The Hat Man is a tall, dark, shadowy figure in a brimmed hat, often a fedora, who people say they see standing in their bedroom, usually at night and often while they are unable to move. He is the best known of the “shadow people,” and he is a genuinely modern legend: the figure took shape on late-night radio and internet forums in the 2000s and spread through social media in the 2010s and 2020s. He is not a creature anyone claims to have photographed or caught. He is an experience, and science has a good deal to say about where that experience comes from.[1]
| Type | Modern folklore; a recurring hallucinated figure |
|---|---|
| Typical description | A tall, dark silhouette in a wide-brimmed hat and long coat; few or no facial features |
| Usually seen | At night, in the bedroom, on waking or falling asleep, often during sleep paralysis |
| Popularized by | Coast to Coast AM (from 2001), Heidi Hollis, internet forums and social media |
| Also reported with | High doses of deliriant drugs such as diphenhydramine; severe sleep deprivation |
| Scientific view | A hallucination linked to sleep paralysis and other altered states |
| Physical evidence | None |
Shadow people on late-night radio
Reports of dark presences in the bedroom are ancient, but the specific idea of “shadow people” took off in the United States in 2001. On 12 April 2001 the radio host Art Bell devoted a long segment of Coast to Coast AM, the overnight paranormal talk show, to shadow people, with a guest calling himself Thunder Strikes. Bell invited listeners to send in drawings of what they had seen and posted many of them on the show’s website. The response was enormous, and shadow people quickly became a fixture of the program and of early paranormal websites.[1]
The writer Heidi Hollis, whose first book on the subject appeared in October 2001, became the best-known promoter of the idea and a regular guest on the show. She described shadow people as dark human silhouettes that flicker at the edge of vision and sometimes jump on a person’s chest and choke them. In her view they are negative, alien beings that can be driven away by invoking the name of Jesus. Among all the shadow figures people described, the one in the hat stood out, and by the late 2000s he had become a character in his own right.[1]
The Hat Man online
Since then the Hat Man has spread through forums, YouTube videos, TikTok and memes. Accounts are remarkably consistent. He is tall, completely dark, and wears a fedora or a wide-brimmed hat and often a long coat. He usually has no visible face, though some people say they can feel him staring, and a few describe glowing eyes. He tends to stand in a doorway or at the foot of the bed, watching. People describe intense dread rather than any specific harm.[1]
That consistency is often taken as evidence that the Hat Man is real. But consistency is exactly what we would expect if many people share the same kind of brain state and the same cultural image. Once a vivid description is widely known, people who experience a shadowy figure are more likely to see, remember and describe a hat.
Sleep paralysis: the most common setting
Most Hat Man experiences happen during or near sleep paralysis, a brief state in which a person is mentally awake but cannot move or speak. It happens when the muscle paralysis of REM (dreaming) sleep continues for a short time after waking, or begins before a person has fully fallen asleep. Because the dreaming brain is still partly active, people often experience vivid hallucinations along with the paralysis.[2]
Sleep paralysis is common. A 2011 review by Brian Sharpless and Jacques Barber, pooling 35 studies, estimated that about 8% of the general population, 28% of students and 32% of psychiatric patients have had at least one episode. It is linked to sleep deprivation, irregular schedules, stress, and sleeping on the back, and it is especially common in people with narcolepsy.[2][3]
The psychologist J. Allan Cheyne and his colleagues found that the hallucinations of sleep paralysis fall into three main groups:[4]
- Intruder experiences: a strong sense that someone or something is in the room, often seen as a dark figure, and often accompanied by fear.
- Incubus experiences: pressure on the chest, difficulty breathing, and the sense of a being sitting on or attacking the sleeper.
- Vestibular-motor experiences: floating, flying, spinning or leaving the body.
The Hat Man is a textbook “intruder.” Cheyne argued that these experiences come from the brain’s threat-detection system becoming active while the person is helpless. The brain senses danger, finds no source for it, and supplies one: a presence in the room. In a dark bedroom, that presence is most easily imagined as a shadowy human shape.[4]
An old experience with many names
The Hat Man is the twenty-first-century American version of an experience found in many cultures, each of which gives the intruder its own form.[2]
- The Old Hag of Newfoundland, studied by the folklorist David Hufford, sits on the sleeper, who wakes up “hag-ridden.”[5]
- Kanashibari (“metal binding”) in Japan is blamed on a small spirit that sits on the chest.[2]
- The Pandafeche of Italy’s Marche and Abruzzo regions is a witch-like figure that climbs onto the chest.[2]
- Jinn are often blamed in Egypt, where research has found sleep paralysis to be more common, and more frightening, than in Denmark.[2]
Hufford’s work in Newfoundland, published in 1982 as The Terror That Comes in the Night, was especially important. He showed that people who had never heard of the Old Hag described the same core experience, which suggests that the experience comes first and the cultural label follows. The Hat Man fits that pattern well: a universal state, given a modern costume.[5]
A shadow person made in the lab
In 2006 the neuroscientist Shahar Arzy and colleagues reported a striking case in Nature. While doctors were electrically stimulating the brain of a young woman with epilepsy, to map areas before surgery, stimulation of her left temporoparietal junction made her feel that a person was standing behind her. When she changed her posture, the “shadow person” copied her. The researchers concluded that the sense of a nearby presence can arise when the brain misplaces its own model of the body, perceiving part of the self as someone else.[6]
That finding helps explain why the Hat Man feels so convincing. The sense of presence is generated by the same brain systems that normally tell us where our own body is. When those systems misfire, the result can feel exactly like another person in the room.
A warning about the “Benadryl Hat Man”
The Hat Man is also widely reported by people who have taken very large doses of deliriant drugs, especially the antihistamine diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl and some sleep aids. Online, “seeing the Hat Man” has become a grim joke about these overdoses. It is not a joke medically. In September 2020 the US Food and Drug Administration warned that a social media “Benadryl challenge,” in which teenagers took high doses to try to hallucinate, had led to emergency room visits and deaths. High doses can cause serious heart problems, seizures, coma and death. Shadow figures are also reported by people who are severely sleep-deprived or using stimulants such as methamphetamine.[1][7]
If you see the Hat Man while falling asleep or waking up, you are almost certainly experiencing something common and harmless. If episodes are frequent or distressing, a doctor or sleep specialist can help. Anyone who sees him after taking a medication or drug should get medical help immediately.
Our assessment
The Hat Man is not a cryptid in the usual sense, but he belongs in this index because he is one of the clearest examples of a modern legend taking shape in real time. His appearance is consistent, his setting is predictable, and his explanation is well supported: a real and frightening experience, generated by the sleeping or chemically disturbed brain and given a familiar shape by radio, the internet and shared stories. The 2015 documentary The Nightmare, which interviews people who suffer from sleep paralysis, shows how real these encounters feel from the inside.[1]
For an older shape-shifting night terror, see the Aswang of the Philippines.
References
- “Shadow person,” Wikipedia, citing Art Bell, “Shadow People,” Coast to Coast AM (archived 2001); Heidi Hollis, The Secret War (iUniverse, 2001); M. Klee, Rolling Stone (2 November 2022); and G. Kenigsberg, review of The Nightmare, New York Times (4 June 2015).
- “Sleep paralysis,” Wikipedia.
- B. A. Sharpless and J. P. Barber, “Lifetime prevalence rates of sleep paralysis: a systematic review,” Sleep Medicine Reviews 15, no. 5 (2011): 311–315.
- J. A. Cheyne, S. D. Rueffer and I. R. Newby-Clark, “Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: neurological and cultural construction of the night-mare,” Consciousness and Cognition 8, no. 3 (1999): 319–337.
- David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
- S. Arzy, M. Seeck, S. Ortigue, L. Spinelli and O. Blanke, “Induction of an illusory shadow person,” Nature 443 (2006): 287. PubMed.
- “FDA: ‘Benadryl challenge’ poses deadly risk,” Healio (25 September 2020); US Food and Drug Administration, Drug Safety Communication (2020).
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from documented and scientific sources. An earlier version said reports of the Hat Man span cultures and centuries and described him with glowing red or yellow eyes, without sources. It now explains the documented modern origin of the legend and the research on sleep paralysis. The illustration above is an artistic impression.