By: Kristen Anderson
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You only see the dark figure when you’re in bed.
Maybe you were just drifting off, or maybe you were disturbed from a deep sleep. To him, it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re in some stage of hazy, heavy-eyed liminality, The Hat Man can come to call, gazing down at you with a troubling malevolence. What does he want? Why does he appear? And how have so many people had the same experience?
I talked about The Hat Man on my podcast Guide to the Unknown years ago, and I’ve been surprised to receive firsthand stories from people who’ve come across him since then. They Google variations of “shadow person,” “hat ghost,” etc., trying to see if there are other accounts out there to validate their experience—and they find that there are.
The Hat Man is said to be an evil entity, often placed in the category of paranormal phenomena referred to as “shadow people.” Shadow people are just about exactly what they sound like—dark, vaporous forms in the shape of humans that are posited to be a type of ghost. Some might be dilute manifestations of people who were once living, others may be something else that we don’t understand. But The Hat Man is a singular character inside that broader category, reported to have particular character traits, a more solid outline than most shadow people, and an especially notable visual marker: he’s always wearing a hat.
That’s not to say he doesn’t like to change up his style every now and again. Some people report encountering The Hat Man in old-timey clothes, a long trench or cape, and various hats— usually a top hat, fedora, or a gaucho hat (think southwestern cowboy). Some have seen him with red eyes, others report a featureless, dark face. But he’s always tall, six feet at minimum, and even more often people say he’s about 8–10 feet tall, forcing him to crouch while standing. Imagine opening your eyes at night and seeing a hunched figure bending unnaturally away to keep from hitting your ceiling fan with the top of his hat. Such a human action on an inhuman figure has to be especially eerie.
They say he sometimes carries a gold pocket watch that he’ll occasionally glance at, which is interesting: it suggests that he’s sticking around long enough to be curious about the time. Could it be a prop used for mockery, suggesting to his victims that he has all the time in the world?
The varying anecdotes make me wonder whether The Hat Man actually changes his appearance for some reason, or whether the point of view of the encounterer influences what they see. If someone associates old Victorian clothing with frightening ghosts, might that subconsciously make his shadowy shape take that form? If you live in the southwest, are you more likely to see him in a gaucho hat? Perhaps it’s similar to the same way we see shapes in the clouds. So much of our experience of the world is colored by our own perception, so it stands to reason that personal interpretation could be a big part of supernatural experiences as well.
Luckily for most who meet with him, The Hat Man doesn’t seem intent on inflicting physical harm. What he’s actually after is slower, more insidious. He just watches the sleeper, sometimes arching his overlong body over their bed. It’s said that even though he doesn’t touch his victims, they can feel evil emanating from him in waves. They can feel that he wants to do them harm.
The theory is that he uses a “look, don’t touch” approach for a calculated reason: it creates a heady brew of confusion, anticipation, and fear in his subject that he can then feed off of. This may be the main purpose of The Hat Man’s visit. The bedrooms of his victims are his demonic charging stations.
When he’s not hovering over the sleeper, he employs two other common methods of viewing his prey: looking at the sleeper through the mirror, or sitting and watching them from the corner. Even though proximity would understandably cause the most fear, I find these two approaches almost more disconcerting. Are there sometimes otherworldly confines he’s working within that force him to use a secondary source (the mirror) to watch his victims…or is it somehow amplifying his gaze? Is his malevolence so innate and casual that he sometimes doesn’t even have to get up, preferring to take a load off in the corner?
When he’s finally had his fill of fear and decides to leave, he shows another contrast to shadow people, who are usually said to dissipate where they stand, by actually using the door and either walking or gliding through it. This suggests a degree of physical control other shadow people may not have, perhaps due to the more solid outline that those who have encountered The Hat Man have remarked on.
He can appear to anyone at any time, but the pattern seems to be that The Hat Man often comes around people who are in turmoil—not unlike the appearance of poltergeists who feed off of the strong energy of those in distress in order to manifest.
So what exactly is The Hat Man? Some say he’s an interdimensional being, a demon, or even the devil himself. My favorite theory is that The Hat Man is a product of astral projection. Astral projection is the esoteric idea that you can use mental techniques to initiate an out-of-body-experience and interact with the world using your non-physical form. Perhaps there are people, real sickies, who do so and appear as The Hat Man to terrorize others without risk of being caught.
Of course, the simplest explanation is often the correct one. Logic would dictate that the people who report having seen The Hat Man have suffered from especially vivid nightmares or sleep paralysis, both as common as they are unfortunate. The fact that he seems to appear to people who are going through a period of unrest in their lives might be a correlation here, too. But the sleepers’ experiences with seeing The Hat Man and the shared “What the hell is that?” moment along with a subsequent search for other people who have seen him, too is undeniable. That experience is very real.