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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/fella_that_is_orange on 2024-09-14 08:34:40+00:00.

Hey everyone. I’m having maybe a medical emergency and thought I’d use this forum as a way to ask about it. It’s a long and strange story so I’ll jump right in.

I’ve had sleep paralysis since I was twelve. My mum believes it started as a puberty thing but it’s been eight years and at least three times a week I get locked in my own body, unable to move or talk, only able to breathe and occasionally open my eyes. 

At first that was the most of it, just waking up in the night, stuck staring at the ceiling or at a wall, scared but very relieved when it was over. After a year or so I then began getting the waking nightmares other people get. To start with it was just noises, indiscernible voices, loud bangs from inside my skull and the occasional shout from a person not there. Couple months after it began I would start trying to pry my eyes open. It was hard but whenever I could manage to open them I saw bizarre hallucinations. They were always black smears or blobs drifting in and out of view, sometimes they would stop and just remain still. Whenever that happened I clenched my eyes shut, there’s something haunting about a shapeless entity observing you as you watch it. I know it wasn’t real but the fact it can move and chooses not to, scared the shit out of me, even if it was just a blurry circle.

I’ve done my fair share of research on sleep paralysis and my case is a severe one but still common enough version of it. The more I looked into it, the more fear I got waiting for the future. A big one I was scared of was hearing footsteps walk right up to you. The idea of that happening to me drove me insane for a while and then one night when I was fourteen it happened. I awake from a nightmare, some bizarre dream about a murderous clown I think, I was locked in my body as per usual. Then I heard a strange series of noises. First a creaking door, followed by a slam, whisperings that I couldn’t comprehend and then.

Clomp, clomp, clomp. Three heavy footfalls right beside my bed. The whisperings are partially discernible but still nonsense.

“Maybe we should see the monkeys, go to the ground floor.” 

It was driving me mad, line after line just like that but instead of all around me, right in front of my face, inches away from me. It had to be real, it had to be some drunken, meth head, freak looming over me, trying to get my attention.

“He broke the vase, I tried to keep it upright.”

I fought my eyelids, I forced them open as the bright light of the day made its way through the window into my sensitive eyes and as they finally cracked open fully. Nothing. Dead silence, and a vague blur hovering just in view. Relief filled my body but so did dread. Once one new symptom starts it tends to become commonplace, so from that moment on, every other night I had to deal with something walking up to me and whispering insanity into my ears.

Another symptom I dreaded every time I read about it was the hat man. Apparently nearly every single person who regularly gets sleep paralysis would see a shadowy figure wearing a hat. Noone can definitively say what kind of hat he wears but they usually lurk just within view. Every time I read that when I was young I would feel sick. I can handle the blurry shapes, even when they stop to look at me but a full man just waiting for the time to pass in the corner of my eye was sickening.

But the truth was, when I finally got that symptom, it was hilarious. The first time it happened I was eighteen. I was having another episode where there was something walking up to me. Once again I pried my eyes open, only this time the voices continued but they moved rapidly over to where a huge congregation of blobs had formed in the vague shape of a man, in the corner of my eye. At first I wanted to scream, a man was in my room and was whispering nonsense. 

“Bring out your rake, he’s nearly ready.”

Then I had this overwhelming urge to check his hat. Everyone talks about his hat so I wanted to finally get to the bottom of what it was. Low and behold, a fedora, it had to be. The short brim, divot on top, mixed with the vague outline of a trench coat, it was a blurry man trying to look like a detective, or maybe a redditor. The idea made me snap out of sleep paralysis immediately and laugh my guts up until I cried. This guy? I thought. This guy is the thing everyone is scared of, a rambling idiot in a shitty cosplay. 

There is only one thing scary about him, is he real? I know that’s a bizarre question but, everyone seems to see him and he is always wearing a hat, so is he real? Or is he a visual ingrained in our minds, an evolutionary fear. If that’s the case, why do our minds give him a hat? It’s always bothered me a bit.

The final symptom I got later was the weight on my chest. Apparently a lot of people get a heavy hallucinatory feeling on their chest when they’re in sleep paralysis. They get a sensation of a little creature resting on them and holding them down. Often this is accompanied by a shortness of breath or the inability to breathe. I never got it until a year ago.

At nineteen my mum wanted me to move out, she was a very traditional parent. Once you’re eighteen, out of the house, live on your own. I managed to hold onto an extra year but then my mum buckled down, made us look for some housing.

“You’re gonna be 50 and still living with us Bailey, harden up and move out.” She would tell me. 

I always found it insane, she acted like living with a nineteen year old was like looking after a middle-aged man. Besides, she never taught me how to look for a house, get a loan, find places to rent, nothing. I was on my own working it all out and she would occasionally shoot me with an address or an affordable place to rent or buy. I would attempt to look into it but I always got confused or embarrassed while enquiring so I didn’t get far on my own. Mum then received an offer. 

Mum is a manager at a local grocery store, a small chain but nothing major. The owner of the whole chain comes in from time to time to check in with each individual store. Her name is Pauline, she’s around seventy and she was so incredibly kind, all the time. She always listened to my mum’s long winded, goes nowhere stories and even gave her paid leave once when mum fell ill.

Anyway, Pauline came into the store and my mum went on her usual rambles but this time she brings up me needing a home. Pauline apparently lit up like crazy and was almost begging my mum to move me into the house neighbouring her’s.

See, Pauline owned nearly her whole street, she bought it out years ago. She rented the houses out for cheap to families in need of easy accommodation and claimed to have even sold a few off well below market value. The house next to Pauline’s has been vacant for a while, she told my mum. About four years or so is what she said so she’d happily let me rent it for an insanely cheap amount just so she was making some kind of money from it. So that’s where I moved in.

The first day I moved in I got to meet Pauline myself. She was short but held herself well, white curly hair and even a small grandma moustache on her upper lip. She helped me tidy the place of dust, which shockingly wasn’t much, so I asked her.

“I thought this place had been empty for a while?”

Pauline nodded, “Yes, a couple months now, didn’t have the time to dust everyday so it built up a little, sorry.”

I got quite confused, that wasn’t what mum said, I was sure of it. After a small period of awkward silence as we scrubbed old grit from the oven I stopped and looked at her.

“A couple months?” She nodded again, her face seemed cold. “Mum said it was four years.”

Pauline stopped for a moment, like she was caught off guard and then chuckled, “Oh my bad sweetheart, that must have made me sound like quite the liar!” She slapped her hand on my shoulder and chuckled a little more, “Your mum must have misunderstood. What I meant was, I can’t keep someone in this house for a long period of time, they usually move out after six months or so, some don’t even last a full month.”

She was still chuckling to herself which made me feel uneasy, it wasn’t really a funny misunderstanding, just a simple mistake but she laughed so awkwardly, like she was laughing out of courtesy at a bad joke. I turned back to the oven and started scraping away. I wondered why people couldn’t stay long. The house was nice, well kept, fairly large and even still had a decent amount of furniture. I dragged my head from the oven and got her attention by tugging on her dress like a five year old.

“Why don’t people stay?” I asked as I stood to my feet and dusted my knees off.

Pauline let out a little sigh and then tossed her rag into the sink, “I should have told you from the beginning.”

She walked out and waved a hand for me to follow. She took me to the bathroom and then pulled the door of the shower open and pointed to the drain. “There’s something wrong with the plumbing, I’ve had people come to look at it but it can never seem to be fixed. A rancid smell occasionally lifts up through this pipe and a few folks have claimed they saw fatty hunks rise from it, their best guess was the sewers are backing up into the house’s plumbing, I don’t know how it works so I just took their word for it,” she looked to me with a worried smile, “sorry I didn’t tell you, that’s not fair on you.”

I told her it was alright and then I stuck my head in to look closer at the d…

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