BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY
No 19. In bed with an old hag
There is a certain class of classical music devotee who considers an interest in rock music and its relations irrational – it’s obviously all ephemeral trash, undeserving of the attention of the world’s finer minds (as, in their eyes, is Classic FM – France 3, Radio 3 and perhaps Lyric FM is where they live). One has some sympathy for this view, given the appalling crap that has infested the charts and the airwaves over the last couple of decades. At the same time one wonders just how much attention they’ve ever paid to the most original exponents of the popular musical arts, whose harmonies can be as disconcertingly ambiguous as any of Beethoven’s, with lyrics as rich as any of Cafavy’s or Lorca’s or Blake’s. It’s only fair to say that on the other side of these tracks are people who think the only bearable item in the ‘classical’ repertoire is the 1812 Overture and that Brian May is a genius. The parallel with the snooty ‘scientific establishment’ view of forteana, anomalistics and paranormal phenomena isn’t hard to spot. Enter, now, a young anthropologist named David Hufford…
In the 1970s, David Hufford observed something like this division when he researched attitudes to the night terror called the Old Hag, as it was (and is) known in Newfoundland. As a student he had had the experience himself (see www.sleepparalysisworld.com/david-j-hufford/) and been baffled and frightened by it, so his personal interest was piqued when he found the Old Hag alive, well, and part of the Newfoundland community. There, if not exactly blasé about it, people were generally aware of the phenomenon, had a popular rationale for it and, crucially, a name for it; and consequently accepted it as a known experience. Elsewhere, where there was no supportive explanatory tradition, people who were visited by the Old Hag found themselves confused, alarmed, and (like Hufford) with no recourse to any form of reassurance. Psychologists who took any interest in the matter tended to dismiss its individual experiential character – in other words, it was irrational, a byproduct of a vague mélange (for which there was rather little evidence) of popular lore. They preferred to conflate – more precisely, confuse – the Old Hag with other sleeprelated horrors – such as the succubus and incubus or just plain old bad dreams – so depriving it of its particularity.
Hufford, suitably intrigued, set out to discover whether the Old Hag was indeed the product of tradition and folklore, or a unique event in its own right. The test was whether, in different contexts, the experience remained essentially the same – or not. A marked difference (or several differences) would indicate the predominance of cultural influences. Otherwise one was dealing with a singular, actual experience. The result of Hufford’s investigations was The Terror that Comes in the Night, published in 1982.
Old Hag visitations follow a general pattern, but may differ in detail. Hufford shies away from offering a broad outline, probably because he considered his case studies were strongly indicative rather than comprehensive, and that his research on the phenomenon was but preliminary. Nonetheless, we can say that the hallucination of the Old Hag comes to you when you’re on the edge of going to sleep (hypnagogic) or emerging from it (hypnopompic). A critical difference between an Old Hag hallucination and others arising on the thresholds of sleep and waking is that the latter present themselves as rather like a slideshow, a series of stills. The Old Hag presents continuous imagery and other effects, as does a movie. So, you are fully aware of your surroundings, but unnervingly are unable to move or speak. Generally, you’re lying on your back, and your chest feels as if a mighty weight is crushing it, so that you can scarcely breathe. You’re aware too of a presence in the room – and it’s evil: a shrouded, seemingly human figure, sometimes actually sitting on you. The face often has few or no features except the eyes, which may be mere ghoulish black holes, or glowing red, or dark, distinct and piercing, among other things. The apparition may exude foul breath, or just stink of itself. There may be weird noises: some report hearing footsteps before seeing it enter the room, or the ‘thing’ makes what one witness called a “snurfling” sound. The bed may rock, or you may feel yourself sinking into it. You may get tingling sensations. The only way, it seems, to break out of this state and make the thing disappear is, somehow, to force oneself to move. Not surprisingly, most find the experience terrifying.
Within this general pattern, and even in Newfoundland, there are large variations in individual experiences. There is (in Newfoundland) also an interesting variety of time-honoured explanations for whatever one’s undergone. One of these fallbacks isn’t an explanation as such at all, in that it doesn’t account for content, or offer a physical or metaphysical source of the Hag itself or its appearance or behaviour: which is to say that someone has called it up and, literally, saddled you with it, on account of some perceived slight or attack, or a rivalry in affections, or the like. In other words, you’ve been cursed. Thus the Hag is assimilated into much broader traditional ideas of witchcraft – or perhaps vice-versa – as it has (as we’ll see) been dragooned into other paranormalities. But there are more mundane and perhaps more reassuring accountings. Indigestion may be responsible (a bit like blaming nightmares on eating cheese too near bedtime), a diagnosis that goes back at least as far as
Galen of Pergamon (AD 129– c.216). Or it may occur because of ‘stagnation of the blood’, a condition that allegedly occurs if you sleep in one position for too long and slow the circulation to deleterious effect. These still don’t explain why the Old Hag in particular manifests itself the way it does, which may be why a supernatural element is not necessarily excluded from people’s general acceptance of the experience – for where regarded as normal, the supernatural requires no explanation, just being one of the sometimes irrational, or rather a-rational, ways things are. Shit happens, as the bumper sticker has it.
The psychologists of the early 20th century, anxious to establish themselves as scientists, and therefore supremely rational, found this curious set of claimed experience and ‘superstition’ supremely irritating, and set about inflicting their own species of rationality upon it. The Freudian Ernest Jones, who applied his Master’s baseless, self-referring system of obsessions to the Old Hag experience, pronounced it to be: “a form of Angst [fear] attack, that… is essentially due to an intense mental conflict centering around [ sic] a repressed component of the psychosexual instinct, essentially concerned with incest.” Some readers may feel the need for a small break here for a nice cup of tea, or medicinal brandy and cheroot, or treatment for a stitch. But hold on, for Jones gets better. Apparently the Hag visits the supine because that’s commonly how women find themselves during sexual intercourse, hence too the weight on the chest. (So, we wonder, does it follow that men suffering a visitation are repressed transgenderites?) The paralysis comes from the conflict between incestuous desire and the conscious need to reject it. Yes dear. Of course we’re all in denial about secretly dying to roger our mothers, fathers, and maybe the family goldfish. If this stuff is not as mad as a parcel of paranoid polecats, what is? Hufford, who is clearly underwhelmed, presents it with heroic self-control, remarking coolly that perhaps Jones’s conclusions were “arrived at more on theoretical than empirical grounds.”
Jones, for all his faults (Hufford details a fair few more), at least had the wherewithal to look into the history and etymology of the term ‘nightmare’, restoring it in his discussion to its original and specific meaning: ‘night crusher’. The Old Hag, which Jones doesn’t mention per se, is the local contemporary term, then, for the earliest meaning of ‘nightmare’, but he missed, in particular, the aspect of wakefulness (real or imagined) that characterises a Hag encounter. This imprecision about different species of nightmare infested later commentators on nightmares and sleep paralysis too, including, as it happens, that Harvard professor of psychiatry John Mack. At one Hulsey Cason’s conflations of different meanings of the word ‘nightmare’, Hufford becomes quite animated: “All of Cason’s findings represent an average for at least three different kinds of events, each of which occur and are accurately reported at very different rates. His [statistical] results place him in the position of a man who is told that the camels in the zoo have humps; he then goes to the zoo and states: ‘I shall define camels, or elephants as they are sometimes called, as any animal found at the zoo, some of which are said to have humps.’ He would find, of course, that some camels have humps, and some have trunks, as claimed by those who call them elephants, but most have neither.” It all fits with Hufford’s observation of what he calls “the psychological dis-interpretation” of the Old Hag, in that “the occasional firsthand Old Hag account has been accounted for in a great variety of ways by a long series of authors. The effect has been to explain the phenomenon away while discouraging the development of a full description of it.” And as he points out, a closer examination of this bizarre experience in its own terms has implications for the treatment of many another bizarre experience. And so it fell to Hufford to nail the definition(s) down and to do the necessary research. For this alone his book is a classic.
The Old Hag experience, he found, has been easily assimilated into other streams of weird experience. Most obvious is the version of this form of sleep paralysis and hallucination in which the incubus or succubus creeps upon, or beneath, the chaste and unwary in their sleep, and cause them to have (and worse, oops, enjoy) naughty erotic adventures. Mormons, he found, have incorporated the Hag into their traditions of Satanic temptation and assault. Some of his case histories show how the Hag has been integrated into sometimes quite complex reports of hauntings. Outof-body experiences feature in some accounts. Hufford didn’t come across an alien abduction, but recognises by way of John Keel and JacquesVallée how alien ‘bedroom visitors’ with all the attributes of the Hag have become part of contactee and UFO lore. Without a tradition such as that found in Newfoundland, the experience is latched onto the nearest available (or most appealing) context. And it is remarkably consistent.
Apart from the wealth of other insights, this is Hufford’s key finding and the answer to the question that triggered his research. He posed the problem thus: “The cultural source hypothesis predicts that… no complete, recognisable Old Hag attacks will be reported by people who have not had contact with the tradition. The experiential source hypothesis predicts that some such attacks will be reported… The substantial difference in predictions centres on whether substantial numbers of attacks are reported in the absence of prior knowledge about the experience….” As it turned out, not only was the Old Hag a widespread phenomenon, as research in the US showed, but had been met with by an unexpectedly large proportion of the population.
Having set this hare running, Hufford had a distinguished academic career, but never revisited the subject at book length, which is mildly surprising given the potential he had exposed. This is perhaps a minor mystery when put beside the fact that it’s now known that the Old Hag is found (by many another name) all over the world, and no one knows why this experience is so consistent, regardless of context. Nice one, eh?
David J Hufford, The Terror that Comes in the Night: An Experience-based Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, University of Pennsylvania Press 1982.
“a Great Book Should Leave You With Many Experiences, And Slightly Exhausted At The End. You Live Several Lives While Reading It.” William Styron