The Terror That Comes in the Night

An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions

David J. Hufford

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812292596
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Folklore y mitología

David Hufford's work exploring the experiential basis for belief in the supernatural, focusing here on the so-called Old Hag experience, a psychologically disturbing event in which a victim claims to have encountered some form of malign entity while dreaming (or awake). Sufferers report feeling suffocated, held down by some "force, " paralyzed, and extremely afraid.The experience is surprisingly common: the author estimates that approximately 15 percent of people undergo this event at some point in their lives. Various cultures have their own name for the phenomenon and have constructed their own mythology around it; the supernatural tenor of many Old Hag stories is unavoidable. Hufford, as a folklorist, is well-placed to investigate this puzzling occurrence.

1

The Old Hag in Newfoundland

The Canadian province of Newfoundland is an island in the North Atlantic off the east coast of Canada. Its 42,734 square miles provide a home for a population of only a little more than 570,000—about the same area as Pennsylvania but roughly one-twentieth the population. This sparse population, predominantly of Irish and English extraction, is concentrated on the Avalon Peninsula at the eastern end of the island, where the capital city of St. John’s is located. St. John’s is the only large city in Newfoundland, with a population of over 100,000. Most of the remaining people live in small villages scattered along the coast. A British colony until 1948, Newfoundland has been isolated from both the Old World and the New by a combination of historical factors, geography, and weather. In recent years that isolation has begun to yield, but culturally the island is still distinct and fascinating.

From 1971 to 1974 I lived and worked in St. John’s as a faculty member in the Folklore Department of Memorial University of Newfoundland. This Folklore Department and the associated Folklore and Language Archive are ideally located because the conservative influences of isolation have left intact in Newfoundland elements of traditional culture no longer functioning in most of the English-speaking world. My work at the university included archival duties, and I was pleased to find that the rich and extensive collections included great quantities of folk belief material, my main interest. Through the archive and field work I found that beliefs and accounts of supernatural lights—Will-o’-the-Wisp, Jack-o’-Lantern, ghost ships, weather lights—are very common, as are ghosts, omens of death, and many other categories. Even beliefs and accounts about the fairies can be found in St. John’s and the outports, although these are much less common now than they once were. The current distribution and the changing state of such traditions appear to support the conventional academic point of view that supernatural beliefs are survivals from a naive past and must decline as “scientific thought” ascends. Newfoundland seems to have more of them than do less isolated parts of North America, and they seem to be more generally distributed. As the forces of acculturation proceed in the province, the beliefs are becoming less common, with the most rapid loss among the most acculturated portions of the population. Similar observations have been made many times all over the world for centuries and are a major part of the basis for the modern understanding of the relationships between supernatural belief, culture, and experience. I first encountered “the Old Hag” while working with these Newfoundland traditions.

Many Newfoundlanders are familiar with the Old Hag tradition and define it as did a university student about twenty years of age: “You are dreaming and you feel as if someone is holding you down. You can do nothing only cry out. People believe that you will die if you are not awakened.” Brief definitions, however, are not the natural form of living traditions. In fact, they are very rarely found in this form except when a folklorist or other outsider asks questions of the “What is …” variety. Beliefs, like values and attitudes, normally find their expressions either in action or descriptions of action, that is, narratives. Narratives are far more easily elicited, recorded, and analyzed than are spontaneous acts, and thus they provide a convenient means of examining beliefs in their natural setting. For these reasons, my data in this book consist primarily of narratives and their accompanying conversations.

The three legends¹ that follow provide a much more accurate, and therefore complex, introduction to the Old Hag tradition than could any number of definitions. The first two legends were received by the archive in response to a questionnaire distributed among university students in 1970 (reproduced in the Appendix). This was called the “Nightmare/Hag/Old Hag” questionnaire because the terms “nightmare” and “Old Hag,” or simply “Hag,” were known to be related, although the nature of the relationship was not immediately clear. Eight general questions about the Old Hag were asked, but it was emphasized that a detailed account of a single experience would be the most useful form of response. The students who received the questionnaire were free either to respond from their own knowledge and experience or to interview others. The following account is presented as submitted by two female students who collected it from a sixty-two-year-old woman.²

Case 1

Yes, the people of —— did speak of having nightmares.

Usually they said “I was hagged last night.” To my knowledge the hag was experienced most often in the nighttime, in the person’s home and it always came in human form.

I saw only one actual person who experienced the hag. It was the year 1915 and it concerns three people: Robert ——, John ——, and Jean ——. Robert was the Salvation Army schoolteacher and John —— was just an ordinary workman. Robert was trying to date Jean who was John’s steady girlfriend. About a month after this had been going on Robert began to be hagged. Every night when he went to bed, it was as if someone was pressing across his chest—it was as if he was being strangled. Robert became so sick that the people he boarded with thought he was going to die. But one night an old man suggested that Robert place a piece of board directly across his chest with an opened up pocket knife held between his hands. It was hoped that when the hag came to lie across his chest, the hag would be killed. However, in the morning when Robert got up he found that the knife was sticking into the piece of board. Only for the board Robert would have been killed. Perhaps because the hag thought he had killed Robert that it never came back again. Robert knew that John —— was the person who was hagging him. He put it down to jealously on John’s part. Both men were about the same age, between eighteen and twenty years old. In this case of hagging it was male against male.

Robert told the people that he stayed with the the hag was human—he could hear it coming and could recognize it but when it came he couldn’t speak—he could only make throaty noises. The hag just walked in or appeared while Robert was sleeping but he woke up while he was being hagged. Robert said that he was always lying on his back and usually he was under stress. The hag was brought about by a curse. It always affected his throat most and took his breath away.

The way to call a hag, Robert later learned, was to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards in the name of the devil. The only way to avoid the hag was by drawing blood or using the word of God and keeping the light on in the bedroom. Although Robert was hagged he always spoke freely about the whole thing whenever anyone asked him.

In contrasting such legends with brief definitions I was immediately confronted with a complication. In the definition, the experience is called “a dream” from which the dreamer must be “awakened.” In the narrative, “being hagged” is equated with “having nightmares.” To anyone accustomed to the modern usage of the word “nightmare,” this suggests that being hagged is a bad dream. But the statement that “the hag was human” does not make sense if “hag” is synonymous with “dream.” Dreams are generally understood to be subjective events, yet in this narrative the hagging is said both to have been done by John and to have been “brought about by a curse.” This apparent contradiction does not simply indicate a difference of opinion over whether these experiences are dreams or objective, supernatural events. Rather, it is a result both of the combination of several traditions around a central core and of linguistic problems resulting from efforts to describe very difficult subjective points. I shall discuss these issues further following Case 2. For the moment, let us say that in Newfoundland “the Old Hag,” and often “the nightmare,” are understood to be applicable to both an experience and a feature of that experience, that is, the attacker. The experience is understood by many to be a state that is different from ordinary dreams but for which there is no good alternative word. Therefore, the use of the word “dream” does not always rule out the traditional belief that the experience is external and supernatural, although many do regard it as simply a special class of natural dream.

The next example, submitted by a male university student, was collected from an eighty-year-old man. This text was also written out by the collector and is therefore an approximation of the verbatim statement of the informant. The student’s written version is presented unchanged except for the omission of unnecessary descriptive comments such as “His eyes held a unique twinkle.” The words of the reported conversation are given complete with original spelling and the student’s efforts to record features of dialect.³

Case 2

STUDENT: Do you know anything about the old Hag?

INFORMANT: Hu? No, boy, I don’t.

STUDENT: The Old Hag! Don’t you know anything about the Old Hag?

INFORMANT: No——hu——do you mean haggin’ people? I can tell you a good one on that; I was there when it happened.

It was down on the Labrador it happened. We was fishin’. I spose it was about fifty odd year ago. ’Twas what you call a good year. We had our stages filled up with fish quicker than we could have done it fullin’ ’em up with rocks. We was in the bunk house this night, and there was a fine girl, what we’d say, a bedroom girl, she was there, and one of us was tryin’ to kiss her. But she wouldn’t let him do it. So he said to her, ‘If you don’t let me kiss you, I’ll hag you tonight’; now she never believed he could do it, and she still wouldn’t let him do it. Anyway he went home; and Brother, that was a night he hagged her! and hagged her good. She was that bad she was foamin’ at the mouth before her father heard her. She was tellin’ us about it after. Yes he give her some haggin’.

STUDENT: How did he hag her?

INFORMANT: Hu? I can’t go teilin’ it. ’Tis not good stuff to be tellin’.

STUDENT: Come on. If there’s any sin in it, I’ll take the blame. I’m writing a paper on it.

INFORMANT: Well——I’ll tell you, but don’t put me name on it. ’Twas like this; she went on over to her place. And as soon as she left, me buddy took off his clothes and kneeled down by the bed. I was there watchin’ him when he done it. And you know what he done? He said the Lord’s Prayer backwards; then jumped under the covers and took a knife from under the pilla and stuck it in the sideboard three or four times.

After awhile I put the kerosene lamp out and we all went to bunk. Every now and then we’d hear him bawl out, ‘Hag, good Hag!’ And that’s how he hagged her.

STUDENT: IS the hag supposed to be an old woman or something? Because, who was he calling to when he said, ‘Hag good Hag?’

INFORMANT: No——He, hisself must have hagged her; because she could see him standin’ over her with the knife; and she couldn’t move because she was stopped still with fright. The foam was even comin’ out of her mouth, and her father only got her back to sense by callin’ her name backwards.

STUDENT: I thought the fellow who hagged her was supposed to be in bed when all this was going on.

INFORMANT: His spirit, his spirit was what hagged her. She said after, if she’d have knowed he was really goin’ to hag her she’d had a bottle ready, and finished him before he’d have hagged her.

STUDENT: What do you mean?

INFORMANT: See——if you swing at a spirit with a bottle, the spirit who is haggin’ you will die. So he never hagged her no more because he knowed she had a bottle ready.

The importance of variations in terminology is illustrated by the informant’s firm negative response to a question about “the old Hag” at the beginning of the interview. The topic would have been dropped if the student had not persisted. While doing a questionnaire study of my own on the subject, I found one respondent who was ignorant of the traditional meaning of “Old Hag” but who knew the term “The Hags” as a name for the experience. Another respondent, who was aware of the connection of the terms, said, “We know it as ‘Hag Rogue.’ One way my mother used to awaken her father … was to call his name backwards.” Although the spelling may vary, this form often occurs, apparently a corruption of the phrase “hag rode” or “hag rid.” In Newfoundland the verb “to hag” is most commonly used, with “to ride” occurring less often. Outside of Newfoundland the most common traditional expression I have found for the experience in English is “riding,” although what does the riding is usually called a “witch,” not a “hag.” In addition to numerous variations on the words hag and ride, the experience in Newfoundland is occasionally called the “diddies” or, as noted earlier, “the nightmare.” In addition to this variety of terms used in the Newfoundland tradition to describe the basic experience, each term is sometimes held to have more than a single meaning. Not only is the experience occasionally called a dream, but other types of bad dreams are sometimes classified as the Old Hag, especially if the dream involves helplessness. The broadened connotations for the traditional terms seem to result from a process of secondary generalization in which the original meaning is the experience described in the above narratives. Why and how this broadening has happened will be discussed in connection with the old nightmare tradition. This variation in terminology, especially in oral forms that can be easily misunderstood or incorrectly pronounced, is one of several factors complicating efforts to reach strong conclusions about the distribution of the tradition.

In both ca...