Night Terrors, Sleep Paralysis, and Devil Stricken Demonic Telephone Cords from Hell
PETER HUSTON
When traveling in foreign countries on a budget, it's ironic that some of my most memorable experiences have been those of just spending time and swapping stories with the people I met.
Such people tend to be very interesting in themselves and, due to the transient nature of the relationship of travelers' crossing paths, much more open than they would be under a more conventional social situation. They talk about things they normally would not mention, and since they do not plan to see the person they are talking to again, they rarely regret it.
It was under such circumstances that I heard one of the most peculiar stories I have ever had reason to believe.
I was sitting in the lounge of a low-cost hostel in Asia and found myself talking to another American, someone of about my age (early twenties, at the time), approximately the same social background, and also in Asia for the first time, intending to find work, to experience something different from the mundane life of growing up in the USA.
At some point, and somehow, the conversation turned to ghosts, spirits, and the supernatural. I said that I thought there might be something to it all and hoped to do some research on it someday.
My new acquaintance said that he did not think it was a good idea to look for ghosts, that it was his experience that "normally they look for you."
He then proceeded to tell me the following story.
Once, back in his "angry, punk rocker" days, in a large American city, he'd gone through a period when he'd frequently been bothered by a ghost, specifically a night hag.
The attacks had started, he said, when he found himself waking up and being unable to move, completely paralyzed and with a feeling of great weight on his chest. Needless to say, he found this disturbing, and his first thought was that it was a sign of some sort of mental illness.
In time things got worse. He would awake in a paralyzed state and find himself forced to watch as an old hag entered the room, floating as she came. She would then alight on his bed and proceed to sit on his chest. He would feel a palpable wave of terror, her weight bearing down and pinning him in place, and sometimes he would experience her putrid breath as she lurched over his face. Finally, after a period of unimaginable terror, she would leave; and he would find himself able to rise and move, but in a terror-stricken state, confused and shaken up.
The "attacks by the night hag" came frequently, and he said he would have been convinced that he needed serious psychiatric help, except that on at least one occasion when he was sleeping with his girlfriend, she awoke during one of his attacks and said that she saw the night hag too. It was then that he abandoned his fears and seized upon a supernatural explanation for his experiences.
I was a bit puzzled by this story and didn't know what to make of it. The obvious explanation to me at the time was that he had just made up the story to see how I would react, but I just didn't think so. It was the way in which he'd told the story, embarrassed and unsure of the truth, beyond the reality that he had experienced, unsure of the way in which I would react. Hesitant.
As time went on, much to our surprise, we found our paths crossing a couple of times more, on one occasion for a very long period of time, as we proceeded to find work, leave countries, and acquire working visas and other such things. I came to know him better and he never told any similar stories or mentioned that one again. His stories about various things were all thoroughly grounded in conventional reality, although sometimes the stranger versions thereof.
Overall, the more time that we spent together, the more he seemed like a relatively honest and normal person, lacking in the motivations for telling an imaginary story about ghost attacks.
On one occasion, when I asked him if he'd had any more experiences with spirits since he came to Asia, he looked very embarrassed, said, no, and quickly changed the subject.
In any event, I did not put his story in the same category as the churchcamp ghost stories that I'd been exposed to in junior high. I spent a great deal of time puzzling over it from time to time, questioning the truth of the story itself, and looking for any possible explanations that might have been feasible.
For many years I was unable to find one and even went so far as to have a similar experience myself. I would awake, find myself unable to move, and feel a great deal of pressure on my chest. I would struggle to move and find myself unable to do anything beyond trembling. It was a terrifying experience and like my friend my first explanation was that my mental health was going. The attacks continued night after night for almost a week. I was at a loss to explain them, fearful, and under a great deal of stress as I tried to understand what was wrong with me.
I was terrified to go to sleep at night because of my fear that I would awaken insane or go into cardiac arrest.
My wife offered the explanation that I was being attacked by the ghost of my grandmother, who had recently passed away on the other side of the world. (I live in Asia, my grandmother died in New Jersey.) I confess that I dismissed that explanation, not on any skeptical, scientific grounds but because it would seem unlike my grandmother to travel around the world to torment me for missing her funeral when many of her nearby grandchildren had missed it as well.
At this time, my wife and I had to make a decision about whether to get a telephone installed in our apartment. (In Taiwan, a telephone line often does not come with an apartment and must be installed by each tenant at a fairly high cost.) I'd been opposed to the idea, but my wife had really wanted one. Eventually, I gave in, even knowing that it would be expensive in terms of both direct costs and the charges for local and long distance phone calls.
Ultimately, I again awoke unable to move and finding that the telephone cord somehow became draped over my body and was in the process of electrocuting me.
In time it was over. I was able to move again, but I was quite confused and upset. I was thoroughly agitated and very angry with my wife for not noticing that I'd been shaking and suffering from this terrible experience.
I was even more confused to discover that the telephone cord was far on the other side of the room, and it was physically impossible for it to have become draped over my body, even if someone had been inclined to pick it up and put it there.
I became convinced that I was suffering the beginnings of some sort of mental breakdown and phoned my parents. My father told me that there had been occasions when he had awakened and been unable to move. He had thought it very strange until he mentioned it to his brother, who said that he'd had similar experiences.
This conversation was a major relief to me, and it was followed by a cessation of such attacks.
I filed these experiences away until I stumbled across a scientific explanation for them.
What my friend and I were experiencing is often referred to as "night terror." My friend's were more like the classic variety, complete with a night hag, while mine was more unusual, involving a "demonic telephone cord from Hell." Such experiences, disturbing and frightening as they may be to the unsuspecting participants, are relatively benign and fall easily within the realm of the "explained" when understood properly.
Such experiences consist of two aspects. The first is sleep paralysis. This is a relatively normal condition characterized by awakening to find oneself unable to move. Although it is one of many indicators of the mental illness narcolepsy, normally, in the absence of other problems, it is a fairly unimportant, relatively common condition.
When one is asleep certain portions of the brain effectively are inhibited and cease to function at their normal level. One of these inhibited functions is movement. With the obvious exception of sleepwalkers (who fall well outside the scope of this article), gross muscle movement is inhibited for sleepers as a normal process. In the case of sleep paralysis, the person awakes before his brain can readjust itself and allow for normal, uninhibited movement. It is seen to be the extension of a sleep phenomenon into the waking period. Reportedly people can be snapped out of sleep paralysis by being touched or hearing their names spoken. In the absence of outside stimulation normal sleep paralysis is of short duration and self correcting.
A closely related and on occasion concurrent phenomenon is hypnopompic hallucinations. These occur when one awakes but hallucinates and sees imagery. At times these images can be vivid and bizarre and of a frightening quality. My friend's ghost and my electrifying telephone cord are both examples of these. Although both had strange, unbelievable qualities, they were both vividly seen, vividly experienced, and believed by the experiencer at the time, and very confusing to the victim upon the cessation of the experience.
The ability to question subjective reality is another brain function that is inhibited during dreaming. Hence the bizarre but unquestioned nature of conventional dreams. This inhibition of the reality-checking function of the brain apparently also extends into the period of hypnopompic hallucination. In some cases, this can lead to intensified emotion, such as terror, and this is the conventional explanation for such experiences. Although the experience of finding oneself paralyzed and possibly insane is frightening in itself, researchers feel that the terror often felt is due to reasons beyond this.
Hypnopompic hallucinations can involve any or all of the senses, but are most commonly visual or auditory. Such hallucinations are normally not shared. I assume my friend's girlfriend said that she had also seen the "ghost" to appease him. Or possibly she actually thought that she saw something. In any event, never having met her, I have no idea how she would respond when faced with a distraught, confused person who feared for his mental health.
Such hallucinations, and the related phenomenon of hypnogogic hallucinations (which occur just prior to sleeping), are not uncommon in children. Thus, when children say they see monsters at night at a time they should be sleeping, they just might really think they are seeing them.
Such experiences have a great deal of relevance to investigators of "unexplained phenomena," not just to those interested in "ghosts" and their supernatural entities. They also provide insight into many cases of "UFO abductions" and similar phenomena. Psychologist Robert A. Baker has suggested hypnopompic hallucinations as the explanation for the experiences described by Whitley Strieber in Communion. Strieber claimed to have been abducted and manipulated by little fetuslike-looking men who sneak into his bedroom repeatedly, and ultimately cause him a great deal of distress—and financial gain—by their actions. (This is one of several explanations advanced for this book.)
Budd Hopkins, author of Missing Time and one of the foremost proponents of the alien-abduction hypothesis, discussed several such reports in a recent Omni magazine article. At least three of these involved children, or adults remembering childhood experiences, seeing aliens or other weird strangers in their bedrooms before going to sleep. Hypnogogic hallucination is an obvious direction for such an investigation and it is one prominently absent from the article.
In Traditions of Belief, a study of supernatural beliefs among middleclass women in today's England, by Gillian Bennett, there are many other stories involving strange people in children's bedrooms. These are cited by adults as memories that convinced them that there might just be something to "the mysterious side of life." These experiences might be more easily explained as hypnogogic hallucinations.
In the excellent collection of essays Phenomenon: Forty Years of Flying Saucers, Mark Moravec discusses hypnopompic/hypnogogic hallucinations as they may relate to UFO sightings. The author states that such hallucinations may explain many UFO-related phenomena that involve tired drivers and people who awake to find strange things, like lights outside their windows and little creatures in their rooms.
The possible images from hypnopompic hallucinations can be of virtually anything that a person might dream about. Obviously culturally determined UFO phenomena, ghost sightings that frequently involve "night hag"-type terrors, or the less hostile images of recently deceased acquaintances (who have been known to provide information that only "they" would know, hence supposed proof of their supernatural origin), fairies, goblins, weird creatures, bright lights, are all possible, just as I experienced the bizarre demonic telephone cord from Hell.
It is important to understand that such phenomena are not a sign of mental weakness or illness, but are often experienced by people of unquestioned sanity (and me too on one occasion). Anyone seeking to understand paranormal phenomena should be aware of this normal human experience.
Bibliography

Peter Huston is a teacher of English as a second language and writer currently living in Taiwan.