Every other time you hear about shadow people, shades, moving shadows, living darkness, what ever you want to call them, they are wearing a hat.

described as "cowboy hat", "fedora", "top hat", or "somekind of brimmed hat".

basically they seem to commonly wear a high hat with a brim on it.

I ponder this and have some theories, but I want to know what others think of this phenomonon.

Don't die wearing a hat.

Maybe, as shadow people are quite unknown, perhaps people aren't actually seeing them as they are, rather as symbols of how they look. So the general human figure, because that is what we know. The shadowness, they are unknown and we fear the unknown. Finally, the brimmed hat - brimmed hats can hide faces, therefore make people less recognisabl and more unknown. So we do not know about these shadow people, and assuming we see symbols, the hats are part of what represents their 'unknownness'.

But I don't know much about these things...