The Hat Man Stands in the Doorway

I need to be careful here, because the internet has a name and a whole mythology for this now, and I don't want to be accused of borrowing it. So let me be clear: I first described him when I was seven years old, decades before I had ever heard the phrase, to a mother who wrote it in a baby book she has kept and which I have re-read as an adult with the hair standing up on my arms.

A man in the doorway. Tall — 'too tall,' seven-year-old me said, 'his hat touches the top.' A wide-brimmed hat, a long coat or cloak, no face I could ever make out, only the sense of being regarded. He came on the bad nights — high fever, the night my grandfather died, the worst nights of a difficult adolescence — never approaching, never speaking, just standing in the doorway, watching, as though attending. I was terrified of him as a child and, strangely, less so as an adult; he became a grim familiar, a figure who showed up when things were at their worst, which I eventually read less as threat and more as a kind of terrible witness.

I hadn't seen him in years. I'd half-decided he was a childhood sleep phenomenon I'd outgrown, and I'd deliberately never told my own children about him, because what kind of inheritance is that.