Night Hag A True Story By
I have, in all seriousness and without hyperbole, had a life filled with paranormal activity. Some of the paranormal experiences I’ve had have been wonderful, some revelatory, some disconcerting, but the most terrifying one I’ve had occurred when I was almost exactly, to the day, half the age that I am right now.
My parents moved from the house I grew up in the year that I went away to college. I remember coming home on a break and helping them move; I remember sleeping on my mattress the last night in my old house, reading Stephen King’s It by the amber light of my table lamp in an otherwise empty room. Earlier this year, I moved my family from the house that my children have halfway grown up in, and I was reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome. I liked It more, but I like my new house better than all of the places that I’ve lived. These facts aren’t really germane to the event I’m about to relate, but they are the sort of coincidence that makes me feel that nothing in life is truly coincidental.
I mention this move because the house where I had my most horrifying paranormal experience was one that I never really considered to be my home. Maybe that fact is pertinent, maybe it isn’t. I lived there on school breaks, and although I had my own room there it always felt like someone else’s space, not mine. So I was very chagrinned and disappointed in the summer following my graduation, I moved back home, one of the classic Gen X boomerang kids. I was woefully unprepared for entering the real world, and the job market that I graduated into was one of the worst ever, especially for someone who majored in English, and whose only real ambition in live was to write novels. Not being able to find anything that matched my idea of a worthy career, I ended up taking two low paying but sort of intellectually stimulating jobs associated with fields I’d like to be in: bookseller and theater usher. Production and not Sales, at least I was still around the things I love.
My parents were wonderful to me, as they always have been, and didn’t seem to begrudge me my initial failure to launch. Although I was feeling a bit like a failure for not coming out of school with a string of publications under my belt, I was writing well (at least, if writing success was measured by quantity and not quality), and I was already making plans to marry the woman I loved. I was happy rather than bitter, so I have no idea why I had the horrific experience I did.
There’s a phenomenon called “Night Hag” or “Old Hag” that afflicted me for two days during the summer I returned home from school. You can Google the term for verification, but basically “Night Hag” is a form of sleep paralysis where a sleeper awakes but cannot move, and the sensation is akin to feeling as though a weight or many hands are pressing you down into your bend, rending you unable to move anything but your eyes. Picturing that alone is enough to make my flesh crawl, but when I recall the thing that visited me during my two day bout with Night Hag, the hair, what’s left of it, literally stands up on my head.
I awoke in my bed around eight o’clock in the morning on a very sunny day. I worked long, late hours at the theater so I liked to leave my window shades up and let the sun wake me, because if I kept the room darkened I’d easily sleep past noon. I opened my eyes, and I saw floating along the opposite wall a semi-spherical object that appeared to be composed of dark gray smoke floating along the wall. The smoke effect was heightened by the greasy grayish yellow contrail the thing left. I couldn’t move, but my eyes tracked its fluttering course around my room.
It turned towards me, and it had a face. Or teeth, at least. I remember teeth and a single eye in an ever-changing skull face, where the smoke hung and fell away like rapidly decaying skin.
I closed my eyes, and it disappeared.
But it was back the following morning, drifting around the room like a thick clot of resinous cigarette smoke. Again I couldn’t move. The previous day all I’d had to do was close my eyes and reopen them and it vanished; a few moments after its departure I was able to move again. So I tried the same strategy. It worked. It disappeared.
But I closed my eyes a second time, and upon reopening the hideous thing was hovering right above my navel. I looked at it and it seemed to pulse, the grayish smoke coalescing and then dissolving as I tried and failed to will my inert body to move.
Then it looked up at me.
I knew it had been watching me before, but this was the first time I actually made eye contact with the thing. Its one eye, a glassy black marble, undulated with a baleful, dead malevolence. I closed my eyes again. I was screaming inside but I couldn’t move a muscle. I fully intended to keep my eyes closed, but I had the sensation of tiny claws prying my eyelids open.
The thing had moved up my body and we were now nose-to-nose, although it didn’t have a nose, just a pair of ragged rents in its smoky, shifting face. It regarded me a moment, seeming to lean forward, and I could feel awful hot breath on my cheeks.
Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, it turned from me and sped towards the window, disappearing before it reached the glass.
I haven’t had a similar experience since.
Thank heavens.
Passing Strange by Daniel Waters Publisher: Hyperion Book CH (June 1st, 2010) Reading Level: Young Adult Hardcover: 386 pages Series: Generation Dead, book #3) Karen DeSonne always passed as a normal (if pale) teenager; with her friends, with her family, and at school. Passing cost her the love of her life. And now that Karen’s dead, she’s still passing—this time, as alive. Karen DeSonne just happens to be an extremely human-like zombie. Meanwhile, Karen’s dead friends have been fingered in a high-profile murder, causing a new round of antizombie regulations that have forced them into hiding. Karen soon learns that the “murder” that destroyed their non-life was a hoax, staged by Pete Martinsburg and his bioist zealots. Obtaining enough evidence to expose the fraud and prove her friends’ innocence means doing the unthinkable: becoming Pete’s girlfriend. Karen’s only hope is that the enemy never realizes who she really is—because the consequences would be worse than death.
Prize:
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