I live in the heart of São Paulo, the most populated and industrialized state in Brazil. My parents came from the country side of Bahia in the late 90’s, a state up north.
Since i was 6 years old, at the end of every year me and my parents would go to my grandma’s house in Bahia, in a village where the closest city is 11km away.
The place is in the Caatinga region (very rarely rains), has red’ish dirt and it’s always very hot. In the old days people here realy strugled with water shortage, and it was not unusual for people to fall ill because of dehidration.
This was in December 2016, i was 12 years old and we were on our trip to my grandma’s house, i never realy liked the place because my grandma was very mentaly ill (we weren’t very close anyways), she would dose off watching old cartoons and religious lectures, and her house was full of religious paraphernalia in the walls and stuff. I am very introverted and love being on the internet, the complete oposite of the other kids my age around there, so i never realy got of the house besides when it was to go into the “serra” (local foresty mountains) with my father and his childhood friends.
One day i was chilling on my bed when my mom asked for my cousing who was the same age as me and lived there to bring me with his friends to go out and explore. I didn’t like the idea obviosly, but thought maybe it would be cool to see the places they normaly go to hang out so i could go chill by myself after.
My grandma’s house is conected with my aunt’s house by a big backyard, and there is a big dirt road that passes trough the front of my aunt’s house that connects with the main road in one side and goes off into the distance to the isolated ranches of the Caatinga.
My cousing told me about a place where there was a big umbuzeiro tree (a tree that produces a sour-sweet round shaped fruit) not far up that road.
We went in a group of 4, me my cousing and two friends of his who were 13 and 14 years old. We walked for something like 15 minutes up that road until i saw the umbuzeiro tree in the distance, it was gigantic from what i remeber. We jumped over a low barbed wire fence and started walking towards the umbuzeiro, while walking we went past a dead umbuzeiro that was like 20 meters from the one we were walking towards, which was kinda weird, i thought to myself: “how can this one be dead so close to one that thrived like it rained everyday?”
We got to the umbuzeiro and my cousin and i picked some from the ground that fell off, while his friends started climbing it and picking fruits and eating them, i just watched them doing it because i didn’t realy like the fruits that much. While this is happening i decide to look over my shouder to the dead umbuzeiro tree. There were three tiny dark humanoids looking straight at us, with a shining “ball of light” to their right, almost like a floating cracked mirror reflecting the sun light at us.
The left figure was the smallest, the middle one was the tallest, and the right one was a little smaller than the middle one, they were to the right side of the tree faceing us. They werent demonic looking or anything, the just looked like three shadow’ish malnourished kids by the base of the three. And that weird light was just to the left side of them, and like i described, the shape looked like if you broke a big mirror and took a big chunk of it and used it to reflect the sun on us.
Throughout my whole life i was a very skeptical guy, never believed these horror/paranormal stories even though they were always very entertaining. I swear to god that if i was alone and saw that, i would shrug it off as me alucinating because of the heat.
I remember so vividly this moment and get chills just thinking about it
After seeing them, my heart started pounding, i touched my cousin arm hoping that he would turn around and there would be nothing there. This all happened in a span of like 5 seconds, he just started screaming and running, i was paralised and still processing if this was all real and looked at the other 2 who were still on top of some branches of the tree, they looked and instantily started jumping off, which was my trigger to start running to the barbed wired fence.
We jumped it and turned that 15 minute road into a 5 minute road lol.
When we got there it was the beginning of the afternoon, and by night we were at my cousin’s house talking about our perspectives and confirming we all saw the same thing.
After this we went to an old woman who was a friend of my cousin’s mom i think, and she told us a story that her mom told her about a family that abandoned their kids in the region when the village had just started and the kids died because all the trees were dead and they were to young to know how to hunt.
I don’t know if the story is true, but it matched perfectly with the shadow kids we saw.
Again, im only telling this story here because this is the only paranormal thing that happened to me that i have no logical way of explaining.
I also realized that “shadow people” or “shadow kids” is a known thing that a lot of people seem to have stories about, but i swear that i never even seen stories about it before this happened to me.
Also sorry for any spelling mistakes, or lack of depth in the story, my english is not the best so is hard to find the right words to describe things.