by Dale Jarvis
Coming soon to a mattress near you
-----------
Dear readers, I have deliberately left this to be my last story with you, with the slightly devilish hope that it will be the last thing you read before tucking in for the night.
One of my best-loved Newfoundland and Labrador terrors is the Old Hag. Part ghost story, part dream, and part real experience, the Old Hag occurs where one is half-awake but paralyzed by seemingly ghostly forces. Some people feel the weight of someone sitting on their chest, others see a ghostly figure either above them or at the foot of the bed. Ofttimes she is described as an old woman, with long, tangled hair. If you have not yet met the Old Hag in person, count your blessings, for it can be a terrifying experience.
Lloyd Pike does not believe in ghosts, but his first encounter with the Old Hag was so vivid it made him wonder. In 1972–73, Pike was spending his first year as a teacher on Pass Island, on the southwest coast near Hermitage. At that point, Pass Island had a population of a few hundred people, with only two Jeeps on the island for transportation. Pike stayed at a boarding house in sight of the school at Mooring Cove. It was at the boarding house that Pike first met the Old Hag, on an absolutely pitch-black night, so dark he could not see his hand in front of his face. Pike describes his experience in this way:
There was a window next to the door, with an old-fashioned, handmade lace curtain on it. It was very dark, but you could see in the window a slight illumination, a little flick of light. That was the beacon light for mariners, which was up on the hill. That would constantly flick, and by that light, you could see the pattern of that lace curtain.
I guess I fell asleep, but everything was so real I thought I was still awake. I was lying there, listening to the foghorn, waiting for sleep, and then I felt that someone had come to the door. Of course, I couldn’t see anyone, because it was so dark, but I just knew someone was there. I waited for someone to speak, perhaps the landlady checking on me, or her mother, but nobody spoke.
I waited, and then I had the sense that the person was walking into the room. The beacon was flickering in the window, the only bit of illumination you could see in the room. I was waiting for the shadow of someone to pass in front of that window, but nothing happened.
Then I had the sense that the person was standing next to the bed, looking down on me. At this point, I started to get that little creepy feeling up the back my spine. This was odd behaviour. And then I had the sense that the person was moving through the bed. At this point, you would think you must know you were asleep, but it wasn’t like that. As they got to the point where I was lying in the bed and they moved through where my body was, I felt this bone-chilling cold. I had never felt so cold; I can feel it still, almost. It went right to the bone. I was lying there, getting more and more terrified all the time, and then the person moved through my body, and the cold went away and the warmth returned. It went to the wall, and then I felt the person come back through me again, and again as they passed through me I could feel that bone-chilling cold. All the while the foghorn was repeating its sound and the beacon was flickering.
Then, the second most terrifying thing: I knew the person was in the room, but I didn’t know where. Then I felt hands reach up through the bed and grab me by the biceps and begin to pull me down through the bed. That is the moment I snapped awake, and I couldn’t move. I’d never had an experience like that before. I absolutely could not move my eyes, and I swear I could still feel the pressure of the fingers on my biceps, pulling me down through the bed. I was very tense. I laid there a long, long time like that, and eventually movement came back to me, and the sensation went away from my arms, but the terror didn’t. I was absolutely terrified.
Of course, the next day, when I told people, they said, “Oh, that was the Old Hag,” and I said, “What’s that, I’ve never heard of that?”
Pike’s dramatic experience with the Old Hag is typical of many encounters: the sensation of not being alone, a mixing of dream and waking states, the inability to move or call out, and the feeling of being held down. The sensation of paralysis, sometimes combined with the sensation of being pressed down into the bed, is a common motif in Old Hag narratives.
In addition to the paralysis, it is common for people with Newfoundland hag experiences to see the creature herself. Julia was one such person:
“The Nightmare,” by Henry Fuseli (1781), is thought to be one of the classic depictions of sleep paralysis. Image courtesy wikipedia.org.
“Before we moved back to Newfoundland, my family and I were staying at a bed and breakfast on Prince Edward Island. I woke in the middle of the night unable to move or call out. I was able to see the chair at the end of the bed, and sitting in the chair was a woman. She was dressed in clothes from the 1940s with the saddest face I have ever seen. Her eyes were black and sunken, and there was a feeling of despair that rolled off her. I closed my eyes, terrified, and woke in the morning.”
Both Megan Somerton and her boyfriend have had run-ins with the Hag on Gower Street in St. John’s:
“I’ve only experienced this once. However, I had heard about the Old Hag tale prior to this so knew exactly what was happening. I couldn’t move, and I was screaming out, but there was no sound. My room was completely dark and I didn’t see anything. I just closed my eyes and waited for it to stop since I knew I couldn’t do anything. My boyfriend has a similar story, although more scary, in the same place. He said there was a very old woman figure all in black; all he could see was eyes next to him. It was pretty intense.”
A sense of despair is often mentioned in such nighttime meetings. “Susan” grew up in St. John’s and has been aware of the existence of the Old Hag legend since she was young. She believes she heard of the Old Hag first from her father, who had also experienced the nighttime terror. Susan herself has experienced the sleep-paralysis side of the phenomenon, but a few years ago, she woke up around two or three o’clock in the morning to encounter a different aspect of the Old Hag.
“It was sometime in the middle of the night,” she remembers. “It was pitch black outside. Every so often, I find that I can’t wake up out of a dream, and this is what happened. I tried to wake up, but I couldn’t.”
In her half-waking, half-sleeping state, the woman tried to scream but found she could not.
“I felt completely paralyzed,” she says. “I guess that is the normal part of it, but what was different about this time was that I felt like I was being pressed on, like I was being stifled somehow. The particular thing about this time that was different was that I felt it on my face. It may sound weird, but it felt like hair or feathers, something ticklish brushing my face. I couldn’t really identify what it was, but it scared the daylights out of me. I tried to scream, but couldn’t scream. I couldn’t move. Nothing.
“Finally, I came to and woke up, and I jumped out of bed,” she says. “It was the biggest fright of my life.”
When I interviewed Susan, she said there was a sense of sadness or darkness that seemed to accompany the Old Hag.
“I want to say it was malevolent, but I don’t know if I’m being fanciful,” she says. “But it was a bad feeling, like it was a witch or something with crazy hair or feathers. I don’t know if it was a bird, or a woman, or something, but it was right up in my face. It was really scary. I’ve never heard anyone talk about hair or feathers before, but that was the definitive part of the dream.”
While the Old Hag is most often associated with visions of creepy old women and the sensation of paralysis, it quite often includes noises, sounds, and other auditory elements. The phenomenon can take on many different forms, and so the feeling of hair or feathers brushing across one’s face is, perhaps, not unusual. British researcher Dr. Paul Chambers writes, “In addition to sensing a presence in the room, many people report feelings of flying or floating, and anomalous noises and lights are also commonly
reported.”
The Old Hag can take many forms. While researching this book, a cashier at the Carbonear Foodland told me about getting the Old Hag, and how a white dog will appear at the end of her bed. A man from Corner Book told me how the Hag would appear as a dark, shadowy figure looking in at him from the doorway.
“The sheer terror and dread that I remember, seeing her in the doorway, was unbearable,” he confessed to me. “It was like knowing that you were sharing space with something sinister.”
Ashley Byrne was hagged in 2012 while living in Goose Cove on the Northern Peninsula, near St. Anthony. It was an experience she describes today as the worst feeling of her life:
“It was the most terrifying, unnerving thing that I have ever experienced! Horrible! I was lying on my side, facing my husband. The front of my body felt like it was on fire, and my back was colder than I have ever felt before or since. The room was so chaotic it was almost vibrating. I couldn’t move anything except my eyes. At the foot of the bed was a long dresser. There were two children, little boys, sitting on the dresser looking at me. I could see a figure lying behind me, and then I felt ice-cold fingers run down my back. I can still picture the children I saw so vividly. The one boy was wearing a grey knitted sweater, and the other fellow was wearing a blue woollen salt-and-pepper kind of hat, and a white long-sleeve button-up shirt and suspenders. It is etched into my memory so clearly. All this happened in less than a minute. I was screaming my husband’s name, or so I thought. The third time I screamed his name, everything stopped, was quiet and peaceful, and I could move.”
Krista Wall experienced a similar creepy-children version of the Old Hag in Paradise. She saw them first around 2004, and then again about three years later, in the same house and same bedroom.
“I’m not sure if I would call it the Hag, or sleep paralysis. Twice it was the same dream: two children in the doorway of my bedroom, a boy and girl. I can still remember in great detail what they looked like. I can still picture the two I saw like it was yesterday. He had on a little jacket, grey with black buttons, with short-style pants and black boots. The girl had on a grey and white dress about knee length, with no frills, very plain, black boots with laces, and black tights. Her hair was down with a little curl at the ends. Both were blond. They just stood there in the doorway looking at me. I remember being cold. I tried to turn on a light—then realized I couldn’t move, or scream. And I tried! Believe me! My grandmother also gets ‘the Hag’ fairly often. I remember being a young girl; Pop told me the demons had come for her. It frightened the daylights out of me!”
“I had the old Hag many times, but it comes in different ways,” I was told by storyteller Tony Power of Branch. “It is as if you are paralyzed; it is like you’re in a battle with evil, or falling off a cliff and waking up when you’re only inches from hitting the rocks. Other times, this old woman appears at the foot of the bed and slowly crawls toward you, and tries choking the living daylights out of you before you wake. It is one of the worst experiences to have in your sleep.”
Luckily, Power also has some advice for those who suffer from the Old Hag.
“If you make the sign of the cross on the roof of your mouth with your tongue, you will wake up,” he tells me. “Holy water also helps.”
In addition to holy water, keeping a copy of the Bible under your pillow may work. Words, of one sort or another, have always been said to be an effective charm against the Hag. According to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, one remedy for the Hag involves the afflicted party calling out his or her own name backwards. Eileen Balsom Matthews of Heritage New Perlican wrote me to say, “Hubby tells me years ago, in New Perlican, there was a guy who had it a lot, and his wife told him ‘to say his name backwards three times really fast to get rid of it,’ and apparently it worked!” Others have advised reciting the Lord’s Prayer, either forwards, as one would normally, or backwards.
In 1896, the Journal of American Folklore printed the following “cure” for the Old Hag:
“A man at Change Islands, in the district of Notre Dame Bay, told me he had been ridden to death by an old hag, until a knowledgeable old man advised him to drive nails through a shingle and lash it to his breast when he went to bed, with the nails sticking up. With great solemnity he assured me that, thus fortified, he had just forgotten the world, when down came the Old Hag all aflop, but with a hideous scream she went ‘off quicker’n she come on.’ His rest has been peaceful ever since.”
Some people are of the opinion that your sleeping posture has an effect on you being hagged.
“My father gets the Hag when he sleeps flat on his back,” Sheila tells me. “He has for as long as I can remember. He doesn’t have any visions but is always very tense and feels like if he relaxes, he will die; however, if he manages to move at all, even a pinky twitch, the Hag will break. In his mind, it is pretty much a life-or-death struggle. Sometimes he even gets mad at Mom since he is going through this and she doesn’t help, but she is unaware of anything until it breaks, and either he wakes or mentions it in the mornings. He has had it happen multiple times in one night, and those nights he gives up trying to sleep in bed and goes downstairs to try to sleep in his recliner. I am pretty sure that is the reason he is donating his body to science once he passes—he doesn’t want to spend eternity on his back!”
As for the Corner Brook man who was visited by the Hag every night from January until March? He moved into a different house.
“To the best of my recollection, I have not had a visit from the Hag since,” he told me.
I have one last, final anecdote. It has been said, more than once, that simply reading about, talking about, or even just thinking about the Old Hag greatly increases your chances of getting a late-night visit from Newfoundland and Labrador’s most terrifying nocturnal horror.
So with that, gentle readers, good night. Thank you for reading, and may you all have pleasant dreams.
— Dale Jarvis, Clarke’s Beach, May 2017
Works Referenced
AngelfireRN. Does Death Have a Smell? 26 January 2010. Web accessed 20 November 2016. http://allnurses.com/general-nursing-discussion/does-death-have-452535.html
Beck, Horace. Folklore of the Sea. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Bond, Susan McDonald. Eric: A Tale of a Red-Tempered Viking. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
Bown, Addison. Bell Island Ferries of Fomer Years. Web accessed 22 November 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20120307125735/http://www.bellisland.net/
Burry, Emma. Sunshine Park Killer Urban Legend. Recorded 27 May 2011. Memorial University’s Digital Archives Initiative.
Chambers, Paul. Sex and the Paranormal. London: Blandford Press, 1999.
Coish, Della A., ed. Tales of Fogo Island. Fogo Island Literacy Association, 1999.
“Concerning Negro Sorcery in the United States.” Journal of American Folklore 3.11 (Oct-Dec 1890): 281-287.
“Connor’s Webpage on the Vikings in North America.” Web accessed 14 November 2016. http://www.valhalla-lodge.com/quicklinks/conor.html
“Corporal Punishment in England.” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 2.1 (May 1911): 99.
Dahl. Richard S. “Lore of Placentia Bay.” Newfoundland Quarterly 7.2 (October 1912): 16.
Devine, Maurice A., and Michael J. O’Mara. Notable events in the history of Newfoundland: six thousand dates of historical and social happenings. St. John’s: Devine & O’Mara, 1900.
Devine, Patrick Kevin (attributed to “P.K.D.”). “Father Duffy’s Well.” Newfoundland Quarterly 34.3 (December 1934): 25.
de Vos, Gail. Tales, rumors, and gossip: Exploring contemporary folk literature in grades 7-12. Westport: Libraries Unlimited, 1996.
Dohey, Larry. “Cemeteries in St. John’s: Archival Moment July 3, 1859.” Web accessed 24 November 2016. http://archiv
almoments.ca/2016/07/new-cemetery-for-st-johns/
“Editorial.” Decks Awash 16.3 (May-June 1987): 62.
Eliot, T. S. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (First American edition). New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1939.
English, L. E. F. “Legends of Newfoundland.” Newfoundland Quarterly 49.1 (June 1949: 13-16.
English, L.E.F. “Pirate Legends.” Newfoundland Quarterly 55.4 (December 1956): 34-35.
“Fogo Island—An overview.” Decks Awash 16.14 (1987): 3-15.
“Folklore of the Port-au-Port Peninsula.” 1972. On file, Newfoundland Room, AC Hunter Adult Public Library, St. John’s.
Gaulton, Barry C. and Catherine Hawkins. Interim Report: Ferryland (CgAf-02) Permit # 15.20. Web accessed 21 November 2016. https://www.mun.ca/archaeology/people/faculty/bgaulton/Ferryland_Interim_Report_2015.pdf
Georges, Robert A. “The General Concept of Legend: Some Assumptions to be Reexamined and Reassessed.” p1-20.
Godwin, Bill, Part 2. Interview with Bill Godwin, Barr’d Islands. Interview conducted by Gerald Pocius and Mark Ferguson, 1989-11-10. Memorial University’s Digital Archives Initiative.
“Got Aground.” Evening Telegram (9 November 1907): 4.
“The Governor and Father Duffy’s Well.” Evening Telegram (20 April 1880): 1.
Hand, Wayland, ed. American Folk Legend: A Symposium. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1971.
“Harbor Grace Notes.” Evening Telegram (27 August 1907): 6.
Hiscock, Philip. “Folklore and Wells.” Downhomer 12.11 (April 2000): 52-53.
Howley, James P. The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915.
Howley, Michael Francis. “Poor Joe Benoit: A True Story of the West Coast.” Christmas Bells (1915): 18-19.
“Imperial Parliamentary Delegates Arrive in the City.” Evening Telegram (1 September 1925): 4.