Imagine waking up in the middle of the night, feeling like someone or something is sitting on your chest, pressing you down into the bed. Your eyes are open, and you are fully aware of your surroundings, but you’re completely unable to move. You try to will your arms to push your body up and your legs to kick out, but nothing happens. You can’t see anyone, but you feel a chilling presence in the room with you. You’re not alone.
Numerous related traditions exist around the world. Newfoundland’s Old Hag, the Scandinavian Mare, and the Italian Pandafeche all include a supernatural being either sitting, standing, or pressing upon the sleeper. The Hmong people’s Dab Tsog is described as a crushing spirit that sits on the chest and takes the sleeper’s breath. The Turkish Ağırlık throws itself onto sleeping people and presses down with full force, preventing them from waking. While every culture has a name for this strange experience, in Hawai‘i, we simply call it the Pressing Ghost.
The sensations are not limited to being pressed into your bed. Sometimes the sleeper reports feelings of choking or strangulation. A choking ghost is said to grab or strangle a sleeping person, sometimes making it difficult to speak or breathe. With a pressing ghost, the person may feel as though someone is sitting on their chest or body, pushing them into the mattress, or simply holding them down with tremendous weight. While neither experience necessarily involves seeing the entity responsible, folklore often interprets the physical sensation as evidence that something has entered the room.
According to doctors and sleep researchers, there is a scientific explanation. Most attribute these sensations to sleep paralysis, a strange state in which the mind wakes before the body. During REM sleep, our brain temporarily prevents most bodily movement so we don’t physically act out our dreams. If consciousness returns before that paralysis has ended, the result can be a terrifying combination of awareness, immobility, and vivid physical or sensory experiences.
A person may be fully aware of the room around them but still be unable to move or speak. Some people also experience sounds of footsteps or breathing, figures moving in the dark, or the unmistakable feeling that someone, or something, is in the room. The most frightening sensations are pressure on the body, as though an unseen weight is holding the sleeper down, or the feeling of something choking or strangling them.
Sleep paralysis is not particularly rare. A systematic review of 35 studies involving more than 36,500 people found that an estimated 7.6 percent of the general population, roughly one person in 13, had experienced sleep paralysis at least once.
However, that does not mean every story of a ghost choking or pressing someone in bed can be explained as sleep paralysis. Some experiences do not fit the phenomenon, and the medical explanation cannot accurately establish what a person actually experienced. What it does show is that the sensations associated with sleep paralysis are remarkably vivid, and may explain why stories of beings that choke, sit upon, or press down sleeping people appear in so many different cultures.
Professor Loyd Auerbach, a parapsychologist and longtime investigator of paranormal experiences, takes a somewhat different approach from the strictly medical explanation. He recognizes that sleep paralysis can produce experiences of a presence, pressure, suffocation, and even the sensation that something is sitting on or pressing down on the body. At the same time, he does not believe that every experience reported as a ghost can simply be dismissed as sleep paralysis. Auerbach emphasizes that investigators should look at the details of each experience and distinguish between different types of phenomena rather than assuming a single explanation.
A few years ago, a Kaua‘i resident shared her experience with a pressing ghost in a cabin in Kōke‘e State Park.
“Before the lease auction in 2024,” she explained, “Our family used to camp in a little cabin in Kōke‘e almost every summer. We’d been going there for as long as I can remember, my parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle, my two cousins, my brother, and me. It was always a special time for us. There was no electricity or TV, but we were never bored. Camping by lanterns and flashlights was always fun for us kids.”
As an adult, her family chose not to pursue a new lease, so they got together one last time to relax and enjoy the outdoors in Kōke‘e together. While the cold air and dozens of hiking trails are invigorating and exciting, they’re also exhausting. After a long day of fun and exploration, the entire family finally laid down to sleep.
For some reason, the woman woke up in the middle of the night to the sensation of being watched. She can’t explain why, but the feeling she got was negative, unhappy, almost angry. Then suddenly, it felt like someone was sitting or lying on top of her, and she was unable to move. She couldn’t even turn her head, but as she moved her eyes around the room, she couldn’t see anyone. Shadows in the corners teased her as she thought some entity might be hiding there, just out of sight. She tried and tried to move her arms and legs, to sit up, but she felt paralyzed; trapped under the weight of some unseen force.
The more she struggled, the more terrified she became, and she swears she heard someone else in the room shuffling around in the dark. Tears began to stream down her face into her ears, and she wondered if she was having a stroke or some other medical episode. She closed her eyes and prayed frantically, all the while trying to move. Then suddenly, the feeling disappeared, and she sat straight up in the bed.
She woke her husband, who used his flashlight to investigate the house and the locks on the doors and windows, but she knew he wouldn’t find anything. She guesses that the entire ordeal probably lasted only a few minutes, but in that state, feeling like someone was deliberately pushing her down into her bed, it seemed much, much longer.
“My mother immediately said ‘pressing ghost.’ My husband thought I should go to the ER,” she said, “And Google said ‘sleep paralysis.’ But I just don’t know. The feeling was real. The feeling of someone or something’s anger was real. And my fear was real.”
The authors can be reached at hawaii.mysteries@gmail.com
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