Nightmare On Elm Street
00:01 Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,
00:23 this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner. of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.
00:42 Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.
01:00 Victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by The Disturbed. This is episode two of my series on The Real Stories that inspired some of the best-known horror movies and characters of all time. And this one belongs to a nightmare on Helm Street. Freddie Kruger came out of West Craven's imagination. The idea underneath him that a person could go to sleep afraid of a dream and be dead by morning came out of the newspaper. And the men in those newspaper stories were real. In the fall of 1980, a former soldier named Vang Zhong was resettled in Chicago with his wife and their child. He was Hmong from the mountains of Laos, one of the tens of thousands of Hmong refugees the United States took in after the war in Southeast Asia.
01:57 In an apartment in Chicago, he went three nights in a row with almost no sleep. And after the third one, he went to see his resettlement worker, a young Hmong man named Muay, who spoke both languages. and told him what had been happening. On the first night, he'd woken up suddenly, short of breath, out of a dream in which a cat was sitting on his chest. On the second night, the room got darker, and a figure like a large black dog came to his bed and sat on his chest, and he couldn't push it off, and he got dangerously short of breath.
02:29 On the third night, a tall female spirit with white skin came into the bedroom from the kitchen and lay down on top of him. He said she stayed about 15 minutes, and that when she left him, he woke up screaming. Two people who worked with refugees in Chicago, Joseph J. Tobin and Joan Friedman, wrote those three nights up for a psychiatric journal in 1983, and they put the words,
02:54 Nightmare Death in the title. Vang Zhang hadn't died of anything. What made three bad nights worth a journal article was that Hmong men across the United States had been going to bed healthy and dying before morning since 1977. and every Hmong family in Chicago knew it. The Federal Centers for Disease Control eventually counted 117 of those deaths among Southeast Asian refugees. Nearly all of the dead were men, and most of them were Hmong.
03:25 The typical age was 33, and autopsy after autopsy came back with no cause. In 1981, a film director in Los Angeles who had taken a few months off to write, read about some of those deaths in the newspaper, and he turned what he read into a screenplay about teenagers who are killed in their dreams. West Cravens, A Nightmare on Elm Street, opened in November of 1984 and has been in circulation ever since. The men he read about got an acronym from the government, and about a decade of medical argument. It took until the early 2000s for cardiologists to settle on what had been stopping their hearts, and the explanation they settled on still doesn't cover everything that happened.
04:07 to them. The oldest medical paper on this kind of death was printed in Manila in 1917, 60 years before the first Hmong case was recorded in the United States. A Filipino physician, Maria Paz Mendoza-Guazon, who was remembered as the first woman to earn a medical degree from the University of the Philippines, published it in Spanish in a Philippine medical journal, under a title that translates as Some Notes on Bangungut. Bangungut, or Bangungot in the modern spelling, is a Tagalog word. The International Journal of Epidemiology traces it to two roots, one meaning to rise and one meaning to moan. And that's a fair description of what families reported.
04:51 A man in good health, usually a young working man, goes to bed, often after a big supper. Sometime in the night, the people sleeping near him hear him groaning or gasping. They can't wake him. And inside of a few minutes, he's dead. Filipino families had been telling each other about that death for longer than anyone had been writing it down. In the folk version, something heavy sits on the sleeper's chest, and the advice handed down with it was to wiggle the toes, on the idea that a man who can move one small part of himself can break out of it and wake up.
05:26 The deaths followed Filipino men overseas. Hawaii's sugar planners started recruiting laborers in the Philippines, in 1906, and the planters' own association recorded more than 100,000 Filipino men arriving in the islands between 1909 and 1946. They were young, they were doing hard physical work, and they were a long way from home, and the death that had a name in their villages came across the ocean with them. In Hawaii, it reportedly came to be called dream disease. In 1948, a Honolulu physician named Majoska published a paper in the Hawaii medical journal with a plain title, Sudden Death in Filipino Men, an Unexplained Syndrome.
06:09 He had collected 81 cases from the years 1937 through 1948. Twelve years after that, a pathologist named Aponte published 11 autopsies in the annals of internal medicine, ten of them on Filipino men and one on a man from Guam. He called his paper The Enigma of Bangungut, and after 11 autopsies, he still still, couldn't say what had killed them. In Manila, the pathologist tried to give the death a physical cause. Starting around 1948, a lot of Manila autopsy reports on these men listed acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis, a violent inflammation of the pancreas. And for decades, that was the answer a Filipino family was likely to be given. In 1998, an American epidemiologist named Ronald Munger
06:58 went back through Manila's autopsy records and death certificates for the years 1948 through 1982. He found that the label on the paperwork had changed again and again over those years, while the death underneath it stayed the same. He also found that the deaths were seasonal, that they'd become more common over time, and that they happened more often to men who had moved to Manila from somewhere else than to men who were born there. Japan had its own name for it, Pokuri.
07:28 In Thailand, it was Laityai, which the cardiologists who later studied it translate as death during sleep. So by 1960, the same death had been written up in Manila, Honolulu, and Guam. And it had local names in at least two other countries. In every one of those places, the pattern was a young man, asleep, with nothing found afterward to explain him. In two of them, Hawaii and Manila, the men it was killing were disproportionately men who had left home to find work. The Hmong are a mountain people. Their ancestors moved south out of China
08:04 in the 19th century into the highlands of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. And in Laos, they farmed the high ridges in the north, in villages organized by Klan. In 1961, the Central Intelligence Agency began arming Hmong villagers in northern Laos to fight the Pathet Lao, the Lao communists, along with the North Vietnamese troops who were moving through the country. Laos was officially neutral, so the United States couldn't openly put an army there, and the agency built one out of the people who already lived in the hills. Its commander was a Hmong officer in the Royal Lao Army named Vang Pao, and its headquarters was an airstrip in a mountain valley called Long Tiang.
08:46 The American public wasn't told about any of it, which is why the fighting in Laos is still called the Secret War. At its height, Long Tiang held tens of thousands of people, and one of the busiest airstrips in Southeast Asia, and it didn't appear on maps. Over the same years, American aircraft dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos, much of it on the provinces where the Hmong lived. Mong soldiers fought North Vietnamese regulars, gathered intelligence, guarded American installations, and went into the jungle after American pilots who had been shot down. More than 30,000 of them served. A public television history of the Hmong puts their death rate in that war,
09:28 at ten times that of the American soldiers fighting next door in Vietnam. The war went on for 14 years, and the cost to the Hmong was out of all proportion to their numbers. A newspaper feature from the early 1980s, which survives today in the CIA's own public reading room, called them perhaps America's most tenacious and loyal ally in Southeast Asia, and put their losses at 50,000 people, about a tenth of the entire Hmong population of Laos. By the later years of the war, so many of the men were dead that Vang Pao's units were filling their ranks with teenage boys. The Americans left in the spring of 1975. Saigon fell at the end of April, and in the middle of May, a small airlift took Vangpao and a few thousand of his officers and their families out of Longtien.
10:18 The rest of the Hmong who had fought for the United States, and their wives and children and parents, were left in the valley and in the hills around it. Laos became a communist country that year, and the new government treated the Hmong who had worked for the Americans as traitors. Families started walking south toward Thailand. The border is the Mekong River, and the accounts refugees gave afterward described crossing it at night on bamboo rafts and whatever else would float, with patrols on the bank behind them. Kathadia Ume, a professor at Berkeley who studies Southeast Asian refugees, has described the whole thing as, a forced migration under the most trying of conditions.
10:59 On the Thai side, there were camps. The biggest one for the Hmong was Ban Vinai in the northeast of Thailand, and families waited there for years to learn whether any country would take them. It opened in 1975, and within a decade it held more than 40,000 people, nearly all of them Hmong. Starting in the second half of the 1970s, the United States began to. Vang Pao himself ended up in the American, West and the men who had served under him along with their families came in behind him over the next several years.
11:33 American resettlement policy spread refugees thin. Churches and charities sponsored families one at a time in whatever city the sponsor happened to be. And so a people who had lived in clan villages for generations were set down in apartments in Portland, St. Paul, Chicago, Providence, and dozens of other places. The same newspaper feature that counted their war did, reported 2,500 Hmong in Providence, Rhode Island alone, and another 52,000 still waiting in the Thai camps. The men had been farmers and soldiers. Most had never worked for wages. Many had never been to school, and almost none spoke English. That feature estimated that three out of four Hmong in America were on public assistance. It also gave a few paragraphs to the deaths, under the subheading, Mysterious ailment, and noted that the federal centers for disease control was looking into them. In the village, a Hmong man had been the head of the household and the person responsible for the family's dealings with its ancestors. In an American apartment, he was often the last person in the family to learn the language,
12:41 and the medical anthropologist Shelley Adler later found men who were depending on welfare checks, or on what their wives and children could earn, to keep the household fed. Adler asked every one of the 118 people she interviewed in Stockton about the problems of resettlement. Nearly all of them reported trouble with work and with learning English, and every single one said they'd had difficulty finding out what had become of members of their own family. They brought their religion with them. In traditional Hmong belief, the world is full of spirits. A household is watched over by the spirits of its ancestors,
13:17 who have to be fed and honored with the right ceremony, at the right times, and a family that keeps up those obligations is protected. When someone falls sick, the family sends for a shaman who goes into a trance to find out which spirit is responsible and what it wants. The healing ceremonies often call for the sacrifice of a chicken or a pig. One of the spirits in that world is called the dabsog. It comes at night, and it sits or lies on the chest of a person who is asleep and presses the breath out of him. And the mong have a second term, Sogtswam, for the experience of being pressed. The people Shelley Adler interviewed described it in consistent terms.
14:00 The sleeper is awake, or believes he is. He can see the room around him, but he can't move his arms or legs, and he can't call out. Something is in the room with him, and then it's on top of him, and there's a weight on his chest that makes it hard to get air. Then it lifts, and he can move again. Sleep researchers have a name for that experience too, and their name is sleep paralysis. During dreaming sleep, the brain switches off most of the body's voluntary muscles, which is what keeps a dreaming person from getting up and acting the dream out.
14:34 Once in a while, a person comes awake before the switch has flipped back. For a minute or two, he's conscious and paralyzed, and it's common in that state to feel pressure on the chest and to see or sense a figure in the room. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. It happens to people all over the world. A review of the research published in 2011
15:00 put the share of the general population who go through it at least once in their lives at a little under 8%. Nearly every culture that has been asked about it has a spirit to go with it. In Newfoundland, it's the old hag. An American folklorist named David Hufford spent years on the Newfoundland tradition
15:18 and published a book about it in 1982. His main finding was that the experience comes first and the story second. He found people who had never heard of the old hag describing the paralysis, the presence in the room, and the weight on the chest in nearly the same words as the Newfoundlanders who had grown up with her. The English word nightmare originally meant the same thing because a mare was a spirit that sat on sleepers and the word only later came to mean a bad dream.
15:47 The Chinese expression for it translates as being held down by a grower. ghost. The Swiss painter Henry Fuseli put the European version on canvas in 1781 in a picture called The Nightmare, which shows a woman lying asleep on her back with a squat creature sitting on her chest. The Hmong had a pressing spirit like everybody else, and they met it about as often. When Adler interviewed 118 men and women in Stockton, California, 97% of them knew what the experience was. 58% had been through it at least once, 36 of the men and 33 of the women. That's better than seven times the figure for the general population, and it showed up in a group of people who, by their own account, were barely sleeping.
16:33 Researchers who later summarized Adler's interviews wrote that they showed widespread fear, stress, and dread around sleep. What mattered was what a family could do about it. In Laos, a man who'd been pressed in the night told his relative, in the morning. A shaman could be sent for, a ceremony could be held, and the ancestors could be asked to do their job. The people Adler talked to had never heard of anyone in Laos dying from a visit by the Dabsog. It was frightening, it was fairly common, and there was a known way of handling it. The traditional reasoning also explained who was at risk. The ancestors
17:11 protect a household that honors them, and when the ceremonies are neglected, that protection can be withdrawn. Responsibility for the ceremonies belong to the men. In America, the ceremonies were hard to hold. Shaman's were scarce in most of the cities where the mong had been placed, and a ritual that involves killing a pig isn't something a landlord or a city health department was going to tolerate in an apartment building. Many families had also converted to Christianity, sometimes the denomination of the church that sponsored them, and Adler found that a good number of the converts had gone on having the night visits after their conversion, with no ceremony left to answer them. Among the Christian Hmong and her sample who had ever been pressed by the spirit,
17:55 64% had been through it at least once since converting. The first death on the CDC's list happened in July of 1977. Moore followed in 1978, 1979, and 1980, in the scattered cities where the Hmong and other refugees from Laos had been placed. The circumstances hardly varied from one city to the next. A man who had seemed perfectly well went to bed. In the early hours, his wife or someone else in the room was woken by the sound of his breathing, which witnesses described to investigators as gasping, gurgling, choking, or labored. He couldn't be roused, and he was dead within minutes,
18:37 usually before any help could get there. The CDC's investigators later worked out a formal definition from those accounts. A case was a sudden death during sleep in a previously healthy member of one of the affected groups, with an autopsy that found no cause. When a family refused an autopsy or one was never done, the death went into the files as a presumptive case. Then the medical examiner would do an autopsy and find nothing that could have killed him. The coronary arteries were open and the heart muscle looked normal.
19:09 The toxicology screens were clean and there was no infection and no injury. I spent 16 years in law enforcement and an unattended death of a healthy man in his 30s with a clean autopsy is the kind of case that doesn't get closed. One of those is a mystery. A county that gets four of them in the same small community inside a year has a pattern. That's what happened in Portland, Oregon. In 1981, the Los Angeles Times reported on a Laotian refugee named Yong Ling Thao, 47 years old, who had come to the United States. States with his family from a camp in Thailand. He died in his sleep with his wife beside him. The Times reported that he was the fourth Hmong man to die that way in nine months, and by the
19:55 papers count, the 13th since 1978. The medical examiner in that story was Larry Lumen, and he had no cause of death to offer for any of them. The Hmong community had theories of its own. The first of them was chemical weapons. Mung refugees coming out of Laos had been describing aircraft that sprayed a yellow substance over their villages and people sickening and dying afterward. In September of 1981, the American Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, publicly accused the Soviet Union of supplying poisons that were being used in Laos and Cambodia. To a Hmong family, men who had been gassed in the hills dying of it a few years later was a reasonable fear. Lumen told the times, that nerve gas doesn't act that way, and he asked why a gas would affect only males and only at night.
20:48 The yellow rain charge itself came apart over the next few years. A Harvard biologist named Matthew Mezzleson examined samples of the yellow spots and argued that they were the droppings of wild honeybees, which released clouds of pollen-heavy waste in mass flights over the Southeast Asian forest. The government never withdrew the accusation, and plenty of Hmong who lived through those years have never accepted the B explanation. Whatever fell on those villages, nobody ever tied it to the men who died in their beds in Oregon. The other theory came out of the religion.
21:22 Many Hmong believed the men were being punished by the spirits of their ancestors or had lost their protection because they had left their homeland. Katharia-Oom has described the anxiety as coming from not being able to do right by the ancestors, either because a family was no longer where the ancestors were, or because it didn't have what it needed to perform the rituals. She has said that for many mong of that generation, the traditional explanation carried at least as much weight as anything a cardiologist had to offer.
21:52 The press came up with a third. In February of 1981, a Los Angeles Times article raised the possibility of what it called a nightmare syndrome. In May, the New York Times ran a story under the headline, Nightmares suspected in bed deaths of 18 Leo Ocean. In July, the Los Angeles paper ran another, headlined, Men of Mung dogged by death.
22:16 In December, an associated press story that ran in papers around the country opened by telling readers that an unexplained affliction was killing Laotian refugees at an extremely high rate, quickly and without warning while they slept. The nightmare idea came out of what the families had seen and heard. A man who was groaning and thrashing in his sleep and can't be woken, Looks like a man having a terrible dream. I think that's a reasonable thing for a wife to conclude at three in the morning.
22:45 It's also true that nobody in any of those bedrooms could know what the man was experiencing or whether he was dreaming at all. And that distinction got lost somewhere between the bedroom and the headline. Vangzhangs' three nights in Chicago belonged to that same stretch of time. He'd arrived in the fall of 1980, and by then, the deaths were common knowledge among Hmong families. When he described the cat, the dog, and the white-skinned woman to Moa Lee, he was describing the dobsog to another Hmong man, and both of them knew what was said to happen to Hmong men who were visited in their sleep.
23:21 Moa Lee's agency could have referred him to a clinic. The agency Joan Friedman worked for, Travelers and Immigrants Aid, had its office on West Wilson Avenue on the north side, in the neighborhood where a lot of the city's refugees were living. According to Tobin and Friedman's paper, Vang Jean, went instead to a Hmong woman they identify as Mrs. Thor, who was highly respected as a shaman among the Hmong in Chicago. A Hmong shaman can be a man or a woman, and in the traditional understanding, nobody chooses the work because the spirits pick the person. She concluded that his trouble was being caused by unhappy spirits, and she performed the ceremonies required to
23:59 release them. After that, Vang Shung reported no more nightmares and no more trouble breathing in his sleep. Tobin by Ben was directing a college program in Japan, and Friedman was the training coordinator at the Chicago agency. They read the case as survivor stress. Here was a man who had been through a war, an escape, and a relocation to a city where almost nothing was familiar, and they argued that the treatment that worked for him was the one that made sense inside his own culture. They also suggested, carefully, that there might be a connection between what he went through on those three nights and the sudden deaths. One case can't prove a connection like that.
24:40 Nobody can say whether Vang Jong would have died on a fourth night without Mrs. Thor, and the paper doesn't claim to know. What the paper does preserve is something the autopsy reports never could, which is a description from the inside, given by a man who believed he was next and was still alive to be asked. West Craven was in his early 40s in the summer of 1981 and living in Los Angeles. He'd grown up in Cleveland in a strict Baptist household, gone to graduate school, and taught college English before he left teaching for the movie business.
25:14 He was past 30 when he directed his first feature. He had made two low-budget horror films that people remembered, the last house on the left in 1972, and the Hills Have Eyes in 1977. And after that, he'd been earning a living as a director for, for hire on jobs like a 1978 television movie called Summer of Fear. In 1981, he got the chance to make two features back-to-back, deadly blessing and swamp thing. Neither one did much business, but they paid him enough to stop working for a few months and write a script of his own. And according to his biographers, he'd had pieces of an idea about a killer who comes after people in their dreams for years by then.
25:55 The Los Angeles Times stories gave him the rest of it. Craven told the story of those newspaper articles many times over the next three decades, and the versions don't entirely match. In a 1992 book about the films, he's quoted describing three small articles spread over a period of time, each one about a young man from a Southeast Asian immigrant family who had died in the middle of a nightmare. He said the paper never connected them. The third, as he told it, was the son of a physician. The young man had been having nightmares and refused to sleep.
26:31 His family gave him sleeping pills. He stayed awake for days, and when he finally fell asleep, everyone in the house went to bed relieved. Then they heard screaming, and by the time they reached him, he was dead. Afterward, the family found the sleeping pills, which he'd only pretended to swallow, and a coffee maker he had hidden in his room to keep himself awake. He was still saying three articles when Cine Fontastique magazine,
26:57 interviewed him in 2008. Then in 2014, a year before he died, he told Vulture about a family that had escaped the killing fields in Cambodia and made it to the United States. In that telling, it's the family's young son who has the nightmares, who tells his parents that the thing chasing him will get him if he sleeps, and who stays awake for days. He died in the middle of a nightmare, Craven said.
27:24 I went looking for that boy. The Los Angeles Times coverage from 1981 that other writers have pulled out of the archive is about grown men from Laos, most of them Hmong, most of them in their 30s and 40s, men like Yong Langthau. The CDC's first list of 38 deaths includes exactly one Cambodian. I haven't seen anyone produce the article with the physician father, the hidden pills, and the coffee maker, and I couldn't find it myself. That doesn't mean it was never printed. It may be sitting in a back section of the paper that nobody has scanned. It does mean that the most specific version of the story, the one with the coffee pot in it,
28:04 rests on Craven's memory of something he'd read years before, and that the details shifted between tellings. The family is Cambodian in one version, and the father is a doctor in another. The core never changed, and the core matches the record. Refugees from Southeast Asia were having bad nights and dying in their sleep. and the autopsies found nothing. Craven was plain about what he did with it. He told Rolling Stone in 1988
28:32 that he turned the cases around and asked what would follow if the dream itself were causing the death and if the men were all sharing the same frightening dream. That question gave him a villain who exists only in dreams. He kept the parts of the newspaper story
28:49 that had stuck with him. The script has a girl who knows that sleep will kill her, who drinks coffee and swallows pills to stay awake, and who hides a coffee maker in her bedroom. It has parents who keep telling her that all she needs is rest. Craven told Vulture that what struck him about the boy was a young person seeing something terrible that every older person around him denied, and he said that became the central line of the film. He supplied the rest of it himself.
29:18 He has said the name Kruger came from a boy who bullied him in school. He'd already used a shortened version of it once for the lead killer in the last house on the left, who was called Krug. In the documentary Never Sleep Again, he traced the figure back to a night in his own childhood when he looked out his bedroom window and saw a man in a hat on the street below
29:38 looking back up at him. He finished the script in 1981. For the next three years, the studios turned it down, and he told Vulture he kept the rejection letter from Universal hanging on his wall. While Craven's script was making the rounds, the federal government put a name on the deaths. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.
30:05 The Centers for Disease Control published its first report in its weekly bulletin in December of 1981, under the title, Sudden, Unexpected Nocturnal Deaths Among Southeast Asian Refugees. Investigators had identified 38 deaths between July of 1977 and October of 1981. 33 of the dead were from Laos, and 25 of those were Hmong. Four were Vietnamese, and one was Cambodian. All but one of the 38 were male, and the median age was 33. The CDC epidemiologist who led that work was Roy Barron, a physician, and he told reporters it was a completely new syndrome,
30:46 and he defined it by what it lacked. Young, healthy people dying at night, within minutes, with no explanation at autopsy. The rates were what alarmed the agency. For the years 1981 and 1982, the annual rate among Hmong men from Laos worked out to 92 deaths for every 100,000. Among other Laotian men, it was 82, and among Cambodian men, 59. The Cambridge World History of Human Disease puts the comparison this way.
31:17 In 1983, sudden death and sleep was killing Laotian and Hmong men between 25 and 44, at a rate comparable to the four leading natural causes of death added together for other American men that age. Barron was mistaken about one thing, and the Manila paper of 1917 is the proof. Doctors in the Pacific had been describing the same death for 64 years in Filipino men under a different name. It was new to American medicine and to the CDC.
31:49 The agency's own name for it shifted as the work went on. The first report was, said sudden, unexpected nocturnal death, and the later ones dropped the word nocturnal and settled on sudden unexplained death syndrome. Some of the press called it Asian death syndrome. Over the next several years, researchers proposed one cause after another. Poisoning was checked first and ruled out, since every toxicology screen had come back clean. Some looked at diet and at shortages of potassium and of thiamen, a B-vitamin. The fright theory stayed in circulation. Somebody raised inbreeding within the clans. Ronald Munger, the same epidemiologist who would
32:30 later go through the Manila records, reviewed those ideas in 1982 and wrote that there was no evidence to support any of them. He offered one of his own, that the men's airways might be closing off in their sleep, and he ended that paper by saying, the deaths remained unexplained. The journal Science had printed an exchange of letters between researchers the year before under the two-word heading Hmong deaths. And that exchange hadn't settled anything either. Barron's team at the CDC, meanwhile, was interviewing the families of the dead, one household at a time, about each man's health, his habits, and his last hours. A Hmong public health researcher in Portland, Bruce Thopal Blietaut published a study that same year that approached it from the other side. He went
33:18 to the families of men who had died and asked about their lives, their clans, and their religious practice. It was one of the first pieces of research on the deaths done by a Hmong investigator, and it took seriously the possibility that the family's own account of what was happening might hold part of the answer. Munger then went to Asia to look. Between October of 1982 and June of 1983, he ran a surveillance study among Mung refugees in the Bon Viny camp in Thailand to find out whether the same deaths were happening there. He found that they were happening there, too. There had been 16 sudden, unexpected deaths in sleep in the camp that matched the American cases. He then compared the dead men with living men from the same camp, and three things stood out.
34:05 The men who died were more likely to belong to one of the two main Hmong subgroups, the green mong. They were more likely to have a family history of sudden death, and they were more likely to have had earlier episodes in their sleep, that hadn't killed them. Those findings changed what the theories had to account for. The deaths couldn't be blamed entirely on life in America if men were dying the same way in a camp in Thailand. And a death that runs in families and concentrates in one subgroup of a people
34:34 looks like something inherited. A team of doctors in Siava reported in the annals of internal medicine in 1984 on three young men, two Laotians and one Filipino, who had collapsed and should have been on the, the CDC's list. Seattle had one of the first paramedic programs in the country, and its crews had reached all three in time. When the medics attached their monitors, each of the three was in ventricular fibrillation, and each went back into it again in the hospital during the first
35:04 days. Ventricular fibrillation is an electrical failure. In a normal heartbeat, a signal sweeps across the heart in an orderly wave, and the muscle squeezes in sequence. In fibrillation, the signal breaks into chaos. The muscle quivers without pumping and blood stops moving. A person in that rhythm loses consciousness in seconds and without a shock from a defibrillator, he's dead in minutes. The gasping and gurgling the wives had described is what a body in that rhythm commonly does in its last minutes. So by 1984, medicine knew how these men were dying. Their hearts were going into fibrillation while they slept. What nobody could say was why a healthy heart with clean arteries would do that.
35:49 A nightmare on Elm Street was finally financed by Robert Shea, who ran a small New York distribution company called New Line Cinema. The budget usually given for it is a little over a million dollars. Craven shot it in Los Angeles in 1984 with Heather Langenkamp as Nancy, Robert England as Fred Kruger, John Saxon as Nancy's father, and a young actor named Johnny Depp, who had never been in a film before.
36:15 Craven's account of that casting is that Depp had come along to keep a friend company at the audition. Craven's teenage daughter was visiting from New York, and when he spread the headshots of his candidates out on the kitchen table and asked her and a friend to choose, they picked Depp. The boiler room where Kruger works was the basement of the old Lincoln Heights jail in Los Angeles. Craven's wife at the time, Mimi, played a nurse. It opened on the 9th of November, 1984. There are no refugees in it. The film takes place in an American suburb on a street lined with nice houses, and the people dying are high school students. A girl named Tina is killed in her sleep while her boyfriend watches. Nancy works out that she and her
36:58 friends are all dreaming about the same man, and that whatever he does to them in the dream happens to their bodies in the bed. Her mother takes her to a sleep clinic, where Nancy thrashes awake from a monitored dream with fresh cuts on her arm and the man's battered hat in her hand. Her father, a police Lieutenant doesn't believe a word of it. Eventually, her mother admits what the parents on the street have been hiding. Years earlier, a man named Fred Kruger had murdered children in the neighborhood and walked out of court on a technicality, and the parents had tracked him down and burned him alive. Nancy stays awake for days on coffee and pills while the adults around her tell her to get some rest, and the one friend who promises to stay up and watch over her falls asleep.
37:41 In the end, she survives by a method Craven wrote in 1981. She turns her back on Kruger and tells him she's taking back every bit of energy she ever gave him. The film earned its budget back many times over. The figure usually given for its worldwide gross is a little over $57 million. Sequels came in 1985 and 1987, and nearly every year or two after that. And the man who directed the second one, Jack Shoulder, told Vulture that New Line became known as the house that Freddie built. By 1991, there were six films, and there had been a television series as well.
38:20 Craven came back to write and direct a seventh in 1994. A crossover with the Friday the 13th series followed in 2003 and a remake in 2010. None of the publicity I've seen mentioned the mum. Craven talked about the newspaper articles when interviewers asked him where the idea came from, and he kept talking about them for 30 years. But a teenager who bought a ticket in 1984 had no way of knowing that the premise had been taken from a county medical examiner's caseload.
38:51 The deaths continued while the film was in theaters and the doctors kept working. In 1986, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study of the hearts themselves. Robert Kirchner, a pathologist with the medical examiner's office in Chicago, had examined hearts taken at autopsy, from Southeast Asian refugees who had died suddenly in their sleep. The earlier autopsies had looked at arteries, valves, and muscle.
39:17 Kirchner's group looked at the conduction system, the thin pathways of specialized tissue that carry the electrical signal through the heart and reported abnormalities there in nearly every heart they examined. It was the first physical finding anyone had, and it pointed the same direction as the paramedics monitors in Seattle. The trouble was in the heart's wire. Early in 1987, the Los Angeles Times covered the Chicago work under a headline about medical experts seeking clues to the nightmare deaths of male Asian refugees.
39:52 By then, the phrase nightmare deaths had a meaning it hadn't had in 1981, and the third Elm Street film opened that same winter. The Times story summed the men up in two short sentences. They cried out in their sleep, and then they died. The CDC published an update in 1988. The total stood at 117 deaths since the agency had started counting. That figure covers only the deaths somebody reported to the agency, so it's a floor. The numbers were falling by then.
40:25 Five deaths had been reported for all of 1987 and two for the first four months of 1988. The agency offered a simple explanation for the decline. Most of these deaths happened within a man's first two years in the United States. States and far fewer refugees were arriving than had come at the start of the decade. 1981, the worst year for the deaths, had also been the peak year for arrivals. That explanation raised a question the report didn't try to answer, which is why the first two years would be the dangerous ones. As the American numbers fell, the same death was showing up on construction sites in Singapore. Singapore was building fast in the 1980s, and a lot of
41:09 A lot of the labor came from Thailand, most of it young men from the rural northeast. Singapore doctors riding in the Lancet in 1990 counted 161 Thai workers who had died suddenly in their sleep there between 1982 and 1990. Every one of them was a man. They ranged in age from 21 to 54. 57 had been autopsied and the autopsies had found nothing. The men who shared their dormitories reported the same things the Hmong wives had reported in Portland. Noisy breathing, gasping, and groaning.
41:45 In Thailand, the news broke in the spring of 1990, when the national press reported that more than 200 Thai men had died that way in Singapore since 1983. The newspaper's number is higher than the doctor's number, and I haven't found anything that reconciles the two. Later coverage found similar deaths among Thai workers in Brunei and in the Middle East. The villages those workers came from already had a name for the death, Lai Thai, and a long acquaintance with it. Gumpanart Viracul, a Thai cardiologist who spent years on the problem, has written that it had been known in the Northeast for more than a century, and that in some families it had taken brothers and sons across four generations. He described the same sounds the Hmong wives and the
42:31 Singapore dormitory mates had, moaning and gurgling, just before the man stopped responding. He has also written about what it cost, from the wives and children who lost the head of a household, up to a country that was losing the wages its workers sent home. The villages had an explanation, too. A widow ghost was coming at night for the men. An American anthropologist named Mary Beth Mills was living in a village in northeast Thailand during the dry season of 1990, and she documented what happened there over about six weeks after the Singapore news arrived.
43:07 Men started painting their fingernails red. Some went to bed in women's clothing. Mills wrote that the villagers were open about the reason, which was to fool the ghost into taking a man for a woman and passing him by. The nail polish had to be applied by a living widow, and so did a protective string that men wore tied around the wrist. Households put carved wooden fallacies out by their gates on the theory that the ghost might take the carving and leave the man.
43:34 Mills read the panic as being about more than one ghost. The young men of those villages were leaving in large numbers for wage work in Bangkok and overseas, and the news from Singapore had just told every family that the men who left might not come back. The belief didn't die out when the news cycle moved on. In January of 2013, the Bangkok Post reported from a village in Surin province where at least 10 deaths of apparently healthy men were being blamed on the widow ghost. A spirit medium brought in by the villagers told every household to hang a red shirt outside the house, and a 42-year-old resident told the paper he'd hung one on his own front door.
44:15 One morning in 1986, a man from Poland brought his three-year-old son to a hospital in Maastricht in the Netherlands. The doctor he had come to see was Pedro Brugada, a Spanish cardiologist who ran the hospital's electrophysiology laboratory and had a reputation across Europe for heart rhythm problems. The boy's name was Leck, and he had been fainting over and over, and the doctors at home in Poland couldn't say why. His sister Eva had done the same thing. She had gone into cardiac arrest several times. The doctors had put in a pacemaker and given her a powerful rhythm drug, and she had died anyway as a small child. The Polish doctors, out of ideas, had told the father to take his son
44:58 to Maastricht. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Brugada admitted Leck to the coronary care unit. Bugata's first impression, by his own account, was of a perfectly healthy child, and the boy's heart turned out to be structurally normal. The electrocardiogram was the thing that was off. In the leads that sit over the right side of the heart, the tracing had a distinctive shape, a segment of the line that should have returned to baseline and instead stayed raised.
45:32 At one point during the stay, Bugata has recalled, the father told him that this was how it had gone with Eva and that she died in spite of everything the doctors did. The boy stayed in the hospital for several weeks. When Brugada got hold of the dead sister's old tracings, they showed the same thing his did. Over the next several years, Pedro Brugada and his younger brother Joseph, who is also a cardiologist, came across six more patients with the same tracing and the same history. They presented the pattern at a cardiology meeting in 1991, and in 1992, the brother's published all eight in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Three of the eight were
46:12 children, and two of those were Leck and Eva. The paper described a new syndrome, a particular pattern on the electrocardiogram, a heart that looks normal in every other respect, and sudden death from ventricular fibrillation. A lot of cardiologists didn't believe it. Pedro Brugada has written that the years between 1996 and 1998 were taken up with arguments over whether the syndrome was real at all. During those same years, other researchers started calling it Brugata syndrome, and the name stuck. The Brugada's first eight patients were European. The connection to Asia was made by a cardiologist named Kunlau Nademani, who was born in Thailand and built his career in the United States. In 1992, a Thai professor who was in the northeast studying kidney
47:02 stones told Nautamani's colleagues about the young men dying in their sleep in the villages there. In 1994, the team examined its first Lytai patient, a man who had gone into ventricular fibrillation and been brought back. They kept finding survivors after that, and in 1997, Nautamani's group published a study of 27 Thai men, average age just under 40, who had been resuscitated from what their families and villages called Lai Thai. Sixteen of the twenty-seven. had the Brugada pattern on their electrocardiograms. The gene came the following year. A team led by a researcher named Chen,
47:42 working with all three Brugada brothers, including the youngest, Ramon, who is a geneticist, reported in the journal Nature in 1998 that patients with the syndrome carried mutations in a gene called SCN-5A. That gene holds the instructions for the sodium channel in heart cells.
48:01 Every heartbeat starts when those changes. channels open and sodium rushes into the cell, which is the electrical spark that tells the cell to contract. With a faulty channel, the spark is weak, weaker in some layers of the heart wall than in others, and under the wrong conditions, the orderly wave can break apart into fibrillation. That accounted for the empty autopsies. The fault is in a protein, in a channel far too small to see, and a pathologist holding that heart in his hands would find it normal because structurally it is. Working with geneticist in Texas,
48:36 the Thai team found the mutation in about a third of the Lai Thai families and Japanese Pocuri families they tested. In 2002, the same collaboration published a paper whose title called Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome, a disease allelic to Brugata syndrome, which is a geneticist way of saying
48:55 they're the same disease. A review published in 1999, had gone through every Brugada case in the medical literature to that point. Of 163 patients who met the criteria, 58% were of Asian origin. The numbers from Asia were large. One estimate for Thailand put the rate at 38 for every 100,000 men between 20 and 49. A survey in the Philippines came up with a figure of 43 for every 100,000 people.
49:25 When Nautamane's group wrote up their trial a few years later, They opened the paper by calling it the leading cause of death in young, healthy Southeast Asian men. Other parts of the old pattern fell into place. The syndrome is far more common in men than in women, for reasons that are still being worked out. The dangerous rhythm tends to come when the body is at rest, and the Thai researchers link the nighttime attacks to the way the nervous system slows the heart during sleep. The tracing itself can come and go, so a man can have a normal electrocardiogram on Tuesday. and the abnormal one on Friday. Fever can bring it out,
50:02 and the published research lists heavy meals and alcohol among the things that can set off the rhythm in a person who has the condition. A Big Supper before bed had been part of the Filipino account of Bangengot since before 1917. There's a treatment, though it doesn't cure anything. An implantable defibrillator is a small device
50:21 placed under the skin with a wire into the heart. It watches the rhythm, and when it sees fibrillation, it delivers a shock. Nademani's group tested it in Thailand in a trial published in 2003. They took 86 men who had survived Laitai, or probably had, and assigned them at random to get either a defibrillator or a standard heart drug. Seven of the men on the drug died.
50:46 None of the men with defibrillators did. Twelve of the men with devices went into ventricular fibrillation during the study and were shocked out of it, and the board overseeing the trial stopped it early. Independent reviewers have since pointed out that the trial was small and that a device manufacturer paid for it. And both of those things are true. The seven deaths were all on one side. The device has also kept a record of every rhythm they saw. In some of those men, the fibrillation started and then stopped by itself before the device had to fire. A man that happened to
51:20 would have woken up gasping, with his heart pounding, and no idea how close it had been. Munger had found in Banerai that the men who died had often been through earlier episodes in their sleep that they survived. The device recordings offer one possible reading of what those episodes were. My own guess, which none of the papers make, is that a man whose heart stops pumping for some seconds in the night and then restarts would come awake fighting for air with a crushing feeling in his chest. If he'd been raised to know what sits on a man's chest in the dark, he would know exactly, what had just happened to him, and he'd know it meant to come back. I think the cardiologists have it right about what killed those men.
52:03 The mechanism was caught on monitors in Seattle. The pattern was found in the survivors in Thailand. The gene explains the empty autopsies, the family clusters, and the fact that the same death turns up in the Philippines, Japan, Thailand, and Laos under four different names. That conclusion hasn't made it into most of what gets written about the movie. A good many of the articles that retell the Elm Street origin story end in 1988 with the CDC's last count and tell the reader that the deaths were never explained.
52:35 The cardiology journals have been saying otherwise for more than 20 years. The cardiologist's evidence does have gaps, and they say so themselves. The SCN-5A mutation turns up in only a minority of people with the syndrome. In most patients, no responsible gene has been found, even now. As recently as 2018, a review in the Journal of the American Heart Association was still referring to sudden death and sleep as the 100 years enigma, counting from that first paper in Manila. Chinese pathologists have been reporting the same death among young men there, and in one autopsy series from Hubei province, two-thirds of the dead were farmers and migrant workers. That makes Filipino laborers in Hawaii, countrymen who had moved to Manila, Thai construction crews in Singapore, Hmong refugees in America, and Chinese migrant workers.
53:31 The gene would have traveled with every one of those groups. Something about being a working man far from home seems to travel with the deaths as well, and nobody has pinned down what it is. The second gap is the 117 themselves. The Brigada paper came out in 1992 and the gene in 1998. The CDC's last count was in 1988. The men on that list died before there was a pattern to look for on an electrocardiogram or a gene to test for. And I couldn't find any published study that went back and tested them or their families as a group.
54:06 The link between the American deaths and Brigada Syndrome is made by resemblance. It's the same kind of man from the same part of the world, dying the same way. And I think that's a strong argument. Nobody ran a lab test on those men that proves it. The timing is the third problem. A gene is present from birth. If the gene were the whole story, Hmong men should have died at a steady rate in Laos, in the camps, and in America, year after year.
54:34 In the United States, the deaths climbed to a peak in 1981, clustered in the first two years after a man arrived, and then faded through the decade. That's the problem Shelley Adler worked on. She was a graduate student at UCLA when she did 14 months of field work among the Hmong in California's central valley. including the 118 interviews in Stockton, 43 of which were conducted in the Hmong language. She kept at the subject for about 15 years and published a book on it in 2011.
55:06 She laid her case out in four steps. The Dab Tzog is the Hmong form of an experience that people have everywhere. Mung belief about it is a tradition the whole community shares. In the wrong circumstances, the experience produces overwhelming psychological stress. An overwhelming stress can cause sudden death. Her argument, in short, is that belief can kill, given the right heart to work on.
55:33 Medicine has a word for the reverse of the placebo effect. When a person gets worse because he expects to, it's called a nocebo. The Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon wrote about the extreme version in 1942 in a paper on people in several parts of the world who had died after being told they were cursed. He called it voodoo death, and he described it as a fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror. In Adler's reconstruction, a mong man in an American city is under heavy and constant strain. He has a pressing spirit attack, the kind his people have always had. In Laos, he'd have told his family and sent for a shaman.
56:15 In Portland or Chicago or Stockton, there may be no shaman. The ceremonies haven't been kept up. He may have converted, and he knows that Hmong men around the country are dying in their sleep. Three out of four of the people Adler interviewed who offered any explanation for the deaths gave one that involves spirits. So he lies there at night, believing that the thing on his chest has come to kill him and that nothing stands in its way. In her account, that terror, acting on a heart that already carries the electrical fault,
56:46 is what sets off the fatal rhythm. It's a careful argument, and it accounts for things the gene. alone doesn't. It fits the peak in 1981, the first two years, and the decline as families moved closer together, found their shamans, and got their footing. The Hmong did move closer together. Through the 1980s, families left the cities where their sponsors had put them and regrouped by Klan, mostly in California's Central Valley and in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Stockton, where Adler did her interviews, was one of the places they went. By the 1990s census, there were more than 90,000 Hmong in the United States,
57:25 and a man in Fresno or St. Paul, who was pressed by a spirit in the night, could find a shaman by morning. Some of the record cuts against it. Munger found 16 of these deaths in Banerai, among Mung who had never seen America. The Thai villages had been losing men to Laitai for a hundred years, with their own beliefs fully intact.
57:47 The Filipino clerks and laborers and Munger's Manila records weren't refugees from anything, though the ones who died were more often men who had left home for the city. There's also a medical wrinkle that I'm not qualified to resolve. Fright speeds the heart up, and the cardiologists tied this particular rhythm to the hours when the heart is slowed down. The Wisconsin researchers who surveyed Mung's sleep in the 2000s raised a different candidate, sleep apnea, which was common in the people they studied, and which has been implicated in nighttime deaths in Brugata patients. So my own read stops short of Adler's.
58:23 The heart condition is established, and stress as an added risk is plausible, and the timing of the American deaths argues for it. Whether any particular man on that list was frightened to death by what he believed was in the room can't be known, because the only person who could say what he was experiencing didn't wake up. The fear itself didn't end when the CDC stopped publishing. A study of 747 Hmong immigrants in Wisconsin, published in 2013, found that 29% of them personally knew a relative or an acquaintance who had died that way. The same study found sleep paralysis, nightmares, and signs of sleep apnea running well above what's typical in the general population.
59:06 And it found that the Dabsog was still visiting. West Craven died at his home in Los Angeles on the 30th of August, 2014. of a brain tumor at the age of 76. In 2021, the Library of Congress added a nightmare on Elm Street to the National Film Registry. Vangzong's story ends in 1983, with one sentence in a journal article saying that his nightmares had stopped. Yong Ling Tao has his name and his age in a 1981 newspaper. The boy with the coffee maker has never been matched to a name, a city, or a date.
59:43 The other men are in the CDC's weekly bulletin, which doesn't print names. The earliest of the 117 deaths is entered there by its month and year, July of 1977, and nothing I could find in print says who that man was. The deaths do have a medical explanation now, even with the gaps in it, and that's something they didn't have when West Craven read about them. A cardiologist can see the pattern on an electrocardiogram. A family can be tested for the gene. And a man whose heart is likely to stop in the night can have a defibrillator put in his chest that will start it again.
01:00:20 No medical examiner in 1981 could offer a widow any of that. Freddie Kruger has nine films, a television series, and a place in the Library of Congress. The men whose deaths gave Craven the idea have a line each in a government bulletin. And most people who know the movie by heart have never heard of them. Craven never hid where it came from. He named the newspaper, and for 30 years he told any interviewer who asked that the men in those stories were real. Most of them were Hmong, and they were in this country because of a war the United States had asked their people to fight. 117 of them went to sleep in America and didn't wake up.
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