You switch off the light and climb into bed. It’s been a long, stressful day and it feels good to be lying down beneath warm blankets. Your mind drifts and you fall slowly, gently into a welcome sleep. Suddenly you are awakened, not by any sound or light, but by a powerful feeling, an instinct.

Something is in the room with you.

There’s something at the foot of the bed. A dark shape. It’s difficult to make it out in the dim light. It looks like a person. What is it? Your eyes adjust and the figure becomes clearer now. It definitely has the shape of a human being, but this is someone, something unknown. It’s tall and seems to be dressed in a long, dark cloak. Your terror builds as you realize that this thing is really standing there in your room.

Although petrified, you try to sit up. As you do, the figure turns and fades…and disappears into the darkness.

You might be surprised to learn how many experiences similar to this one have been reported over the years by people of all ages and from all walks of life. Sightings of “hooded beings” seem to be a unique subset of the ghost phenomenon. And although not all sightings or experiences are exactly the same, the similarities outweigh the differences, perhaps indicating that this is a special kind of ghost encounter.

Like much ghost phenomena, the hooded beings tend to show up at night and seem to have no reservations about appearing to small children and scaring them out of their wits. Trisha, for example, was just five or six when she had her encounter. She recalls that she woke up sometime during the night and went to her parents’ bedroom. As she was climbing into the bed beside her mother, she saw a man-sized robed figure standing at the foot of the bed, just staring at her. It appeared to have a bald head, and its skin, where it showed, glowed with a soft pink hue. She hurried under the covers and never told her parents about the incident, in fact never told anyone until she related the story to this author. “I have never forgotten the way the eyes looked at me,” she said.

Was it just a childhood imagining or the remnant of a dream? While it is true that these beings often do materialize at bedsides, waking people from their sleep, this is not always the case. Nine-year old Nick from San Pedro, California, had just come home late with his mom. He was heading toward his bedroom when he was stopped by the sight of a short, robed, hooded thing staring at him. (As you’ll see, these entities do a lot of staring, as if their objective is simply to unnerve those they visit.) The eyes and face were invisible deep within the hood. When Nick called his mother’s attention to it, the creature vanished ...