Posted: 13 Jul 2022 11:39 AM PDT

An Austin, Texas man recalls a bizarre encounter he had as a boy. One night, he observed a bright white silhouette that he described as the ‘White Samurai,’ with a helmet and katana.

I received the following account from Kyle & Cam at Expanded Perspectives:

“I can confidently say I still have never heard of anyone encountering a being quite like what I saw in my backyard when I was 8 or 9 years old. I grew up in Austin, Texas, in a suburb pretty close in to the city. When I was really little we had a bunch of invasive bamboo in the back corner of the yard, but my parents had it all cut down. However, in the very large lot behind ours there was still a big stand of bamboo, and the old lady who lived there didn’t mind if kids played back in it. So I would move aside a couple of loose cedar posts in the fence and delve into the bamboo forest. There isn’t much more fun you can have as an 8 year old boy than having free reign in a bamboo forest and a machete. I would cut paths through it, make staffs and torches out of the bamboo, and cut different paths whenever the old ones were filled in by new shoots.

I spent a lot of time back there. Sometimes when I was in the bamboo forest, I would think I saw a quick movement between the stalks out of the corner of my eye, only to find nothing there. I mostly wrote it off as my active imagination. But one night, around the year 2001, after finishing an arts and crafts project for school with my mom, I went out my back door to put away a pair of pliers we had been using for the project in our tool shed. As I was walking up to it, I got a vague impression of a shape in the darkness beside the shed, and I stopped in order to look closer. Now, there was a light on the front of the shed, which made a fine threshold of light extending from the side of the shed, in front of which was light, and behind which was darkness.

In this darkness, in the general direction of the old patch of bamboo that had been cut down and the makeshift gate into the bamboo forest, there was a still darker shape I couldn’t quite make out. I stared and squinted for a moment, not sure if I was seeing anything at all. And then, it stepped into the light. It was stark, blank whiteness. It was the shape of a thinnish man, with something like a helmet on its head and something long hanging from the side of its hip. But there were no details whatsoever, just a silhouette, seemingly a 3-dimensional figure but all I could see was flat stark white. It was like that scene in ‘The Matrix,’ where they’re in their own simulation and the background is featureless illuminated whiteness, but this was a human figure instead of the background. It seemed to be illuminated by the light on the shed, but it was bright white like on a screen, not like white paper would have looked in this dim, slightly yellow light. As I was really into Japan at the time I interpreted the apparent helmet and sword as Samurai helmet and katana, so I called it the ‘White Samurai.’

Terrified, I backed away from it, which of course took me farther from the back door of the house, but it didn’t seem to follow me any farther and just stood there. After a moment I backed into a large spider web, which was about the only thing that could have torn my eyes from this thing, and so looking up and seeing a big spider right above me, I had enough and sprinted back into the house, not even looking back at the white being, and locking the door behind me. Of course, when I told my mom she said I was imagining things, and when my dad got home a little while later we all went out to look at where I’d seen the thing and have me explain exactly what happened. There was no sign of anything weird, and even the spider had left its web.

Hopefully someone has seen something similar or has some insight into this encounter, because I still have no idea what to make of it. Did it have something to do with the bamboo? Was it totally random? I have a journal in which I collect paranormal or otherwise weird experiences from people I meet – first-hand accounts only – and I’m sure there are a couple in there y’all would be interested in.” RG

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