The Hat Man

Draco Noktul

This preternatural childhood memory was profoundly reawakened in me a few

weeks ago when I was watching a horror themed video on the internet one

night. In the video a narrator was reading allegedly true paranormal encounter

stories that he had collected. In the video there was an extraordinary harrowing

story about an encounter with a shadowy and malevolent entity referred to as

“The Hat Man”. When I heard the description of this supernatural creature

alongside the visual of the drawing it brought to surface a long-buried memory

that only rarely I would vaguely recount in my mind. Until that moment in time I

had no idea so many others around the world shared an incredibly similar

frightful experience of meeting this abyssal specter. I am now convinced that this

entity must be some type of shared psychological boogieman, a Jungian

archetype of the collective unconscious or manifestation of our repressed

revived many forgotten details of that harrowing night over twenty-one years

ago and the following is my personal experience with the paranormal entity

known as “The Hat Man”.

I was nine years old living in the Centennial state of Colorado. Both of my

parents were gone on an out of state vacation for a few days visiting friends. I

recall that a tall and lanky bespectacled young man in his early twenties who

was a trusted family friend was serving as the paid guardian over my older

brother and I during my parents absence. It was dusk on a grey and rainy

overcast day and my older brother and I were animatedly swinging in the

square sandbox on a playground while the male guardian watched over us. The

cold silver chains that we held in our hands were slick with rainwater. I

remember merrily joking and laughing with my brother as well as challenging

and pressuring each other to greater velocities and heights. The increasingly

concerned and duly responsible babysitter cognizant of the gathering gloom and

the descent of darkness gave us a strict time- limit of fifteen minutes before we

had to begin walking home. Besides the three of us the serene suburban

environment was still and quiet. When our time of play had expired we
reluctantly followed our guardian home. When we arrived to our home in a

quaint and small cloistered cul-de-sac of six two-story homes this is when my

memory gets a bit hazy until I retire to my bedroom to read. Despite some fog

and static I do clearly remember our guardian giving us an early bedtime of

eleven P.M. which I took as a personal insult to my manhood. I wasn’t a little

baby! I was nine years old after all and that meant I was worthy of at least a

midnight bedtime. Despite a brief but passionate protest against this

authoritarian injustice I eventually surrendered to his command and retired to

my bedroom alone. He may have won the battle but not the war. I stripped down

out of my damp clothes and then donned my plaid pajamas with an oversized

white t-shirt. Then being the cunning little rebel I was I snuck out a small

flashlight hidden in my closet and entertained myself by reading a choose your

own adventure Goosebumps book under my covers. I remember this clearly

because of the silver holographic cover that set these Goosebumps books apart

from the regular ones. I even remember the exact choose your own adventure

Goosebumps book I was reading that night due to it featuring a type of green-

headed goat demon with curled horns and long claws. The book was called

Welcome to Horrorland and had a haunted theme park theme. The goal of the

books was to be wise and cunning enough to survive a world full of monsters and

hazardous traps. From a young age I’ve always been the type of person to get a
thrill out of being scared. I liked safely experimenting with fear in a way where I

could tuck my proverbial tail between my legs and retreat back into my

cowardly fortress of security if the fanged threat ever became too real. I liked to

fantasize about bloodthirsty monsters and grotesque demons, to feign boldness

and taunt the minotaur of the labyrinth, to have these cloven-hoofed horrors as

my long-distance friends was a great pleasure to me and as long as they stayed

in their impish realm and safely and securely behind that solid but invisible

border that separated them from my material flesh-and-blood reality we got

along fantastically. A few silent hours armed with the flashlight went by.

Shrouded comfortably under the covers and enlightened with an artificial halo I

became lost in my bottomless imagination and engrossed in the titillating stories

of outsmarting ghouls and goblins. Once I finally started to grow drowsy and my

eyelids grew heavy from their hungry investigations I carefully put away my

cherished book in a sheltered trove in the closet and turned off the flashlight. My

screen- less window was partially open so I could enjoy listening to the tranquil

slow fall of the dreary drizzle outside. The organically melodic and pleasant

sound of falling rain was the most peaceful and relaxing ambiences to me as well

as the ghostly mechanical sound of distant trains barreling down their iron

trajectories. When I sat up in bed before beginning to pull the covers over myself

I caught sight of a few jarring anomalies from my cloudy peripheral vision.

windowsill and gazed out of the window to witness two adult men standing

motionlessly in the street below. Both of them looked about six-foot-tall in height

but one of them was dressed in all black while the other man was wearing plain

and faded blue jeans, worn and dusty brown work boots and a blue bomber

jacket as well as a blue mesh cap. He had the appearance of a middle-aged

working class White man possibly a truck driver or construction worker. At the

time these calculated thoughts were not in my head but came to me as later as

contemplations upon my reflections of the childhood memory. I was surprised to

the point of a jolting mild shock see them there since it was so late at night

probably around one in the morning at this point in time but at first I didn’t

think it too strange figuring that they must have been completing some type of

quick but necessary job but the more I looked upon the now unwelcome guests

the more uneasy and unsettled I became. They were standing totally stiff and

still, unnaturally rigid almost like articulated mannequins. They stood in front of

a large metallic dumpster that was coated with a thin layer of dust and grime,

the bulky container was nearly overflowing with firmly compressed cardboard

boxes. The two men were standing in the road on the opposite side of the cul-de-

sac but this was still only a stone’s throw away from my position in my elevated

bedroom. The two men seemed drained of vitality and were seemingly lifeless,
not even moving a muscle or twitching a finger and not making the slightest

noise. The two men were directly facing each other and standing about nine or

ten feet apart almost as if they were preparing for some type of nocturnal

ritualistic pistol duel of some type. As I grew nervous at the appearance of these

inexplicable figures I continued to study these bizarre characters with my eyes.

The man in black worried me the most as his nebulous face seemed to be a

featureless chasm of blackness, where his eyes should have been were infinite

hollows. His fell countenance was like an all-devouring black hole. He was

wearing sleek dark leather gloves, an Australian style black duster similar to a

trench- coat and a wide-brimmed hat that partially reminded me of the hat

worn by the character from Mortal Kombat called Kung Lao who donned a

razor-rimmed wide-brimmed hat and also wielded it as a lethal weapon against

his opponents; Mortal Kombat of course being a violent fighting competition

videogame that was a favorite of mine at the time. The hat man didn’t seem

human more like a grounded shadowy phantasm yet somehow he did appear to

be of material weight in the physical universe. Not merely an ephemeral

silhouette but something more tangible. Nervousness transformed to fear and

anxiety at an alarming rate. I wanted the shadow man to leave and to disappear

forever as I felt like my peace of mind and security would not return until then. A

bleak and dire feeling of impending doom gripped my heart in icy claws, a
foreign type of sharp terror I had never experienced before. Just as I was about

to remove my damp hands from the windowsill and flee and hide the hat man

slowly craned his neck and looked directly into my eyes, or at least I feared he

looked directly into my eyes and this froze my soul. Or had he actually even seen

me? Maybe I was quick enough to escape without being detected. I crossed my

fingers and hoped I was safe from the hunter in the night and if I was religious

I’m sure I would have prayed. Petrified I shrunk away like I had been pierced by

a poison arrow. My pulse quickened and my breathing became labored as I was

overtaken with panic. I sat down in the corner of my room shivering as my gaze

darted frantically across the walls. Had the shadow man seen me? Was he

coming to hurt me? Maybe I had imagined the whole frightful scenario, too

many Goosebumps monsters and goblins warping my young impressionable

brain, after all my overactive imagination had caused me some amount of

trouble and distress in the past even to the point of struggling with insomnia at

times from the oversaturation of too many scary stories. Maybe I was deep

asleep in my bed, twitching in discomfort and this was just a horrible nightmare

that once awake would be of no consequence and quickly forgotten. Those were

comforting thoughts but I knew they were nothing but wishful deceptions. This

was no superstition, it was real I could hear my racing heartbeat between my

eardrums and I could taste the sickening flavor of metallic fear on my tongue.
The dense sweat forming on my brow felt like megaton millstones anchoring me

down into stark reality; The stark reality of the perfidious shadow hat man who

lurked below like a hellish vulture. I sat there shivering in the paranoid darkness

of my bedroom for around ten minutes. Maybe the shadow man was gone now

and it was safe. I had to make sure he was gone or I would never be able to sleep

again. I worked up the courage to take a quick and stealthy peek out of the

window in the hopes that my otherworldly tormenter had forever vanished from

this mortal coil. I was gravely disappointed in the results of my investigation.

The shadow man in the wide-brimmed hat was still there but the other man, the

human one had disappeared completely. The hat man was staring blankly

straight ahead where the other man had once been like he was staring into a

void. Maybe he was staring through the dead man’s ghost? Who was this specter

of darkness? The Shadow Hat Man. The Grim Stalker of the Night. The Nocturnal

Soul-Eater. An accursed apparition of the bottomless pit. The Nebulous Anti-

Man. These are titles that seem to suit him upon mature contemplation a few

decades down the line. What foul cauldron had he been conjured in? He hunted

human prey and he was coming for me next I could feel it in my bones. For me

this shock and dreadful revelation was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Close to tears and suppressing a scream I swung open my bedroom door like it

was an infernal penitentiary gate binding me to perdition and I fled down the
dim hallway. I went into my older brother’s room and feeling like a coward I got

into bed with him and hid under the covers, crawling close enough next to him to

absorb some of his body warmth. I don’t remember getting much sleep that

night as I stayed alert with my nerves frayed and only when the salvific light of

dawn began to slowly but gloriously permeate the house did my stolen sanity

begin to return in full bloom. Had it not been for the resulting shame of being

mocked and scolded for sleeping in my brother’s bed by both the babysitter and

my annoyed brother I might have convinced myself that the horror of the

shadow hat man was all a product of my overactive imagination or just some

type of anomalous fictional night terror. This was not the case though. I have full

confidence this was as real as the physical experience of typing these words on

the keyboard now and the shadow hat man has definitely made an indelible

mark on my psyche. In the stories of others encounters with this entity it is often

described that once the hat man got close to them they felt an oppressive

suffocating dread as well as some smelling an overwhelming caustic sulfur scent.

Some have said they believe the hat man is a guise of the devil himself. While I

believe the hat man is a malevolent entity who is hostile to humanity, I

personally do not believe he is a guise of the devil. Although I was more

fortunate than some of the other poor souls who have encountered the hat man

in the sense that thankfully he did not come nearly as close to me as he did to
them. Maybe if he had gotten closer to my person that night I would feel much

differently about this. If I had seen the hat man enter my home in search of me I

may have literally died of panic. My theory on this is that the hat man did not

come for me that night but instead he came for the man on the street that

vanished. I just happened to have the misfortune to become an involuntary

voyeur into his mysterious and malefic activities that night. Sometimes I wonder

who that man was who was claimed by the shadow hat man that night. I doubt I

will ever know. I feel sorry for him without a doubt but much better him than

me. Anyways, farewell for now my friends and thank you for reading and to “The

Hat Man” as they say on some of the internet horror forums let’s not meet again.

If by chance some night we do meet again though, who am I to complain or

protest? I’m sure you have your reasons for the rendezvous. Just promise not to

bite.

Below is the best pictorial representation that I could find which shows how ‘The

Hat Man’ manifested himself to me on the night in question. This picture comes
incredibly close to how I remember seeing him.