Tag Archives: sleep

Scissor Lock

Nationality: Korean
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

Scissor lock

The Informant:

My friend, was born in Los Angeles, CA. He is an only child and stayed in Southern California his whole life. He came over to my room one day and I randomly asked him if he had any good stories. I asked him specifically if he ever heard about the scissor lock and he told me:

The Story:

You’re asleep. You wake up in the middle of the night and you’re in your room. You see a figure in a corner – a grandma. She’s a Korean grandma wearing traditional clothing, not the nice kind of the type that commoners and poor people wear, with gray hair. She’s sitting on a chair, moaning and weeping. You want to get up and talk to her but you can’t. All you can do is move your eyes. You look to the right and it’s a blank wall. You look back at the grandma and she’s gone. Suddenly you feel a presence at the base of your head. You want to look up but you can’t – you’re petrified. You want to do something but you can’t because you’re stuck. You can’t move. Then I started saying prayers and singing praise songs and everything went away.  You wake up with your arms crossed and hands on your shoulders, like a scissor.

 This never happened to me, thankfully, but I know people who have experienced it.

The Analysis:

The scissor lock is an occurrence that I first came across two years ago. When I asked my friend to tell me this story, it was late at night around 11pm. The room was very bright and the story did not seem scary at the time. The scissor lock appears to be a common occurrence among Koreans, Korean Christians especially. This version included specifically seeing a grandma clothed in old, dirty clothes. It is not known whether this is a general case of a specific case for just my friend. The name scissor lock appears to come from the position in which one wakes up in, with your arms crossed diagonally across the body.

Sleeping Around the Christmas Tree

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student, Part time facilities attendant at on campus gym
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/24/13
Primary Language: English

Here my informant recounts a Christmas tradition her family shares:

My family always sleeps, well, not always, we’ve done it before… Okay, so we always sleep in the living room right around the Christmas tree at Christmas time, and all of us just, like, sleep on the floor on this big mat. Uh, just like a mat, just, not like an inflatable bed, but we’d just kind of each make our own, we’d call it a mat, but it was more our own kind of blanket and pillow bed I guess, we’d all sleep on the floor with.

My informant described how her family started this tradition when she was just one year old, and how she, her parents, and her sister would spread out blankets and pillows under the Christmas tree, and sleep there together on Christmas eve. She said it was a way for her family to celebrate being together and loving one another on such a special holiday, and how it always made her appreciate what a wonderful home she had.