by Rich Newman
In addition to having a resident spirit in my bedroom, two other events took place while I lived in Scott City, Missouri, that could be labeled as being paranormal. The first of these happened to be a recurring incident that investigators over the years have dubbed “getting hagged.”
Since ancient times, people have reported experiencing the feeling of waking up from their sleep during the night and being unable to move. In many countries, this condition is called “Old Hag Syndrome.” This is due to traditional folklore that tells of an old woman who would visit people during the night and sit upon their chest as they slept. According to these stories, this old woman was typically a demon who would use this opportunity to leech the life from her victims. It is this very legend that has spawned such creatures as succubae, incubi, and vampires. And it is the Old Hag who is said to ride her victims much like a “night mare”—a term that is still used today to describe a particularly nasty dream.
Prior to living in the haunted house in Scott City, I had never experienced this condition. But not long after moving in, I started being hagged on a regular basis—about once every other week.
It is a horrible affair—especially to children. I remember waking up, being unable to move, but aware of everything going on around me. I could hear the silence of the room (itself a powerful and heavy thing), feel the bed beneath me, and even smell familiar scents. But I could not move at all. This would have been bad enough, but the attack did not end with just that. Oh, no. There was more.
In addition to being paralyzed, there was also the overwhelming sensation of a presence being in the room with me. It did not specifically feel as if something was sitting on me, as the legend suggests, but in my mind I knew there was something in my bedroom with me. And it wasn’t pleasant.
What’s more, I could sense that it was moving, approaching the bed. This was when things got terrifying. I would try to cry out, but my voice would not cooperate. Eventually, if I was scared enough or the presence got too close, I would suddenly snap out of the ordeal. I would wake up with a jerk and sit up in the bed in a cold sweat.
After experiencing this very event many times, I soon began to dread going to sleep. It was bad enough that the closet door would eventually open by itself, but now I had to worry about some mysterious entity that paralyzed me in my bed at night! Back then I did not have the information that I have now about hagging; all I knew was that my room was a hall of terror when the lights went out.
These days, scientists have correlated Old Hag Syndrome with a medical condition called “sleep paralysis,” but paranormal investigators have learned (including me) that people who live in haunted locations seem particularly afflicted by this malady. Could it be that this sensation is not always a simple medical condition? Maybe there’s a little bit more to do with this syndrome than meets the eye—something that gives a bit of credence to all the old tales. Something that science simply cannot explain away.
When my family moved from the haunted place in Scott City, I never had another hagging incident. Not once in the remainder of my childhood. Not once in my adult life. That is to say, I didn’t have any further haggings until I visited the Martin place …
Nightmares, Etc.
While I was involved with and investigating the Martin case, I was also experiencing a few life changes of my own. I had recently moved into my first house (that I owned) along with my wife, and now we were going to have our first child.
So, needless to say, reviewing all the evidence from my investigation, as well as coordinating my visits to Mississippi, was being juggled with all the mundane logistics involved with maintaining a new place and preparing for a baby. Somehow, I managed to get through all of this—but not without experiencing some strange evenings in the new house.
Not long after finishing my review of all the footage captured during my first visit and planning the details of my second visit to the Martin home, I woke one night to an all-too-familiar sensation. It was a hagging—though slightly different from those I had experienced as a young man. I still could not move, and I was still aware of everything in the room (such as my wife lying beside me), but there was no fear. There also didn’t seem to be anything in the room with me. Or at least I didn’t sense anything.
When the event was over, I simply sat up, shook off the heebie-jeebies, and took a long look around the empty room. Maybe it was a product of being “all grown up,” but it wasn’t quite the horrible experience that I remembered having as a child. But this wouldn’t be the end of it.
This experience happened a couple of times and eventually culminated in one strange evening. On this particular night, I had a relatively nasty nightmare. I can’t remember the specifics, but it had something to do with an intruder in my house. I have a nightly habit of personally checking every door (wherever I am) before I go to sleep, so I can remember thinking in my sleep, “I know I locked all the doors. How did someone get in?”
The dream must not have lasted long, though, because I woke up not long after falling asleep, once again, to the strange feeling of paralysis. But this time, by sheer willpower, I snapped almost instantly out of it, jerking up in the bed. Now, believe it or not, here’s the weird part …
For a moment, when I first woke up, I could have sworn that I saw the silhouette of a short person (perhaps a child) standing beside my side of the bed. I instantly jerked away from the figure, which woke my sleeping wife. She asked what was wrong, I mumbled something about a bad dream, and she immediately dozed off to sleep again. Sleep took a bit longer for me, however.
Why was I suddenly experiencing these things again? I was relatively sure I hadn’t moved into a new haunted place, so I assumed I was simply having nightmares because of being in a new house, the combined stress of moving, and expecting a baby. And, certainly, the evidence I had captured at the Martin trailer was weighing on me (as well as the prospect of returning there to explain it all to Joanne).
But I had no reason to believe that a ghost, or anything else paranormal for that matter, had followed me home. Though many investigators believe that spirits can follow a living person to a new place, I could not imagine any spirit wanting to follow me home (though my wife has always jokingly warned me to not bring home ghosts from the cases I investigate). And I certainly didn’t feel like I was obsessing over the subject of ghosts or demons.
It was all quite perplexing and before long I began to question whether or not I had actually seen a figure by the bed. “Maybe I was still asleep and dreaming somehow,” I would tell myself. But I knew otherwise.
Experience has taught me that when a person has some-
thing unexplainable and/or terrifying happen to them, that person’s mind will immediately begin to doubt what was witnessed. Sometimes within hours, a person will even recant their own eyewitness account and write it all off as a mistake or imagination at work.
During the interviews at the Martin trailer, Tim (aka Hot Boy) had said something about one of the entities there that had stuck with me. “It won’t let you sleep,” he said. “It constantly messes with you, messes with your head.”
In the end, I decided to chalk up the whole affair as a product of me delving into the Martin case too intently and working far too many hours. Since I was re-experiencing a paranormal event from my past, though, I began to wonder if another type of activity would start to reoccur as well …
Corner Demons
As I mentioned above, there were two additional, strange things that happened while I was living in the haunted home in Scott City, Missouri. The second concerns the subject of “corner demons.”
I don’t remember where I first heard the term—though I believe it was actually at a church I went to with a friend (a Church of God or Church of Christ, I do believe). The gist of it is this: supposedly, every single person who walks the Earth has a guardian angel and a demon that is assigned to watch over them, and these beings
have the ability to influence our decisions on a daily basis.
According to the spinner of this yarn, it is said that we can, on occasion, actually catch a glimpse of one of these entities—though to look directly at it would mean instant madness. I, of course, queried how this was possible. I was given this example:
Have you ever been watching television or reading a book and you thought you saw something move out of the corner of your eye? That was one of your assignees. It simply stopped moving for a moment and you noticed it. Because of this apparent ability to see these creatures out of the corner of our eye, they are simply called corner demons (since nobody is particularly afraid of angels, the story deals mainly with the demon side of things).
According to the same tale, if you were to accidentally see one of these so-called corner demons straight on (especially if you saw or looked right into its face), you would go insane from fright.
I was immediately intrigued by all this information, though nobody I knew had ever heard of such a thing. This was because I often saw dark shapes out of the corner of my eyes while I lived in the old, haunted house. And after hearing the story, I always wondered if, someday, I would accidentally find myself staring face to face with some demonic entity.
Over the years since I first heard this story, I’ve never managed to find anything else out about corner demons. For all I know, this was just a spooky yarn made up by the preacher at that particular church.
Today, seeing dark shapes out of the corner of your eye or anywhere else (sometimes in the shape of an actual person) is a common paranormal experience—especially in haunted locations. Sometimes they are called shadow people or black masses, but investigators tend to have a great deal of disagreement concerning the nature of these beings. Are they evil? Or are they simply another form a spirit can take on after death?
Since I have little faith in the existence of demons, I have always chosen to believe that these dark entities are just another type of ghost—the spirit of someone who has passed on from this life. Or it’s a bug or some other common thing that we are all glimpsing out of the corner of our eye! I certainly do not think all these things we are seeing are demons or the Devil.
But, as mentioned before, it does not mean that I’m not afraid of the Devil. Like most who have grown up in a Christian household, I have a particular fear of just such a being. And I definitely do not want to have any kind of run-in with such a thing. This is mostly for the obvious reasons, but this is also because I have had a personal experience concerning the Devil in the past.
A Sad Tale of Warning
As with the Martin family and other people mentioned in this book, I will keep the names associated with the story I’m about to tell anonymous. The details of the sordid tale I will tell here, though, are entirely and verifiably true—much to my everlasting dismay.
This story takes place when I was nineteen years old and dating a local girl in Scott City I’ll call “Tara.” She was much like any other American teenage girl, but her sister—I’ll call her “Sarah”—was someone altogether different. Tara still lived at home along with her family, but Sarah was living on her own in a mobile home with her young daughter “Tiffany.”
Since the father of Tiffany was in prison (no lie), it was just Sarah living alone in the trailer with the baby. For most folks, this would pose no problem, but Sarah was not most folks.
First of all, Sarah was quite popular with the local male population—even while she was married. Second of all, she liked to party—often and hard. And while she did take care of her baby, all of us who knew Sarah still had to wonder why she tended to get drunk so much around her child. Of course, being nineteen and unable to legally drink myself, Sarah’s trailer was a sort of illicit wonderland for Tara and me.
On many a night, Tara and I would hang out at Sarah’s trailer to party with the older folks, and then I would walk Tara home to make sure she was there by her curfew. On the particular night of this story, we had done just this, but unlike other nights, I would return to the trailer to sleep until morning. This was because I was planning to meet a friend there early in the morning to go to a job interview with me. (We were both attempting to get employment at the same place). And it was easier to just crash there than it was to go home.
After I had walked Tara home, I returned to the trailer to find the aftermath of a party that had clearly gone to sky-high proportions. Amidst the beer bottles, half-eaten bags of chips, and cigarette butts lying around the place, Sarah sat in a drunken heap on the floor beside a small bassinet that contained baby Tiffany.
I told Sarah that I was going to get some sleep for my interview the following day, but Sarah told me that there was a couple already sleeping in the spare bedroom. This was no big deal, however, as I had crashed on her couch more than a few times in the past.
But as I made myself comfortable on the sofa for some sleep, Sarah suddenly became agitated and quite animated. She crawled around on the floor like a mad woman, babbling about how “some day” she was going to get away from everything and everyone and have it made. I attempted to ignore her, hoping she would eventually wind down from her drunken state and go to sleep, but soon she was crawling right up to me on the couch and ranting even more.
“Someday I’m going to be rich,” she panted. “My daughter Tiffany is going to be rich and famous and I’ll have it made.” I told her that she should go to sleep, that she would feel better in the morning. Then she said the words that have stuck with me ever since that night: “You know how I know all this? It’s because I talk to the Devil. He said he’s going to make Tiffany famous and that we’re both going to be rich.”
Now Sarah isn’t a bad person—and I certainly doubted that she seriously worshipped Satan—but she wasn’t the brightest of individuals. Why she was saying such bizarre things was beyond me. But say these things she did—and for quite a while before finally winding down and deciding
to go to bed. At that point, she slowly got up off the floor and made her way to the adjoining bedroom. She then asked, “Do you mind bringing the baby into the bedroom for me?”
I said that I didn’t, so I picked up the entire bassinet and carried it into the bedroom. I placed it a few feet from the bed (little Tiffany was sound asleep) and left as Sarah was crawling under the covers. I then went to the couch, made myself comfortable, and fell fast asleep. The next thing I knew it was morning and there was a knock on the front door, quickly followed by screams of utter terror.
I sat up quickly on the couch trying to comprehend what was happening. The couple that was sleeping in the guest bedroom shot by me in a mad dash into the bedroom to check on Sarah. This prompted a second set of screams.
Meanwhile, the knocking on the door became frantic. So I got up and opened the front door in a hurry; it was my friend ready to take us to our job interviews. I then shot into Sarah’s room to see why they were all screaming. Of course, I now wish that I hadn’t.
Poor baby Tiffany was lying in her bassinet and she was blue. She had died during the night. And if this wasn’t bad enough, it was the state of the child that has stuck with me for all these years. The baby was lying on her back with her back arched and her arms up in the air—almost as if she was warding off someone or reaching for something. Her little head was back and her mouth was still open as if she had been screaming or gasping for air.
As everyone tried to calm Sarah down and comfort her, I said that I would go call an ambulance. Naturally, Sarah had no phone in the trailer so I would have to go to Tara’s house to call the ambulance. Since I did not want to be the one to tell Tara (or her mother) that little Tiffany was dead, I told them that the baby was unresponsive and needed an ambulance. But it was completely clear from looking at the body that the baby had been dead for a while.
My friend and I then left for our interviews as the ambulance was en route to the trailer. Once we were finished, I returned to Tar
a’s house to find the family grieving over their loss. Sarah was a complete wreck.
We were soon informed by the police that the baby’s father was going to be released from the county prison for forty-eight hours to attend the funeral and grieve, and it wasn’t long before he was at the home and they were all planning the funeral for the baby. Still shook up by the whole affair, I thought it best to let the family have some alone time, so I left and went home.
The following day, I returned again to visit with Tara and found the baby’s father in tears on the front porch. I asked him if he was all right, and he responded with a terrifying story. He stated that he had gone to the trailer to pick up some clothes for the baby to be buried in, along with some appropriate clothes for Sarah to wear to the funeral.
While he was gathering the items, he suddenly heard a disturbing sound: the loud cries of an infant. And they were coming from the bedroom where he was standing. He immediately dropped the clothes and fled the scene. He then asked if I would mind going over to pick up the items for him; they would be waiting where he left them in the bedroom floor of the trailer …
Reluctantly, I agreed. So I again called upon my buddy to go with me to the trailer (there was no way I was going in there alone). When we arrived, the door to the trailer was wide open. In his haste to escape, the father had not shut the door.
Cautiously, the two of us went inside and made our way to the bedroom. The clothes were right on the floor where they were supposed to be. And though we did not hear a baby crying in the trailer, we still gathered the items as quickly as we could and fled the premises as if we had.
In the weeks that followed, the horror and sorrow of the tragic death began to fade and life went on for everyone. The father went back to jail, the baby was buried, and we all tried to get past the horrific experience. As for Sarah, she could no longer stand to live in the trailer, so she moved back in with the family. It was at about this point that I started experiencing a horrible, yet persistent, recurring nightmare.
