Youtube recently recommended to me a video about a monstrous figure that wears a hat and haunts people. Apparently the Hat Man is a known variation of the Shadow Person folklore that has cropped up, According to Wikipedia, there have been reports of him since at least the “late 2000s”. But what the video reminded me of is that I basically invented that guy myself in 2014.

The Hatwearer, I called him. Hat-wearing guy who haunts people, and in my version, kills them. I was just trying to create something evocative of the Creepypasta stories I was learning about around that era and thought he was generic enough to work. Obviously the big difference between my Hatwearer and this Hat Man fellow is that my one isn’t a shadow person. He has corporeality going on and everything. Detailed features, messed up though they are by our human standards. But the basics are similar enough that it made me think.

I’ve never had a sleep paralysis event, and I have never had a need to take Benadryl. Those, Wikipedia says, are the main sources of seeing the Hat Man. I guess I just tapped into the zeitgeist and trod some mental territory that was already well-trodden. I can only apologize for being unoriginal.

Anyway, I didn’t mention it at the time, because I hoped I’d do it some day, but my intended use for the Hatwearer was for him to appear in a specific story. I had, in those days, hoped I’d be able to get stories about the Hateful King made, and it was my intention to have the King just casually kill off that particular demon with ease, to show how powerful he could be. It’s more than a decade later and I’ve made no progress on any Hateful King stories, so I guess that story can now be told here. In this form. Consider this hackneyed demon to have been slain.