The Old Hag

Perhaps you've experienced the sensation-while awakening or falling asleep-of not being able to move. You discover that your body is paralyzed. Although you may try to call out, the sound remains locked in your throat. Meanwhile, your mind is clamoring to know what's going on.---

"Sleep Paralysis" American Medical Association Guide to Better Sleep,
l984.




I experienced this sensation at about age 13. When I approached my mother and told her of these episodes I had been having; she told me that I was being tortured in my sleep for having improper thoughts about boys. "Have you been thinking about boys", she asked? Although I had a boy on my mind as I responded to her, (hey, I was 13!) my answer was "no", even though my eyebrows raised up, my voice got higher, and my eyes left her gaze - all the telltale signs of someone lying to you.

For years I believed what my mother told me, and for years I lived with this secret because I understand it to mean that I was responsible for what was happening to me. In all fairness, my mother was only repeating to me what she had been taught; a story handed down from generation to generation and a story that still thrives in Southwest Louisiana.

In African culture, this experience is known as the "witch riding your back. Several studies have shown that African-Americans may be predisposed to isolated sleep paralysis, also known as "the witch is riding you" or "the haint is riding you". In addition, other studies have shown that African-Americans who have frequent episodes of isolated sleep paralysis were predisposed to having panic attacks. This is probably why, as a young person, I noticed that most of my school friends who were African-American also experienced this "nightmare."

In the Chinese, Vietnamese, Phillipine, and Japanese culture, it is known as the "ghost holding, riding, or pressing you down." In Mexico, it's believed that sleep paralysis is in fact the spirit of a dead person getting on the person and impeding movement, calling this "se me subió el muerto" (the dead person got on me). In Greece and Cyprus, the experience had a similar perpetrator; a ghost or spirit. In Newfoundland and Great Britain, the spirit was called "the Old Hag."

In 1995, Katherine Roberts collected personal experiences of these "assaults" from people living in Southwest Louisiana. There, the name of this experience was called "Cauchemer", meaning a "pressing phantom" and was widely known among the people of African descent with French language in Southwest Louisiana. She talked with several people in an around the Lafayette, Louisiana area who all knew of "Cauchemer." She noted that most people of older generations still firmly believed, as my mother once did, that it happened to warn or punish a person for something; while most people of the younger generation believed that it "just happened", there was no real meaning behind it.

Ms. Roberts continues her research with many individuals whose firm belief is that they are having an encounter with the supernatural and that this belief has been handed down from older ones to younger ones over years and remains a part of their culture.

27 years after my first experiences with this "nightmare", I overheard one of my nieces describing the sensation of being awake, screaming out, but no one hearing her and not being able to move. She told me that she called my mother, and again, my mother told her the same thing she told me. Realizing now that maybe there was a medical reason for this experience, I turned to the internet. After googling the description of the nightmare, I found message board after message board of people who had experienced the same thing. Finally, one poster related that it was a condition called "sleep paralysis." To my relief, this is what I learned:

The description of sleep paralysis mentioned at the outset of this article, occurs as a natural part of REM sleep. Your body becomes paralyzed to prevent it from acting out while dreaming, but when the brain awakes from a REM state, the body paralysis persists. This leaves the person fully conscious, but unable to move. The paralysis can last from several seconds to several minutes after which the individual may experience panic symptoms.

After assuring my niece that what she was experiencing was physiological, and not mental, I phoned my mother. When I asked her if she had ever heard of "the old hag", she said " You mean your period?"