If You Go Looking

The night visitor

UN/3/F+E

Old Hag · the mara · incubus and succubus · kanashibari

Something heavy on the chest in the dark, under many names.

Waking unable to move, with a strong sense of a presence in the room and often a weight on the chest. Newfoundland calls it the Old Hag and Japan kanashibari, and Old English named the crushing spirit the mære, which survives in the word nightmare. Medieval demonology turned it into the incubus and succubus. The folklorist David Hufford showed in 1982 that the experience is real and recurring, and that people report it whether or not they know the tradition. It is now recognised as sleep paralysis, which explains why the figure is so consistent without explaining it away, and why abduction accounts that begin in bed so often share its features.

If you go looking

Sleep-state phenomenon

Sleep paralysis is common and harmless in itself, though frightening. Frequent episodes, especially with heavy daytime sleepiness, are worth mentioning to a GP.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

UN/3/F+E

Origin uncertain · embodiment 3 of 5, comes and goes · source: pre-modern folklore + recurring reports · key

Dates

The mære: Old English

Incubus and succubus: medieval demonology

Hufford's study: 1982

Related

Shadow people are the modern version of the same experience. Many abduction accounts that start in bed begin exactly here.

Shadow people →Greys →Psychedelic entities →

Terms used on this page

UN: origin uncertain

Origin code

Reported with some consistency but carrying no origin claim in the encounters themselves. Filing these as alien is an assumption the listener adds.

Degree of embodiment: 3, comes and goes

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

F: pre-modern folklore

Source code

Inherited oral tradition with no author and no publication date, in several cases continuous to the present.

E: recurring reports

Source code

Described by many apparently unconnected witnesses. The strongest category in the guide, and the smallest.

David Hufford

Folklorist, 1982

American folklorist whose The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982) studied the Old Hag of Newfoundland and argued that the tradition rests on a real, recurring sleep experience rather than on culture alone.

Sleep paralysis

Mechanism

On waking or falling asleep, the body's muscular atonia can persist into awareness, producing immobility, chest pressure and a strongly felt presence. It generates an intruder figure with remarkable cross-cultural consistency, which is why the old hag, the mara and the modern shadow person describe the same thing.

Sleep-state phenomenon

Practice-side

Strongly associated with sleep paralysis and the hypnagogic state. Genuinely frightening, and the fear is not evidence of anything beyond the mechanism. Sleep deprivation and disrupted schedules make it more likely, which is worth knowing before deliberately disrupting your sleep to induce it.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

← Back to all 59 entries