Spectral, shadowy beings are the new boogeymen.
Shadow people are dark, humanoid figures that manifest just outside a person's vision. Some people insist they are ghosts or demons. Other people suggest they are hallucinations caused by schizophrenia, dementia, or drug use.
Author Jason Offutt recounts the story of Lisa Falour on his website: From the Shadows. As a teen, Lisa lived in a Sears Vallonia in South Euclid, Ohio.
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| 4522 Telhurst Road, South Euclid, OH. Capture from Google Streetview. |
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| Sears Vallonia from the 1936 Modern Homes catalog. |
As Lisa sat in the kitchen doing her homework, she would regularly see shadowy figures in the adjacent dining room.
As Offutt relates in his story, "The Thing on the Stairs", Lisa said:
“I constantly saw shadow people walking around in the dining room while I sat at the kitchen table,” she said. ”They were normal sized and silent, and though usually out of the corner of my eye, when looked at straight, they would just quietly move on. It wasn’t a trick of the eye.”
If she turned on the dining room light, the shadow people disappeared.
At nights, Lisa would hear footsteps advancing up the stairs. Then, she would feel a presence standing at her bedroom door.
Lisa also saw a door in the dining room that wasn't actually there. From "The Thing on the Stairs":
“I repeatedly saw ‘another’ door,” Lisa said. “It may have been at another point in time, as the house was constantly worked on and changed. It was just slightly to one side of the ‘real’ door leading to the bathroom, cupboards, TV room, closet …”
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| The Vallonia floor plan. Was Lisa seeing the original door to the staircase that had been later moved? |
Lisa was unaware if any other family members saw the shadow people. She moved from the house at age 18, but continued to see the shadow people on later visits.
From "The Thing on the Stairs":
“I never heard a sound from the shadow people, and didn’t feel particularly threatened, but I did feel uneasy and not happy they were there,” she said. “It made me not like the house. All I can say is the house was creepy.”
Lisa's family owned the Vallonia from 1967 to 1975. She claimed that the house had numerous owners before 1967 (presumably because of the hauntings).
I couldn't find any evidence that anyone died in the house. Lewis Noll, a carpenter, built the house in the mid-1920's.
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