What is the Old Hag nationality ?

I’m very surprised by the number of people talking about the Old Hag. We don’t have this belief in France, and I had to come on this forum to heard about this legend.
The “sleep paralysis” trouble seems to be the source of many superstitions, which seems to differ according to the country. For instance, in UK, they have the Black Shuck, or Old Shuck, a large black spectral dog, and a lot of people experiencing SP are attacked by it. In USA, thousands of people believe they have been abducted by ET’s, etc.
In France, we don’t have such a specific legend :sad: , except for incubus and succubus, which can also be found in many other countries… French sleep-paralyzed people generally believe they are attacked by demons or ghosts.

So, I’ve some questions : what is the Old Hag “nationality” ? :smile: Or, more clearly, if you have been told by your mom or friends about it, what is your country ?
And a second question : if you weren’t told about Old Hag, is there a specific legend related to sleep attacks in your country ?

In Norway, the word for “nightmare” is “mareritt”. In the beginning, that word was used for those dreams where you wake up exhausted, and can’t move, etc. It means you have been “ridden” by a “mare” which is supposed to be some kind of evil spirit. She is female in the legend.

In Estonian this thing is called “luupainaja”, what can be translated strictly as “bone obsessor” (or bone twister). It’s probably related with feeling of SP, where you cannot move your bones as someone is pressing you down, and hardening your breath.

If i remember correctly then Old Hag had English origns, but i might be wrong.

I’ve read somewhere that Old Hag origin was Canada and NewFoundLand, but I find it very questionable, as people there came from Europe. Or is it a mix between European and Indian legends ?

I like your legends very much. What a pity that we don’t have something like “mareritt” or “luupainaja” in France ! :sad:
As far I know, the Baltic countries (and Finland?) were the latest christianized zones in Europe ( near 1100 ? ) and that’s why they have preserved a lot of old legends.

in holland we have the ‘nachtmerrie’ that’s nightmare. I learned on a documentary that in the middle ages the nightmare was associated with demons attacking you in the night.
But before I saw that documentary i didn’t know that and the word ‘nachtmerrie’ had for me the meaning of bad dream.

interesting topic you have raised!

Bah, England is boring too. That dog thing you mentioned… never heard of it :wink:.

:eek: I’ve seen a homepage of a parapsychogist who collected apparitions of the black dog…

I can’t put the link, cause there is a forbidden word in it and the forum automatically changes it in *** :rofl:

…and in Harry Potter, there is this black dog, too. But I probably made a mistake : this parapsychologist had SP experiences in which he always saw a black dog. I misunderstood this, and believed that this black dog always appeared in dreams. In fact, it seems to be a sort of ghost, like the hitchhiking “White Lady”.

I never experience ‘the old hag’, but i have experiened a similar character when waking up in your bed while dremaing thing. It was actually the midget guy from jackass dressed up in the umpa lumpa constume from charlie and the chocalate factory, really strange shit, anyways i wasnt paralysed or anything, i was scared, got up a beat the shit outa the little focker,…do i need therapy?

I suppose it is not an old Swiss mythology… :tongue: Nevetherless, I notice there is a “chocolate factory” in your hypnagogic hallucinations : that’s typically Swiss ! LOL ! :grin:

Basilus: The Harry Potter refernce was what I was reminded of as well. Only, in HP it’s called a Grim, and I haven’t heard of that either… :tongue:

BooDha: Sounds like an FA. In fact, I’m sure it is.

Thanks for bringing up this great topic Basilus West! :happy:

I can’t recall any local legends about such a creature, but I’ve read somewhere about the Dweller on the Threshold who is most often seen during astral projection. I don’t know if it’s related to the Old Hag phenomenon, but it has some similar features:

A slightly more esoteric explanation:

About the Old Hag, apparently it goes all the way back to the Sumerians:

It goes probably back to the beginning of dreams… :happy:

About Lilith : she’s the source of the middle-age incubus/succubus legend, through the judaic mythology. In Sumerian texts, if I remember well, it was rather a demon of early children mortality. Later, (in the Talmud ?) it was told that she gives birth to little demons through the sexual relations she has with men in dreams.

Thank you for your information about the “Dweller on the Threshold” : I was just searching about it, but as I knew only the french translation, and didn’t know how to translate it back, I didn’t find anything. I didn’t know it came from the Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni. Great information ! :grin:

Dweller on the Threshold? Do they have to make this thing sound as scary as they possibly can? Yeah, so we’ve gotta get past this thing, but I’d feel alot better about it if it were called something like ‘Guy who gets in your Way’ over ‘Dweller on the Threshold’. ‘Dweller’ is a very scary word, as well as ‘Threshold’. They both hit chords in your mind that make you think of dark and scary things, at least for me anyway. ‘Dweller’ doesn’t make me thing of a jolly forest ‘dweller’ it makes me think of a dark, evil, shadow dweller! And ‘threshold’ doesn’t remind me of happy newlyweds, it makes me thing of ‘Death Grip’. ‘Thresh’ sounds like ‘flesh’ and flesh is a creepy word, and with the ‘thr’ instead of the ‘fl’ that makes it alot more scary, ‘T’ is alot scarier that ‘F’. ‘Thresh’ just say it, I promise you won’t think of good things. ‘Threshold’, I imagine the Grim Reaper’s cold hand pulling me down to Hell. Maybe I’m just crazy and pessimistic.

:rofl:

Hilarious reply and I totally agree :smile:

Maybe we should start the reformation now and rename the Old Hag/Dweller into : guy who gets in your Way :smile: It definately sparks a different reaction. And also the empowerment to actually defeat it like “hey! get out of my Way!” I like it :happy:

OK. I found what I searched on Internet at :
SP in Myth and Legend
I recommand you to read this article, it’s very interesting.

Thank you everybody for your help… especially Mystic, Siiw :cool: , Cyrus, Q, Sureal, BooDha and Dreammonger. :wink:

As nobody amongst the great number of Old Hag terrorized people replied about her origin, I suppose that they heard about her for the very first time on LD4all. That what I’ll said the next time I will be asked about this point : “Don’t worry, Old Hag is just an ol’ LD4all legend, it has never been heard about her somewhere else”. :puh: :gni:

More seriously : Old Hag is a NewFoundLand legend, and was called “Ar Rog”. I wonder what it means, and what language it could be ? It seems not to be gaelic… :confused:

Lol Basilus :happy:

I’ve put the old hag thing on LD4all after I heard about it in a documentary, and ppl mailed me about it as well, then i searched for more info, i only found one or two sites, so then i decided to put a little about it on LD4all.

Actually I thought it was something quite common and that i was the only one that heard it for the first time - so thanks for starting this thread and enlightenment :smile:

Great article!

I’ve been doing a little research on the net. This is what I found:

From archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/NF … 0959535323 :

The article from Firestone mentioned here (Firestone, M. (1985). The “Old Hag” sleep paralysis in Newfoundland. Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, 8, 47-66) seems worth searching for. I’ve looked in the databases (mainly Webspirs) available here for the local intranet users, and I’ve found similar papers, all about the folklore behind the Old Hag. However, there isn’t any PDF file of them available online, so I’ll have to search for them in the main library. I think I might do that after my last exam (Friday in a week) :smile:

About Ag Rog… According to www.shadowbeings-movie.com/The_Legend/a_synopsis.htm it’s the language of Newfoundland, and it means “Old Hag” :peek:
Well… at least I guess this is the case because it’s listed amongst other terms, each with the language between brackets and with the translation:

Interesting to see Djinns are also mentioned. So there’s a connection between those magical spirits in the lamp and the Old Hag experience. Also the Fomori are interesting: they were ancient Old Irish seagods who inhabited Ireland at the time of the five Great Invasions (according to ancient lore, Ireland was invaded by five different races; some of them fought hard wars with the Fomori). Amazing how all this mythology can develop into something like an Old Hag myth…

From ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publicatio … /chap8.txt I got this:

The language of Newfoundland - an English dialect - stems from the origins of its inhabitants, being Ireland and English West Country. The English West Country lies in the Southwest of the UK, going from Cornwall, Devonshire, up to Hampshire, Gloucestershire and even Wales.

So I’d say Ag Rog is West Country-based Newfoundland English :smile: Also, could “rog” be derived from “rogue”? An etymologist would know :wink:

I was rather surprised by the etymology they give for Incubus (Latin) and Cauchemar (French), so I made my own researches. :tongue:

About incubus, they’re wrong. The meaning is clearly sexual. Incubo means “to lie upon” and succubo means “to lie under”. For instance, succuba means “concubine”.

About “cauchemar”, which nowadays means “nightmare, bad dream”. The etymology is not clear. In old french, it’s “cauquemare” : my dictionnary says it comes from “cauquer” (old french word which means “to tramble”) and from the dutch “mare”, a night ghost, like in “nightmare”. The word “cauquemare” comes from the region of Picardy, North of Paris.

What is more interesting, I found the old meaning of this term. In the middle of 19th century, “cauchemar” corresponds to the exact definition of what we call now “sleep paralysis” : a sleep trouble in which one thinks to be suffocated by a ghost.

More and more interesting : in the 17th century and before, “cauquemare” was feminine. It’s no more a sleep trouble, it’s a female person. Rabelais talks about “old and ugly cauquemares”.

In the “Demonomania of Witches”, by Jean Bodin, in 1580, we can read : “In the countries of Valois and Picardy, there are a sort of witches they call cochemares, and indeed Nicolas Noblet, a rich ploughman living in Hautefontaine-en-Valois, told me that, when he was a young boy, he often feels during the night such incubi, or “ephialtes” :confused: , which he called cochemares; and the morning after it happens to him, the old witch he was afraid of always came in his house asking for fire or anything else.”

So, probably the meaning was the same for “nightmare”, and other similar European terms, and at the beginning, a “nightmare” or “cauchemar” was a witch. :content:

I know this stuff is old, two months old, but why is the “Old hag” such a popular discussion?