Dark Folklore E-Book

Mark Norman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 252

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

How did our ancestors use the concept of demons to explain sleep paralysis? Is that carving in the porch of your local church really what you think it is? And what's that tapping noise on the roof of your car..? The fields of folklore have never been more popular – a recent resurgence of interest in traditional beliefs and customs, coupled with morbid curiosities in folk horror, historic witchcraft cases and our superstitious past, have led to an intersection of ideas that is driving people to seek out more information. Tracey Norman (author of the acclaimed play WITCH) and Mark Norman (creator of The Folklore Podcast) lead you on an exploration of those more salubrious facets of our past, highlighting those aspects of our cultural beliefs and social history that are less 'wicker basket' and more 'Wicker Man'.

Leseprobe

For our wonderful illustrators, Tiina and Kathryn, without whose talent and generosity this book would look far less beautiful.

Text: Mark Norman and Tracey Norman

Illustrations: Kathryn Avent and Tiina Lilja

First published 2021

This paperback edition published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Mark Norman and Tracey Norman, 2021, 2023

The right of Mark Norman and Tracey Norman to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75099 832 1

Typesetting and origination by Typo•glyphix

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

About the Authors

1    The Old Hag: Folklore and Sleep Paralysis

2    Blurring the Lines: The Dark Church

3    Folk Ghosts

4    Urban Legends: The Darker Side of Storytelling

5    Dark Tourism and Legend Tripping

INTRODUCTION

Most of us love a creepy story. Even if we aren’t fans of horror films or literature, there is something about a chilling tale that resonates with us. It can be fun to be a little on edge if it happens in a safe environment.

Look into our history and heritage and there is a rich vein of such stories. Folklore is full of tales of monsters, ghosts and demons. In more superstitious times, before the advent of scientific and medical knowledge that helps us to understand the world, these creatures were seen as responsible for much of what happened to us as a species. The opening chapter of the book demonstrates this clearly.

The internet is full of stories. The digital age has made it easy for people to tell them and pass them on, and they often become embedded in our culture, as you will see in Chapter 4, which examines urban legends. There are many websites talking about those ghosts and hauntings that inspired scary movies or books. Lots of podcasts retell these tales around the virtual campfire.

But what of the historical and social study of these things? Although there are many good books that mention lots of darker tales, there are surprisingly few that offer a more thorough examination of the folklore that informs them. Our reasoning for writing this book was to redress this balance. From ghosts in ancient Greece in Chapter 3 we span the centuries, coming up to date in the twenty-first century with online legends in Chapter 4 and looking at the intersection between our folklore and modern tourism in Chapter 5.

We hope you enjoy this in-depth look into the darker parts of our folkloric past.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Tracey Norman is an historian and author. She is the researcher for ‘The Folklore Podcast’ and writes regular folklore and history columns for The Moorlander newspaper. Her stage play, WITCH (2016) has been used as Theatre in Education for Years 8 and 9 and Exeter University undergrads and has been included as a formal seminar in two Bristol University undergrad degree courses. Its seventy-fifth performance was also its London premiere. She writes in several genres and is currently working on a supernatural mystery, a non-fiction based on her play, and a fantasy novel.

Mark Norman is a folklore author and researcher, and the creator and host of ‘The Folklore Podcast’, which can be found online at www.thefolklorepodcast.com. He has previously written Telling the Bees and Other Customs: The Folklore of Rural Craft for The History Press as well as other publications on spectral black dogs and fairy lore. Mark is a council member of the Folklore Society and is currently developing a long-term project to bring together a library and archive of folklore materials for future researchers. The Folklore Library & Archive can be found at www.folklorelibrary.com.

Tracey and Mark live in Devon, in the south-west of the UK, with their teenage daughter, a trip-hazard cat and some rescue chickens.

ILLUSTRATORS

Tiina Lilja is a Finnish-born visual artist, who is currently living and working in North Devon with her husband and a rescue Alsatian called Shut Up Rusty.

Kathryn Avent is an illustrator from Victoria, Australia. She has a passion for fine-line illustrations with an emphasis on the weird, wonderful and unseen. Drawing inspiration from folklore, fantasy and fairy tales, as well as natural flora and fauna, Kathryn can often be found in the forest looking for stories to draw, flowers to press and treasures to unearth.

Nightmare: Stipple engraving by J.P. Simon, 1810. (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0)

1

THE OLD HAG: FOLKLORE AND SLEEP PARALYSIS

A few years ago, I started having a very strange experience on some nights, waking up during sleep but not feeling awake, could not move and breathed with difficulty. At first, I thought it was a dream, a nightmare in the case, but things started to get worse, became more frequent, even during napping in the school classroom (I was never a very applied student). I went through this situation. It started to scare me. I searched the internet. I visited a doctor; he told me that it was possibly an effect of the combination of stress and deregulated sleep. I worked hard to improve my sleep, started sleeping earlier, regularly, and over time the frequency of ‘sleep paralysis’ was decreased.1

Those words came from one of the listeners to my online folklore programme, ‘The Folklore Podcast’, in response to a request for information from anyone who had first-hand experience of sleep paralysis.

The medical condition of sleep paralysis is not as unusual as you might think, with statistics suggesting that 8 per cent of the general population have suffered an episode.2 It occurs as an individual is either entering or leaving the stage of sleep known as REM (or rapid eye movement) and physically presents as an inability to move the limbs, head and torso. In many cases, this may be accompanied by hallucinatory aspects that lead both to fear and a feeling of suffocation or pressure on the chest. Although we understand the medical reasons for the sleep paralysis state now, it has culturally been widely attributed to more superstitious origins, such as visits from demons and other evil spirits in the night, because of these seemingly very real visions.

In the example quoted at the beginning of this chapter, a sufferer describes the physical stage of the condition without touching on any illusory aspects. Even in medical circles, sleep paralysis is often referred to as ‘old hag syndrome’ because it is common for the hallucinations to take the form of a stereotypical hag as well as the other demonic forms. The imagined creature may appear to sit on your chest and be responsible for the breathing problems. It is this aspect of old hag syndrome that first caused it to enter into folklore and superstition, over the centuries, in similar ways around the world. As we shall see, however, as with most folklore it has developed and adapted over time through association with shifting cultural patterns and the like.

Professor Owen Davies notes that accounts and discussion of sleep paralysis may be found in both European and Chinese writings over the last two millennia, so the experience is far from new.3 Many sources, including Davies, suggest that the earliest reference to what we now call sleep paralysis may be found around 400 BC in a Chinese book of dreams. This is, however, a little more speculative than it may first appear.

The book in question, Zhou Li / Chun Guan, emerged in the pre-Chin period and it noted that the government at that time had set up imperial staff who acted as official dream interpreters. Dreams were placed into six categories, one of which was named ‘E-meng’. This translates as ‘dreams of surprise’. While there is no direct evidence that this category represents sleep paralysis per se, many writers consider that it is similar, with another category, ‘Ju-meng’ (‘fearful dreams’) symbolising nightmares.4

A few centuries later, during the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 30–124) the Chinese written character ‘yan’ appeared in the first Chinese dictionary, Shuo Wen Chieh Tzu. This combined the two individual characters for ‘ghost’ and ‘oppression’ and is generally taken to mean something along the lines of ‘being oppressed by ghost at night and paralysed’.5

In less enlightened times it was natural for people to draw on the more supernatural and superstitious beliefs of their culture to explain both the things happening around them and those happening to them that they did not understand. This is certainly true of medical conditions before modern treatments and cures began to be discovered and goes some way, for example, to explain the proliferation of folk medicine, charms and spells recorded around the world.

For a person afflicted by sleep paralysis, the experience would naturally be an extremely frightening one. The pressure on the chest may come from breathing difficulties or choking, and so in very early Greek accounts, the phenomenon was known as ‘throttling’ or ‘the throttle’. The earliest recorded case of what is recognisably sleep paralysis is disputed. It has been claimed that the Greek physician, Themison of Laodicea, writing in the first century BC, has the first reference. However, although he refers to the concept of throttling in some letters of the time, there is no clear description of a full case of sleep paralysis.

More likely to have recorded the first true case is seventh-century Byzantine physician Paulus Aeginita. In Section XV of his writings, which examines ‘Incubus, or Nightmare’ (which we will look at in more detail shortly), he says:

It attacks persons after a surfeit, and who are labouring under protracted indigestion. Persons suffering an attack experience incapacity of motion, a torpid sensation in their sleep, a sense of suffocation, and oppression, as if from one pressing down, with inability to cry out, or they utter inarticulate sounds. Some imagine often that they even hear the person who is going to press them down, that he offers lustful violence to them, but flies when they attempt to grasp him with their fingers.6

We certainly find all the common attributes of the state of sleep paralysis in this description, even if medicine has since learned that it is not connected with issues of digestion (although we will pause and look at cheese later!).

Extensive early writings on the phenomenon may also be found in a chapter among the many hundreds that make up the three Persian manuscripts named Hidayat, written by the physician Al-Akhawayni Bukhawi. Drawn up in the tenth century, during what was known as the Golden Age of Islamic Medicine, Bukhawi wrote on the subject prior to a description of the condition and treatment of epilepsy.

Often the experience that a person goes through during an episode of sleep paralysis will be accompanied by hypnopompic hallucinations (i.e., those when waking from sleep) or hypnogogic ones (hallucinations experienced when falling asleep), depending on the time at which the sleeper suffers the attack.

The first detailed case study of the condition is probably one published in Latin in a 1664 collection by Dutch physician Isbrand van Diemerbroeck. These works were translated into English in 1689 by William Salmon, a doctor and collector of books. He gave the translation the title Practical Disputations of Isbrand de Diemerbroeck. Case History XI was called ‘Of the Night-Mare’ and reads as follows:

A woman of fifty years of age, in good plight, fleshy, strong and plethoric, sometimes troubled with a headache, and catarrhs falling upon her breast in the winter; the last winter, molested with no catarrhs, but a very sore in the daytime, but in the night time, when she was composing her self to sleep, sometimes she believed the devil lay upon her and held her down, sometimes that she was choaked by a great dog or thief lying upon her breast, so that she could hardly speak or breath, and when she endeavoured to throw off the burthen, she was not able to stir her members. And while she was in that strife, sometimes with great difficulty she awoke of her self, sometimes her husband hearing her make a doleful inarticular voice, waked her himself; at what time she was forced to sit up in bed to fetch her breath; sometimes the same fit returned twice in a night upon her going again to rest.7

He continued to make an interesting diagnosis of the condition:

This affection is called Incubus or the Night‐Mare, which is an Intercepting of the Motion of the Voice and Respiration, with a false dream of something lying ponderous upon the Breast, the free Influx of the Spirits to the Nerves being obstructed. He thought that due to over‐redundancy of blood in the whole body … the Motion of the Muscles fail … Now, because the motion of the Muscles, for the most part ceases in time of sleep, except the Respiratory Muscles, therefore the failing of their Motion is first perceived, by reason of the extraordinary trouble that arises for want of Respiration. Now the Patient in her sleep growing sensible of that Streightness, but not understanding the cause in that Condition, believes her self to be overlay’d by some Demon, Thief, or other ponderous Body, being neither able to move her Breast, nor to Breath. The experiences can return the same night: … that if she fall asleep agin, especially if she lye upon her Back, the same Evil returns …8

The last statement is an interesting one because modern medicine seems to corroborate this idea.

We now have a good understanding of the symptoms. Sleep paralysis is caused when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is disturbed. Because the body’s central nervous system is active at this time, visual and auditory senses are enabled, but because the brain blocks muscle activity during this part of the sleep cycle to prevent injury during dreaming, paralysis is still experienced in the waking state. The sequence of events and resulting hallucinations may come about in the following way.

At the base of the brain lie two almond-shaped clusters of cells called the amygdala. Their name derives from the Latin and translates as ‘almond’. Part of the limbic system, this is the area where our emotions are activated and given meaning. Episodes of sleep paralysis could be triggered by an overactive or misfiring amygdala. Something perceived as a ‘threat’ is triggered subconsciously and so you wake up as part of the natural fight or flight response, but your body is in the wrong sleep cycle and hence you can’t move. Your brain cannot accept the paradoxical situation where a threat state has been triggered by the amygdala for no reason, so it generates a hallucinatory one that is probably going to draw either on cultural tropes (witches or demons), an innate fear (maybe spiders or bugs) or an image from something you read recently or a film you watched (such as an alien who may abduct you).

A fourth alternative may be something more random. For example, some people have reported hypnogogic hallucinations of abstract or geometric shapes and one witness recently recorded sleep paralysis events with a hallucination of lines that became tangled – in one case, with numbers appearing on the lines.

To the Chinese (and to many indigenous peoples), spirits are intrinsically linked with the dream state. By way of example, we may consider an obscure case recorded within the Inuit community. The case centres around that of a 30-year-old Inuit woman who sought help from the Counselling Office of Anchorage Community College. She spoke of how she had suffered from a sleep disorder since she was a young child but had not seen a doctor until she was 18. The woman describes a typical incident in her case notes:

Just before going to sleep and waking up, I get paralysed. Sometimes it starts with a buzzing. Sometimes I can almost see something and it scares me. My grandparents told me it was a soul trying to take possession of me, and to fight it.

After the buzzing sound I can’t move. Sometimes I really start feeling like I am not in my body anymore, like I am outside of my body and fighting to get back. If I don’t get back now I never will. I really get panicky. It takes me a long time to move sometimes, like forever. I feel like if I don’t get back into my body that I am going to die. That is the first thing that I think of. I finally wake up and move and my heart is just pounding, and I am shaken up and frightened.9

Unfortunately, the source for this account does not give any details as to when it took place. We know that it must have happened after 1924 because the doctors, who appeared baffled when told that lots of natives had similar experiences, gave the woman an EEG (electroencephalogram) test before administering Valium and other tranquillisers – the EEG was invented in 1924. It was the doctor who saw the test results who eventually suggested sleep paralysis.

In this case, it appears that the feelings of distress or fear do not come from any hallucination of a spirit or entity, but rather from concern over being trapped in the spirit world. Other native Alaskans who were interviewed about their personal experiences reported similar things.

It is the relationship between the human world and the spirits within Inuit belief that seems to account for the fear in these cases. Native beliefs in Alaska say that one is more susceptible to influence from the spirit realm during sleep, or when entering or leaving that state. While sleeping, the soul is more likely to leave the body because of the chance of outside influence. Paralysis is therefore thought to signify the loss of the soul, with death following if it cannot find its way back and restore movement.

An alternative explanation (for there is generally more than one within folklore) is one of spirit possession, where the paralysis is caused by the entity taking control of the physical body. This is perhaps closer to the Chinese concept of ghost oppression. The Chinese would usually employ the services of a spiritualist when trying to treat the symptoms associated with sleep paralysis. Other cultures took a more medicine-based approach. Greek doctors in early times, for example, would treat the problems with a special diet. We might remember that they believed the condition to be linked to digestive issues. They would also use phlebotomy – what we might more commonly know from the Middle Ages as bloodletting.

In medieval Europe, because of the teachings of the Church, most things that were not seen as good were caused by some form of demonic intervention and so naturally this became the case for the effects of sleep paralysis and its associated hallucinations. Although much more of a patriarchal society in that period, medieval folklore delivers on gender equality from time to time and thus we have the demon in female form preying on sleeping men as well as the reverse – sometimes physically, and sometimes in their dreams.

In the female form, the demon is the succubus, and the name derives from the Old Latin, meaning ‘to lie under’. Sub (meaning ‘under’) and cubare (the verb ‘to lie’) become succubare and then succubus, which is also the Medieval Latin term for a prostitute and subsequently applied to the sexual aspects of a demonic visit in the night.

In modern times we tend to use the word nightmare to refer to any particularly bad dream. It may wake us with a start, or in a cold sweat, but by the morning it may be mostly forgotten. The roots of the term nightmare, however, refer to something rather worse. Proto-Indo-European etymology gives us ‘mor’ (a malicious female spirit) and ‘mer’, the verb ‘to die’. This developed all over Europe into ‘mare’ (for example, in Old and Middle English and Scottish) and ‘mara’ (from the Old Norse, across Iceland, Scandinavia and into Germanic and Old Saxon language). In Croatia, the term for sleep paralysis is ‘Mora’, which again comes from similar linguistic roots.

Mara may also be seen to derive from the verb ‘merran’, meaning ‘crusher’. Certainly, this linguistic root taken alongside those above describes the attributes of a creature sitting on the chest of one sleeping at night and causing them to be paralysed. While not strictly demonic in the ways later described by the Christianised Church version, the Norse mara is therefore a magical creature that rides its victim for nefarious pleasure.

Grendel, one of three monsters in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, is referred to twice using the term ‘maere’. This makes good sense in the context of the creature’s preferred method of attacking men while they sleep, who it crushes and tears apart. Before Beowulf faces Grendel, it is explained that others have been beaten because they were unable to stay awake during the night:

what sudden harryings. Hall-folk fail me,

my warriors wane; for Wyrd hath swept them

into Grendel’s grasp. But God is able

this deadly foe from his deeds to turn!

Boasted full oft, as my beer they drank,

earls o’er the ale-cup, armed men,

that they would bide in the beer-hall here,

Grendel’s attack with terror of blades.

Then was this mead-house at morning tide

dyed with gore, when the daylight broke,

all the boards of the benches blood-besprinkled,

gory the hall: I had heroes the less,

doughty dear-ones that death had reft.10

Grendel is described elsewhere in the poem as being a descendant of Cain, an important point to which we will return in a moment.

The Latin term for the nightmare is ‘incubo’ and it is from this root that we see the development of the incubus in medieval superstition. The incubus was said to be a male demon who would lie with sleeping women and have intercourse with them. They were able to father children, an aspect that was undoubtedly used to explain illegitimate or unwanted pregnancies. The half-demon child of a woman and an incubus was known as a ‘cambion’. Merlin, the sorcerer of King Arthur’s legendary court, was said to have been the result of an incubus sleeping with his mother. This was the way in which he obtained his magical skills.

In both cases, the incubus and succubus were used to explain the symptoms of sleep paralysis and night terrors because the demon would sit on the victim’s chest, pinning them down so they couldn’t move and hampering their breathing. There are some suggestions also that these creatures were associated with less savoury experiences such as sexual dreams, night-time sexual attacks or advances by trusted people such as relatives or members of the Church.

Records suggest that women were attacked by incubi far more than men were by succubi and hence legends say that there was only one succubus to every nine incubi. Of course, this may be because the method of impregnation requires the incubus to work harder in the manner of a worker bee. The Malleus Maleficarum tells how the succubus would collect semen from the male victim, which the incubus would then take around to impregnate human women. This was how demons, traditionally impotent, were said to be able to reproduce and father children as noted above.

King James, who wrote extensively on witches, demons and more in his tract Daemonologie, had slightly differing views. He agreed that angels and demons as entities were incapable of reproduction, but then his suggestion was that the devil would intervene and use one of two methods to put seed into the human female. This would either be demonic intervention or possession.

Title page of Daemonologie, by King James I. (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0)

In the former case, King James postulated that the incubus and succubus were actually the same entity – two sides of the same demonic coin – transporting semen and impregnating the victim and essentially appearing differently in each stage of the process. In the latter case, the devil would actually enter a dead male body and cause it to rise by possession. In this state, the corpse may be found to be able to engage in intercourse with the living female. What James does not seem to suggest, however, is that this worked in reverse as an explanation for cases where a female entity engaged in unwanted relations with a male victim.

We may find parallels to the succubus as a demon who offers temptation to men in other cultures. In Islamic traditions this creature is called the ‘Qarinah’ and in old Middle Eastern superstitions it is known as ‘Lilith’, a name that is used for a seductress in some versions of the Bible. The Qarinah, according to Arabian mythology, is generally said to be invisible to anyone who does not have the gift of second sight. In those cases where it can be seen, the Qarinah will appear in animal form, usually as a cat or dog, or some other domestic pet. This would suggest links to the Islamic supernatural beings often called the jinn, who are described as appearing in three forms, one of which is zoomorphic.

In Biblical terms Lilith was, according to Jewish mythology, Adam’s first wife. Prior to Eve, who the Book of Genesis tells us was fashioned by God from one of Adam’s ribs, Lilith was created at the same time, and from the same clay, as him. Lilith and Adam, however, argued because Lilith refused to be subservient and to lie under Adam, insisting that they should be equal. She said (in what can be seen as a direct parallel with the succubus lore) that she would rather lie on top. After Adam said that this could not be the case, Lilith left the Garden of Eden. Adam told God that his wife had left, leading to God fashioning the replacement Eve with help from Adam.

Later, on returning to the Garden, Lilith discovers that she has been replaced by Eve. Mystical literature written by early Jews says that she torments Adam in his sleep, but prior to this she attacks the couple’s firstborn son, Cain (in the manner of a succubus in its medieval Latin translation). As a result of this, she bears a number of demons and spirits.11 You will recall that the cannibalistic Grendel was described in Beowulf as being a descendant of Cain.

We can see that many cultures and traditions use the image of the ‘mare’ or demon in order to bring understanding to a condition about which nothing would have been known medically. And this is one of the aspects of folklore generally that should be of great interest to us. Why do we find similar motifs employed in so many different countries and cultures and how do they travel?

One answer to this question may follow the ideas of Jungian psychology. The concept suggests that we all carry some form of collective subconscious upon which we may draw when we decode symbols around us. It may have been developed throughout the evolution of our species and can be considered to be a kind of folk memory. Our brain may make use of this independently of our commonplace normal thinking or at times when we are not engaged in wakeful thought.

Another theory that has been proposed to explain why we see similarities in different supernatural experiences is known as the ‘cultural source hypothesis’. This idea suggests that the stories and traditions in a particular culture may shape the ideas that people from that culture have about the world in general and hence their experiences within it. Where this hypothesis is somewhat limiting is in the fact that it only works for one distinct culture at a time.

In his book on sleep paralysis, The Terror that Comes in the Night, University of Pennsylvania Professor David Hufford proposes an alternative theory that he calls the ‘experiential source hypothesis’. Here, Hufford suggests that some elements of supernatural events are, in fact, universal and not related to culture at all. Similarly, anthropologist Michael Winkelman believes that humans are hardwired to see spirits genetically. He calls this concept ‘neurotheology’ and discusses it with particular reference to shamans but extends the idea to us generally as a species.12 The idea of neurotheology doesn’t take as its premise the idea that spirits are real, but rather that the experiences that people have with them are authentic.

One country that does have a long tradition of ghost belief and a complex structure of ghost-types, which they call the Yōkai, is Japan. ‘Yōkai’ is a general term for the wide variety of ghosts and other supernatural beings that we find in this country. They appear in many old myths and legends but also, because of their proliferation, we find that in different stories they are quite often contradictory in their nature. Such is the way with folklore!

The Japanese have their own term for sleep paralysis: Kanashibari. The English translation of this is ‘bound in metal’, referring obviously to the inability to move the body during a paralysis episode. Stories of Kanashibari can be traced back to ancient times and are equated with a supernatural force entering the body itself. Different legends highlight differing causes, but the most common type is one of possession. In these cases, the body is invaded by any one of several forms of tsukimono, the Japanese term for animal spirits.

In some of the Japanese folk tales, Kanashibari can be caused not by animals or ghosts, but by magicians or priests. Even in modern times, there can sometimes be a religious connection to the experience. For example, in one case recorded in 1987, a witness said, ‘I suddenly woke up from sleep and found that I couldn’t move a bit. I couldn’t speak either. I saw a figure, which resembled a Buddhist image, on my stomach. I was very frightened.’13

Another Yōkai that is equated with Kanashibari