Shadow over Amlwch

Watch out for shadows that shouldn't be there

In the early 2000s, two security guards were working the night shift at a department store. One of them was new in the job, and his more seasoned colleague had been showing him the ropes. Even though they had just met a few days earlier, the two of them were becoming fast friends. They were messing about in the break room, playfully fighting over the box of pastries the day shift had left behind when a beep from the security office cut their break short.

They went to check the cameras and saw that a motion sensor activated camera had picked up two drunk guys loitering outside one of the main doors. They didn’t look like they were going to cause any trouble, so the two guards debated whether it was even worth going out there to tell them to move along.

Eventually they agreed that it would be best if they went and dealt with it, because if they didn’t and those guys broke a window or accidentally tripped the alarm, the two of them were going to be buried in paperwork until the next night shift.

The older of the two later stated in an interview that he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary as he and the guard he named as Sunny were making their way to the front door. They chatted about having to deal with the drunkards, and Sunny mentioned that while the working hours weren’t ideal, he was enjoying the job well enough and was planning to stick around for the foreseeable future.

They made it outside and politely asked the drunks if they could move the party somewhere else. The men obliged without causing any fuss, and within a minute or two they had stumbled halfway down the street and out of view, all while singing some song that they didn’t seem to remember all the lyrics to.

Security cameras confirms this part of the story. Upon reviewing the footage investigators later confirmed that it shows the two guards patting each other on the back and having a good laugh about the drunks. Then they head back inside and begin walking towards the security office.

Nothing out of the ordinary, until something was.

According to the older guard, this is what happened next:

“Sunny realized there were still snacks left in the break room, and he began running ahead. He joked that if he didn’t get there first, I was going to eat all of them before he could have any. He ran about 15 meters ahead of me, and then he tripped. I distinctly remember the little sound he made when he realized he was going to fall over, that little half-cry, half-laugh we all make when gravity doesn’t agree with us.

But instead of hitting the ground, he just vanished.

I thought Sunny was playing a trick on me, that he had been taking some stage magic lessons and was pulling some kind of prank using an optical illusion. So, I yelled out, commending him on pulling off his disappearance so well. But I didn’t get any reply. I yelled again and still got no reply.

I started to get creeped out by the situation, so I hastily made my way to the security office and checked the footage. To my horror, I realized my eyes hadn’t been playing a trick on me, and Sunny wasn’t a skilled illusionist. Clear as day, I saw him in the playback run ahead of me, trip, and then vanish. The best way I can describe it is that it looked like he fell through an invisible doorway or trapdoor.”

Several people were shown the CCTV footage, and they all confirmed seeing what the older guard had described. Sunny ran ahead, tripped, and then vanished. Initially as freaked out as the older guard, the others quickly rationalized what they had seen. Surely the camera had just dropped some frames, and that’s why Sunny appeared to disappear out of plain sight.

Their boss said he got a call from Sunny. He explained that the job just wasn’t for him and that he had decided to move on.

After that, the others started giving the older guard strange looks whenever he brought up the situation, so he stopped.

But then something weird happened.

“The freakiest thing happened about a week after his disappearance,” the guard explained. “While working the night shift, I got a call on the work phone. That in itself is unsettling, because in all my years working there, I could count on one hand the number of calls I received on that thing.

It was an unknown number. Normally I wouldn’t answer one of those, but it was the work phone, and the rules were that if it rang, we had to answer.

I picked it up, but all I heard was static. As my ears started to adjust to it, I could hear a voice through all the noise. They were saying something, but I couldn’t make out what.

Something in my gut told me that it was Sunny, calling me from wherever he was.

I told my coworkers about the call, and they all agreed that it was creepy, but they obviously weren’t as freaked out as I was. I stopped bringing up Sunny in conversation after that. It was clear the others didn’t want to hear him anymore and just wanted to move on from the incident.

I don’t think about it much myself anymore, but if someone brings up the paranormal or asks if I have a bizarre story from my time working nights, I always think of Sunny and that night.”

When I initially looked at the footage, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But then I came across an unrelated interview that had been filmed in the department store at the exact same spot where Sunny disappeared.

In the CCTV footage from the night the vanishing, there is what looks like a smudge or stain on the ground where Sunny disappears. In fact, it looks like Sunny trips over the smudge and then vanishes.

The stain is gone by the time the interview takes place a few weeks later.

I rationalized the discrepancy, thinking that the stain had been cleaned up after the incident with Sunny. But something in my gut told me to investigate it, and I gained access to the entire file of security footage from that day.

In the footage you can see that the smudge isn’t there when Sunny and the older guard are confronting the two drunks outside. It materializes as they’re walking back to the office.

It’s not a smudge or a stain.

It’s a shadow.

And it disappears after Sunny vanishes.

It wasn’t the first time a shadow took someone.

About seventy years earlier, a farmer and his family living in the same area were finishing dinner. It was July, so by the time they were done clearing the table, it was still bright outside, and they decided to go for a stroll through a nearby grassy field.

The wife and children were picking flowers, and the farmer was walking a little ways ahead by himself when he suddenly cried out to his family:

“Where are you? I can’t see anything! Everything’s gone dark!”

His wife looked up to see what he was talking about, but she couldn’t see him. His children thought he was joking, so they ran over to where he had been moments earlier to find him. They giggled with anticipation as they searched the area, fearing and hoping he would jump out at them from his hiding place.

But he didn’t.

They searched the entire field, and he was nowhere to be found. Yet they could hear him.

During their search, his whimpering cries for help turned into blood-curdling screams, growing more terrified with each plea for his family to come find him.

They never did.

The wife sent their son to fetch his grandfather. The grandfather fetched the neighbors, and the neighbors fetched the town. They walked through the field in a line, all holding hands as to not miss an inch in their search, but the farmer was never found.

Day turned into night, and one day into two, then three. His voice grew hoarser and hoarser, and his family became more frantic. Even though they could hear him, he didn’t seem able to hear them.

Still, someone always stayed near the spot where he had disappeared, just to keep him company.

By the fourth day his voice had grown so weak that it was barely audible.

By the fifth day it disappeared.

And it never came back.

The farmer has never been seen since.

The neighbors later said they believed no one ever built a home on that plot of land because of the strangeness surrounding it. Some even claimed they would occasionally see a shadow in the middle of the field, despite there being no trees or terrain tall enough to cast one.

I’ve read many of the accounts about the shadow spots that make people vanish, but the account that frightens me the most comes from one of Peter Underwood’s books, the famous ghost hunter from the British Isles.

He met with a man from a tiny village near Amlwch on Ynys Môn, the largest island off the coast of Wales, and the man told him a story about his grandmother.

My grandmother Suzannah lost her mother when she was very young, and because her father was away often, she stayed home and took care of her younger siblings for several more years than was common back then. So, by the time she left to serve as a maid at a manor, she was an adult and had a good head on her shoulders, which made what happened to her all the more believable.

Back in those days, maids lived at their place of employment, and they were only allowed one day off each week to visit their families. Although it wasn’t really a day off, like others in her position, Suzannah still had to help with chores at home, but she enjoyed it because she still got to spend time with her family.

Her day off was usually Monday. So one early Sunday evening, when she was released from her duties at Tyddyn Mawr near Bryn-y-Mor, she walked out through the back gate and followed the path that would take her to her family’s home in Llys Dulas.

She walked the path as she had many times before.

Then suddenly her vision went black.

It wasn’t like the darkness of nighttime where you can still sense things around you and the stars provide some light. It was total blackness. She later described it as if she had been shoved inside a closed box completely devoid of light.

Paralyzed and unable to move any part of her body, and feeling as if her feet were glued to the ground, she could do nothing but scream.

She screamed and screamed, but she couldn’t hear anything in the darkness aside from her own voice.

It felt like she had been screaming for an eternity, though it was probably only a few minutes.

When she stopped to catch her breath, she heard a voice.

It was the voice of her master from Tyddyn Mawr.

“Suzannah, Suzannah, are you there?”

Overjoyed to hear him, she shouted back:

“Yes! Yes, I’m here! Come and help me, I’m here!”

“Where? I can’t see you!” he replied, frantically searching the area where the sound was coming from.

“It’s all dark! I don’t know where I am!” she shouted.

But he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t even see the black patch that Suzannah later said she had noticed on the path before everything went dark.

Then suddenly she was no longer trapped in the darkness. She could see the manor and her master, and he could see her too.

Moments earlier there had been nothing but empty landscape before him.

Then she appeared.

They hurried back to the manor to tell the mistress what had happened. She didn’t believe them. At first, she accused Suzannah of playing a trick on her master, and then she accused both of them of conspiring together to fool her.

But her master was adamant.

“I could see everything all around me, the fields and the footpath were completely empty. The sun was shining everywhere. I could hear the girl shouting and crying so close, as if she were just yards in front of me, and yet she wasn’t there!”

He struck his fist into his palm to emphasize his words.

“Then there she was! One minute emptiness, then she appeared exactly where I was looking.”

All three stood silent for quite some time. If thinking made noise, the room would have been louder than a locomotive. But none of them could find a rational explanation for what had happened.

As the days passed, they spoke of it less and less, and then eventually, not at all.

This is the only story I have found where someone who disappeared into the shadow made it back. It is eerie that it matches the details of the earlier story almost perfectly.

The stories might seem unrelated. The first two took place in North Carolina, and the last one in Wales. But while the ocean separates them today, those lands were once part of the same mountain chain.

Maybe something ancient, something beyond human comprehension, still lingers in both places.

Intrigued by the story, I decided to walk the route from Tyddyn Mawr to Llys Dulas myself.

I drove from Llandudno to Bryn-y-Mor. I couldn’t find anything that looked like a manor, but there was a path leading from Bryn-y-Mor to Llys Dulas, and I began walking.

Twenty minutes later I was at the other end of it.

I walked back the way I came, and since I’m alive to write this, I think it’s safe to say that if there ever was a shadow on the ground that could transport someone into a black void, it’s gone now.