, hooded thing
staring at him. (As you see, these entities do a lot of staring, as if their
objective is simply to unnerve those they visit.) The eyes and face were
invisible deep within the hood. When Nick called his mother's attention to
it, the creature vanished.
In May 1996, on the night before her sixth birthday, Morgan seems to have
seen the same creature, and in very similar circumstances. It was the middle
of the night when she woke up needing to go to the bathroom. She headed down
the hallway past her brother's room toward her parents room, a staircase and
a window to the outside. Morgan said that on such trips to the bathroom at
night, she had a habit of glancing out this window as she passed. But on
this night, something was blocking it. Standing before the window was a
thing dressed in a black cloak and hood. Morgan was able to make out some of
its face, however. It had a greenish tinge, and its eyes, which exuded evil,
were blacker than all the black that surrounded them. The being was grinning
at her. "The most evil grin I have ever seen in all my life" Morgan called
it. "Whenever I moved, its eyes would follow me. It wanted to lure me into
something." Morgan ran to her parents room and woke her dad. When he came
into the hallway to investigate, it was gone.
When he was 12 years old, Lukas lived in a small house in Atlanta, Georgia.
The house was so small that he slept in a bunk bed in the family's living
room, and his brother had a bed in the adjacent laundry room. Lukas woke up
one night around midnight, sensing that something was not right. From his
top bunk, he could see into his brother's room, and there seemed to be
something sitting in a chair next to his brother's bed. He was sure he was
awake, but at first was unsure of what he was seeing. "All I could see was
what looked like a person wearing a hood (like a cloak) staring at my
brother" Lukas said. The room also being the laundry room, Lukas reasoned
that this was really just a pile of clothes and that his eyes were playing
tricks on him. But piles of clothes do not move by themselves. "It turned to
look at me" Lukas said. "I could not see any facial features...just evil
darkness".
And that wasn't the end of Lukas's frightening encounter. He lay down in his
bed, trembling with fear. He heard the spectre's chair move against the
wooden floor, then footsteps coming toward him. They started on the laundry
room's wooden floor and moved onto the carpeted floor of his room. He pulled
the covers up over his head, petrified. After what he thought was just a
short time, he mustered the courage to pull the covers down and confront the
being. When he did, however, not only was the hooded being gone, it was also
morning. Somehow, five or six hours had also vanished with the entity.
Multiple Apparitions
It could be debated whether children, like those in the stories above, are
more prone to imagine things than adults, or if they are actually more
sensitive to perceive things that adults often do not.
In any case, adults of varying ages also see these hooded beings, probably
just as often as children do. In fact, there are cases in which multiple
hooded beings have been seen at the same time. They donâ??t always travel
alone.
One case, remarkable in many respects, was related to me by a woman named
Lillith. A close friend of hers, who had a reputation for having a "wild
side" had recently passed away. Not long after, she would be awakened at
night by her bed shaking. This went on without explanation for several
months. Then one night, she said, her friend appeared to her in a most
surprising way. She was awakened by the feeling of someone nibbling at her
ear. She sat bolt upright in bed only to see her dead friend standing there
dressed in a robe, like a monk".
Frightened and shocked by his unwanted intimacy, she demanded that he go
away. Just then, the wall behind her friend's apparition seemed to open up,
revealing a scene of several monk-like figures walking slowly in a line,
following a "master". This leader called out to her friend, admonishing him
to rejoin the line, explaining to him that "our two worlds were not supposed
to meet". Lillith recalled feeling a profound sadness surrounding these
souls, sensing that they were doomed to wander for a long time before they
would be able to join those on a higher level.
Aaron was 17 when his bedroom was invaded by a horde of these creatures. He,
too, was awakened from a sound sleep, suddenly becoming aware of many small
figures in his living room, which adjoined his bedroom. "There were about
ten to twenty of them", Aaron recalled, "all about three feet tall and
wearing dark brown or black hooded robes". Aaron admitted that the
experience was very dream-like, and in that hazy state of mind he reached
over to his nightstand for what he thought was a gun. He aimed it at the
figures, then was brought to his senses by a beeping sound. "I found myself
sitting up in bed, phone receiver in hand, pointing it like a gun toward the
door," Aaron said. "The phone was beeping due to being off the hook."
Aaron's somewhat humorous anecdote forces us to consider the true nature of
these hooded-being experiences and the common thread that runs through all
of the stories we have related so far: they have all occurred at night when
the victims either had been asleep or were tired enough to crave sleep.
Are these experiences only dreams? Are the hooded beings an archetype from
the collective human unconscious?
Beings Observed Outdoors
This is almost certainly true in many cases. But perhaps not all. What are
we to think, for example, of instances in which these hooded beings are seen
outdoors (in other words when the witness is not in a dream-like state),
sometimes in daylight and by multiple witnesses?
In June 2001 at about 6:30 p.m., one witness had gone into the woods of his
property to spread feed for his pet guineas. He was stopped in his tracks
when he saw "a figure with a gray robe and small wings" walking across the
hillside. This was a large apparition, standing an estimated 20 feet tall
and carrying a mace. The witness claims he actually watched the Grim
Reaper-like figure turn and walk slowly away and out of sight.
It was nearing twilight in the fall of 1981 when Chris and a few of his
college mates thought it would be fun to explore a gutted old dorm building
that was scheduled to be torn down. It was Halloween and they were up for a
little fright in the dilapidated, graffiti-scarred building. They joked and
tried to startle one another in the creepy environment, then decided it
might be even scarier to go to the small cemetery near the woods just
outside the campus.
They passed through a rusted old chain link fence and walked among the
headstones of long-deceased college faculty and their families. Chris was
the first to sense something, a true eeriness he didn't feel in the old dorm
Then they heard the crunching of leaves and the rhythm of footsteps
somewhere in the distance. They assumed it was just another college friend
trying to scare them and laughed it off.
Chris heard the footsteps getting closer and strained his eyes in the
gathering darkness to see who or what it was. "Coming from the dark edge of
the woods" Chris said, "I saw it. Vague in shape, it was definitely cloaked
in black, head to foot."
No, this was not a costume-clad student on his way to a Halloween party. Its
movement and behavior ruled out that possibility. "It seemed to move in
spurts of speed and then, as though time fast-forwarded, it would be ahead
of my speed of sight, closer to me than before until it stopped at the
corner post of the fence. I blinked my eyes a few times, thinking my
contacts were the problem, but they weren't".
As he watched, this cloaked and hooded entity turned and faced Chris and his
friends. He could discern no arms, flesh, or eyes on the creature, and he
could not see any feet below its body, even though the hem of its garment
floated inches above the leaves and grass. Without a word, Chris turned and
ran as fast as he could toward the first lighted building that came into
view. He became aware that someone was running beside him. It was one of his
friends. He, too, had seen the hooded spectre.
A similar incident took place on another Halloween night in 1997 when Jacob
and his girlfriend were walking home after a football game. They decided to
take a path through a wooded area close to a quiet neighborhood. After about
20 minutes of walking and talking, Jacob said, "I suddenly noticed what
appeared to be a person about seven feet tall or more in an all-black robe
with a hood and a long cane". His first thought was that it was a character
in a "haunted trail" that the parents had created for the kids. But then the
creature floated in a quite inhuman manner into the middle of the path and
began moving toward the young couple. Jacob's girlfriend screamed at the
sight of it, and they both took off running.
An Enigma
What can we conclude from these tales of hooded beings? As with most ghost
phenomena, it's impossible to conclude anything definitively. . These
entities don't hang around long enough or appear with any reliability to
undergo scientific study or even a rudimentary, objective evaluation. All we
have are the eyewitness accounts. While it is reasonable to suspect that the
cloaked creatures glimpsed in the night out of a deep sleep might be part of
a waking dream or a figment of the unconscious, it is more difficult to
dismiss sightings under wide-awake conditions and with multiple witnesses.
Despite their appearance, these hooded beings don't actually seem to be any more threatening or evil than other kinds of apparitions, even if they are described as having eerie eyes and evil grins. Because their features are usually hidden within the cloak and hood, these beings, whether they are real or imagined, seem to represent a distinct level of mystery and the unknown
