"The Mysterious Hat Man"...Part Two

  Hello and welcome to the playhouse!

If you dit'n catch last night's blog, I suggest you go back and read part one, so you will understand part two, of a very spooky phenomena known as ...

"The Hat Man"

 Copied From "From The Shadows"-True Tales Of The Paranormal by Jason Offutt

The tumor was large, about the size of a chicken egg. In the spring of 1971, a surgeon removed the cancerous mass from 11-year-old Rob Langevoort’s brain and Rob spent a month undergoing radiation therapy.

So, when Rob started seeing things that didn’t belong in his home, he didn’t know if they were real or imaginary. His first encounter was summer 1971.

Rob slept in on a Saturday. His mom was shopping and his dad was out repairing rental property so he had their home in Framingham, Mass., to himself.

“I proceeded down the hall to the kitchen to make myself something to eat for breakfast (and) I fell flat on my face,” Rob said. “It felt as though I was pushed.”

Rob tried to push himself up but couldn’t move – he felt someone standing on his back.

“All of a sudden things gave way and my arms had straightened out and I was staring down the hall to the living room just in time to witness what appeared to be a silhouette of a man in a trench coat wearing a fedora move from the living room to the dining room,” he said.

Rob would later call this entity the Hat Man, but despite the attack, Rob followed it.

“What I did next I find hard to believe,” he said. “I ran into the adjoining kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife I could find and ran into the dinning room.”

The Hat Man wasn’t there. The sliding glass door that led from the dining room to the back porch was still closed, the drapes covering it hung still. He ran through the house and found himself alone, clenching a knife. All the doors and windows were locked.

“I searched that house good,” he said. “Nothing. I went back to the dining room and checked the sliding glass door again. It was locked.”

But he hadn’t heard the front door open, so the back porch was the only way out. He unlocked the sliding glass door and stepped onto the porch, thinking the Hat Man had somehow locked the sliding door behind him and leapt off the porch. But 10 feet below the porch railing was rock – and that was the only way down.

“My father had the builders purposely not install a stairway up to the porch to prevent any intrusions,” Rob said. The Hat Man was gone, and he didn’t jump off the porch.

Was the Hat Man real, or just a side effect of the brain tumor? Rob wondered.

“What exactly did I see or did I see it?” he asked. “And how am I gonna tell Mom?”

Rob’s mother listened to his story, and filed it away as a product of radiation or an overactive 11-year-old mind … until she saw the handiwork of the Hat Man herself.

Seven days later, “my mother prepared breakfast in the dining room, opened the drapes and got the shock of her life,” Rob said. “The sliding glass door was shattered.”

The entire six-foot glass door had been broken into small pieces. Not by a projectile from outside the house, but from something inside – only the interior of the double-pane glass was shattered. Rob was sure the Hat Man had been hiding inside the door.

But that was just the beginning. Although Rob hasn’t seen the Hat Man since he was 11, he’s seen similar shadow beings all his life, although nothing has pushed him or broken glass in decades.

Now an Internet programmer with two children, shadow people remain a part of his life.

“I still see them after 30-plus years and more often now since I have moved in with my elderly father,” Rob said. “It’s not disturbing to me other than they won’t stay still long enough for me to take a good look at them. They appear as semi-transparent charcoal gray foggy silhouettes that I catch in the corner of my eye.”

When Rob tries to look at them straight on, they zip away.

“I see them mostly in doorways and hallways,” Rob said. “I saw one once dash around a sofa. This tells me they can see objects – probably including me. I don’t get excited, (they’re) pretty commonplace with me after all these years.

“How often do I see these shadow people?” Rob said. “All the time.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt



(From "Ghostly Talk")

My parents and their party guests once saw a man with a black wide brimmed hat and a long coat. He was a shadow, so you could only see his outline and was, I assume, treading through the shadows. 

They always explain he looked like he was wearing old time clothing. Anyways, he came in through the back patio where they were having a BBQ with all their friends, back when they were in their 20's. The man quickly glided into the room where I was (I was a baby and sleeping), which was directly adjacent to the patio. 

My parents were justifiably mortified and my dad ran into the room after him with some of his buddies, probably ready to kick some ass, but there was no one there. The room was deathly cold. EVERYBODY at the party saw the same man with the top hat and the coat.

That was back in the 80's, in a town in Chile, where we lived at the time. A few years later we moved to America, to Los Angeles. 

Just a few years ago when I was attending UCLA, I was on some hiking trails at a canyon outside of LA (on DeSoto avenue) with 4 other friends. We were walking through the trails and exploring right as it was getting dark. When it got too dark, we started to leave, but not before resting for a little bit near our car, at the canyon's exit path. 

Suddenly, I looked up, and directly in front of me, there was a shadow in the shape of a human, just kind of hovering, maybe waddling back and forth...it was weird!

It moved like it was a human, it was outlined like a human, you could even make out a head and the feet, but it was ABOVE the ground, and just kind of...watching us. 

I immediately turned around and start bolting towards the car and noticed that my friends were all running to the car too, but without saying a word-just a look of horror on their faces.

We compared notes as we were speeding as far away from that place as possible, and we had ALL seen the same shadow thing. (Except for my best friend who saw blue lights, but not the shadow.)

All these other stories about the shadow people and "The Hat Man" are hitting me hard. This is crazy scary! People are having similar experiences all over the world. 

Some similarities I have observed from all I have read in the blogosphere include:

1) Kids or babies are more often than not involved. 

2) He is a watcher...just kind of watches people.

3) He can appear outside in broad daylight, but seems to prefer the dark and also prefers bedrooms.

4) He wears a hat, a long black coat, and sometimes a cane.

Something is going on.



(By "TressPasseR")
"I live in Canada in the province of Nova Scotia and this happened roughly 4 years ago. My friend and I were walking home to his place from another friends house at about 2 am. My friend Nick lives in a apartment building 3 stories high in a small L shape. WE were coming the back way to the back door which had a light bulb over it, and we were on a hill behind the building pretty much parallel to the third floor. We were about twenty five feet from the back door and I stop dead in my tracks putting out an arm to do the same to him as I was the first to see it. In between the second and third floor in the corner of this L shaped building was an entity about 5 feet tall just hovering in the dark corner, I could see it clearly because it was blacker than the shadows and the light bulb helped visibility. This "thing" appeared to have a long trench coat that looked like it swayed in the wind unnaturally and it was not windy that night and on the top of its head was like a cowboy hat or a wide brimmed hat. Nick saw this as clear as I did so I knew it was not just me. Now this entity was pretty close to the back door and something about it just made me kinda scared and uneasy and I said to Nick " I don't even want to know what that thing is, lets just use the front door." He agreed, when we got inside Nick almost didn't even want to acknowledge we saw something really weird and we never spoke of it again to each other, or anyone else. "


(By "lostgirl") 

"I live in a large old Victorian house that's been divided into 4 apartments. I've lived there 10+ years.
 
A woman & her 3 children moved in next door. Shortly after they moved in, I started seeing the hat man. He would 'visit' briefly before going back through the wall to the neighbor's apartment. 

I would even watch my dog watching the shadow. I wasn't dreaming, I wasn't hallucinating, and I don't take any drugs.
 
The new neighbor was a mess- seriously into meth, eventually she got her aging mother to move in, while she took off for weeks at a time. She would pop in maybe 1-2 a month to stay the night. Every time she came home, hat man would make a brief 'tour' of my place before going back to hers.
 
I never got a sense of evil from it. My dog didn't act afraid, either. But it definately had a strong 'presence'. If I was sleeping when he visited, I would wake up-Like when someone is staring at you when you're asleep. I also had odd dreams. 

After they moved out, everything stopped-no more visits from hat man, no weird dreams, nothing. 

I think it must attach itself to certain people, for whatever reasons."

So what about you? 

Have YOU seen "The Hat Man" ??

If so, I would be delighted to hear your story! 

 

In the meantime, I'm going to continue investigating this strange phenomena, so stay tuned to this blog for part three of...

 

"The Mysterious Hat Man"