Source: http://www.fatemag.com/2005%5F05art2.html

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 “hooded beings” 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’ll 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 don’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?

Symbolic Manifestations


The shrouded or hooded figure often appears in literature as an archetypal symbol that suggests “social apartness and the unknown,” says Peggy Maddox, Dept. of English at Fulbright College, University of Arkansas in her article “Retiring the Maid: The Last Joan of Arc Movie,” which appeared in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. She references the spooky cowled form of the Ghost of Christmas yet-to be in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the wizard Gandalf in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and the many literary and artistic representations of Death and the Grim Reaper.

In a lecture about archetypal figures in dreams, Dr. Eleonora Marinaro says that such hooded shadow beings contain “personal characteristics which have been denied expression in conscious life. It feels undeveloped, primitive and threatening.” Marinaro believes that these figures are symbols for elements in our lives that must be confronted, understood and integrated into our waking lives. From this perspective, the hooded beings, although they can be intensely frightening, may actually appear as an impetus to face our fears; they can be catalysts for self-enlightenment and growth.

So, is that all these hooded beings are—symbolic manifestations of human fears that materialize from our unconscious mind from dream states?

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.

In another case of a sighting by more than one person, the cloaked figure had a habit, so to speak, of appearing to different people in the same location. In 1982, Brenda was a bartender in a downtown nightclub in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was the middle of the afternoon when Brenda and a colleague were working on some club-related business in their third-floor office. Heeding the call of nature, she went down to the second floor where the ladies room was located.

In the ladies room was a full-length mirror. “As most girls will do,” Brenda said, “I glanced in it…and was stopped dead in my tracks by not my own reflection, but that of a tall, gaunt, pale man in a dark riding cloak with a hood. He just stared at me as he slowly faded away.”

Brenda hurried right back upstairs, and by her expression, her colleague could see that something was wrong. He asked her what had happened, but Brenda, not trusting her own senses, said that she wasn’t sure. To her utter shock, he said, “You saw him, didn’t you?” Brenda was almost afraid to ask what he meant, but she did. “The man in the cloak,” he replied. He had seen the same figure on the second floor just the day before. It appeared to be bent over, as if picking up something off the floor. It looked up at the man and faded from view.

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.

Stephen Wagner manages the About.com Guide to Paranormal Phenomena at paranormal.about.com