Night Paralysis and My Ghostly Visitor
It was probably the late 1980s when my family and I moved to Western
Pennsylvania. During an early trip there to house-hunt, we were
staying in an apartment over another family’s home. While sleeping
on the couch, I had an experience where I believed that I had awakened
to find an invisible presence in the room touching me in a “very
personal” way. I even had a very clear picture of the door
between the apartment and the house downstairs being wide open, though
that door was normally kept locked.
Some time later, when we had
moved into our new house, I had a much more disconcerting
“visitation”. In that situation, I woke up during the
night, unable to move. Above me in the air I could see what
appeared to be a gray cloud-like entity, which tried to force itself
into my body. When I fought it, I found that I couldn’t breathe,
speak, or move. The best I could manage was a sort of choking
sound. This sound woke up my younger brother in the next
bed. I didn’t tell him what happened to me. The next
morning, he told me a story almost identical to my own – a gray
cloud-like apparation choking him and keeping him from moving. I
was convinced that the two of us had seen a ghost. Then I read this
article.
Apparently this phenomenon is rather common.
It’s called “Sleep Paralysis” and the article mentioned above
describes it this way:
Sleep paralysis embodies a universal, biologically based
explanation for pervasive beliefs in spirits and supernatural beings,
even in the United States, Hufford argues. The experience thrusts
mentally healthy people into a bizarre, alternative world that they
frequently find difficult to chalk up to a temporary brain glitch.
In fact, the article describes two stories nearly
identical to my own. First, one similar to my experience in the
apartment:
Hufford
retreated one December day to his rented, off-campus room and fell into
a deep sleep. An hour later, he awoke with a start to the sound of the
bedroom door creaking open?the same door he had locked and bolted before
going to bed…
This description is also very similar
to my second experience:
“The first time I experienced this, I saw a shadow of a
moving figure, arms outstretched, and I was absolutely sure it was
supernatural and evil.” …Yet another person reported periodically
waking with a start just after falling asleep, sensing an ominous
presence nearby. The tale continues: “Then, something comes over me
and smothers me, as if with a pillow. I fight but I can’t move. I try to
scream. I wake up gasping for air.”
As the
article says later on:
Even the most rational people who experience sleep paralysis
often find it difficult to write off their nighttime ordeals as
unreal…”I suspect that millions of people in the United States
are walking around never having told anybody about having these
terrifying experiences,” Hufford says.
I can’t
argue with him. The experiences I had were extremely vivid and
realistic, corroborated in one case by the fact that my choking sounds
awakened someone sleeping nearby. It’s something I only very
rarely talked about because I figured most people would think I was nuts
for thinking I’d been attacked by (for lack of a better
description) a ghost in the night…