True Story
Held Down Under Blankets by Some Unknown Force
One of the strangest, scariest moments ever encountered
Each morning, after waking up in my small apartment in Queens with my new baby sleeping peacefully in his crib beside me, I’d turn on the TV and watch The Jack LaLanne Show. It was my quiet time before the pressures of raising a child alone began. It was like any other day and started without incident.
Being an early riser, I would usually awaken while it was still slightly dark outside, but I could never get back to sleep once I was up for the day. With the TV on and comfortable in my warm bed, I lay there thinking of my upcoming tasks.
First, there was changing the baby, feeding him, and putting him in his playpen while I dressed myself. Usually a quick inventory of what was in the cabinets for our survival, setting up his stroller, then a trip to the grocery store with never enough money to buy what we needed.
This routine was relatively new to me, as I had worked in Manhattan for years before becoming pregnant and losing my husband. Being a young mother of 21, alone in a city far away from my parents and siblings, it was starting to wear on me. In addition to that, my beloved grandmother had died a few months earlier.
My mother’s mother, whom we called Mama, had been sick for a while, and I found too many excuses not to visit her. When my husband was with me, sometimes we would drive from Queens over to Brooklyn, where she lived, but we never seemed to have enough gas money to make the trip.
Though she was ailing, she was very independent, and it bothered me that I could not find the time to do more to help her. I always thought I’d get there the following week or so, but I never did.
Lots of loss
When my husband became involved with the wrong gang and got himself arrested, he was sent to jail for a few years, leaving me alone, pregnant, and without a car.
My grandmother died suddenly toward the end of my pregnancy, adding to my stress and guilt. My uncle from Long Island, one of Mama’s four children, picked me up for her funeral in New Jersey, as that’s where the rest of my family was living and where she would be buried.
I’ll always remember the way she felt when I kissed her cold, stiff face and how sick I made myself as I cried loudly and uncontrollably while I stood next to her open casket.
It was a long five days of watching my mother hold back tears, visiting the funeral home day after day, attending the final service, and watching as they interred Mama out of our lives forever.
I had never seen a dead person up close, much less the one person I loved most in the whole world, the one person I should have spent more time with. And now she was the one I could never say apologize to.
Back home
When I arrived back at my small apartment, I lay there at night, thinking and crying. Then one night, shortly after the funeral, there was a ball of light bouncing around my room. I thought maybe it was a car in the street below and ran to the window, but nothing was out there. It didn’t look like a flashlight, either.
It bothered me as I stared at the corner of the room, watching, then fell asleep with the covers slightly over my face. The next night and then another, the same thing occurred.
In a conversation over the phone with my mother, rather than shaking off the bouncing light incident, she told me the same thing was happening to my younger cousin, who was also very close to Mama.
Months passed, and the bouncing light stopped. I gave birth to my son and moved into a slightly larger apartment a few blocks away, also in Queens.
Alone still, I had a new life, a new routine, and a new son.
Another incident
This one morning, as I lay there watching, but never exercising with, Jack LaLanne on the TV, something or someone threw the blankets over my head and held me down. I screamed and tried to free myself, but I could not move.
Many thoughts went through my mind.
The lingerie shop I lived over was closed at the time, but there was a staircase in the hall from the street that stayed open all night.
Someone must have gotten into my locked apartment or come in through the skylight. That’s it — they must have come in through the skylight.
I continued to scream and struggle, fearing I would smother or worse, not be able to save my son.
Then, as suddenly as it began, whoever it was got off me and let go of the covers. As I threw them off, I saw the room was still quiet and slightly dark, the TV was still on, and I was alone except for my sleeping baby.
I jumped up and turned on the light in the kitchen, checked the door, which was still locked, and looked up at the skylight, which was high up in the ceiling. Even if someone was up on the roof, there was no way they could open a sealed skylight, drop down into my apartment, get back up through the skylight without a ladder, then close it and seal it shut.
Who was it?
It wasn’t as if I were dreaming and couldn’t get up, I was wide awake and could not push this person — or ghost — off of me!
So what just happened? Was that my grandmother again? Was she trying to tell me something? Was she unhappy with something I had done or not done? Is she remembering the times I could have tried harder to make the trip to Brooklyn but didn’t?
I didn’t know what to think and was shaken up for the rest of the day. This time, when I called my mother, she had nothing to say. She was as confused as I was.
Why would Mama scare me like that?
For years, that memory haunted me. There was no explanation for it. There was no physical evidence that someone was actually in my apartment, and there was no reason why my grandmother would do that to me.
A possible answer
Decades later, while taking a psychology course (one of the most enlightening courses I’ve ever taken for many reasons), I came across something about narcolepsy and sleep paralysis and being caught between the awake state and REM sleep where people are sometimes feeling they’re being attacked by what they believe is a “sleep paralysis demon.”
This state very often occurs when someone is stressed out and has a lot on their mind. Now it makes sense. That has to be the answer, as the circumstances fit. I was worried about money and getting the baby to the store safely, where my life was going, when my husband would come home, and probably dozed off without realizing it.
Fortunately, it was an isolated incident, but I had blamed my grandmother for decades — poor thing, as she lay peacefully in her coffin at rest, not bothering a soul, and there I was thinking she was trying to scare me.
Well, she was born on October 31 — Halloween! And she did love a good scare!
Here is more information on this very real phenomenon:
