Photo from the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum– this is 134 not 137

For those who haven’t heard of them, shadow people are human-like shapes seen by people anywhere, any time. They are usually seen first in the peripheral vision and then when one turns his head, these figures disappear or disappear as soon as they realize they have been seen. They are also quite intriguing because they can be seen in cemeteries (often) and people’s homes (modern homes without histories), outdoors and in hospitals. As ludicrous as these descriptions sound, it gets even more eerie when people report that they are so black that they seem to suck the very light out of the spot in which they stand, as if they are solid.

In the 1930’s people claimed the house on Lake Ave East in Carleton Place was so haunted that children were afraid to walk by. It is such and innocent and beautiful home– what could have been wrong? After talking to someone who does not want to be named, I maybe have an answer.

The children that passed by on a daily basis going to school saw what a lot of others did not see. They were called Shadow People. As a 6-year-old child he began to see seeing dark black shadow people walking around inside and outside the home. He also also claimed someone would poke him as he walked by and it hurt. Other children said the same thing and would cross the street so they would not have to walk on the same side of the street as the house.

Shadow People” are dark, transparent and fleeting. From the stories I’ve read, it’s not uncommon to read that they killed themselves, were in a car accident, were the victim of a homicide, or some other pre-natural death. Even small children who were able to speak to Shadow People said that the reason they were still here is that, “They can’t go to heaven.” In other words, stuck in this lower vibrational realm.

Some Shadow People don’t want to leave until they feel something here is resolved or they are too attached to a person or place. All spirits do have more than one opportunity to move on so it’s a matter of time before they do, with or without our help. They range in color from black, to grey (most often), to white. Some said they appeared in the edges of their vision, and then when they tried to focus on them, they literally run away. The man in question said he thought one followed him home one day.

“I was 10 years old, in fourth grade. I awoke with a chill on my feet. Moved a bit to warm myself up, but it didn’t work. I sat up and looked in front of me. There I saw a shadowed figure, the felt and saw the presence of a man. The energy I got from him was sorrow. I was petrified from fear, and masked by sadness. I looked back at the end of my bed and he was gone.”

The explanation we get from skeptics and mainstream science – and who are usually people who have never experienced the shadow people phenomenon – is that it is nothing more than the active human imagination. Was it their minds playing tricks on them… or was it therefore their eyes seeing things in a fraction of a second that were not really there – but merely illusions?

There are a lot of questions about why we’re seeing shadow people as more of a modern phenomenon. One theory that is interesting is that our eyes are used to looking at screens that refresh at fast rates of speed and that perhaps we have retrained our vision to see things in the spectrum we didn’t see before.

So watch what you see when you walk around here and if you see a shadow out of the corner of your eye- it is what it is