Text: The Hat Man is a recurring figure in LS’s sleep paralysis episodes. He is tall, faceless, dressed in a trenchcoat, and wears a wide-brimmed hat, like a big fedora. He stands in the corner of the room, watching, while the sleeper is awake but unable to move. He does not speak or approach. After a few minutes he is gone. 

Context: Told to me by my friend LS, who experiences recurrent sleep paralysis. LS had encountered testimonies of the Hat Man online both before and after her first sleep paralysis episode featuring him, notably on Reddit’s r/sleepparalysis and YouTube. He has appeared in several of LS’s subsequent episodes, almost always the same way. 

Analysis: Sleep paralysis itself is well-documented neurology: during REM the body is paralyzed to keep us from acting out dreams, and on waking the paralysis sometimes outlasts consciousness, producing hallucinations of intruders, pressure on the chest, and shadowy figures. What is folkloric is the figure. Different cultures have produced their own intruder for the same neurological event: the Old Hag in Newfoundland, the Pisadeira in Brazil, Kanashibari in Japan, the night-mare of medieval Europe. The Hat Man is the contemporary English-language version, relatively common on internet forums and YouTube in the 2000s. It’s interesting how in lockstep different accounts of the Hat Man align with each other, and I wonder if it is a natural phenomenon that causes this similarity of accounts or if it is the sharing of the accounts that causes the Hat Man to appear in such a consistent form.