Haunted Cosmos - Sleep Paralysis

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

Join us as we investigate the high strangeness found in the dark corners of God's spoken world.In this episode, Brian and Ben discuss one of the most commonly experienced episodes of high strangeness in the world: sleep paralysis. What does it mean? Is it neutral? How do we respond to it?Enjoy! We're glad you're here.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Support the show

When Liz Kikowsky was about 15 years old, a strange and terrifying occurrence began frequently afflicting the otherwise ordinary high schooler. With two siblings, seven and eight years older than her, respectively, she had previously enjoyed being the only kid of the house. It meant she got the entire second story to herself. Her own bathroom, the empty bedrooms of her brother and sister kept the same for them in case they ever came home to visit, and her own room right at the middle of the hall. Most kids would naturally covet a situation like this, and Liz was no different. She loved the sense of independence. But eventually, a dark strangeness would plague her for an entire year of her life. Every night, as she brushed her teeth in the bathroom, she felt a sense of

dread began to overcome her. She would only ever remember this recurring fear right as it came on. So it was not looming through the rest of the day, as if it was white. from her mind and then introduced in that bathroom before bed each evening. No matter what, she could not look up into the mirror after beginning to brush her teeth. An overwhelming paranoia in her mind told her that if she did, something would be staring back at her, something other than her own likeness, something dangerous. She would quickly spit out her toothpaste and wipe her mouth without taking a single glance at that mirror. That mirror to her was evil.

As she would shuffle out of the room and head down the hallway, the fear and dread would not leave. She found herself every night running down the short hallway to her bedroom and jumping as quickly as she could into her bed. Like most kids, she felt more secure under the covers in her bed, only her eyes poking up from beneath the sheet, but the fear lingered. Despite uneasiness, though, she would always fall asleep quickly and with ease. Finally, with relief from this horror, she could sleep. Only, it wasn't over. Between midnight and 3 a.m., every night for that year, her mind suddenly sprang to life in the most vivid and realistic of dreams.

In a dream, she would see herself lying in bed before suddenly switching to the point of view of something or someone, slowly creeping down the hall towards her room. With frightening lucidity, she'd later recall thinking in the dream that whatever this thing was, it was the same thing she was afraid of seeing in her mirror. It passed the bathroom, Liz still viewing the dream as if through this entity's eyes,

and eventually it would creep past her own room towards her brothers at the end of the hall. Just as relief began to enter Liz's mind, the entity stopped and slowly backtracked towards her room. As she lay helplessly asleep in her bed, her mind would dream as the thing pushed itself like a malignant mass of glowing evil through the wall and over her bed. and then snap. Her eyes would shoot open just before the creature lunged towards her. She quickly found that, though her eyes were open and her mind was indeed fully lucid,

she could not move, not even a twitch of the eyebrow. In the backbending weight of evil and malice and sorrow and despair lingered thick there in her room. She was not alone. But every night it would eventually subside. A flick of the finger would evolve to, the clenching of her hands into fists, until finally she was free again. As she was released, she would quickly descend back into a troubled sleep.

When she awoke, she never remembered the terror of the previous night until she settled into her nighttime routine again the following day. Only a year later, when these terrifying experiences finally stopped, was she able to remember them fully. Almost a decade later, well into a career of comedy writing, that she shared with her brother Craig Kikowsky, Liz had almost forgotten the teenage haunt in her child at home. Then one night, at a writer's party in a local bar, a colleague started telling his best ghost stories. Folks had a good time and Craig thought he would share his own story.

As her brother, eight years older than her, started talking, Liz's eyes welled with tears from an immediate sting of an old fear reawakened. Craig told how, in his junior year of high school, he would have this horrible and always vivid dream of something, something very evil, slowly creeping down the hall, past Liz's room and into his. He would bolt awake, but find he was completely unable to move. The presence would linger and stalk him from the corner of his doorway until he regained his mobility and sank back into a deep sleep, a sleep that, like his sisters, several years later, would cause a sort of amnesia until the next night when it happened again like clockwork around 3 a.m. What brought A thrill of terror, driving through Liz's consciousness, as she heard her older brother recount this story,

was the fact that he had never once shared these details with her. Details that seemed startlingly similar to the horror she experienced in that very same house just a few years later. The nightmare, in its traditional sense, is a term seldom understood to many modern folk. Most may be more familiar with its new name, sleep paralysis. Even some of those who have experienced this don't understand that it actually does have a name, and it's relatively common to people. If they did not know of it already, the terror it inspires is often enough for them to try and forget that it ever happened. But this is nothing new.

Visions of demons in the night, weights on the chest, old hag rides that lead to terror or even death, encounters with a succubus and shadow men lurking and stalking you from the corner of your paralyzed vision. Humans have been afraid and puzzled of this phenomena for their entire history. Even in the oldest Middle Eastern and Hebraic mythology we find Lilith, the demon Night Witch, who was supposedly Adam's first very evil wife. According to tales of Ben-Sirah in the Jewish Talmud, she uttered an unspeakable name of God irreverently and was therefore condemned to be drowned in the Red Sea. But before she died, she negotiated with God.

She claimed she was put on this earth to pray on healthy mother's mother's to be and their children, and asked that she be released from her punishment of death to endure the punishment of having all her night children taken away from her. According to the tale, she was set free to seduce men in their sleep in order to survive, only to have the offspring of the unholy union killed. In retaliation and vengeance, she did indeed terrorize young and healthy mothers, as they gave birth to their first children. Now obviously, this is a lie that superimposed over the biblical

account of history. But the myth may not all be rooted in fiction. Her more likely origins date back to her being recorded in the Samarian King list of 2400 BC as one of four vampire demon women who was the cursed mother of Gilgamesh. All of these vampire women would terrorize men in the night while they dreamed and be forced to devour any children they bore from these demonic and rapine unions. At any rate, even the book of Isaiah mentions the screech owl who will well in the ruins of destroyed Edom in chapter 34, verse 14. Only screech owl is a modern interpretation of what originally meant night monster, commonly understood to be Lilith, some demonic witch of Old Testament lore. Today, we call this being the succubus. But the first story of the

actual nightmare, or nightmare as it was originally called, that demon thief that sits as a weight on your chest, making it hard to breathe, and terrifying you as you wake up lucid but unable to move. Comes from the Nordic story of King Van Landy. Found in the Inglinga saga of the 13th century, written by Snorri Sturlson, the story goes that King Van Landy of Uppsala is killed by Amara in the night that is conjured by the Finnish witch wholed. You see, the king had abandoned his wife in Finland and went to live in Iceland. So the queen bribed the evil witch wholed to send a Mara to either entice Van Landy to return home or to kill him, should he refuse. As you may have guessed, he refused the summons. What follows is quoted from verse 16

of Inglinga Saga. He then became very drowsy and laid himself down to sleep. But when he had slept but a little while he cried out saying that the Mara was treading upon him. His men hastened to him to help him. But when they took hold of his head, she trod on his legs. And when they laid hold of his legs, she pressed upon his head, and it was his death. The Swedes took his body and burnt it at the river called Skeeta, where a standing stone was raised over him. The first modern telling of a sleep paralysis, or nightmara encounter, comes from the notes of physician and professor Isbron von Diemerbach. In the year 1689, he wrote the following in response to a curious case he had overseen.

Quote, a woman of 50 years of age, in good plight, fleshy, strong and plethoric, sometimes troubled with a headache, and catars falling upon her breast in the winter. The last winter, molested with no catars, but a very sore in the daytime. But in the nighttime, when she was composing herself to sleep, sometimes she believed the devil lay upon her and held her down, sometimes that she was choked by a great dog or thief lying upon her breast, so that she could hardly speak or breathe. And when she endeavored to throw off the burden, she was not able to stir her members.

And while she was in that strife, sometimes with great difficulty she awoke of herself. Sometimes her husband hearing her make a doleful, inarticular voice, waked her himself. At what time she was forced to sit up in bed to fetch her breath. Sometimes the same fit returned twice in a night upon her going again to rest. One could brush all of this off,

as a common tale told through history to explain lasting fear from a bad, bad dream. I though, am inclined to give these old stories more credit. Because even today, with all of our modern knowledge of the mind and our pseudo-scientific evolutionary framework of reality, these things still happen to people, many people, in fact, from different backgrounds and walks of life. And most of them, despite being told the logical explanation by their doctor, remains stubborn in the belief that what they encountered was real and very evil. Welcome to this of the Haunted Cosmos.

My name is Ben Garrett, and I am joined as always by my friend and pastor Brian Sovey. Man, what a terrifying topic we have to talk about today, Ben. Okay, has this ever happened to you? Just right off the bat, I need to know. No, I've never had a sleep paralysis incident. Praise the Lord. Yeah, how happy are you about that? I'm so pleased.

Like, I know some people, I think there's a type of person who kind of, they secretly want to have some sort of supernatural encounter. I'm like, no. Young Christian man, you do not want, they're demons. Please. No, thank you. You do not want the demons in your room at night. No, definitely not.

I mean, especially when you can't move. Because then you can't like go Jason Bourne on them, you know? You can't do any of the elaborate scenarios you've thought out in your mind about how to deal with a nighttime intruder. Right. You know, pulling out your glocky-glock, racking the slide. I mean, just the slide rack itself will send them running. I don't actually have to rack the slide because. I'm a responsible gun owner, and it's already racked.

Anyway, I don't. So mine's already racked, but I do it anyway, because it gets me hyped. Just because in the movies, every time before they shoot someone, they racked a slide again. Every shot. Every shot. Golly. Totally off topic. Yes. Anyways.

So tonight we're talking about, as you may have guessed, sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis. The night dash mare. And closely connected with this topic is the topic of shadow people. Those lingering beings in the corner of your vision that you swear aren't just like a trick of the light or in your brain, they're actually there. Yeah. So when you first learned of shadow people in sleep paralysis, do you remember your knee-jerk reaction? Like, how long ago was this for you that you heard of this?

I think the first time that I had heard of a shadow person phenomena or a hat man or sleep paralysis style nightmare scenarios, lucid dreams was probably around 20.000. 2016, 2017. Yeah. And I immediately thought to myself, well, that's obviously demons. Okay. I was like, you know, there was no, there was no,

oh, you know, there's probably some scientific, there's probably in the amygdala, and there's some sort of chemical imbalance that's not related to the REM sleep that goes wrong, similar to a hiccuping phenomenon of the brain. No, it's like, that's demons. Yeah. Same.

Same. I was like, this is, I mean, it doesn't get simpler than this. It's just demonic. Has that view evolved or, become more precise for you now, or is it still just sort of this general, this is demonic, but I don't really know how. The more I learned about this phenomenon, Ben, it was like the tip of the iceberg poking out

of the water were these stories that you hear on the creepypasta Reddit type of world. Some of them, I absolutely believe, are fictionalized accounts. Yeah, sure. Or at least like dramatized. Dramatized. But some of them, I'm equally convinced, are real experiences that people have. I've heard from Christians who either earlier in their life experienced this or had family members experienced this that were highly plausible to me. And what happened is the more I learned about it,

the more I developed a coherent theory, at least in my own mind, of how this functions and that what we're seeing here is a demonic strategy that takes many similar forms throughout history. Yeah. Stretching back to ancient times, to antitimate. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to have you elaborate on that a little bit more in just a moment. Sure. But first, I want to ask you, because we both had the same knee-jerk reaction. Oh, this is demonic. Yeah. But why did we have that reaction? For me, there's these shared qualities between sleep paralysis and some other things that happen, that I would say are highly strange. Yeah. One of those common denominators is an indescribable and overwhelming sense of dread that people feel after they

have these things. Yeah. To me, the, you know, the evolutionary explanation is that your brain and your body kind of have this like miscommunication basically where your brain is awake, but it doesn't wake up your body yet. Yeah. So it gives you this really scary scene to kind of like jumpstart your body. Mm-hmm.

The reason that I don't like that is because it seems to break evolution zone rules where what survival, or like, what survival tool would you gain? by waking up and continuing to feel like absolutely terrified of everything. Paralyzed. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. And so when you couple that with stuff like the Bigfoot, which we're not going to talk about today, but hey, but we are going to talk about. Yeah, we will. But it's not just, yeah, it's not just natural because people have way too much fear. Yeah.

After they encounter. So that was the big telltale sign for me. But was it different for you? Yeah. I mean, that was a lot of it. It's just the, the thing. themes that come together across all of these folkloric sources and modern sources and biblical evidence that the running theme is that this thing is evil it hates me it wants to destroy me but then even this whole relationship of the rules that seem to apply where they're not allowed they can only go so far yeah they want to be welcomed in they are banished often by the name of Jesus. Things like that, where their immediate instinct in many cases is to begin praying when they experiences, and it's effective. If they're a Christian. Even if they're not, they think like,

sometimes even if you're not. I need to pray. They immediately pray to Christ. What you're really striking. It reminds me of the sons of Sceva, where you have these exorcists that are Jewish that they use the name of Jesus, but they don't understand what it is. In that case, the demons literally attack and them. Yeah. I think God allowed that to demonstrate that the name of Jesus isn't just a talisman. Yeah. But there is some kind of spiritual overtone to all of the story that to me is, is simply not adequately

explained through the materialist instinct. Yes. Even the whole, are you familiar with the study in, I think it was a Swedish doctors? Was it a shadow people? Okay. No, no, I'm not familiar with that one. Let me give you some details. Let me, I have a...

This has got to be good. I have a tab here. This is so great. Hold up. Okay. This is a study that was done by neurologist Olaf Blunk of the Brain Mind Institute in LaSanne, Switzerland, and some colleagues of his. And they were attempting to identify at this time what was causing epileptic seizures in a young woman. She was in her early 20s.

Okay. And so they took and surgically implanted electrodes to various parts of her brain. and they started stimulating different parts of her brain. And an interesting thing they discovered is that when they stimulated this very specific part of the brain, it's called the TPJ, the left temporal parietal junction, they could create the illusion of what some summaries of the study call a shadow person. Now, seriously? Yeah.

If you get into the details of the study, it wasn't exactly the same, though. Okay. So they were stimulating a portion of the study. brain and they they could say the woman felt a presence of like near her yeah and uh they compared it to schizophrenic delusions and things like that so you have these scientific explanations of sleep paralysis where they kind of take that that kind of study and then they'll they'll look at like the way that REM sleep works where our body is paralyzed essentially yeah you want to hurt ourselves so we don't act out or our spouse last night my son came into our room and he was like he has

He sleepwalks all the time, as I did, sometimes out of the house, as a lad. And he was like, I've got to get the TNT. And we were like, what, buddy? He was like, I got to get to the TNT. And then we were like, okay, buddy, do you need to go to the bathroom? So somnambulism, sleepwalking is a misfiring of this kind of process. Yeah. People start moving.

But when you put all that together, what I think you're missing here is, the sheer consistency of the experiences, the clear spiritual overtones and the sheer evil of them. And to me, that is just simply not satisfying when you, would you start to just say that it's some

chemicals misfiring in your brain and naturalistic? I don't like it. I don't like it. And there's a reason that we included, that first story in the cold open, the Kikowsky siblings, Liz and Craig. Great point. Yeah, there's a reason we picked that story A, it's really creepy and interesting.

But B, why was it so... I mean, it was the borderline, the exact same experience for the both of them. Almost, in fact, it had almost evolved for Liz to become worse in a way, but the similarities were there. And it's the same house, it's brother's sister. It skipped the middle sibling. A lot of people are like, oh, it's genetic.

But none of their parents... They've, like, asked their family. None of them have ever had anything like this. It skipped the middle sibling and went to Liz. And it reminded me of kind of like what we harp on, where it's these entities that are running plays, and they're trying to improve their game. And so for Craig, it was terrifying, no doubt.

But it seemed much worse for Liz. Can you imagine having the lucidity to see the POV of something creeping down the hallway towards your room? Yeah. It's like a horror movie. Horrifying. So anyway, we included that because I think that really pretty, the point that this is more than just like, oh, some misfiring chemicals in the brain.

Yeah. You have the same experience in the same house without any communication from the different parties. If you believe that the people giving the account, and it seems like it was a believable account. I've heard the account first person from them. Yep. And it was, it's, they sound like very believable. Like this, this actually seemed to have happened. It was wild that they never talked about it. And then she found out, she was like, wait, what happened to you? Say that again. That happened to Me. Eight years later, six, seven, ten years later, I don't know. Crazy. And it was also a similar portion of their childhood. Yeah. Just pretty much same time period. I think for her it was like a year earlier. It's a love temple parietal stimulation. Miss me with that. Yeah, miss me with that.

Miss me with that. Get out of here. Before we, before we move on, because again, you mentioned this idea that for all time and for all cultures seemingly, there's some really common denominators and what they see before we get to that because that is a huge point that we have to hit. I got to ask, and we'll talk more about this when we talk about vampires, which will happen. But what do you think about Lilith? Because I got deep in the Lilith rabbit hole with this episode. So, and I'm super into it now. I was only, I was only in a very superficial way familiar with the Lilith folklore. Yeah. And the, and more familiar with other aspects of that. of like the night demon, the succubus, incivist stuff.

The old hag kind of... The old hag. Yeah. And then you started connecting the dots on the two, and it sort of blew my mind. And the first thing that comes to mind is that there's just this disclaimer of the Talmudic Jewish tradition is not biblical in its origin. No, absolutely not.

It is extremely mystical. You get into whole, there's whole branches of Judaism post-Christ, where, you get exactly what you would expect from a people who had rejected their Messiah. It's very in error. Oh, absolutely. Like, extremely in error. Very mystical. Actually, it's pagan.

Yeah, absolutely. Kabbalistic Judaism. Talmudic stories. They're actually extremely blasphemous. Yeah. And so even this Lilith story is extremely, it's blasphemous. It's contra-biblical. The account of Lilith as the first wife of Adam, of course, did not happen.

Yeah. It upends everything that Christians confess. Yeah. But the point. point is that they didn't come up with that. We can say, oh, well, it's clearly not in the Bible that this happened. So this did not happen. We have a detailed description of creation and this is not part of it. So where did they get this? Well, they got it from something older. Yeah, they're describing a real phenomena that you see crop up across many cultures and places and times

of this night demon, night hag, witchy demon encounter. That is sexual, that is blasphemous, that is degrading and evil and contrahuman. Yeah. Just all of these themes come together. And so for me, the Lilith story is yet another example of a culture, giving a name and a story to an experience that people had. Yep. And then retell back explaining it through this folkloric sort of mythical.

Degrading is a good word to use. Use the word degrading. All of these things are humiliating and degrading to the image of God. God, that's part of the point. It seems to be the play they're running. One of the striking things with Lilith, too, and again, I don't want to talk too much about it because we'll talk about it more,

but she is seemingly alluded to in the book of Isaiah. It's the word that the Hebrews would use to refer to Lilith. And the really interesting thing is it uses the modern term screech owl or night owl or whatever. And part of the legend is that these, vampiric, you know, demon women would have a human upper body, but they'd be kind of like a chimera where their lower body would be like a vulture. So even that translation, that's a whole well of connections that can be made.

But Brian, one of the most prolific connections and commonalities between these experiences is a being that people have now commonly referred to as the Hatman. Yeah. Can you walk us through the Hatman phenomenon? and how it kind of lends a little bit more weight to us saying that this isn't just natural. Yeah, the Hatman phenomenon is absolutely terrifying. It's this phenomena that relates to shadow people, where shadow people are the entities that people are seeing during these sleep paralysis experiences.

Some of them see these entities in waking moments as well. You'll have stories where people are, you know, maybe walking down a quiet street late at night and they're alone or they'll be you know just somewhere isolated and in the dark and they'll see humanoid shadow figures sometimes with red eyes sometimes with varying characteristics yeah almost cloaked looking that will stay just on the edges and the periphery of the light and occasionally do as mundane of a thing as observe and just come with a sense of extreme dread. Yeah.

Or even attack and assault people. Yes. You'll have stories where people will be, there was one story that I remember. This is in our notes, just kind of off the cuff. I remember a story of a couple that were sinfully cohabitating in their apartment. Such a shame. Come on, guys. Come on.

You want demons, sexual sin. Yeah, just fornicate. Just ask for them. Just ask for them. Just saying. Simple ask. And they had this continued encounter where one of the couple would experience sleep paralysis, this vivid dream of a shadow person with a hat, wearing a top hat, the hat man,

who shows up over and over in these encounters. And he would even come and choke the person experiencing this. And they would be strangled. And one of the experiences really, it's fascinating is the other partner was awake and looking at the, I think it was the girlfriend who was experiencing the sleep paralysis. And he could see what was happening to her, that she was stopping breathing and struggling but couldn't move. And he like came and shook her awake and she told him what was happening. So he couldn't see it.

Yeah. But she was experiencing it over and over and over and over. And so this phenomenon just seems to occur, this entity, the hat man, this sort of demonic black figure, the top hat shows up in many accounts. Yeah. The thing that makes it weird is the hat. Yeah, why the hat? Why?

Like, why, what is the evolutionary explanation for there being a hat? That's not a common thing that you'd see on a humanoid shape that you make in your brain. When you think of a human, you don't think of a guy wearing a hat. No. That's such an oddity. Now, many believe the hat man to be some ancient spiritual entity that's been depicted in lore from almost every culture as far back as one pleases. And this would explain why there's a hat there. And this entity is the Grim Reaper.

According to Welsh legend, the man we colloquially referred to as the Grim Reaper was actually named Anku. He appears as a man or skeleton wearing a black robe and large hat that always conceals his face. And another legend, he's just a shadow that lingers on the outskirts of one's vision or, like you said, on the outskirts of a light source. He said to drive a large black coach pulled by four black horses, he uses to collect the souls of the dead.

The Medeval's thought he was some cursed first child of Adam and Eve, again, that's a little ridiculous, that was kept secret due to his demonic and grotesque love of death. Some also say that he's just the first dead person in whatever village he lives in to die that year. And his punishment for being the first person in the year to die is that he has to see through to the afterlife the rest of the people that die that year.

That actually reminds me of a Haitian voodoo legend. Remind me to circle back. Keep going. One more thing. Yeah, keep going. That's more of like a medieval slash modern Christianized take on this Anku thing. I mean, it's problematic, obviously.

But it's there. They were looking for an explanation. but there's an even deeper explanation that's far more demonic and to me pretty compelling. And that comes from the neo-pagan Hellenistic Greeks. According to one modern pagan posting on Reddit, he's apparently an expert in modern Hellenism. He says Hermes is the Greek god who is the messenger of the gods, constantly traveling from the divine realm to the physical plane and into the underworld.

One of his underlooked divine roles is to deliver the dreams down. down onto us in the physical plane, and to guide deceased spirits to the underworld as a shepherd of souls. One of his key attributes is a cloak and a patasos, which in Greek is a sacred hat that Hermes alone wears. Wow. And he has a overall benign, according to this man, yet very cunning, almost trickster-like personality. There's that archetype of trickster that shows up in lore all the time. This explains why most reports seeing Hermes during sleep paralysis, when Hermes shows himself in a physical form to deliver your dreams and sleep visions from the astral plane. Think of an ancient mailman with a hat and all showing up to send you dreams and make sure you're doing all right.

He is a Greek god and so he rules over boundaries, meaning he's much above our attempts to banish him. He will still show up and there's nothing ominous about it according again to this man. Anyone in the Hellenism community will probably tell you that Hermes is the friendliest deity, deity that. that you've ever worked with. I think that fear is a natural response to the unknown, when in reality the hat man could be an old god just doing his job. Don't be intimidated, this man says. And no, Hermes does not feed off your fears.

Even though he's a trickster god, he's more lighthearted about it and harmless. Have you ever tried asking him to make himself unseen? And then he goes into these tricks that people can use when they see the hat man to try and bring levity to the situation. This is so demonic. Seriously. Hey, just so you know, this guy that fills you with an existential sense of dream, he's actually like pretty hell.

He's a friendly god. He's like Casper, the friendly ghost. Casper the friendly god. Hermes the friendly god. It's like, that's what I meant at the beginning. This demonic play over and over. And it takes different flavors. It's like you go to the store of the ramen aisle.

You can get the shrimp ramen. You can get the oriental flavor, which I have no idea what that means. Or like, what is oriental? The flavor of the orient. I'm sure. It's terriaki because that's always what they do. Or the chicken or the beef. This is like you can have your modern atheistic hat man encounters on creepypasta

or you can have your neo-pagan helenosa encounter. Or you can have this barons. This is the Haitian connection here that's fascinating to me because it's again, this is a totally different culture, Haitian voodoo, which is it's like a syncretism of Roman Catholicism with African religions and African. sort of traditional religions from western central Africa.

You see it develop between the 1500s and the 1800s and the 1800s. And there's this being in the Haitian voodoo tradition who is an Iwa of the dead, which is kind of like a spiritual being, a category of spiritual being,

kind of like O'Lorin is... Oh, yes. A Meyer. A Meyer. You know, in the Tolkienian tradition. He becomes Gandalf, by the way. He becomes Gandalf. For listeners that need to read more Tolkien.

For listeners who are kind of densed. stupid. No, I'm kidding. We love it. Barren Samdi, and Samdi just means Saturday in this, it's like a French combination of French and some other languages. But Baran Samdi is a being who is described as having a top hat, a black coat or tailcoat, dark glasses. And then there are some details that are specific to the Haitian voodoo tradition where he has cotton plugs in his nose. And basically the whole picture is supposed to be that he is like a corpse being prepared for burial in the Haitian tradition. So he's just depicted as a black man with his face painted like a skull.

He speaks in a terrifying voice. But he's related to obscenity, debauchery, death. And Haitian graveyards often have a cross. They'll find the oldest male who died there. And they'll put, they'll basically dedicate his grave to barren insomnia. Wow. Sometimes under the name Baron La Croix.

So yeah, there's a connection to that well-sludge. Absolutely. Wow. And they'll put a hat on the cross. It's this Roman Catholicism. And to me, you look at the way these folklore tradition to develop. They're often like a bastardization of Christian faith the same way the Talmudic legend was. Right, right.

They try to co-opt the Christian story, but remove the gospel and the true worship of the true God into death and horror and evil. debauchery and wickedness and disgusting black demonic and they get people to like start to offer worship or start to fear these entities and so to me it's like it's just it's a demonic strategy that's i think that it might be Haitian also there's another iwa named papa legba these names were just amazing yeah papa legba and he's like a syncretism of some voodoo god and then also saint peter and I think St. Anthony is supposed to be kind of all of them coalesced into one. And he is the more positive take on that. Where he's associated with the fathering of children.

So people will pray to this like syncretism saint to watch over their kids if they can't be with them. Like if a bunch of kids are playing outside, you know, they may ask pop a leg, but to keep them safe. The point is, and this isn't new, it's just like what you're saying, when you get this syncretism vibe going on, it's like a blended up version of light and dark where you're trying to bring in the obvious and objective beauty of Christianity into something that's ugly. Yep. But when you blend up the light and dark, you're just left with this amorphous gray that's gross. You skip the dark.

It's powerless and it's disgusting. And so that's why a lot of these legends have been lost to time because ultimately, while they're talking about real things, they're giving unsatisfying answers. And so they've made themselves obsolete. Like with the Hellenistic example, at least it's a real thing. real answer. It's evil. I mean, it's completely evil, but at least it's an answer that people are satisfied with. Have we told the story of the mother of cats account here yet? No, but I was just about to say, we've got to get into just some stories of that man, because these are terrifying. So please.

They flesh it out a little bit here. Take it away. This is an account from a Reddit poster, and you'll see a lot of these, you know, people see Reddit, oh, it's all made up, creepy pasta. And again, I need to make sure we don't use these terms without defining them. Creepy pasta is A website or series of websites, it developed from a portmanteau. Portmanteau is like the word smog, smoke and fog jam together. It basically came from copy and paste. Yeah. C&P copy and paste, creepy paste.

It was really a popular, first of all, in 4chan. Yeah. And then it's become this Reddit thing too. Yeah. So creepy pasta, people copy and paste stories and things like that. They write their own source. A lot of them are fictionalized. However, some of them are actual accounts that people tell that are their own personal accounts.

These stories, for example, that we're going to tell. They're from a subreddit or just an entire website dedicated to the Hatman. Yeah. So it's not a creepypasta subreddit. It's something that, you know, supposedly these people really believe this happened. Yeah. So they're not trying to fictionalize or dramatize it. And you'll see that and they're creepy, but they're not overly creepy.

You can tell the difference. Yeah, they're not like over the top scary. So anyway, this is from the account of the mother of cats zero zero. He said, I've been researching this figure entity, whatever he is for a while since this happened. I'm someone who digs into things and tries to figure out a rational explanation, but I'm honestly stumped. Anyways, this first encounter was quite disturbing. I have a history of extremely detailed dreams in general that I can remember for years. I was inside a house, not the nicest place, almost seemed as if it was 70s-era house.

There were other women inside with me, and they were screaming. I looked outside the window and a lamp post was outside the window. There was a walkway gate and bushes visible too. He emerged from the lamp post as a shadow with glowing eyes and an old school top hat. Very long coat in all black. He walked towards the home and I immediately felt the need to go to the door and check to make sure it was locked. It was locked, but when he touched the handle, it fell apart and hit the floor. He started pushing me towards a couch and attacking me.

I fought back, pushed him off, and then he ran out of the door. The women seemed to calm down immediately. Second dream, he was standing at the foot of my bed. Same exact clothing in those yellowish glowing eyes. Except this time, he smiled at me. And it looked like the Cheshire cat grin from Alice in Wonderland. Like jagged teeth, too. I froze in fear, to be honest.

Both experiences weren't pleasant for me. Like I said, I have a history of extreme, detailed dreams or nightmares of general. But nothing ever felt this strange, terrifying, or imprinted upon my memory, as these two. I like to think maybe he has an odd way of challenging people to face fear, perhaps, but another part of me thinks he might not have good intentions. I'm wondering if anyone else has been attacked by him,

perhaps seen him come out of a lamp post. Any similarities? I really like diving into the unknown, thanks. Yeah, I got to say, her saying that he might not have good intentions, probably good instincts. It's so interesting to hear how people who don't understand the embattled

nature of the cosmos, they don't understand spiritual war. They try to explain these things. Yeah. Through their own... Well, they want neutrality. Yeah, they want there to be this kind of like yin and yang. And, you know, maybe he's just... Again, maybe he's just this entity that teaches people to face their fears.

Yeah. It's this idea that there's... That within everyone, there's some good, there's some bad. And you can't have purity in both. You can't have a purely good. good thing. You can't have a purely evil thing. There's another account, this is from another Redditor, whose name will be edited because it was inappropriate. But let's just call her the goat, because the word goat was involved. She says, when this happened to me, I did not even

realize that it had happened to other people. I looked it up after the fact because it haunted me so terribly. But when I was younger, I'm 26 now, my dad went on a business trip. Whenever he went away, I would sleep with my mom and we'd have a girl's sleep over with her in the master bedroom. We watched Gilmore Girls with popcorn in bed. It was great. I fell asleep, but then in the middle of the night, I woke up. From the master with the door open, I could see the doorway of my room, and it looked like there was a man with a top hat sitting on my bed. I got freaked, but convinced myself that it was my imagination, and so I continued to watch TV. I looked back over, and now he was in the hallway, standing up. I started freaking out.

and I tried to make myself fall asleep and blame it on my imagination. I had the urge to look one last time, and he was in the doorway of the master bedroom. Top hat, trench coat, shadow figure is all I saw. I tried to wake up my mom, but she was still knocked out, and I just pulled the sheets over me and didn't look again until I fell asleep. It truly still messes with me today because I know it was so real, and upon looking it up, I find it even crazier than I'm not alone,

and I need to know why. The thing that gets me about that one is that she tried to wake up her mom and couldn't. Yeah. And also she was just like awake watching TV and he and the shadow, the hat man was still there. That is so scary to me. Yeah. Absolutely mind-blowing. And these stories often have this element where they'll blend sleeping and waking,

but there will be a portion of the experience where they have a state of consciousness where they're awake and they still see this thing. Yeah. For a time. there was even there's a i can't remember the guy's name he's he's one of these guys there's a category in fact let me let me just for a moment yes there's a category of person that we're actually one of the reasons we're doing this show is because there aren't enough christian resources out there that are categorizing these spiritual phenomena and explaining them adequately to prepare people to understand and be ready

to live in the world that we live in. And to minister to people who are not Christians who are being deceived by demonic entities and by this spiritual world into a trusting in false gods or even just being degraded and horrified by them without Christ. So there's an increased interest in this sort of category of stories and supernatural things.

And this is a tremendously dangerous thing. on one hand because a lot of people are going into this as like, oh, they're just fun stories, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they don't know that what's really happening here is these malevolent, ancient, undying spiritual beings who want to kill you and drag your soul in hell, right? Yeah, you're like, that's bad. Yeah. So we want people to be equipped for them and to understand these stories, but you have this

whole category of people who remind me of like the magician and axe who I think Simon the magician. Yes, Simon of Cyrene. Yeah, Simon of Cyrene. Yeah, Simon of Cyrene, who he's a magician and he is, you know, coming into Christianity. and anyway, you can go read that story. But there are people like this that try to syncretize the two.

There's an author that comes to mind. I'm trying to remember his name. He's written like 30 plus books on these sorts of things, on black-eyed kids. Oh, yes, I know the guy. And he is one of these guys that dabbles between demonic stuff

and like Roman Catholic stuff. Yeah, like he attends a Roman Catholic church. Yeah, and he thinks of it as magic. He thinks of it as a magic show where the priest is magically making the bread into Christ's body. Right. So he views it as this esoteric occultic sort of thing. He went to a school of the occult, learned all these things,

and then writes books about it. And so you have this kind of person who is fascinated with the spiritual. And David Weatherly. David Weatherly, that's right. You have a lot of guys like this who research in this field that you'll find if you start to try to categorize and understand and be able to respond to this sort of phenomena. And you need to be careful. You need to be equipped to understand that a lot of these guys, their explanations, actually, it's not that they're all untrue. It's that they're actually

describing demonic subterfuge that they themselves have been taken in by. Yeah. So this guy himself has had these kinds of experiences and even noted that as he studied them, he began to experience phenomena like this. Yeah. And so you need to be aware that you can't, this isn't like a topic that you should just lightly take up and like, oh, whatever, it's kind of funny. Guess it'll be my thing. Yeah. No, no, no, no. These are, these are demons who hate you and hate God and want to destroy you. Yes. You need to be equipped for them. And I think that's a through line and it just runs through all these stories is that they leave people

often in a state of horror but also in a state of deception. One of the best tools they have to deceive is even with just a seat of doubt where they might evangelize you with a message of, actually, maybe what you can see is all there is. What do you think about that? So there's this doubt aspect to it.

Brian, will you tell us the story of... So there's a website called the Hatman Project This is so common that there's an entire website cataloging stories trying to determine what this thing is, what this occurrence is. Will you tell us one of the stories from that website that's very striking? Yeah, no problem, Ben. Here's the story from Hatmanproject.com, this research project into this phenomenon. It says, quote, I saw him in 2014. I was 15 at the time and was going to bed.

I and my grandma were alone in the house, and this was a regular home, no fancy things, just a basic condo. Our house was nearly impossible to break into since we had a security guy at the entrance and our condo was on the third floor. That night, after saying good night to my grandma, I climbed up from my bed and was checking on my phone. Then suddenly my door started to open. I curiously looked to the door because I thought my grandma came to say something. But all I saw was darkness. No face. No eyes.

No nothing. Just a black figure. I tried to scream and I tried to touch my phone. I couldn't move a muscle or yet make any sounds. After a few seconds, which felt like in eternity, he slammed my door. I was really scared and I had to check on my grandma. She was watching TV. Before I even said a word, she said,

Why did you slam your door? I couldn't respond. I couldn't explain and I still wasn't able to talk. I shook it off after a few hours, but to this day, I still know it was the hat man. So here we go. with the hatman able to move things. Manipulate the environment.

Yeah, like really manipulate the environment. You got stories of people dreaming about getting a glass of water and they see the hat man and then they wake up the next morning and there's a glass of water on their nightstand. Come on. That's crazy. That's crazy. Come on.

And Ben, you know what's even crazier than this? What? So I tweeted the other day something inspired by this because, man, people don't realize, speaking of demonic deception, there's this whole movement of people getting into hallucinogenics and drugs to try and explore the spiritual world, things like DMT and other things we'll talk about. You know who one of the people who's been getting into this is? Tell me, Aaron Rogers. The quarterback.

This is pretty big. Tell us about Aaron Rogers and what he's been up to. By the way, do not do this. Yeah, don't. Look, hot tip. Don't. Don't do this. This is an example of what not to do. Aaron, the reason that this is so crazy is because this is a big name guy. Yeah.

This is not an obscure redditor online. Like, guy you'll see selling car insurance on a Super Bowl ad. Yeah. It's like, this is a famous guy. Guy who is performing at a high level of physical preparedness. Like, this is a top guy. And he said that on a trip to Peru, he was taking a drug

which is called ayahuasca I think I'm pronouncing that right I have no idea I'm pretty sure it sounds right it sounds right yeah sounds legit and it's a

it's this herb that the indigenous peoples would use and they still use it today to alter one's thinking one's physical ability even and then there are emotions and senses

so you probably know where this is going but the old world people would use this to have communions with their gods no you know yeah it would enlighten

the vision and all that stuff. So Aaron Rogers goes to Peru and he's like, why not? Let's try this thing. And he sees what he said was a mysterious character who was black, shadowy, and wearing a hat. And he actually referred to this man as the hat man. So it almost is like it gives them a title or something like that. Tell him about the rabbit. He said, so he said that this was a terrifying experience. He went and then he went on another trip to Peru. Okay, a similar trip in the 2020 off season. And this time, again, for a second time, he tried this drug because he wanted to go on another adventurous journey, he said.

And he said, quote, referring to the hat man, he will sometimes appear in the distance, usually veiled by darkness, holding the corpse of a dead rabbit and sometimes a blade. Come on. If you're going to try and tell me that that's just a not good, neither good nor bad entity. I'm going to laugh in your face. What a, what a, like this whole,

we gotta do a whole episode on this sometime, this whole DMT world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. Because like the thumbnail sketch guys, people are doing hallucinogenic drugs. They're even studying this like Stanford, I think, at this point. And they are going deep into this hallucinogenic state and across the world experiencing almost the same things, meeting entities.

Yeah. They think are like extra-dimensional beings. Right. And I'm like, and guess what? You're communing with demons. Why do you think all the Native Americans and everybody would be like, oh, yeah, we're going to smoke some of this plant that we discovered helps us commune with our gods. Yeah.

The demons, guys. They love it. Apparently, they love when you do the gonga and just cannot think in your right mind. Just listen to your old KJV Southern Baptist grandpa who says, stop doing the alcohol. Stop doing the reefer. And you're going to, the devil is going to get you. This is the thing. He was flipping right.

Like, stop it. Well, Rogers went on to say, after these two experiences, he's now, like, terrified to be alone in the locker room. And he claims that any time he is alone in the locker room, it's not just that he feels scared. It's that the lights start flickering, and then they go off one by one getting closer to him.

He says, quote, referring again to an experience with the hat man where he wasn't on any drugs. He's in the locker room. And he was awake. And he says, quote, it was behind me. not even breathing hard. I heard its feet hitting the ground in a constant rhythm. I ran to my car, opened the door, slammed it behind me,

and locked it as fast as I could. This is a top performance athlete who is scared out of his mind, sprinting to his car from the locker room he goes to every day and trying to lock it as fast as he can. And only has only things to lose by telling these stories. Oh, yeah. People are just going to think he's crazy. State Farm isn't going to be like,

do we want the guy who's talking about being chased by spirit, entities, hawking arc, car, or whatever insurance are. Well, he already did the vaccine thing. Like, he's already blacklisted to a lot of people. Oh, yeah, that's right. So, like, this is, this is suicidal for him. Yeah, this is like career suicide. This is like his Joe Rogan arc.

Yeah, his Joe Rogan deep esoterica arc. Brian, as we close out tonight, I want to leave our listeners with a couple truths. There are some primary things that I want you to take away from this episode. One of them is that these things are real. I hope something that we've

gotten across tonight has been that this isn't just flippant stories told by people who maybe they had a little bit too much to drink. These things are real and they're very demonic. So you should be equipped as the Christian with the knowledge that you're not just battling against physical things in the world. Remember, you're battling powers and principalities by the power of Christ working in you. And I hope the other thing you take away is that as the Christian, you don't have to be terrified of these things if your fear is in the Lord. Remember that our primary enemy is not these demonic beings, but rather the old flesh that we wrestle with all the time. Christ has given us pure blood, and yet we have sitting on our shoulders, our redeemed shoulders, that lizard of the old flesh that wants to pull you back to sin and death.

Kill the lizard in your own life first. Take dominion in your mind and heart by the fear of the Lord. And in your fear of the Lord, you will be equipped to stand courageous against all other things and all of our lives. other occurrences. I hope that that's your takeaway from tonight. Yeah, that's so true, Ben. Even the Apostle Paul connects these things together, our normal everyday work of trusting in Christ is our victor, trusting in the forgiveness of Christ. In 2nd Corinthians chapter 2, Paul is talking about the ordinary relationship of sin being repented of by a sinner in the congregation and that the forgiveness of Christ being extended to that sinner. And Paul even says that he's teaching them

these things, this normal everyday Christianity one-on-one sort of stuff, quote, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs. And so we know that the work of these spiritual realities of Satan and his minions is meant to distract us from Christ, to deceive people, and to pull the wool over their eyes. So yes, understand where these stories are coming from, their demonic origins, be able to name them, and to give them a name. as a Christian and say, that's not this God who's for you. That's not this thing trying to lead you into truth. That's not an extra-dimensional being. That's not just neutral. It's not just neutral. Those are demonic or stories. Those are demonic occurrences. Be prepared to fight them.

But remember, as Ben said, the most powerful way we fight them is by trusting in Christ, repenting of our own sin, being busy about the duties of Christian living. Let me leave you with one final story here to underline what some of these demonic strategies are looking like and taking the shape of so that as you may be in the workplace here, a coworker tell you a scary story that happened to them. You can name them and say, well, no, that's, that's demonic co-worker. Let me point you to Christ. And this is another story from those same Reddit projects that we shared. Quote, it started with me drifting off to a quick nap in between shifts at work. This nap felt better, though like the sleep was heavier and deeper than usual.

My body felt almost anchored to the bed, even though I was still at least half awake. Eventually, my eyes opened. They were heavy to find myself stuck. I could see and think. I could breathe fine, but I had no movement beyond that. As I came to grips with it, I noticed a black human-shaped mask in the corner of my room. It had this strangely punchy and really menacing presence about it. like it stuck out in great contrast against the rest of the room,

made me scared immediately. Partly because even though it was a shadowy figure, I knew right away who it was or who it was supposed to be. I knew it was my father, or somehow it was meant to be him. As it approached me, still unable to move, this strange buzzing noise in the background got louder and louder, and this thing's presence felt more and more menacing and evil. Finally, right as it reached out its hand for the side of my bed,

I snapped out of it. I was terrified. I couldn't sleep for a week. Did you know that patrons get access to bonus stories that didn't make it into the main episode, as well as early access to half of the season of haunted cosmos at a time? Support the show and get access to all kinds of great perks at patreon.com slash haunted cosmos. Want more haunted cosmos?

Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash hauntedcosmos and sign up now.