Hey everyone. This is my first time posting on Reddit, but one of my friends told me I should post here to see if anyone else has gone through a similar experience. I’m posting this on a throwaway account to preserve my anonymity. This is going to be long, so bear with me.
For context: I (21M) am a college student at a university in a rural area in the South, so nothing like this ever happens here. My university requires that everyone lives on campus, which is weird, I know, so all of my friends and I live within a five minutes walk of each other. Most of my friends are seniors, so they live in a separate dorm that’s across campsu from me.
This past weekend, I was at a party - it was just a casual dorm party, and as the night’s winding down I decide to head back to my own room, since it’s such a short walk and I always prefer to sleep in my own bed. I’m walking out of my friends’ dorm, shivering because the cold front had just come through and I hadn’t brought a jacket to the party, when I see a man, standing against the wall of the dorm.
There wasn’t any light out, so I couldn’t see his face, but I could see that his body was tilted towards me. Now, normally I wouldn’t think anything of this, there’s always people walking around on my campus and it was a Friday night, so I would expect people to be out, plus I had admittedly had a little too much to drink, but what stopped me was the fact that this man did not move at all. I even stumbled, half from the booze and half from the fright that he had given me, and he just stood there, without movign. I shook my head, trying to convince myself that he was just another drunken person who had locked himself out of the building by accident, so I held the door open for him - stupid of me, I know, but I thought he was a student - but he did not move from the wall.
“Whatever,” I said, probably loudly enough for him to hear considering the amount of alcohol I had drank, and I let the door close and began walking back to my dorm. As I opened the door to my building, I looked back and my heart stopped. In the darkness, just outside of the light from the streetlamps, the man was standing there. I still couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was the same man. I quickly shut the door, and when I reached the elevator, I turned around again and screamed. The man reached the door, and he was stanidng right outside of it, his hand pressed against the glass, but his face was still hidden in shadow. When the elevator doors opened, I rushed inside and up to my room, and I tried to forget the whole thing had happened.
The next morning, Saturday, I got breakfast with my boyfriend, who we’ll call James (20M). We’ve been dating for about 3 months, but I still wasn’t sure if we were close enough for me to tell him about what had happened to me last night without him thinking that I was crazy. Eventually, I worked up the courage to tell him, and his jaw dropped. James, since he was young, has always had pretty bad nightmares, but recently I’ve noticed that they’ve gotten really bad.
I’d tried to talk to him about them, to see what was wrong, but he only shook his head every time I brought it up, and I didn’t want to push him. After I finished telling him this story, however, he told me that the same exact thing had happened to him, two weeks ago, as he was walking back to the dorm with his late-night McDonalds. He had seen a random person outside of the parking garage, but he hadn’t been able to see his face, and when he had gotten to his dorm he had seen the same man once again right outside. This is what he had been having nightmares about - the man with the black hole for a face, getting closer and closer to him.
I managed to push it out of my mind, to tell myself that the strange man I had seen the night before and the man from James’s nightmares was all a one-time thing, until Monday night. I had an exam on Tuesday morning, so I was up late studying in the library. For some reason, the library here closes at midnight, and I lost track of time until 11:50, when the library assistant came to me and told me I had to leave in the next 10 minutes. I walked out just as the lights to the library were shutting, and when I walked out, I saw him.
Once again, he was sitting on the wall, but this time, as soon as I walked out he stood up and began to walk towards me. I ran. Anyone who’s ever toured a college campus knows they always tell you about the blue lights, which you can press to call the campus police, and that you can supposedly see from any point on campus. This is not true: I was running and I didn’t see anything, but I could hear his feet behind me. I screamed out for help, but with the cold everyone was already inside their dorms for the night; there was no one but me and the man chasing me.
By some miracle, I reached my dorm before him and shut the door in his face, but once again his hands slammed against the door as soon as I had closed it, though he kept his face just far enough out of the lights for me to see it. The next morning, on Tuesday, I called campus police. I told them the situation, and I asked them to help me, but they said that, without any proof, there was nothing I could do. I tried to explain to them that I had seen this man twice already around campus, but they just told me to be careful and to let them know if anything else came up.
I haven’t been able to sleep well since then, but thankfully, I only have one class on Wednesday, so after that ended I shut myself in my room and tried to distract myself by playing video games. James came over around 9 last night and we fell asleep together, without any sign of the Shadow Man (this is what we’ve started calling him). This morning, Thursday, was when it got the worst. I’m normally an early riser, but I woke up at 10am to James shaking me awake, asking me why I was still asleep. I had slept through my first two classes of the day.
This is unheard of for me - I always wake up to my first alarm at 7am, but just in case I sleep through it, I set about thirty different alarms each night to make sure. I opened my phone, confused, and saw that all of the alarms had been turned off. I didn’t know how this could have happened, and as I was trying to figure it out, I saw that my room was a total mess. All my clothes were laying on the floor, and the picture I keep on my desk - which is of me and James at our one month anniversary - was missing, the frame empty. I got out of bed and went to take a picture of the room to use as evidence, and when I looked at it in my phone gallery, my heart stopped.
Before the picture I had just taken, there were about 10 new photos: all of them of James and me asleep together. The time stamp said they had been taken at 6:37, right after the sun had risen today. I don’t normally lock my door - again, I know, this is dumb of me, but we’re in the rural south - so anyone could have gotten in, but I immediately knew it was him.
After James managed to get me to calm down enough to show him the photos, I called campus police again and went to their office in person. After begging them to help me, they finally looked at the security footage from last night. They didn’t let me see anything, but after only about ten minutes they came back and told me that they didn’t have any footage from last night. For some reason, the cameras had stopped working.
I knew exactly what had happened, but I could tell they thought I was making everything up. I even showed them the picture I had taken, of the mess in my room, and of the picture of James and me sleeping together in my bed, but they just said they could not prove who had taken those pictures or who had made the mess in my room. They just told me to make sure I locked my door at night and then sent me out of the office.
I have no idea what to do. Campus police obviously isn’t going to do anything. Can someone please give me advice on what to do? Has this happened to anyone else before?