Me and My Shadows

I am probably one of the most psychically insensitive people in the world. I have visited or stayed in buildings that were hundreds of years old, lived in several newer houses where people have died, visited many cemeteries, and wandered about assorted "haunted" locations and have never seen, heard, or sensed anything unusual, or at least not explainable. Something happened a few weeks ago, however, that, for the first time, I cannot explain away.

I was walking my two dogs along our usual nightly walk at about our usual time of 9pm. We usually turn out of our street onto the main side street in our subdivision, walk a half-mile south to the next major cross-street, then turn around and come back north up the other side of the street. There is one intersection two blocks from my street that tends to creeps me out -- but only at night and only when I approach it going north toward my street. There just always seem to be too many shadows making too much movement. I've always put it off to a combination of the night, street lights, and my less-than-perfect eyesight and overactive imagination.

The dogs and I were walking along, occasionally stopping so they could sniff something or relieve themselves. As usual, I had headphones on connected to an MP3 player in my pocket playing music. Both dogs' leashes were in my right hand and my right arm was extended from their pulling (they're big dogs). My left arm was down and holding a bag full of dog-droppings that I'd cleaned up.

I tend to walk with my head down, so I watched the shadows of me and, to my right, the two dogs move about as we approached and then passed each streetlight. We were just coming up to the intersection that tended to bother me a bit. We were at the point, light-wise, where our shadows were elongated and almost directly in front of me. Suddenly, there was a second shadow to my left. Startled, I whipped my head around, thinking there was someone coming up behind me whom I hadn't heard due to my headphones and that the dogs had been too absorbed to notice. There was no one there. I looked back at the shadow, which was starting to move away to where you couldn't really distinguish shapes, and the second shadow was still there for a second, then it disappeared.

I tried to rationalize this as there being a double shadow caused by the street lights, but there was only one shadow of each dog. Additionally, the shadow was about 6-7 inches taller than me, both its arms were at its sides, and it did not have any dog leashes or bag in its hands. I have no idea what this was and haven't seen it since.