http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/self-portrait-shadow-desert/

They say the Shadow People are both warning and invitation. Their legend has grown in a hundred directions, each more fantastical than the last. They’re said to be ghosts that lure the unprepared to their deaths. They’re said to be benevolent, the unlucky who ended up on the wrong end of the desert and who steer toward safety those who might unwittingly follow them. Crazier still, they’re said to be alive and thoughtful and civilized, a whole community that exists on the far side of death, and the shadows we see are simple reflections of an otherwise normal people living otherwise normal lives.

In the Boom Cities near the coast and in the Rush Towns that dot the edges of the desert, the stories of the Shadow People are ubiquitous. There is a bartender in San Francisco who gets a crowd every Thursday night to hear his tale of the Shadow People following his caravan for three days as he came West from Chicago. In Tucson, the West’s only female deputy tells the story of a time the Shadow People saved her life from an escaped convict. Every town has a story about the Shadow People. It has become a part of the West, as much as the cacti and the coyotes and endless stars that watch over the clear nights.

Among the Hopi villages on the desert plateaus, stories about the Shadow People are new. Every traditional Hopi story is old, passed down through the generations from an old storyteller to his young heir. For the Hopi, new stories are strange things, and few of the stories of the Shadow People are flattering. The Hopi distrust new things, and that goes double for supernatural things brought to life by white settlers.

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In truth, the Shadow People could be anything. But they are, probably, little more than retained memories.

The desert rocks are old and they are stingy, but they are not without heart. They remember the people that came and failed, in varying degrees, to tame this wild land. When the sun hangs just right, those rocks with the longest memories put on a display, more art show than horror story. On their surfaces, they flash their memories of the men and woman who came to the desert and never left. Shadow People are odes to ambition from a sympathetic but unrelenting desert.

They are not invitation, and they are not warning. There is no horror meant in them. As far as we know, our lives do not exist on the other side of anything – death, life, sunlight. Our shadows are displayed because the desert remembers us even when people forget.