So Supernatural - THE UNKNOWN: Sleep Paralysis

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

In the terrifying, mysterious experience known as sleep paralysis, people wake up to find their bodies completely paralyzed. They are frozen in place, unable to do anything but watch and listen as they are assaulted by nightmarish, shadowy demons. 

You've probably had a dream that goes something like this. Something is chasing you, you're running for your life, and then suddenly you're frozen in place. Your brain screams to keep moving, but your body doesn't listen. You're paralyzed. It's only a dream, right? But what if you woke up and you still couldn't move? That's what happens during an episode of sleep paralysis. People wake up in the middle of the night completely immobilized. They can't move a finger or make a sound. All they can do is breathe and look around.

Waking up in this state is beyond disorienting. You're completely vulnerable and you can't even call for help. But as terrifying as the paralysis might be, it's nothing compared to what happens next? This is Supernatural. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, I'm talking about sleep paralysis, a terrifying phenomenon where people wake up inside a living nightmare. Whether it's ancient shadow demons or a fluke in our brain chemistry,

sleep paralysis is far more common than you probably realize. So be careful tonight. You might be next. We have all of that and more coming up. Stay with us. Everyone who goes through sleep paralysis says the same thing. They weren't dreaming. They were awake when it happened because they could see and hear everything going on around them.

And everyone who only hears about sleep paralysis says the same thing. There's no way these people were actually awake. It was probably just an extra vivid nightmare. But once you hear stories about people who experience sleep paralysis, you realize there's a problem with that theory. You start to wonder, if it wasn't real, then why did they all see the exact same thing? This question haunted a man named David Hufford. In 1963, David's a college student studying in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. One night, he wakes up in his dark off-campus

bedroom to find himself completely paralyzed. He can't lift a finger. In fact, he can't move a single bone in his body. He tries to call out for help, but his vocal cords aren't responding either. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before, so he has no idea if it's ever going to end. He feels more helpless and more vulnerable than he's ever been in his life. And that's when it gets a thousand times worse. David hears a faint shuffling sound. It takes him a second to realize that it's the sound of footsteps. There's someone in his bedroom. He tries to roll over and switch on the light, but his muscles still won't cooperate. Meanwhile, the

footsteps are getting closer. Then he feels the bed sink down, like something's climbing in. David tries to scream, but no sound comes out. And that's when he feels a sudden pressure on his chest, like something's kneeling on him, pressing him down into his mattress. He can't see it. He can only feel it. But whatever it is, grabs his throat and starts to suffocate him. Sheer terror runs through David's body, an overwhelming sense of dread. He is convinced in this moment he is going to die. But then something changes. David doesn't know how he shakes off the paralysis. He just suddenly realizes that he's able to move again. He leaps

out of bed and switches on the light and the room is empty. David searches his bedroom, but there's no evidence of an intruder, which is super bewildering. He's had plenty of bad dreams before, so he knows this was not a dream, but he's too scared to go back to sleep. His mind is racing. Like, is he having a nervous breakdown? Or was he really just attacked by some kind of phantom? The next day, he considers telling someone, but what can he say? His friends will just brush it off as a nightmare or worse, laugh at him. So he keeps it to himself. If he wants answers, he's going to have to find them on his own.

The question is, where to start? Keep in mind, this is the 60s, so there's no Google. So David heads to the local library. He doesn't find any hard answers, but there's no shortage of folk tales about nocturnal phantoms. Like the succubus and incubus. Ancient Mesopotamian demons that raped men and women in the night to steal their semen or impregnate them. And soon, David becomes kind of obsessed. He keeps poring over these types of stories well into grad school. After he graduates,

he gets a job as part of the folklore department at a college in Newfoundland, Canada. David's only been at his new job for a short while when he starts to hear about this local urban legend. The people of Newfoundland call it the Old Hag. From what David gathers, it's this shadowy spirit who attacks people in their sleep. Some people think it's a witch. Some say it can be male or female. Others argue it's a satanic spell that anyone can cast on their enemies. But one thing everyone agrees on, though, is what happens when the old hag attacks. Victims wake in the middle of the night, unable to move or scream, as a shadowy figure holds them down, suffocating and smothering them. So that gets David's attention.

It sounds exactly like what happened to him. And this isn't just some old legend. The people of Newfoundland talk about the old hag like it's real. Many say they have even seen it themselves. Which means either one of two things is true. A, there's some rational explanation for all this, in which case maybe David can help get to the bottom of it. Or B, they've all seen the same demon he has.

So David keeps digging. He gets organized and starts documenting people's stories. He even ropes in his students to go out and interview everyone they can about the old hack. And the results are chilling. Not just the stories themselves, but how many he finds. Almost everyone in the community has an old hag story, either about themselves or someone they know. Some people have seen it more than once, and their stories are remarkably consistent. Most victims only see the old hag out of the corner of their eye. They describe it as an evil shadowy figure.

Sometimes it just watches them, sometimes it jumps on their chest and starts to strangle them, and sometimes it tries to push or pull them out of bed. There are even a few people who say they've gotten a good look at their attacker, although their descriptions vary. One man describes an old woman in a hat. A female grad student sees a male figure in a white mask with a creepy red smile. But there are a few creepy details that just keep cropping up.

A number of people recall distinctive smells, usually a dusty, sweaty odor, which I don't know about you, but I don't usually smell things in my dreams. And then there's the sound. Over and over, victims describe this very distinct sound of shuffling footsteps, almost like a block of wood being dragged across carpet. One woman calls it a snurfling sound. David always asks, okay, but how do you know you weren't dreaming? And they always say the same thing. They could see their bedroom around them and hear things going on in the house. And it didn't change like dreams do. It was a continuous, normal flow of time like you experience when you're awake. The episode usually lasted until they managed to move their body in some small way, like wiggle a finger. After that, the attacker vanished.

It has to be wild for David to hear all of this. The number of stories, the similarities. And David has experienced it all himself. So either he's just stumbled upon some unknown medical condition, or the monsters from his folktales are stepping off the page. After doing his initial survey, David finds that a staggering 23% of people he questioned had one of these episodes. Obviously, this is more widespread than he realized. But is this the case everywhere?

Or is it just happening in Newfoundland? So David takes his investigation to the mainland. In the winter of 1973, he does a radio interview talking about the old hag legends and the bizarre experiences he's documented. And that's when the floodgates burst. He starts getting letters from people all over Canada, people who have never heard of the old hag, but who have experiences just like this. Many of them are relieved to have someone else to talk to about it.

They've kept their story secret for years because they're afraid of sounding ridiculous. All the while, they've been terrified that their attacker will return. And for some of them, it has, over and over. Still, after years of researching and gathering stories, David's no closer to understanding what's causing the attacks. As far as he can tell, it happens to around 15% of people and isn't connected to a history of mental health issues. But he also can't rule out the possibility that maybe this thing is supernatural. Fortunately, the old hag attacks don't seem to cause long-term health effects for anyone, apart from fear and trouble sleeping. If the attacker is a demon, it must be content to leave its victims alive.

But that's about to change. The next time the old hag strikes, over 100 people die. Coming up, a new investigator joins the case. Now back to the story. In the early 1980s, David Hufford's research into the old hag phenomenon is getting lots of attention from scientists and sleep researchers. They technically already have a name for what he's studying, sleep paralysis. I mean, the term has been around since 1928, and it was thought to be a rare side effect of narcolepsy. But David's research shows it's far more common. Still, no one knows what causes it and why

people's experiences are so similar. And David's not the only one interested in figuring it out. For Shelley Adler, it's a matter of life and death. In 1987, Shelley is a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She's studying medical anthropology, which is basically a cross between human culture and biology. And she hears about a wave of mysterious deaths affecting a group of Southeast Asian refugees living in the U.S. The victims are mostly young men, usually around their 30s, who appear to be perfectly healthy. At least until they go to sleep one night and never wake up. Doctors are mystified. They end up chalking it up to sudden, unexplained nocturnal death syndrome,

which basically means nothing more than they died in their sleep and we have no idea why. But Shelley wonders if there's something the doctors missed, like maybe the cause of death isn't 100% medical. So she interviews over 100 refugees and what she finds is terrifying. They don't need doctors to tell them what's killing them. They already know. The refugees call it the Da Cho, roughly translated, night spirit. Sound familiar? Apparently, it's an evil spirit that attacks in the night, paralyzing its victims with fear and dread.

The refugees are terrified, so much so they're literally setting alarms every half hour to stop themselves from falling into a deep sleep. But it isn't working. The Dodge Show keeps visiting. One refugee describes a dark shape that came over his whole body like a heavy weight, which sounds just like David Hufford's encounter, only this was with a group of people from the opposite side of the globe. Most of the refugees Shelley talks to are members of the Hmong, an ethnic group from Laos, which is worlds away from eastern Canada. And yet, they're reporting the same experience. What is different is the number of people experiencing it. Based on his surveys, David estimated that around 15% of people worldwide might have an old hag type encounter.

But when Shelley interviews the refugees, 58% say that they have personally seen the da-cho. And no one in Newfoundland ever died from an old hag attack, so why is it suddenly killing healthy young men? The refugees have their own theory. They tell Shelley that because they left their homeland, the spirits of their ancestors can no longer defend them from the Da Cho, which is a pretty tragic thought. And in the span of just a few years, the CDC counts 117 dead, which is a massive number for the size of the Hmong refugee population in the U.S. Meanwhile, the CDC is able to figure out one thing about the Hmong men. They're disproportionately affected by a genetic condition known as Brugada syndrome, which can lead to abnormal heart rhythms.

But this can't be the whole answer, because gradually the number of deaths decreases until they stop altogether. So if this was all just some genetic fluke, you'd think that the deaths would have continued at the same rate forever. So even if Brugada syndrome was ultimately what killed them, something else triggered it. Maybe that something was the night spirit. Maybe when they finally woke up, paralyzed, and saw it hovering

over them, they were so frightened it triggered their underlying condition and stopped their heart. It would at least explain why the Da Cho killed these men while the old hag left its victims alive. But it doesn't explain why two groups of people as far-flung as eastern Canada and Laos have such familiar folklore. Once you start looking, you'll find similar stories from all over the world. In China, this experience is known as ghost oppression. In Ethiopia, it's a czar. And in Turkey, it's a malevolent djinn. But of all of these legends, one in particular

sticks out. It's about an old Norse demon called the Mara. The Mara was an evil goblin-like creature that was said to ride on people's chests at night, causing bad dreams. A Swedish folklorist described it by saying, the Mara could be heard coming. There was a click in the lock, there was a patter crossing the floor, and there was a sound as if something soft were being hauled across the boards, which sounds an awful lot like what David heard in his college bedroom. Not only that, the Mara's name comes from an Indo-European word meaning crusher, recalling the intense pressure sleep paralysis victims feel on their chest. It's also one half of the old German word Nachtmar or nightmare. That's right, in its original meaning, nightmare did not refer to just any

bad dream. It actually meant a female evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers. So literally the experience we now call sleep paralysis. Which means that as late as the Middle Ages, people everywhere knew about this. They talked about it like the Newfoundland locals talked about the old hag, and the Hmong talked about the Da Cho. Somewhere down the line, the word got watered down. But as David found out, the demons never left. And before long, a new generation of detectives rose to continue the search for answers.

And what they found terrified them. Coming up, an internet crusade brings the demons into a new light. Now back to the story. Less than a decade after Shelley Adler investigated the deaths of the Hmong refugees, a person named Tim Brown started his own search for the truth. In 1994, Tim is just 14 years old and living in Nashville, Tennessee. One night, he's lying in bed with the television on, and he's just starting to doze off when he hears something. His bed is facing the open doorway and as he looks through it, he sees someone in the hallway. It moves closer and Tim sees that it's a towering human-like figure, like a shadow come to life. It looks male in shape, but its face is featureless. I mean,

it has no eyes, no nose, no mouth. It's just this amorphous, impenetrable darkness. The one distinguishing characteristic is that it's wearing a wide-brimmed hat and what looks like a long trench coat. I don't know about you, but if I saw that in my hallway, I would be chilled to the bone. And Tim is only 14. He is definitely frozen with fear. The shadow doesn't seem to have noticed him yet, so he lies there pretending to be asleep, praying that it goes away. But apparently he's peeking at it because he sees the shadow lean into his grandmother's room. Then it leans back out and looks right at him. It stands there for a long moment before it slowly moves down the hallway

out of view. At this point, Tim's really worried for his grandmother. He summons his courage, leaps out of bed, and runs screaming into the hall. When he gets there, the shadow is gone. At this point, though, his yelling has woken up his grandmother and his great-grandmother. Tim's hysterical and insists there was an intruder, but there's no sign of one. Still, his grandmother and great-grandmother believe him. They both say they've seen the same thing before. For Tim, it's validating.

But years pass and he starts to lose confidence. Maybe it was just a figment of his imagination. Maybe his grandmother and great grandmother were just humoring him. Before long, he stops talking about it. Until 2006, when Tim is 26 years old. It's two in the morning, and Tim is up listening to the radio. The host is talking about something called shadow beings, human-shaped patches of darkness that flit in and out of someone's peripheral vision. Then the host and his guests start describing an eerily similar experience they've been hearing about. A lot of people say they've been waking up to see a shadowy man with a wide-brimmed hat looming over them.

Tim is stunned. This is exactly what he saw. So he goes on the internet and finds even more people with similar experiences. Stories about waking up frozen in bed, unable to move or scream, and seeing the shadow of a man in a wide-brimmed hat. Eventually, Tim finds so many stories that he's having trouble keeping track of them all. In 2008, he launches a website to compile people's so-called hat man sightings. Tons of users write in. They share personal experiences with sleep paralysis, as well as studies, theories, and research. But by far, the most popular discussion is about the hat man. People describe him as a dark male figure around six feet tall, like a shadow but somehow even darker, wearing a wide brimmed hat and a long trench coat.

Sometimes they see him alone. Sometimes he's flanked by two shadowy companions. And almost everyone who sees him describes the same overwhelming sense of evil and dread. Okay, so let's take a step back. We've got the old hag, the dacho, the mara, the hat man. The stories are just so specific and consistent across cultures and centuries, and yet no one truly knows what to make of them. The good news is all the research from David Hufford, Shelley Adler, and others has provided a ton of data for scientists. And thanks to them, we now have an explanation for at least part of the mystery, the paralysis part. As the medical community understands it, it's actually normal for our brains to paralyze us when we're asleep. That's why we don't get up and start acting out our dreams. But every once in a while, for some reason we don't really understand, our brain turns the paralysis on too soon or turns it off too late, and we wake up still unable to

move. So basically, what people experience during sleep paralysis is a brain glitch, one that occurs right as we're falling asleep or right as we're waking up. It can even explain things like the old hag. Apparently, scientists think of sleep paralysis as the state between wakefulness and dreaming. So we can see our bedroom, but the parts of our brain that create our dreams is still firing on all cylinders, which creates bizarre visual hallucinations. I mean, it's a pretty tidy explanation, but it doesn't solve everything. Like why so many people are having the same exact hallucinations. The closest answer for that comes down to pop culture. Whether that's religion or folk tales or even movies.

Basically, we're all seeing the same things because we're all afraid of the same things. One sleep paralysis expert, psychologist Christopher French, thinks that the hat man sightings could be inspired by Freddy Krueger, the hat-wearing villain from the Nightmare on Elm Street films, who kills his victims in their dreams. But as a theory, it doesn't really pan out because plenty of people remember seeing the hat man years before the first nightmare on Elm Street came out as early as 1971. So maybe there's another answer out there, one that's actually demonic or somehow spiritual. Even the experts agree that more research is needed. In the meantime, recent surveys estimate that 40% of people will experience sleep paralysis at least once in their lives. Don't worry though, there are precautions you can take.

Get plenty of sleep, limit stress, avoid sleeping on your back. And if you do wake up stiff as a board with a shadow demon looming over you, try not to freak out. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.