A figure appears at the foot of a bed and is gone. A dark shape without a face crosses a room. Something unseen presses on a sleeper's chest. Footsteps cross an empty house night after night. These have long been sorted into two boxes — apparitions (a figure seen) and hauntings (a presence in a place) — but the reports themselves do not respect the line.
When Lightf1ow measured its own record, the clear cases at each end were a small minority; the vast bulk sat in between — shadow figures, felt presences, forms that are neither a distinct person nor a place-bound haunting. The gap was larger than the two categories. So the registry stopped drawing a line through the middle and carries them as one family.
An apparition-or-haunting report is an account of a figure or a presence — anywhere on a continuum. Four subtypes mark points along it: a seen figure (a distinct person or being that appears), a shadow figure (a dark, featureless form without identity, often at the edge of sleep), a felt presence (a known presence, a voice, a sense of being watched, with no figure seen), and a place-bound haunting (a presence or activity tied to a place and usually recurring — footsteps, objects moving, a spirit in a house).
The subtypes are set where a report clearly bears one; the many reports that sit between them are carried as the family without a subtype — which is honest, because the material itself is between. This is kept distinct only from a Marian apparition, which is specifically an appearance of the Virgin Mary.
Two traditions, long held apart. Folklore and psychical research treated the seen apparition — a figure, often a messenger or a crisis-apparition of someone dying elsewhere — as a different phenomenon from the haunting, the presence bound to a house or a place. Whole literatures grew up on each side of the line.
The shadow figure. A distinct modern strand — shadow people, the 'Hat Man' — a dark, featureless form without identity, reported worldwide and especially at the edge of sleep. It belongs to neither classic box: not a recognisable figure, not a place-haunting.
The felt presence. Another strand with its own research literature — the sensed presence, the sleep-paralysis 'intruder', the feeling of being watched — a known presence with no figure seen at all.
Why the registry merged them (2026). Measuring its own record, Lightf1ow found the clean apparition and haunting cores were a minority and the middle — shadow figures, felt presences, undetermined forms — was several times larger than both ends combined. A boundary the material crosses that freely is not a boundary. The two were joined into one family with subtypes along the continuum.
Every camp, fairly stated; a side for none. This is the chapter only a registry can write — we are the one place that does not need anyone to win.
Sceptics point to well-studied ordinary sources across the whole range: hypnagogic and hypnopompic imagery at the edges of sleep, sleep paralysis with its classic sensed 'presence' and shadowy figure, grief and expectation shaping perception, pareidolia in low light, and — for place-hauntings — draughts, settling structures, infrasound and suggestion. None requires that anything was present.
Those who report these experiences stress their clarity and, often, their shared quality — more than one witness, a detail later found apt, an encounter while fully awake. Sincerity is not proof, and the registry says so; but it records the account without explaining it away.
The most interesting finding is structural. When the registry tried to sort these reports into 'apparition' and 'haunting', a quarter of the labels ended up contradicting their own text — not because the labels were carelessly applied, but because the phenomena form a continuum with no natural cut. Showing that the old line broke down is more honest than defending it.
Most reports here are single-witness, or place-bound with nothing an outsider can re-examine, so they trace only to the teller. A minority — multiply-witnessed figures, or place-hauntings a family and later occupants both report — reach further. Verified always speaks of the corroborated circumstances, never that a figure or presence was real.
Reports across this family sit heavily in reported and unverifiable: a single witness, a private encounter, a place with no instrument reading. That is shown plainly.
A minority reach verified where several unrelated sources converge on the same named case. Verified still speaks only of the corroborated circumstances — never that a figure appeared or a place is haunted.
The same cards, gates and honesty invariants as the main flow — filtered to apparitions & hauntings.
Browse all 1379 on the radar →Lightf1ow tracks 16 categories of reported anomaly, each measured the same honest way.