The Hat Man seems to be accompanied by sleep paralysis, a phenomenon where the body is unable to move or speak while often experiencing vivid, terrifying hallucinations.
Why does The Hat Man and other so-called shadow people appear so consistently across cultures, and what does his presence reveal about the nature of sleep paralysis and the human mind?
Accounts of The Hat Man began to circulate on the Internet in the late 2000s.
Then picking up steam with the introduction of TikTok over a decade later.
But shadowy figures during sleep are by no means a modern phenomenon.
Throughout history and across cultures, people describe almost identical encounters with fearsome "shadow people" in that confusing state between being awake and sleep.
The similarity of these visions feels so surreal it might only be explained as supernatural.
As far back as the 2nd century, Greek physician Soranus of Ephesus described sleeping patients experiencing demonic attacks that evoked a feeling of heaviness and oppression and sort of choking.
They imagine that someone has suddenly attacked them and stunned their senses, exhausting them and preventing outcry.
Some people have proposed that shadow people are a shared hallucination-a psychiatric condition where one person's delusion becomes shared by two or more other people.
