This article comes from Castle of Spirits, reprinted and shared with permission.

I’ve been keeping this to myself for really most of my life but an image keeps popping into my memory, an image from my childhood which I had initially blocked out. I sort of believe in the unknown like ghosts and extraterrestrials and stuff but this entity I saw was something I’ve never understood or even knew about until now.

Let me take you back to 1995 when I first discovered this strange being at my childhood home in Forest Park, GA. It was just a regular day at the house. My dad was at work and my brothers and I were home alone. (Which was a recurring event since babysitters couldn’t stand to be in the house due to strange occurrences that seemed to be ghostly in origin.)

So yeah, we kind of had a ghost but that’s not the story here. Because as one of my brothers would reveal to me in my adult years, it was all made up. Now, I know what you’re thinking. If he made that up then surely the Straw Hat Man was another myth. My response is: he admitted that he had nothing to do with this image and don’t call me Shirley.

The reason I don’t believe the Straw Hat Man is a myth my brother created is that I actually saw him. I never saw the supposed ghost and only experienced different tricks that my brother employed to fool me into believing in him.

Anyway, I was hanging out with my brothers in their room and we were playing games like the Batman game and then we played a card game. And we were talking and just entertaining ourselves while our dad was gone. We liked to play games when we were alone or go into the forbidden dining room where we’d play the piano and play all the vinyl records our dad owned.

Before we got ready to go to the dining room, my brothers were half way out the bedroom door when I noticed something in the corner of my eye. I went to the window and pulled open the blinds and there he was standing and staring straight into my soul.

Now, he didn’t necessarily look like a spirit but he certainly didn’t look human. I remember the yellow straw hat, his crooked pale hands, his black pants and I distinctly remember him tipping his hat in my direction. It was chilling. He smiled and then he was gone. It felt like a lifetime that I was looking at him looking at me. My brothers came in at that point and told me to hurry up and I just sort of forgot about the sighting.

Until a few weeks ago when I woke up from the worst nightmare ever. He was back. He was looking in at me while I was sleeping. It was so meta. He smiled at me. I know what he was doing because I was watching myself sleep and saw him looking at me until he noticed me floating above my body and put his crooked finger to his lips as if to silence me. The nightmare ended when when he reached in to shake me awake.

After that dream, I found it very difficult to shake what had happened. It was like he seeped back into my subconscious and weaseled his way back into my memory. So I decided to call my brother and ask him about the strange goings on in Forest Park, starting with the ghost. That’s when he told me about making it up just to play with us. Then I mentioned Straw Hat Man and he confessed to also seeing him at a different time when he was alone. I was shocked. I thought I was the only one. But it turns out it was real. He saw him and I saw him and he would tell me if he made it up because he told me about the ghost.

You can believe what you want but I know what happened. If anyone else has seen this thing (my brother says it’s a shadow man which I don’t believe), let me know in the comments. I really want to find out if others have had this experience and I really want to know what it was since it’s basically been haunting me my whole life even when I didn’t know about it.

See more from Castle of Spirits at www.castleofspirits.com.