My Grandmother Called It the Old Hag, and Now It Visits Me

My grandmother kept a pair of open scissors under her mattress and a line of salt on her windowsill, and when I was a girl I thought it was just one of her country things, like the way she would not let you hand her a knife point first. She called the thing the scissors were for the Old Hag. She said it came in the night and sat on your chest and stole your breath, and that it hated iron and could not cross salt, and that if you woke and could not move it was because the Hag was riding you.

I loved her but I was a modern child and I filed it under superstition, next to the horseshoe over the barn door.

She has been gone eleven years. I inherited a few of her things. Not the scissors. I did not even remember the scissors until the visits started.

The first one, I was thirty two and had never had a moment of trouble sleeping in my life. I woke in the dark and could not move. Simple as that and total. My body was not mine. And there was a weight settling onto my chest, gathering, the way a cat gathers itself before it steps up onto you, except heavier, so much heavier, a compressing weight that pressed the air out of me and would not let more in. I lay there suffocating slowly under something I could not see and could not throw off, and every muscle in me screamed to buck it away and no muscle answered.

I thought I was dying. I genuinely thought, this is a heart attack, this is how it feels, and I am alone and I cannot even reach the phone.

It let go all at once and I sat up heaving and the room was empty and the clock said four. I went to a doctor. Heart was fine. Everything was fine. The word she used was sleep paralysis, and she explained it kindly, the REM sleep, the muscles switched off, the mind waking early into the gap, the very common sensation of a crushing weight on the chest that people across every culture have reported since the beginning of records. She even used the phrase old folklore called it a hag or a demon. I did not tell her that was my grandmother she was quoting.

It came back. Not every night. But often enough that I learned its rhythm, the settling weight, the stolen breath, the pinned helplessness in the dark. And each time, lying there unable to move, I thought of Grandma and her salt and her open scissors, and I felt like the stupidest woman alive, because I had laughed, and here I was.

So one afternoon, feeling ridiculous, I bought table salt and I laid a line of it along my windowsill. And I found an old pair of sewing scissors and I opened them into a cross and I slid them under my side of the mattress, and I said out loud to my empty bedroom, sorry, Grandma, and I felt like I was six years old again.

I want to tell you it stopped. It did not stop, not entirely. But it changed.

Now when I wake frozen, and the weight comes, it comes to the foot of the bed and no farther. It gathers there, at the end, where the salt line runs along the sill above it, and I feel it want to climb up onto my chest the way it used to, and I feel it not be able to. It presses at the edge of something I cannot see, the way you press a palm against glass. And after a while, breathing hard through a chest that is mine again, I feel it withdraw.

I have not moved the scissors. I refill the salt whenever I dust. My husband thinks it is a charming eccentricity I picked up from my grandmother, and I let him think that, because the alternative is telling him that I laughed at an old woman my whole childhood and she was right, she was right about the weight and the breath and the way it waits, and the only thing she was wrong about was believing I would be smart enough to listen before it found my window too.