“Night Hags”, in the literal sense, are a particularly strange brand of phenomena. The term itself is most often associated with sleep paralysis, but the “hags” I’m referring to in this blog are a bit different. In fact, I’ve come across many instances where people have claimed to awaken from sleep and see a physical entity either sitting on their chests, or standing elsewhere in their bedrooms watching them. Aside from sleep paralysis itself, this notion could also be linked with paranormal reports involving things like alien abduction.

On one occasion, I asked my pal Joshua P. Warren about what, if anything, scared him most (since he and I have spent years upon years hunting paranormal anomalies with this guy, and seldom encounter anything truely frightening I might add)!

After some thought, Josh replied, “I always get reports from people who have woken up to find a ghost or apparition standing over them, watching them sleep.” He described one occasion he had been told of where a woman experiencing various aspects of a haunting in her home had also awoken very early every at a specific time over several consecutive mornings, unable to find a cause for her sleepless nights. Someone suggested that she set up a video camera to film the bedroom around the time she had been waking up. She did, and reviewing the footage, she saw a tall shadow-like “apparition” enter the room, stand over her bed and watch her for several moments, then leave. Just after its departure, the woman woke up! Right there in the video she claimed that the clock in her bedroom read the same time she had consistently awoken on the several previous evenings. Based on this idea, Josh’s most frightening scenario dealt with “why they watch us while we sleep.”

I have come across many instances where people have reported literal encounters with visitors in the night, contrary to the common notion of a “night hag” being associated with sleep paralysis. The term seems to have originated in the American South, and often is said to warn of some impending disaster. Literal reports of people claiming to have a hag or old woman sitting on their chest have been reported also, though this may be due to the mind compensating for the kinds of breathing problems often associated with sleep paralysis. Similar to the idea of a hag riding one’s chest, African American traditions refer to the same phenomena as a “witch” of “devil riding your back”. Both accounts bear a strong resemblance to the Henry Fuseli painting The Nightmare (above), commonly accepted as a classic depiction of a one such demonic visit in the night.

Though cultures throughout the world have different names and interpretations of the phenomena, I still tend to think that in a few isolated cases, the kinds of phenomena one may awake from a deep sleep to behold could fall somewhere outside the circle of mere sleep paralysis. For instance, one evening while taking photos at the Grove Park Inn resort hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, an electrical outage caused the lights throughout most of the hotel to go out, blanketing my comanions and I in darkness (trust me, the hotel is very large). I had been lingering near a particular room in the historic portion of the building which dated back to the early 1900’s, famous for its association with a spirit called “the Pink Lady”, when suddenly a woman emerged from the room next to it who shared her unique story.

She and several of her co-workers from Texas had been visiting the hotel on a business trip, and a friend of hers had been staying in the room across from her. At breakfast one morning, he shyly discussed how he had awoken in the middle of the night with difficulty breathing. Opening his eyes, he instantly saw ”pink ruffles” billowing across the bed in front of him, and looking up, his eyes met with those of a woman who he described as “gaunt looking, with long gray hair and wearing a long pink gown.” Upon seeing this, the woman began to fade, then vanished.

At breakfast, the man had been hesitant to tell his co-workers about the encounter, and only felt better about what he had seen once hotel employees who had overheard his story affirmed that his room had been called “The Pink Lady’s room” for years. Indeed, many had experienced similar things while staying in the room, number 545, according to the hotel employees themselves! If it had been merely sleep paralysis, how likely could this man have “guessed” that the woman appearing on his chest in the night would be wearing the distinct garb associated with the hotel’s famous ghost?

So perhaps Josh is right to be frightened by such reports… you or I may find it frightening also if we suddenly learned who, or “what”, might be watching us while we sleep!