Sounds rather terrifying.
Sorry for the delay; here's one of my shadow-person stories, written in the day or two immediately following the event.
On Monday, Feb. 19, 2007, at 1:04 p.m., I sent an email to my five fellow graduate students about meeting for our study group in a couple of weeks. I was running behind and trying to get done and out of my office quickly. I finished writing the email and hit send, then immediately stood up to get my coat, backpack, etc. My computer “dinged” that I had new mail, which since I had sent it to all six of us, I wasn’t surprised. It then dinged again just a few seconds later, and again a few seconds after that. Since I was trying a new email address for one of my fellows, I thought maybe it was telling me that the address was wrong, so I sat back down to check. This was perhaps a minute, no more than that, after I had hit the send button. There were two responses to my email, one from K, who was at the other end of our 24-foot office in her cubicle working, and from T, who works in another county.
This struck me as odd, because the message was several paragraphs long and I don’t think it would have been possible to open, much less read and then respond to, my email, in less than a minute. I opened the first email, from K, who in a short sentence said “meeting after the next coffee talk was good, she’d be there.” I closed it and opened the one from T, which was a response to K (that is, the text from K’s message was under T’s message). T agreed that she’d be there, too. The time between the dings for K and Ts messages was less than 10 seconds, I’m certain. Both had signed their names; K and used my name, and T used K’s name. I closed out of the email. For a second I thought about printing them out, and I though about asking K how she had responded that quickly. But, I was in a hurry to get going, and she was pounding away furiously on the keyboard, so I didn’t say anything and finished getting ready to go.
As I did so, putting on my hat and coat, I was facing toward the door, down at K’s end of the office, and kept seeing a shadow, fleetingly, out of the corner of my eye, like someone sticking their head around the doorjamb to see if I was there; you know, being sneaky, but not so much to not be noticed…you know how someone might do if they’re playing a joke and wanting to get seen.
I knew it wasn’t K, because I could hear her typing still, and she simply couldn’t do that AND be sneaky at the same time. So, I walked on out, and no one was in the hall, the nearest doors were closed, and the lights were off in the only other room open within conceivable reach of a person. The significance of that is that the lights turn on and off because of a motion sensor in those classrooms. If you sit still in the room long enough, the light goes off and you have to wave your arms around. If you just walk in, the lights come on.
I went on home. Later, before I left the house to go back for class, I checked my email, and found that the two messages were gone. I thought it odd, but sometimes things don’t show up both places. Rare, but it does happen. But when I got back to my office, I checked the email again, and indeed both were gone. K was still there, so I asked her if she had sent a response earlier. She said no. She had read it later, but not when I sent it. T also did not see it or respond until later.
So that's one of my experiences.
