Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there's nothing scarier than the patriarchy when discussing tales in which women are often the villains. We'll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims. This episode contains the usual amount of cursing and mentions sexual abuse. Please be advised.
Tonight on the podcast, we're talking about the old hag who sits on your chest at night and steals your breath. Speaking of intense, terrifying pressure, have you given Paranormal Pajama Party a rating or review yet?
If you're enjoying the show so far, please pop a five-star rating and review on your favourite podcast app. They keep me and my fiendish familiars out of your bedroom in the wee hours and they help other listeners find the show.
Ghouls and gals. I know this may come as a bit of a surprise from a lady with a paranormal podcast, but I'm afraid I don't believe in ghosts.
This is for two reasons. The first is extremely logical, I think. If ghosts were real, wouldn't we hear about a heck of a lot more run-ins with dinosaur ghosts? I mean, talk about unfinished business. Those guys were right in the middle of going about their day-to-day dinosaur lives when bang! Pow! Asteroid to the face. Isn't it just a little weird that we're always running into the spectres of dead nuns and women in white, and not confused, phantom stegosauruses?
But the second reason I don't believe in ghosts, and I admit it's not a very good reason, is that I've never had a run-in with one. That's ridiculous, right? I've never had a run-in with a giant squid either, and I believe in them. I know the planet Neptune is real, and not one person I've met has ever been there. For Pete's sake, I've never met Kelsey Grammer, and I know he's real.
But I have had one otherworldly experience. Now, normally, this is the part of the episode where I tell you a scary story I made up while sitting right here in my cozy office. Or I'd read you an old-timey story from some long-dead author. But tonight, PJ people, I'm going to tell you a true story about my personal run-in with something very dark and very frightening.
I had recently moved into a new house. Well, new to me anyway. It was actually pretty old, and it had an old, unfinished, creepy basement to match.
My washing machine and dryer were down there, but I didn't like spending any more time than I had to in that basement. It was really cold down there, for one thing, and the lights didn't reach all the dark corners so there were all these dark nooks and crannies everywhere, and I always had this very creepy, strange feeling that when I turned my back to them, I was being watched.
The concrete floor had all these suspicious, clearly body-sized lumps in it, and it was always sprinkled with this light dusting of dead cockroaches. They always say that cockroaches will survive the nuclear apocalypse. So something in my basement was worse than that.
The best thing about my new place, though, is that I could finally have a pet. And I was living alone for the first time after college so I really wanted a little, little furry friend. So I went to the local shelter and I brought home this big, handsome, black and white cat that I named Winston Purrchill. As soon as he sank his little fangs into my hand at that shelter, I knew he was the one for me. He took a little more convincing, but eventually, maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, I don't know, but within a few weeks, he loved me right back.
He was the light of my life, my moon and my stars. I love this guy. I can't emphasize enough how much I love him. We've been together for more than a decade now. I still go, “Awww”, when I see him, like, “so cute”. He's got these big green eyes and these giant white paws, and he loves cuddles and treats. And I just love him. I love him so much. I love him. You get it.
Early in our relationship, I took some laundry down to the basement and I decided it would be adorable if Winston came along for the ride in the laundry basket. He was actually pretty happy to get into the basket, but then as soon as we started down the basement stairs, he freaked out. He just freaked out. He yowled and he jumped out of the basket and he clawed his way up my chest and over my shoulders. And then he ran like a maniac back to the safety of the ground floor.
So you can imagine how comforting that was. Right? Animals are supposed to be like harbingers of doom. They can sense things that we can't. That's all so silly. I don't believe in ghosts. Mostly unless I'm alone in a really scary basement trying to wash my underwear while something is watching me from the dark.
The other scary thing that was happening that I haven't told you about yet was that recently, when I'd get home to my dark, empty house after work, I'd walk in the back door and immediately notice that the basement door, which was directly across from it in this little hallway, was slightly ajar. And that was weird because I always made a point to shut it. It was it was so creepy down there. I didn't want anything coming out of it. You know, if it were to.
The first couple of times I came home to the open door, I just chalked it up to me being kind of forgetful. But the third time it happened, I was downright spooked. I knew that I had shut it. That morning I'd heard the latch click into place. I remember that.
[CREAKING LATCH]
Steph: I shut the basement door and I tried to shut thoughts about what could be opening it out of my mind at the same time, Winston and I were totally okay living alone. It was just taking some time to get used to the quirks of a new place. Right?
One sunny weekend afternoon a few days later, I fell asleep on the living room couch with Winston curled up beside me, because napping is one of our mutual interests. He's a snorer.
Sometime later, a noise woke me up. I was instantly on high alert. But weirdly, Winston, who's supposed to have super cat-hearing, hadn't heard anything at all. He was still snoring under my arm like a tiny lawnmower.
The noise was coming from somewhere behind me and to the left, kind of. So I turned my head to look.
Well, I tried to turn my head, but nothing happened. Nothing happened when I tried to move any of my muscles except for my eyes. It was like every single muscle had simultaneously mutinied against my brain.
So as I was processing this, I felt something enter the room. Someone was in my home. I heard soft footsteps on the far side of the room.
[FOOTSTEPS]
Steph: My only strategy was just to pretend to already be dead. Just hold really still, and maybe if I fake being dead, it'll ruin all their fun and they'll give up. I don't know, it didn't... Logic was out the door.
So I was staring at the ceiling, trying really hard to figure out how to telepathically communicate, “Play dead” to the cat, when I blinked, Normally that's not something that I'd brag to you about. But in this case, blinking was a big deal because I couldn't move.
I blinked again, and then I tried to sort of wiggle one of my toes, experimentally. It worked. I sat up fast and I snatched Winston up.
He hadn't heard anything, so he was very grumpy. And it makes sense that he hadn't heard anything, right? There was nothing there. There was no one else in the room.
Of course, there was one thing on my mind, which was the frickin basement door. So I basically just threw poor Winston down and ran through the house to that door. I don't know what I would have done if it had been open. Died on the spot, probably. But lucky for me, it was still closed pretty tight. So I obviously, I ran around the house, checking everywhere, making sure I had my softball bat, just making sure no one had come in.
And ultimately I decided that it must have been a crazy dream, right? That's all. Just a dream. Definitely not a demonic basement-dwelling ghost from hell, for sure. So I was standing at the kitchen sink, waiting for my heart to stop pounding nd then behind me were the basement was, this latch snicked, and this hinge went…
[CREAKING NOISE]
Steph: My stomach dropped. I turned slowly, my heart in my throat.
And Winston Purrchill looked me dead in the eye and pulled his stupid little paw out from under that door that he'd just pulled open, like he'd done it a squillions times before. Which, as I now knew, he had.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi, I'm Steph and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off of these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Tonight's episode is actually not about my dirty, rotten scoundrel of a cat, although I am happy to discuss either Winston or our orange tabby, Ike Eisenmeower, any time. Like, any… Seriously, any time.
No, tonight we're going to talk about the intruder in my story, because actually there was something in that room with me, and she's probably the least-welcome guest at any slumber party ever, which is sort of sad. She goes by many names and she shows up in a number of disguises, but you may know her as the old hag or the night hag.
And when I say you may know her, the chances are pretty good that you do. You see, the old hag describes a hallucination many people see, hear and feel during episodes of sleep paralysis, which affects up to 50% of people at least once in their lives.
Ancient Greeks writing about sleep paralysis and its accompanying hallucinations, thought that it was maybe caused by digestive issues. That explanation stuck around for a really long time. It's actually why, when the ghost of Jacob Marley appears in A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge says, “There's more of gravy than the grave about you, whatever you are.”
These days we know about the REM phase of sleep, which is the part of the sleep cycle where we dream. During this phase, your brain temporarily shuts your muscles down so you don't physically act out that recurring dream about being late for the high school science final you forgot to study for. That's good news for us from an evolutionary point of view. That way we can't hurt ourselves in our sleep and we get some much-needed rest.
Sleep paralysis occurs when something goes a little haywire and the timing is off. So we kind of wake up, but our brains are stuck in the REM phase. So even though we're mostly conscious, we can't move and we're still seeing and hearing things that aren't there.
Some people have out-of-body experiences in this state, and some people, like me, see or hear intruders. So you may hear footsteps that aren't there or feel an electric buzzing through your body. In fact, there are theories that many supposed ghost sightings or alien abductions can actually be explained by sleep paralysis. I have never felt as much like Dana Scully as I did saying that just then. Sorry, Mulder.
The old hag straddles your chest, crushing you so that you feel like you can't breathe and drains your life force from you slowly, night after night. She's one of the scarier hallucinations. Not that any of them are much fun. If you've ever had a sleep paralysis experience, you never want to go through it again. If you're one of the unlucky people that it happens to regularly, you truly have my sympathy. It's terrifying.
If it makes you feel any better, and it definitely won't, you're not alone. For thousands of years, people all over the world have been describing this phenomenon. And in every culture where people sleep, which is all of them, there's folklore to try to explain what's going on.
In the American South, for example, people call this experience “being witch-ridden”. In Louisiana specifically, and pardon my literal French, they call it couchemare, which means “nightmare” in French, but actually comes from other words that mean “a pressing phantom”.
Brazilians call the night hag pisadeira, which means “she who steps”. They say she's a tall and skinny old woman with long, dirty nails and white, tangled hair who lives on the roof and waits to step on people who sleep with a full stomach. In the Philippines, a vengeful obese she-demon called the batibat suffocates sleeping victims and gives them bad dreams.
Those are just a few of the myths about the supernatural attacker. And I think it's notable that in many of these stories – not every story, to be fair, but many of them – she's a she. What's that about? I don't know for sure. I have some theories, though.
Have you ever wondered what the mare in “nightmare” is? I guess if I'd ever really thought about it, I would have assumed it was some kind of, like, horse-related phrase. I don't know. I've never been a horse girl. My horse vocabulary kind of begins and ends with saddle.
You know who is a horse girl, though? The female spirit who actually did put the mare in nightmare: The mare, or Mara, in Germanic and Slavic folklore.
The mare is this entity who brings us bad dreams and presses down on us in our sleep. She is the old hag. But unlike the old hag, who most often looks like, you know, an old hag, the mare can take many forms. She's known for riding people while they sleep, riding horses overnight and tangling their manes, and even riding pine trees. They'll drain people, horses and livestock of their energies and even their blood at night.
And by the way, if you're starting to be like, “Heavens, all this riding people in bed is starting to sound a little sexual,” all I can say is, you ain't heard nothing yet.
As I said, the mare was a spirit. Sort of. Mares can be sent by witches to torment or even kill their enemies. But mares can also be the spirits of witches themselves, who have the ability to send their souls out independently to do mischief. Or the mare could be a piece of yarn or a pile of straw or a cat named Winston. It's a little confusing.
The thing that sets mares apart from other folklore beings is that they could transform back and forth into different forms. Sometimes animals, like frogs and cats, sometimes everyday objects, like shovels and string. If your horse was acting weird and tired, and his mane was all tangled up, there was a good reason to look kind of suspiciously at that new rake in your barn because it could be a mare in disguise.
Distressingly, so could your sister, your neighbour, or the crotchety old lady down the road. There are many ways to mare, and they're not always consensual. In Poland, for example, mares could be the soul of a person living or dead, such as a sinful woman or someone who died without confession – one of those unclean spirits we talked about in the rusalka episode.
But you can also become a mare if you just happened to be one of seven daughters, or if your eyes were two different colours, or if you had a unibrow. It's like that Parks and Rec bit about jail in Venezuela: If you were promised to marry a man but he married someone else? Mare. Your priest mispronounced your name when you were being baptised? Mare. You mispronounce a prayer? Believe it or not, mare. Also, bad news if you shave your armpits: Hairless pits could make you, you guessed it, a mare.
In a lot of these cultures, either men or women could become witches and learn to shapeshift and cause trouble, but the mare is almost always female. Why? Well, one of my sources pointed out that historically, men were the ones with the resources and platforms to tell their stories. And historically, men have been the ones with a vested interest in demonising and othering women, so there's that.
I did learn some important context for the mare's origins, though. The Nordic and Germanic stories about the night hag usually occur in rural farming communities, and the folklore in these communities is very big on themes of luck and fortune.
Remember in 2016 when “growth mindset” was a big buzzword and there were all these LinkedIn posts about how visionaries have growth mindsets while bad leaders have scarcity mindsets? Well, anthropologists kind of thought of that first, but they call it a limited good model.
In communities that believe in limited good, everyone believes there's this constant number of assets to go around – the land, the money, whatever. There's only so much of it. That kind of system means that every time one person profits, another one suffers.
In this model, any changes in someone's fortune or misfortune can't come from inside the community. They have to come from outside forces – probably the devil, maybe just some sneaky person with no armpit hair… could be either one.
The other problem with this model is that the only way you can prosper is if another person suffers. So to get ahead, you might have to steal or trick someone out of their assets. And there's one group of people in rural farming communities who usually don't have any assets at all, and therefore good reasons to want to take yours: Older, unmarried women. No husband, no youth or beauty to trade on, no property, no money, no power. Yuck.
If you were a land-owning man in a patriarchal culture, it would feel pretty unfair if a single older woman started to do well, or if a widow had property that granted her the same level of power that you have. It wouldn't make sense. She doesn't even have a penis! She's probably in league with the devil! She's probably a witch!
So maybe I'm drawing a long bow here, but it does seem like if you were a land-owning man and suddenly you started having terrible, and terrifying, bouts of sleep paralysis, that would feel like great misfortune. If an older woman in your neighbourhood was suddenly doing well around the same time, or you suspected that she might be trying to steal your fortune because she has none of her own, that would make her a prime suspect for being a witch who sends a mare to do her bidding, or even the mare herself.
That would only make the problem worse, conceivably, because maybe you'd be so convinced that she was the root of your problem that your brain would still be subconsciously turning over the problem at night. And there you have it: You wake up, unable to move, and your brain has conjured up the very same old woman you suspected all along.
The third reason that the mare might be a woman in all of these stories is maybe the easiest to believe, though. If men were usually the ones able to pass their stories down in writing, and statistically, most of them were heterosexual, maybe their brains were just pranking them with some really weird sex dreams. I mean, it's happened to the best of us, right?
Right?
Ahem.
The mare wasn't always an old woman in folklore. Sometimes she was a pretty, young woman – and usually naked.
And let's be honest, when I talk about a woman riding a man in bed at night, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn't, “Oh, she's probably a gal whose mother crawled through the caul of a foal to avoid pain in childbirth, and now she's been cursed, forced to torment this fellow by someone who wishes him ill and wants to steal his good fortune.”
Even when the mare in these stories was actually a hot naked babe the whole time, they're never explicitly sexual. No one's having a good time when the mare, a woman who traditionally wouldn't have been allowed to have the sexual upper-hand, is sitting on her victim.
And in many of the stories, the only way to defeat her is pretty brutal. You need a knife, a scythe, or fire. Female sexuality is scary when it's not being used for wholesome reproductive reasons. You’ve got to attack it before it attacks you!
And that brings me to our third lady of the night. and I do mean it that way: the succubus.
People have been reporting sexual attacks in their sleep by invisible entities since the Middle Ages. Shakespeare even mentions the old hag or her succubus sister, maybe, in Romeo and Juliet.
The difference between the two is that the old hag is mostly passive. She kind of just sits there crushing your chest, not even trying to convey a message or laugh at you, while the succubus is actively trying to bone you. (Am I using that right in this context? Do you have to have a boner to bone? I googled “Can women bone someone?” and I just got a bunch of results about osteoporosis.)
Speaking of boners, the succubus has a male counterpart: the incubus.
Succubi are direct descendants of Lilith, whom you may or may not have heard of depending on your familiarity with Jewish mystical texts or Sumerian cuneiform. In mythology, she's supposed to be Adam's first wife. That's right – Eve was his second marriage.
I'm not going to get into Lilith in-depth tonight because she's a real heavy hitter in the pantheon of scary women and deserves at least a whole episode to herself. What I will say is that mythology says Lilith wasn't into being submissive to Adam. Actually, she thought they should be equals. That was obviously insane, and unfortunately, those two crazy kids couldn't make it work.
Rather than compromise, Lilith turned into a dragon and flew away from the Garden of Eden. God sent some angels after her who told her she either needed to come back and be subservient or be doomed to be some kind of child-murdering demon-queen witch-vampire. Guess which one she picked? I do not support child murder, but still… kind of badass, Lilith.
Oh, also, she had sex with the Archangel Samael a.k.a. Satan, like a big old slut, and now she's the personification of lust. Her children became all the spirits and demons that roam our world. She's to blame for disease and she's especially naughty for, and I quote, “wandering about at nighttime, vexing the sons of men and causing them to defile themselves.”
Lilith and her succubus daughters are probably the clearest examples of women's sexuality being seen as monstrous if it's just for pleasure and not procreation. But again, it doesn't seem that fun for anyone involved.
And it's not her fault! According to the same religion that shames her for her behaviour, the succubus needs semen to survive. I know that sounds like a bad porno plot, but have some sympathy for this devil – she's just trying to eat.
Here at Paranormal Pajama Party, we are all about enthusiastic consent, and the really fucked up thing about succubi and incubi is that the rational explanation for them stems from a lack of consent. There seem to be higher rates of sleep paralysis among people with post-traumatic stress disorder, and another classic symptom of PTSD is nightmares in which the traumatised person re-enacts what happened to them.
You can absolutely see how that would make for a toxic and terrifying combination for a sexual assault survivor with PTSD, and how that person could 100% chalk it up to being tortured by demons, which is heartbreaking.
Unfortunately, this demon business also made for a pretty good cover story for perpetrators. You'll never guess who the incubus prefers to attack, for example. Why, yes, the answer is virgins! Especially cloistered nuns.
The nun part seems kind of surprising until you read things like this: Quote, “A favourite guise assumed by Incubus was the clerical. Thus, Hieronymus relates the story of a young lady who called for help against an incubus whom her friends then found under her bed in the guise of the Bishop Silvanus. The bishop's reputation would have suffered had he not been able to convince them that the incubus had assumed his shape.”
Whew! Lucky for the bishop! What if all of those sheltered and devoutly religious women hadn't believed the male authority figure they'd been trained to obey?
As you can tell, personally, I come down pretty strongly on the side of succubi, mares and old hags as mythical explanations for a pretty rational if freaky-as-hell phenomenon. That being said, these women are the only ones we've talked about so far on the show that have actual, confirmed kills. They just didn't happen like you might have expected
In the US in the late 1970s, previously healthy people from Southeast Asian communities began mysteriously dying in their sleep. The demographic hit hardest by this mysterious phenomenon was Laotian Hmong men, and they weren't old men. The median age of those who died was 33 at the time.
Doctors called this sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome, which wouldn't have been very comforting for their surviving family, especially as the death toll rose.
These men had a few things in common. At the same time as the Vietnam War, the Hmong people fought a guerrilla rebellion backed by the US against the Laotian Communist government. They lost, and to avoid harsh reprisals, many of them left to move to the US.
But they had a tough time in the States. The community was scattered and jobs were difficult to come by far away from their ancestral home. They also couldn't worship the way they wanted to. The Hmong have a mystical worldview. For them, spirits inhabit the world just like you and I do.
They believe that if they can't properly pay their respects to their ancestral and village spirits, the male head of household, who's responsible for feeding these good spirits, won't be protected from malicious spirits. Spirits like the dab tsog. The dab tsog sits on sleeper's chests and strangles them. Sound like anyone we know?
You're probably familiar with placebos – doctors and researchers prescribe patients with a medicine or a procedure that works because of its positive psychological effect rather than any physical effect. The opposite of a placebo is a nocebo, a detrimental effect on health created by psychological factors. For example, if you don't believe a treatment you're receiving will work, it probably won't.
Professor Shelley Adler, a medical anthropologist and author of the book Sleep Paralysis, Nightmares, Nocebo and the Mind-Body Connection, believes that the dab tsog acted like a nocebo.
Traumatised by guerrilla warfare, hugely stressed by the adjustment to life in a completely new society and separated from their community and their culture, this particular group of men was especially vulnerable to nightmares, and their cultural understanding of the dab tsog was that it was intensely real and intensely murderous.
The only person who can stop it once it begins attacking you is a trained shaman, but because the Hmong were so scattered, there weren't enough shamans to go around. Professor Adler posits that the psychological nocebo effect of the dab tsog, paired with a genetic cardiac quirk prevalent in Southeast Asia, killed each of these men in the night. More than 100 people died.
There's another way the night hag will get you, and this one is far deadlier for women.
The Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of Witches” was the go-to handbook for German witch-hunters after its publication around 1486. And you bet your pointy-toed boots that it had something to say about succubi – mainly some very confusing stuff about why they need all that semen.
I'm not going to go deep into the Malleus tonight because holy moly, it's an episode in its own right. But the inclusion of succubi and their sisters was bad news for women for centuries to come… no pun intended. The book remained popular for a long, long time and influenced a lot of violence against women, including the infamous Salem Witch Trials, which also need more time than I can give them now.
During the trials, several people reported nighttime attacks by alleged witches, especially a woman named Bridget Bishop. She'd been married three times, owned a tavern in town and dressed in bright colours. You know, like a witch.
Cotton Mather, the Puritan who sort of laid the groundwork for the whole witchhunt business in New England, wrote in his book about the trials that, quote, “John Lauter also testified that one night, after having argued with Bishop, he did awake in the night by moonlight and did see clearly the likeness of this woman grievously oppressing him, in which miserable condition she held him, unable to help himself till near day.”
This was really bad news for Bridget. She'd actually already been accused of witchcraft 10 years earlier, but was acquitted for lack of evidence. No such luck this time.
As the hysteria grew, more people piled more accusations onto her, including that she had a third nipple, which mysteriously disappeared the second time the court looked for it. She kept denying that she was a witch, which, of course, they held against her for lying on the stand. She never had a chance. Mather wrote, “There was little occasion to prove the witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders.”
Bridget Bishop was sentenced to death and hanged, the first of 25 people to be executed, tortured to death or die in prison throughout the trials. The night hag didn't kill Bridget, but she sure as hell sealed her fate.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Well, once again, it's time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. Thanks For joining me!
To learn more about the old hag, mares, succubi and the dab tsog, check out the sources I've linked in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today's episodes, or just close your eyes and drift off to sleep. I'm sure one of these ghoulish gals will swing by your bedside eventually.
I'll see you next week for more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don't forget: Ghosts have stories. Women voices. Dare to listen.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]