Didn't you see the man in the hat running in the field next to you?
In the 1980s this man was a teenager in a village in Croatia. Until he got a car in 1989 he walked everywhere, usually alone, along one of two routes into the nearest town. One was ten kilometres through the woods. The other was ten kilometres of straight road with open fields on both sides. Neither road nor village had a single street lamp. He walked them in pitch darkness all the time and was never afraid.
The first time, he was walking home from a party in town at three in the morning, leaving early because he had school. On the straight road, about fifteen metres away in the field to his left, a man in a hat was standing perfectly still, looking at him. There was no reason for anyone to be standing in a field at that hour. He ran the rest of the way home, and he had played football all his life, so he could really run.
The second time he was alone again, around four in the morning, on the same road. Tired, he heard two of his friends talking somewhere far ahead and ran to catch up. Every time he ran, they ran too. When he stopped, they stopped. When he finally reached them at the end of the road, he was angry and demanded to know why they kept running away from him.
They stared at him. Hadn't he seen the man in the hat running through the field beside him? Every time he started running, they said, the man in the field ran too, alongside him and toward them. That was why they had run. He says he still gets chills remembering it.
The third time he was driving. It was pouring with rain after a party, and he was taking four girls home along the same road through the fields. About ten metres ahead, a man in a hat rose up out of the ditch on the right, ran across the road in front of the car, and dropped into the ditch on the left.
He kept driving and didn't dare look back. He asked the girl beside him whether she had just seen a man in a hat cross from one ditch to the other. She said yes, she had.
Elsewhere in the world, people describe a tall dark figure in a brimmed hat, the Hat Man, most often at their bedside at night. This one kept to the fields.