SPECTERS
Faceless Man in Wide-Brimmed Hat Reported in Homes Worldwide, Said to Pass From Kin to Kin
A podcast episode gathers witness accounts of the so-called Hat Man, a figure said to appear to one family member and then to another.
THE INTERNET — Witnesses around the world describe the same faceless man in a wide-brimmed hat, and they say that once he appears to one person in a house, another family member is often next, according to the show notes of a recent episode of the Weird Darkness podcast, titled "The Hat Man: The Shadow That Spreads From One Family Member To The Next."
The episode's central segment, credited to Greg Newkirk and Dana Matthews of Week In Weird, notes that reports of the figure, a mysterious entity in a long-brimmed hat, continue to arrive from many countries. It asks the questions the subject invites: who the Hat Man is, what he wants, and why so many people claim to have been visited.
The account that opens the telling dates to 1969, in a rental house in Northern Virginia. According to the episode summary, a boy named Brian fled muffled voices in his closet and saw a tall, thin man in a large-brimmed hat standing at the foot of the guest-room bed. The summary notes this was decades before he had heard of the Hat Man or of the shadow people, whom Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM made famous in 2001.
The Hat Man shares the program with a varied company of other oddities. A contributor named Heather Circle tells of her aunt Amy, who is said to have woken to what Heather believes was the Grim Reaper, nearly seven feet tall and holding a toddler's missing pink sippy cup, two weeks before Amy was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 25. Another listener-style story concerns a woman who lost her favorite aunt to a brain aneurysm and later found herself stranded by a broken-down car near the cemetery where the aunt is buried.








