Two Encounters with Shadow Figures in the 1990s

I should note that I'm already an old fart and my childhood was mostly in the nineties. So here are a couple of stories to start with. And if the first one can somehow be explained, then with the second one fuck knows. There were five witnesses there including me.

For general understanding, I lived in the middle of nowhere back then. In those days we had a lot of old houses, dormitories, and abandoned objects of various kinds. Naturally, we loved to explore all that and do all sorts of crap there. Despite the fact that our parents scared us with all kinds of maniacs, that was a popular thing back then. Then gypsies, then gangsters. And supposedly they often "lived" in those places. So all sorts of strange stories around mystical themes or something like that happened right there.

1) I remember it was 1994, it was winter and it was cold. At school, our natural history lesson or something was canceled. The lesson was the last one and a couple of classmates and I went for a walk. More precisely, we decided to walk a friend home. He lived on the outskirts in an old neighborhood. We walked him home, but didn't feel like going home despite the cold. My buddy and I decided to go into some entrance to warm up. Fortunately, back then the doors were wooden without code locks and intercoms. We went into an old three-story building. I should note that the floors and stairs there were wooden. We went into the middle entrance where there was access to the roof. The door in that entrance closed poorly and it was cold on the first floor. We went up, there was a small semi-attic room before the exit to the roof. So we're standing there talking about our business.

And then we hear creaking boards below. And the entrance door didn't open. The creaking wasn't like someone walking, but like someone standing and shifting from foot to foot. We went quiet. We're thinking who's there? If a person didn't come in from the street, then maybe they quietly came out of an apartment. Although most likely we would have heard that too. And the question is, what is he doing there? We look down and see nothing. Suddenly my friend says: "Look, he's there in the corner." At first I didn't notice. But that's because I was looking straight ahead. Then I went down a couple of steps and saw him. More precisely, a kind of dark silhouette. It seemed to be standing in the corner. And it was relatively darker than the surrounding environment. The thing is that some light penetrated into the entrance from the street, through the windows and through the gap in the doorway of the entrance door. And you could see that some person was standing under the stairs. Seemed like it was even swaying a bit from side to side. My friend and I got kind of scared. What if it really was a maniac or some drug addict? We whispered and agreed that if anything we'd scream our heads off and bang on apartment doors.

But then the following happened. On the second floor a door opened and an old woman with a bag came out. She started descending. And when she reached the first floor, she seemed to pass that figure without noticing. And then she suddenly startled. She turned around and probably did notice that shadow after all. She started backing up towards the entrance door and opened it. That figure immediately disappeared. No, it didn't vanish, it just stopped being visible. The old woman started whispering something like: "Holy, holy" and all that. As soon as that old woman left we bolted out of the entrance.

However, later we started looking for a rational explanation of that effect (so to speak). Like a play of light and shadow or something like that. We started conducting experiments. Opening the entrance door a bit, looking from different angles. But we didn't get any result. And then it got even colder and we decided to go home. Well, we sort of decided it was physics, not some paranormal stuff. Like it really was some effect of light and shadow, and the old woman was just a dumb uneducated person who got scared.

2) Outside the city we had an old abandoned building. A former chemical plant trust. It was two stories, long, with huge corridors and office doors opposite each other. I remember we burrowed in there with the same buddy and three girls on an autumn evening. We were sitting on the second floor playing cards. And one of the girls suddenly wanted to go home. It was already kind of dark outside. After her, everyone started getting ready. So we come out into the corridor, and it's already quite dark in the building. We're walking towards the exit slowly, chatting about something. And then at the other end of the corridor, right from one doorway into the opposite one, a small shadow figure comes out. It looked like a person, only small and unrealistically thin. About one and a half meters tall probably. It seemed to dash quickly. In about a second. But everyone saw it. The girls screamed and rushed to the exit. We followed them. Outside we started walking around the building, heading to the side where that figure was. However, the girls started pulling us home by force. They were afraid it was some demonic crap and it would come out of the building and chase us. So we never figured out what it was in the end.

Later we visited that building a few more times, but nothing like that happened. Though we visited it in daylight and with a big group. By the way, I still keep in touch with one of those girls (now a woman, of course), eternal friendzone. She remembers this story very well to this day.