#shadow spirits

Ah yes the 3 stages of making a creature/species

First stage you have the idea but you didn’t know what you were doing with it

Second stage you have the concept and theme and inspiration what you want but you aren’t 100% sure what your doing but you’re getting somewhere

Final stage: You finally got what you wanted give yourself a treat

Jumps straight into angst woOO-

Jackal is an example of "I am no longer baby, I want power" and is way more than his little bird exterior. Shadow spirits will often join humans if they promise more of the energy they want to feed of of.

I’m planning on dividing certain sections of my tales into location-based bits. Basically, if a place had multiple stories, they will be part of a series. This one is all about my family’s home on 7th Street.

7th Street - The Shadow Kids

Before I introduce the stories that happened on 7th Street, allow me to introduce this location: When I was 7 years old, my family and I moved to a house in an old, Westside neighborhood in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This house was on a block surrounded by some of the strangest and friendliest neighbors I’ve ever encountered. We had a professional Santa Claus who lived down the block named Larry, who had also been an active member of the KKK. Another KKK member, (and recently a headline-making murderer) named “Popeye” lived next door to us. To the right of our house was a Hispanic family that paid the neighborhood kids in Otter Pops for sweeping their sidewalks. Across the street was the largest family I had ever seen shoved under one roof. And their son was Satan, I swear. Another neighbor was my good friend Jeffrey, who played with my younger brother and I multiple times a week. Down the road was an adult-child named Jason who rode bikes in the middle of the street with all the bike-owning kids. There were the Hawe family, who were made up of a single mom, a girl my age, and eight of their pets. Lastly, there was a drunk who helped me save a dying pigeon one time. I don’t know why you need to know all these people, because they don’t effect this story at all. But it’s a fun detail, right?

Anyways back to the actual house situation.  

216 North 7th Street was chock full of freaky shit. The house was like, 100 years old. It was in one of the first developed neighborhoods of the city which housed miners from the Gold Camp area. So of course, the house was set up for success when it came to the creep factor.

Source: Realtor.com

The layout of this house was pretty normal. Each room was finished, had working electricity and utilities, the usual. But each room carried its own energy, most of which were negative. But I’ll get to the individual rooms in a later post. For this story, I will focus on my bedroom. More specifically, the Shadow Kids who visited me in there. When shadowy spirits show up, it’s not often considered a good thing. I’m not saying that all shadow spirits are demonic or evil in nature, but based on my experiences, they aren’t the friendliest of creatures. Let me tell you two stories about the Shadow Kids.

My bedroom. Source: Zillow.com

When I was around 8 years old, I had a sleepover with my friend Melissa* (name changed due to privacy). We had both fallen asleep on palettes on my bedroom floor facing my bed. Sometime in the middle of the night, when all was dark, I jolted awake from a deep sleep. My eyes fell upon my bed and wouldn’t leave. It was as if I knew something was about to happen on that bed. Not but 10 seconds later, two black shadows in the shape of kids were hopping up and down on my mattress. They were silent, but menacing. The way they jumped was almost animated, like a twisted cartoon. Hop, hop, hop they went. My blankets ever creasing with each bounce. I sat up quickly and hissed at them to go away. My heart was racing and I didn’t know whether to cry or scream. They jumped higher and higher, and got bigger and denser in shade. Finally, after was felt like an eternity, I stood up and turned on the lights. 

Both of the Shadow Kids were gone. Nothing was left of them other than wrinkled blankets strewn across my mattress. Melissa woke up and asked me to turn off the lights, but I couldn’t make myself do it. So we both grabbed our blankets and pillows and moved the sleepover to the living room. She had asked me what was wrong, and I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t want to scare her. I ended up not getting much sleep that night.

The Shadow Kids didn’t seem to want to leave. In fact they appeared on several other occasions during the night, each time in a sinister and playful manner. On this particular occasion, I was asleep in my bedroom with my bed positioned parallel to the door. I usually slept with my door open so I could holler out to my parents if need be. Again, I found myself compelled to wake up quickly in the middle of the night. Some sort of noise was happening outside of my door, so I rolled over to investigate. 

There, on the left side of my door frame, was a Shadow boy. His head peaked around the threshold several times, as if to tease or play peak-a-boo. His outline looked a lot like my brother’s, so my immediate reaction was to shout at him to get back to bed. 

This photo was taken around the time of this story. On the right is my brother. So basically imagine the outline of his body filled with a dense, black shadow. Source: Me.

“Go to bed, Zane!” I whispered sharply.

The shadow continued his little dance, peaking in and out of my room. 

“ZANE. GO TO BED.” 

This time, it waved. And I got angry.

“WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME!” I yelled.

Suddenly, the lights came on from the room outside of mine, and the boy disappeared. Dad grumpily stomped into my doorframe and asked me what I was yelling at. I told him that Zane was out of bed like he wasn’t supposed to be. So, off he went to check Zane’s room to see what the fuss was about. Dad returned a few moments later and told me with confusion and irritation that he was sound asleep in his bedroom. I started to cry out of frustration because for one, Dad didn’t believe me, and for two, Zane was trying to pull a trick on me. I calmed down enough to go to the bathroom and walked past my brother’s room to see that, in fact, he was dead asleep. Snoring and all. I cried and cried out of confusion and fear. Dad told me to try to get back to sleep, but I was absolutely terrified. So he spent the rest of his night with the TV on low volume, being sure to leave the living room light on to give me comfort.