Reports of the strange “Hat Man”, a mysterious entity dressed in a long-brimmed hat, continue to pour in from all over the world. Our latest witness report comes from a man named Brian, who met the Hat Man in his childhood home in Virginia long before the phenomena had ever been widely reported. According to Brian, the shadowy entity even brought along a few ghosts that took up residence in his closet.

I grew up in a mostly well-adjusted family. My father was an Air Force officer, my mother a stay-at-home mom and I have one older sister. In 1969, my family was relocated from Colorado to Northern Virginia. My dad had recently returned from a long tour in Southeast Asia. While waiting for a new home to be built, my family moved into a rental house in a typical suburban NoVA neighborhood.

The rental house was a two story deal with one bedroom downstairs and three up. Since my sister had seniority, I was assigned the downstairs bedroom (the third upstairs room was designated a “guest room).  For a while everything seemed fine.  I liked having my own space where I could hang out with friends and also use the unfinished basement to work on model airplanes.

About four months into our time there, I started having problems sleeping through the night. After falling asleep I would sometimes be awakened by sounds seemingly emanating from my closet. The sounds were really weird, almost like the muffled conversations of a large group of people, almost like a ghostly dinner party or something similar.  I was so frightened by these sounds but I just lay there in bed not moving. It happened to me several times and I told my parents, but they laughed and told me I must be having nightmares.

Finally, on one such night, I was so frightened by the noises that I left my room, went up the stairs, and lay down in the guest bedroom. I was very tired but still too scared to sleep.

As I lay there trying to relax, I suddenly noticed a tall, dark shape at the foot of the bed. The shape was silhouetted by a window behind. It was the shadowy outline of a tall, thin man in a large brimmed hat. The shape wasn’t moving much, just kind of hovering near the bed, but the figure was very well defined, sharp against the moonlight coming through the window. I couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness but I could tell he was looking at me. I was petrified! I started to scream, waking my parents and my sister who jumped out of bed, ran into the room and turned on the light. The man in the hat was gone.

My family had no explanation for the story I told them, but they weren’t laughing anymore. Although they had seen nothing, they knew I had seen something – real or imagined – and it had scared the daylights out of me. They were probably questioning my sanity at that point. I had been studying South America in school and the story I relayed to them was that I had seen the outline of a gaucho – the South American cowboys with brimmed hats. No one else in my family had ever had any strange experiences in that house. I had no more strange experiences after that night.

So it wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally heard about the Hat Man on a paranormal podcast. Hearing the descriptions of other people who had seen something similar made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.  I did a quick internet search and found the stories on Week in Weird and artists’ conceptions of the Hat Man. It was him! At long last I knew that what I had seen all those years ago wasn’t just a figment of my imagination- lots of other people had seen the same figure.

My family now believes that I saw something that night in 1969, because ever since that night, even before there were such things as podcasts or the glut of paranormal shows on television, I’ve always told people that story of the shadowy gaucho who appeared in front of me. But now I know that it wasn’t a gaucho. It was the Hat Man. And I really did see him! I know he really does appear to people in the night.

We moved out of that house in 1970 and I’ve never seen another strange apparition like that since. I believe that what happened to me that night jump-started my extreme interest in the paranormal, a subject I’m very much interested in to this day.

Who is the Hat Man? What does he want? Why have so many people around the world been visited by this strange entity? The Hat Man certainly isn’t doing much talking, so the best we can do is continue to compile reports and establish the patterns, so the next time you hear a mysterious shuffle in the darkness of your room, take notes, will ya?