A few days ago, I promised that throughout the month of October, I’d be frequently posting Halloween-themed blogs to celebrate my love for the holiday and all things spooky. Now it’s finally October and I’ll kick things off with a personal story.

Back during my days at UC Santa Cruz, after I left the campus dorms, I moved into this beautiful Victorian duplex just across from the Boardwalk. As I have already explained in a previous blog, it was an awesome place to live. But it was also a very strange house.

The architecture of the building was definitely odd. The angles were off. You walked in through the front door and there was a sharp angle leading to the stairs to the second floor and another sharp angle to the hallway to the downstairs bedrooms. It’s hard to explain, but it made no sense. People would comment on it all the time. They’d walk through the front door and you literally couldn’t see anything in front of you unless you turned abruptly to your left or right. The angles created an illusion of “nothingness” if you looked straight ahead. Granted that was one of the things we loved about the house—its uniqueness. But when my roommates and I did some research on the history of the house, we learned that those odd angles were modeled after the positions of the rocks at Stonehenge. Why did the architect choose to do this? No one knows.

The next odd thing I noticed after moving in was a wet spot that would appear on the floor of my bedroom. I thought it might be a busted pipe or some other plumbing problem, but several people came to check it out and found nothing wrong. Sometimes the spot would be wet, other times completely dry–it was pretty random. I just learned to avoid leaving anything near it that could get water damage. There’d also be weird noises in the night, doors would sometimes open and close by themselves and the strange angles of the house would create the most bizarre shadows that would change nightly, but we just chalked that up to the place being old and having character.

But this one night, both my roommates were away for the weekend and I was alone. You have to understand that I don’t get scared easily. I’ve been through some truly frightening and weird experiences so something would have to be pretty terrifying to faze me. Well, I got that truly terrifying experience that night.

I went to bed as I normally did, but sometime in the middle of the night, I abruptly woke up. And when I say abruptly, I mean I went from what felt like a deep sleep to suddenly being completely awake. And I knew that something was in the room with me. Not another person, but a thing. I didn’t have to see it to know this, I felt it. I didn’t even want to open my eyes because whatever it was that I felt in the room with me, I also knew it was something bad. I had to muster all of my courage to force my eyes open.

And when they did, I saw only darkness and shadows. But I still felt that thing in the room with me. I tried to move, but then I realized I couldn’t. I was completely paralyzed. It felt like a great weight was bearing down on me. I opened my mouth but couldn’t speak. I’ve never felt so helpless. By now, I not only felt something in the room with me, I could hear it. It was talking; whispering. I couldn’t make out what the words were but it didn’t sound…pleasant. And not only that, it was moving around in the house. I swore I could hear footsteps walking around upstairs and outside my hallway—opening and closing doors. I was just waiting for something to eventually open my door. 

Finally, I was able to speak. And what I did was basically shout for whatever was present to get the fuck out. I don’t know if I screamed for seconds or minutes or longer, and I also did something I’ve never done before—invoke the name of God—but eventually everything returned to normal. I could move and whatever presence I felt was gone.

Now, this isn’t the first time something like this had happened to me. As a child, I remember other times when I woke up in the middle of the night; not being able to move, but this was more terrifying because I was convinced there was something evil present. You can say I imagined it or it was a dream, but I have no doubt I was completely wide-awake.

And what I just described is not an uncommon experience. Depending on which statistic you believe, anywhere from fifteen to eighty percent of Americans have gone through a form of “sleep paralysis” at some point in their lives. And the stories share many similar traits—oftentimes those going through this report a ghostly presence that accompanies the paralysis.

This phenomenon is common across most cultures and many have explanations for it. In China, it is the work of the sitting ghost—an entity that literally sits on you and weighs you down. In Newfoundland, these visits are attributed to a spirit known as the Old Hag (legend says that if you say the Lord’s Prayer backwards while kneeling naked, and then call out “Hag, good Hag,” your enemy will be visited by the Old Hag that night—but as there are always unforeseen consequences with these sort of things, don’t try it if you’re inclined to believe). In traditional European lore, this is the work of the incubus—a demon that enters a woman’s bedroom at night, mounts her chest and has sexual intercourse with her (the female equivalent is the succubus). There’s also something known as night terrors—the most bizarre example of this involving Hmong American men in the late 1970s who literally died of fright in their sleep. I’ll blog about this in a future post.

Of course there are scientific explanations for this. Usually sleep paralysis occurs not in the dreaming stage of sleep (REM) but in deep, dreamless sleep (another common thing that happens during this period of sleep is the sensation of falling; forcing you to abruptly wake up just as you’re about to splatter). During this period of sleep, your breathing and heartbeat slow dramatically and for all intents and purposes, you’re about as close to death as you’re going to get. It is when a person transitions from this stage to REM when they are most vulnerable to menacing dreams and visions, a feeling of paralysis and the sensation of a great weight on your chest.

No one’s really sure why this happens. As my fellow Offender Roger pointed out previously (sharing his own supernatural history in the process), we only use a small percentage of our brain so who knows what we are capable of “activating” subconsciously, but one explanation involves what is known as the diving reflex.

The diving reflex is common in seabirds and aquatic mammals that must dive underwater for food. The reflex inhibits breathing and heartbeat while the animal is submerged. It is thought that this may have been something our more aquatic-dependent ancestors once possessed, but that we lost the ability over the course of evolution. Although it is of no use to us now, the theory is that perhaps it is somehow being activated in these periods of sleep causing a form of paralysis.

But how does that explain the accompanying supernatural sensations or visions? Maybe if this reflex is indeed suppressing our breathing and heart rate, it is creating a condition where we are more susceptible to hallucinations. Many people report seeing strange things in times of physical trauma so it may be similar to that.

But whether you believe that there is a scientific rationale behind this or it truly is the work of a supernatural entity, if you’ve experienced sleep paralysis, it’s something you’re likely not to forget.