An Brief, Uneventful, But Certainly Unexplainable Occurrence

To cut straight to the point before supplying details: I believe that I may have witnessed a Shadow being.

Now, to further elaborate: My boyfriend and I saw something for which neither of us could deduce a cause. We are both very skeptical, academic students and, at the risk of sounding pompous, we are rather intelligent and rational people. We are true scientists in that we strive to provide explanations only for events which are common and repeatable and can be studied in a systematic manner, because science is a process and not a belief system (as many people seem to treat it).

To begin, I would like to provide a brief-as-possible description of the floor plan: imagine the living room as a rectangle. The couch we were sitting on has it's back to one of the long walls, with the television backing the other long wall. From where we were sitting, the television was in front of us (about 8 feet away) and the right-hand corner of the living room lay about 10 feet to the right of the television (make the t.v. Closer to the left-hand corner). This right-hand corner has two doors - his bedroom door, in the long wall, and the back-porch door, in the short wall. The right-hand short wall has the back-porch door and a window next to it, which looks out on the back-porch. Aside from the window in the door and the window next to the door, there are no other windows in this whole room.

At night, plenty of light streams in through this right-hand wall because the back-porch lights of all the other apartments stream in. Many times you know when people are passing by the apartment because you will see them through the windows, their shadows move a certain way, and you often hear them. Also, my boyfriend's dog will start barking (he's half-beagle).

As boyfriend and I sat on the couch, watching some late-night Comedy Central, I saw a shadow move in the right-hand corner. By shadow, however, it wasn't really against the wall. It didn't seem like a solid mass, it seemed like a shadow, but it did not stay against the wall. Rather, it moved in front of the wall. I guess you could say it almost looked like it was walking from the bedroom door to the back porch door, back and forth a few times, but I don't know that it was moving between those doors so much as it was just confined to those areas. The other strange thing about the occurrence of this pop-out shadow is that I detected no movement behind the apartment, no single person walking by, and apparently neither did the dog. And I certainly did look from my vantage-point. Given the angle of the shadow in relation to where we were sitting, I should have been able to see the source of it outside the door, and obviously I did not.

I honestly was just a little puzzled, more than anything, but I had a bit to drink earlier in the night and had assumed that it was just a case of slight inebriation. I didn't even say anything, move, nothing. But then my boyfriend asked me if I had just seen the strange shadow, and I said, "The one in the corner by the door?" and he confirmed my response. For a few seconds we discussed possible sources of the shadow and could find no cause. None whatsoever. I don't really know how he felt about all of it, but it actually did no more than puzzle and mildly interest me. We both pretty much just had an attitude of, "Huh, that was different," and then moved on.

The event by itself was no great spectacle, but I can honestly say that I have had no definitive experiences that have been more than just incredibly strong feelings about certain locations or incredibly vivid dreams - in short, nothing I would call paranormal. The boyfriend has told me of a couple of occurrences that he has no explanations for, but they rather discomfort him so unless he brings anything up I try not to let my curiosity take over and ask him anything. Perhaps he is the reason I saw what I did. Perhaps neither of us actually saw anything paranormal, only a strange anomaly of physics. But I do still find this occurrence fascinating, and think that other people can appreciate the account of something unexplainable by a person whose job it is to systematically study natural phenomena.