Hatted Gentleman Hushes Sleepless Woman in Bedroom at 3 A.M., Reddit Post Reports

THE BEDROOM, ELSEWHERE — A Reddit user posting to r/Paranormal has described a pre-dawn encounter with a figure she cannot put out of her mind, and has asked the board's readers to help her decide whether she met a ghost or merely a hallucination.

According to the post, the author woke between three and four in the morning to the sound of her cat miaowing loudly somewhere in the house. She then saw a dark figure walking about the room on her husband's side of the bed. She took it at first for her husband, she writes, until she realised he was asleep beside her.

The figure, she says, appeared to search her husband's bedside table as though looking for something. It then turned, looked at her, and held a finger to its mouth in a gesture of hushing. She describes the man as appearing to be in his fifties, with stubble, wearing a tallish hat of vintage style. Soon afterward he moved toward the door, and she is unsure whether he left the room or simply vanished.

The author offers her own skeptical context with some candour. She writes that on perhaps five occasions in her life she has woken to see spiders across the bed and room, vanishing after about ten seconds, which she understands to be hallucinations. She has never before, she says, hallucinated a person, and the experience felt so real that she doubts herself.

She says she hopes it was a hallucination but fears it was a ghost that may return. The post closes with a plain question to readers: what does it sound like? The record does not yet show the verdict.