7
Margaret Dudley and Julian Goodare
These two stories may seem to have little in common – especially since the people who tell them are separated by some three centuries:
Once every month since then, the Devil appeared to you, sometimes in a house, and sometimes in the fields, in various shapes and likenesses; sometimes in the shape of a beast, and sometimes in the shape of a man; and made you kiss him in several places, and worship him on your knees as your lord.1
I went to bed and lay down and felt a tickling up my side; had a flash, a vision of the following scene. I was standing in the kitchen and I opened the door, and there he stood. A tall alien in a blue and black wet suit. He was skinny, bald, with a narrow head, big eyes, and light skin. He scared me profoundly.2
The first story is an extract from the dittay (indictment) of Marion Grant who was executed for witchcraft in Aberdeen in 1597. The second story was related by an anonymous person claiming contacts with UFOs, and describes an alien abduction experience. Both describe beings that are outside our modern scientific understanding of proof. Throughout recorded history people have made claims of contact with superhuman or non-human entities. Modern claims, and the experiences prompting them, are classed as anomalous phenomena. This chapter is about the culturally specific narrative clues that bridge these testimonies, pointing to a common psychological explanation. People experienced entities that approached them from the Outside-in, but the psychological interpretation shows the experiences coming from the Inside-out.
The most likely experience behind both these testimonies is sleep paralysis. This has been thoroughly investigated in a seminal paper by Owen Davies.3 Davies ranges over the whole of Europe and demonstrates a number of common factors that reflect the universality of the experience. What we can offer here is a case-study of a single country – a case-study that does two things in particular. Firstly, it confirms Davies’s findings and illustrates how his methodology can be applied. Secondly, it offers a shift of emphasis, at least for Scotland, picking up on one of Davies’s own suggestions to argue that there is more than one way to interpret the effect of sleep paralysis on early modern witchcraft. But before such interpretations, the sleep paralysis experience must first be explained.
I
Sleep paralysis is a medical condition related to narcolepsy (a form of epilepsy which induces sleep without warning). Sleep paralysis is milder and much more common; between 25 and 40 per cent of the population have experienced it.4 It occurs during the ‘rapid eye movement’ (REM) phase of sleep. Sleep is caused by the inhibitory action of REM-off cells in reciprocal interaction with REM-on cells. This symbiotic process prevents motor output (paralysing the body to prevent the acting out of dreams causing injury to self or others) and blocks sensory input, while providing the forebrain with internally generated activity which leads to dreams. REM sleep occurs several times in a night and usually passes unnoticed, though dreaming is more common and more vivid in this phase. It has been called the ‘paradoxical’ stage, as the brain is more active but less accessible to external stimuli.5 The condition is commonly labelled as sleep paralysis, or perhaps more fully ‘awareness during sleep paralysis’, although full consciousness is rare. Little is known about the actual physiology of sleep paralysis, but its symptoms come in a now well-recognised sequence of episodes.
The symptoms can be frightening, especially for the first-time experient. The experience tends to happen when the subject is about to fall asleep or about to wake, usually while lying on their back. The subject wakes up feeling paralysed and sensing a presence in the room with them. Although they are consciously aware of their environment, they are unable to move – except for their eyes – or to speak. The sensation of a presence induces fear or even terror. A feeling of levitation or flying is sometimes described. Some relate seeing balls of light, or being in unusually light surroundings. A visible or invisible entity may seem to sit on their chest, shaking, strangling or prodding them. Visual hallucinations can include lights, animals and figures. Auditory hallucinations have been described as heavy footsteps, a buzzing noise or the sound of heavy objects being moved.
One neurological model suggests three sets of experiences in sleep paralysis.6 The first set of experiences is the ‘Intruder’. This may be due to the activation of the amygdala, situated in the brain, which is involved in normal fear reactions. With sensory input and output blocked, the process of analysing the source of the fear may last several minutes instead of the usual fraction of a second, allowing increasingly elaborate interpretations to be made. Such interpretations can be informed by stimuli received during the period, either from outside (such as external sounds) or from inside (middle ear activity). These result in auditory or visual hallucinations.
The second sleep paralysis experience is labelled the ‘Incubus’. This is the phase, noted above, when the subject feels pressure on their back or chest. It may be due to the subject’s efforts to control their breathing, not understanding that their body remains paralysed; their lack of success is interpreted, by the brain, as pressure or feelings of being crushed or choked.
The third and final phase, which occurs only in a minority of cases, has been termed ‘Unusual Bodily Experiences’. This includes the sensations of floating or flying, and out-of-body experiences. As the subject is paralysed and cannot receive feedback, any vestibular (inner ear) activity is interpreted by the brain as floating or flying. This produces a distinct type of experience; people who have reported out-of-body experiences sometimes interpret them as a form of life-altering spiritual elevation of body and soul. They are sometimes happy about the experience, unlike those who perceive a terrifying ‘intruder’. We have largely omitted discussion of this type of experience, as it is distinct from the others. Out-of-body experiences are discussed in another chapter of this book.7
Overall, then, sleep paralysis produces vivid and often terrifying experiences, although it is physically harmless. It is not the same as a bad dream, even a ‘nightmare’ in the modern usage of this term to mean an anxiety dream. It does, however, constitute the likely reality behind the original term ‘night-mare’.8 It is particularly common in the ‘hypnagogic’ and ‘hypnopompic’ phases of sleep, respectively the phases of gradually falling asleep and gradually waking up. Preindustrial sleeping patterns may have made people particularly prone to sleep paralysis. They habitually woke up, at least partially, for an hour or so around midnight, in between periods known as ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’. The end of the ‘first sleep’ was a period of particularly vivid dreaming.9
Sleep paralysis does not directly cause people to see witches, demons or aliens; the ‘intruder experience’ is no more than a vague sensation. People have to interpret their terrifying experience retrospectively. In the cases with which we are concerned, they conclude that the anomalous experience must have been due to witches, demons or aliens. This involves constructing false memories – which is remarkably easy, as a number of studies have shown. Many people are suggestible, and complex memories of non-existent phenomena can be created retrospectively. In one experiment, respondents were asked about their memories of the media’s coverage of a recent aeroplane crash; over half came to ‘remember’ some details of a television film of the crash, even though no such film existed.10 Once someone has had a terrifying nocturnal experience involving an intruder in their room, they need to explain it. Their search for an explanation may well include the creation of a ‘memory’ of a more detailed view of the intruder – especially if the search is assisted by an interested expert like a witchcraft prosecutor. This ‘memory’ will contain the kind of beings that people think likely to have been assaulting them: aliens today, witches or demons in the early modern period.
II
The symptoms of sleep paralysis, and the anomalous phenomena they produce, appear to be a universal experience, but interpretations of them vary from culture to culture. What were the dominant cultural interpretations of the sleep paralysis experience in early modern Scotland? Here we must visit some of the testimonies found in Scottish witchcraft trials, beginning with statements by accusers of witches.
One such incident can be seen in the trial of Janet Lucas, an accused witch in Aberdeen in 1597. Her dittay included an accusation from the goodman (tenant) of Petmurchie, who witnessed the Devil in his room at night. He claimed that Janet, who was sleeping in the same room but in a separate bed from Petmurchie and his wife, must have summoned the Devil as there were only the three of them in the house. His wife was lying ill with a fever next to him, and all the doors and windows were locked.
The Deuill thy maister, com to the[e], and thow, be his instigatioune and thy inchantment, the gudwyf beand lyand seik, the parpan [i.e. partition] wall of the hous schuik and trymblit, and made sic ane dwne and noyis as [if] the same haid bene halelie fallin. … At this same nicht that the wall trimblit and shuik be thy deuilische inchantmentis, the Deuill thy maister, appeirit to the[e] in the said gudwyf of Petmurchieis chalmer, quhair the gudman him self was lyand, in the forme of ane four futit beist.11
Some classical symptoms of sleep paralysis are evident here. Petmurchie hears loud noises, feels vibrations and senses a four-footed beast. He gets out of bed to light a candle. He complains, when Lucas asks him what the matter is, ‘I trow the Deuill is in the hous, for I can nocht lye in my bed for feir.’12 Petmurchie’s intense fear is a common emotion for sleep paralysis sufferers. He also appears to be able to recall the incident remarkably well, although no indication is given as to how long ago it occurred.
Another likely episode of sleep paralysis, from the same group of Aberdeenshire trials, is that of Helen Gray. She was accused that ‘thow com to William Chalmeris hous in Clochtow, on the nicht, the durris being clos, and yeid [i.e. went] up and doun the fluir, and thaireftir past out at the window in the lyknes of ane dog, quhilk the said William ratefies, and apprewis on his consciens, that he saw the same’.13 Fewer details are given here, but the motif of the closed doors is a recurring one that seems to have been a standard way of reporting an anomalous nocturnal episode.
Women with children in the bed with them may have had a particular propensity to experience visions of an assaulting witch. In 1661, when a Dalkeith woman was lying in bed with her child, Janet Cock ‘and many utheris came in and lay above her, and they all drew at her chyld: and shoe having said, “the Spirit of Grace be in this house,” they went all out of the glasse window with a noise.’ When a mother in Dundas lay ‘in chyld-birth with her young chyld besyd her, in the night-tyme, the doore being locked,’ Janet Millar, ‘with uther notorious witches, who are since brunt, blew up the doore, and came in upone her, essayed to tacke the young chyld from her, bot not having the power, went to the doore in a confusione’.14 Rosina McGhie, in Dumfries in 1671, having quarrelled with the accused witch Elspeth Thomson, feared that Thomson might attack her young child; she ‘took an extraordinary sickness and swelling herself, Qch she thought was occasioned by ane other fear, That she visibly saw Elspit thomson come to her bed, endeavouring to destroy her and her chyld’. Thomson’s husband, William McGhie, also experienced episodes of what appear to have been sleep paralysis, according to two neighbours who related what he had told them: ‘yr came one tyme a great heaviness over him, and yt the devil came like a rat, and bet his left arme’, and ‘one morning in his bed, he saw ye devil looking in his face, and being terribly affrighted, his wife griped him fast, and sd qt neided him to be so feared, for she was not feared for all that’.15 It is ironic that Thomson’s attempt to reassure her husband seems to have led him to conclude that she was to blame for his terrifying experience.
Several likely sleep paralysis cases show the experient as seeing, not the witch, nor the Devil, but an animal that they believed to be the witch – often a cat or sometimes a dog (as in Helen Gray’s case above). Margaret Duncan, Janet Gentleman and Marion Ure, in Glasgow in 1699, were accused by William Scott of having ‘appeared in the chamber where the said William Scot was lying in the bedd betwixt two and three hours in the morning in the likeness of ane sow, ane catt and ane ape, and danced in the rome before his bed, he being waking at the tyme and verry sensible of ther being present; and after a litil tyme they all three vanished’.16 Beatrix Leslie in 1661 had a quarrel with William Young’s wife, ‘and that same verry night, the said William Young awakened out of his sleep, in a great affrightment and sweat, crying out, that she with a number of catts wer devouring him’.17 Probably not all cats were manifestations of sleep paralysis, though. The cat that insisted on sharing the bed of Katherine Ewen and Ambrose Gordon for twenty nights, and bit Gordon’s arm, was probably a real cat, though their belief that the witch Janet Wishart had sent it is less credible.18
III
People experiencing sleep paralysis would be particularly likely to construct a false memory of having seen a witch if they were concerned about the witch’s reputation, and especially if they had had a quarrel with the witch. Petmurchie’s experience involved both. The case of Agnes Finnie, tried in Edinburgh in December 1644, provides another example. On one day in June 1643, John Cockburn had quarrelled with Finnie’s daughter Margaret Robertson, and the alleged incident occurred that night.
Litle rest gat he that nycht bot having gottin his first sleip and awaiking furth thereof being struckin in great feir and amaisement, he saw and evidentlie perseaved, all the durris and windowis of his hous being fast cloised, yow the said Agnes Fynnie, with yor dochter Margaret Robertsone, bothe sitting one his bedside, fearcelie ruging at his breist; and being in excessive feir with that villent rugging and vexing him in a manner foirsaid, he cryed out all that tyme: ‘God be in this hous. I ken yow weill aneughe. God be in this hous.’19
Here the violent ‘ruging’ (tugging) of Cockburn’s chest relates easily to the sensations of pressure or choking in the ‘incubus’ phase of sleep paralysis. The feeling of fear comes across strongly, and also the sensation of a presence in the room. Cockburn’s cries woke his wife and apprentice, who confirmed his state of fear. Finnie had had a reputation as a witch for almost thirty years, and Cockburn’s quarrel with her daughter would have worried him. Stress is a predisposing factor to sleep paralysis. Cockburn’s experience also occurred at the end of his ‘first sleip’, which, as we have seen, was often a time of vivid dreams.20
This case is also interesting for the way that Cockburn’s anomalous experience was interpreted by the authorities. Finnie’s trial occurred in the central justiciary court, with highly-trained advocates on both sides. The accusation terminated with two alternative interpretations of the event: ‘Quhilk feirfull apparitione was ather the devill himselff or your selffis, brocht thair be his devillische illusiones and be your procurement.’21 Cockburn himself seems to have been sure that his assailants had been Finnie and her daughter, but the prosecutors thought that it could have been the Devil. Indeed the phrase ‘devillische illusiones’, applied to both of the possibilities, indicates that they thought that if the apparition was not actually the Devil, then the Devil at least played the key role in bringing it about – something that Cockburn himself did not mention. The defence could have argued that if what Cockburn saw was really an illusion brought by the Devil, then Finnie was perhaps not responsible for it; but this possibility does not seem to have been entertained.22
Historians discussing contemporary interpretations of demonic apparitions have tended to focus on cases of demonic possession.23 England and New England sometimes saw a distinction between guilty ‘possession’ and innocent ‘obsession’, but this distinction does not seem to have been drawn in Scotland.24 Moreover, the cases under discussion here were not straightforwardly cases of ‘possession’; the apparition seen by Cockburn remained external to him. As for the question of whether the Devil could counterfeit the appearance of an innocent person, this became a matter of debate in the Salem trials but was rarely discussed in Scotland.25 We need more study of the intellectual interpretation of apparitions in early modern Scotland, although this would take us well beyond the experience of sleep paralysis and indeed beyond witchcraft.26
IV
The material that we have discussed so far confirms Davies’s findings. Some people in Scotland, as elsewhere, suffered from sleep paralysis and interpreted their anomalous nocturnal experiences as attacks by a witch. However, these findings can be extended. It was not just accusers of witches who described experiences of sleep paralysis: some witches also did so themselves. These cases are less common, but they exist, as Davies suggested that they might.27 They deserve careful attention.
Scottish witchcraft suspects were often asked about their encounters with the Devil. Coercive interrogation made it essential for them to answer this question somehow. They did not necessarily talk about the Devil; some talked about fairies.28 What we are mainly looking for here are cases in which the witchcraft suspect had experienced sleep paralysis symptoms, and talked about the ‘intruder’ in such a way as to enable the interrogators to conclude that this was the Devil. Possibly they already believed that they had truly had some contact with otherworldly beings, or possibly the process of interrogation persuaded them of this. We will come back to the dynamics of interrogation; but first, some likely cases.
Marion Grant’s dittay, quoted at the head of this chapter, goes on to give greater detail of her visits from the Devil:
The Devill apperit to the[e], within this auchteine dayis or thairby, quhome thou callis thy god, within the said James Cheynis pantrie, about ane hour in the night, and apperit to the[e] in ane gryte man his likness, in silkin abuilzeament, with ane quhyt candill in his hand.29
A good deal of detail is evident here. The time is known, one o’clock in the morning, and a light anomaly is also in evidence, ‘with ane quhyt candill in his hand’. This is strongly indicative of sleep paralysis.
Detecting sleep paralysis symptoms experienced by accused witches is not as obvious as it is for the sleep paralysis symptoms related by the accusers. In the case of Andrew Man, in Rathven in 1598, no time of the day or night was mentioned. We are told that the first visitation from the Devil occurred in his mother’s house and that the visits continued for ‘the space of threttie twa yeris sensyn or thairby’. Sleep paralysis can be a prolonged condition, with attacks becoming more frequent during times of stress. The hour of the visit was apparently less important to the interrogators. Most dealings with the Devil were associated with nighttime, so perhaps this was taken for granted. Another item of his dittay reads: ‘Thow saw Christsonday cum owt of the snaw in the liknes of a staig, and that the Quene of Elphen was their, and vtheris with hir, rydand vpon quhyt haiknayes.’30 Light and light colours feature in this passage, as they do in many sleep paralysis episodes.
Man’s much-discussed and extraordinary case has many unusual features; he is certainly not a typical Scottish witch. In searching for sleep paralysis among Scottish witches, should we be mainly looking at the unusual cases like Man’s? Not necessarily. Let us take the case of Agnes Pogavie, in Liberton in 1661. Pogavie was caught up in a group prosecution during a major panic, and her confession was brief and heavily demonic, with stereotypical renunciation of baptism, sex with the Devil, Devil’s mark and financial reward that turned to a ‘sclait stone’. This is standard material in Scottish witchcraft cases, and all of it could have come straight from leading questions under torture. Yet Pogavie began with what looks like a sleep paralysis experience: ‘as she was lying in her bed, as she thought waking, she thought her spirit was carried away, she said the[y] say the divel his a bell that he rings’. Neither spirit flight (out-of-body experience) nor the Devil’s bell (anomalous sounds) were part of the standard repertoire of demonic confessions as sought by interrogators, so they are likely to have represented something like Pogavie’s real experience.31
The ‘incubus’ phase of the sleep paralysis experience, with something pressing on the chest, appears in several witches’ testimonies. Thomas Black, one of Pogavie’s co-accused, confessed that the Devil appeared to him in the night, ‘the doores being fast locked’, and that the Devil ‘lay heavie on’ him.32 Helen Wilson, in Prestonpans in 1659, experienced the Devil coming to her as a rat. She chased the rat away, but the Devil then changed into a man and lay heavy on her as she slept.33 Janet Paiston, in Dalkeith in 1661, was lying in bed one night after her husband had beaten her, and ‘ther came as shoe thoght a heavie spirit wpon hir which maid hir to say the beleif and the Lords prayer and yet shoe could not be red thairof’.34
Another motif to watch for is unaccounted-for or missing time. Time runs at a different pace in fairyland, and the same is reported by alien abductees. A sleep paralysis episode can give the impression of a great deal of time passing when in fact it may only last a few seconds. This phase of REM sleep can allow for extended interpretations of what is happening to the experient. Andrew Man told of such an encounter:
Thow grantis the elphis will mak the[e] appear to be in a fair chalmer, and yit thow will find thy self in a moss on the morne; and that thay will appear to have candles, and licht, and swordis, quhilk wilbe els bot deed gress and strayes.35
This episode may well feature some sleep paralysis symptoms. As well as the unusual passage of time, Man describes the interior lighting of the chamber; similarly, alien abductees describe the interiors of spacecraft as luminous. Light anomalies feature in many sleep paralysis episodes.
V
Was there a sexual element to sleep paralysis as it manifested itself in Scottish witchcraft? Some modern women (though not men) experiencing sleep paralysis have reported that aspects of it resembled sexual assault.36 This seems to have been behind a number of cases discussed by Davies.37 Many Scottish witches were accused of having sex with the Devil, and this may provide some relevant evidence.
One possible explanation of sleep paralysis involved the incubus and succubus, male and female demons respectively, who were said to enter the victim’s room at night and have sexual intercourse with them. Incubi and succubi do not seem to be mentioned by name in Scottish witchcraft trials, although incubi had been encountered in the twelfth century.38 This may be because they were thought to have a natural cause. Davies cites a number of naturalistic interpretations of incubi, including one Scottish example: James VI, in his Daemonologie (1597).39 An earlier Scottish example is the canon lawyer William Hay, in the 1530s:
People who suffer the incubus sometimes think they are oppressed by a man known to them, sometimes by a woman with whom they have had intercourse, and associate them with anyone whose eyebrows meet together. In fact there is no truth in this at all, for this is either caused by the pressure of blood round the heart when sleeping on one’s back or by a slight exhalation arising to the head, which oppresses and interferes with the sense organs. When these things occur in sleep it is quite obvious that they are not real.40
However, this remarkable description of sleep paralysis was almost a throwaway comment, in the middle of a discussion of the Canon Episcopi – the famous tenth-century law concerning women who were deceived by demons into believing that they were transformed into animals and carried long distances.41 Neither Hay nor James gave clear directions for distinguishing between natural and demonic experiences, beyond rejecting the actual term ‘incubus’. Sleep paralysis, although widespread, is not common knowledge among the general population today. If naturalistic interpretations of the ‘incubus’ were common in our period, then sleep paralysis may actually have been better known then, but evidence for this is scanty. Partly this may be because a sleep paralysis experience that was interpreted naturalistically would be unlikely, by definition, to be recorded in a witchcraft trial, concerned as this had to be with demonic intervention. In practice, people who had anomalous sleep experiences were readily able to opt for a demonic interpretation, or to have one suggested to them.
There was, of course, a great deal of demonic sex reported in Scottish witchcraft trials. It was normal for women, at any rate, to be asked about sex with the Devil. Much of the material thus obtained was stereotyped, deriving from the authorities’ interest in deviant sex rather than from the witches’ real lives. The church courts, which often identified witches and orchestrated their prosecution, spent most of their time disciplining fornicators and adulterers.42 The mixture of stereotyped and individual detail is characteristic of witches’ confessions.
One witch who seems to have interpreted her experience of sleep paralysis in sexual terms was Elizabeth Crockett, in Alloa in September 1658:
In Lentron last bypast, shoe lying in hir bed in the dawing found ane come in to hir bed and lye in hir right arme, and thairat shoe thocht he had carnell copulatione with hir, and that he wes nether cold nor hott, and declared that shoe knew not when he come in nor when he went away.
The interrogators then seem to have persuaded her that this had been the Devil. Asked about the Devil’s mark, she continued: ‘shoe knew not whether the Devill gave hir ane mark or not that night he lay with hir, but if it wer found wpon hir, shoe should be content to die the death of a witch’. Later that day she added a further detail, still ambiguous: ‘the said Elisabeth did confess that if shoe had the Devills mark it was on hir privie member’. Interrogated again in March 1659, she omitted the sexual element but added some further details:
In Lentron last, shoe being lying in hir bed wnwell in the dawning of the day, found ane thing come on hir in the bed wnder the clothes and lay above hir very heavie, having nether armes nor legs, hot nor cold as shoe thought, clothed with old gray clothes, but shoe saying (as shoe affirmed) Christ be heir it evanished away and shoe knew not how it come nor how it went away.43
Crockett was clearly a confused and desperate woman, pressed hard by her interrogators; they may have forced her to add the sexual element. But this merely underlines that that was how these confessions were constructed. Crockett’s original experience, though vivid, was probably inchoate – a thing without arms or legs, pressing her chest as she was waking in the early morning. It was during the interrogation itself that she came to reinterpret it in demonic and sexual terms.
VI
Both alien abduction narratives and witchcraft trial narratives are related through the process of answering questions posed by someone in authority. For the alien abductee, the person in authority is a therapist – someone claiming authoritative knowledge of alien abductions, who can confirm that the subject’s anomalous nocturnal experience was indeed an abduction by aliens. For the accused witch, this person was their interrogator – someone claiming authoritative knowledge of the Devil, who could confirm that the subject’s anomalous nocturnal experience was indeed the Devil. Scottish witchcraft suspects were often interrogated coercively, including the use of torture. What implications does this have for the way in which episodes of sleep paralysis were recorded?
Sleep paralysis experients sometimes recall specific details of their experience – sights, sounds, lights. Some experients, however, wake up feeling that something terrifying and profound has happened to them, but with no clear memory of any details. Some alien abductees base their claim entirely upon their memory of having felt terrified during the sleep paralysis episode and have no conscious recollection of actual contact with aliens. This is because the ufologists have disseminated the idea that symptoms of sleep paralysis are indicative of abduction by aliens.44
How can a false memory be created in either of these circumstances? False memories, as we have seen, can be generated by many people; there is no pathological condition involved. Studies have identified personality types who are particularly prone to false memories, though it would be hard to link these with early modern witches, about whose personalities we usually know little.45 It is more relevant that a trancelike state similar to hypnosis can be produced from the pressures of interrogation. Memories ‘recovered’ from trance-like or hypnotic states are notoriously unreliable; memories can be changed and even completely created in these states.46 Whole episodes of information can be suggested to people, retained and repeated.
Under conditions of coercion, some people will ‘confess’ without fully believing that what they are confessing is true. There are immediate benefits to them: cessation of questioning or pressure, approval from the interrogator. These can easily outweigh the long-term disadvantages: punishment for the crime, which to an innocent person may seem an improbable prospect. This type of confession has been called ‘pressured-compliant’. But some people will go further and will come to believe what they are confessing – creating what has been called a ‘pressured-internalized’ confession.47 Various types of pressure can be effective, but one is particularly significant: sleep deprivation, for one or two nights, causes people’s suggestibility to increase markedly.48 This is something to which Scottish witches were often subjected. Such conditions were highly likely to produce false memories.49
The kind of questions that could have been put to the suspects include: ‘Where and when did you meet the Devil? What happened when you met him?’ These are fairly open questions. But the interrogators also asked more specific, less open, questions. For women at least, these might include: ‘Did you have sex with the Devil? What was that like? Was the Devil’s body cold?’ This last question, which derived from elite demonological ideas, seems to have been common.50 Leading questions under pressure can easily make people suggestible. Questions like these, to someone who had had an anomalous nocturnal experience, could have triggered the creation of a false memory.
Diane Purkiss makes the important point that people talk about what they know, rather than what they do not know. Some accused witches will have drawn their confessions from stories that they had heard as fictions; to stave off the pressure of questioning, ‘a woman might drag a folktale from her memory to make silence rather than to break it’. This, however, is more convincing than the inference that she draws – that ‘the early modern populace did not “believe” in fairies and they did not disbelieve’.51 Today, we read fictional stories about imaginary humans, but this does not call the existence of real humans into question. The early modern populace may have known that a particular folktale about fairies was a folktale, but there is no evidence that they doubted the actual existence of fairies. The extraordinary and vivid reality of the sleep paralysis experience was, for some, confirmation of their existence.
This may even apply to the case that Purkiss discusses in most detail, that of Elspeth Reoch, in Orkney in 1616. Reoch confessed that the ‘farie man’ who became her spirit guide had assaulted her sexually: he ‘delt with you [i.e. Reoch] tua nychtis and wald never let her sleip’, urging her to have intercourse with him, promising rewards and saying that she should henceforth be dumb, to protect the prophetic gifts that he was conferring on her. In Reoch’s tale, she eventually succumbed to his assaults: ‘And upoun the thrid nycht that he com to hir she being asleip and laid his hand upoun hir breist and walknit her, and thairefter semeit to ly with her.’52 After this she was indeed dumb for a long time. Sleep paralysis is probably not the whole explanation for this story, which appears to be a fantasised reworking of some trauma – rape, perhaps, or failed courtship.53 But the final phrase here, ‘semeit to ly with her’, along with the pressing on the chest, may well indicate that one or more episodes of sleep paralysis were woven into Reoch’s agonised recollections.
VII
Overall, the material reviewed in this chapter reveals an important psychological dimension of Scottish witchcraft. It is well known that some Scottish witches made fantastical confessions of encounters with uncanny beings. Here it can be seen that for some of these witches, sleep paralysis was probably at the core of the experiences they related. Not all the anomalous phenomena in the confessions can have originated with this condition, but we have isolated a group of examples for which the condition is the best explanation.
The universal, medically-recognised symptoms of sleep paralysis, combined with historic and culturally specific forms of description, provided two sets of narratives for early modern Scottish folk: one in which the ‘intruder’ assailing them was a malevolent witch, and the other in which the ‘intruder’ was a more benevolent fairy or other such being for which they themselves were responsible. The first narrative was that of a victim of witchcraft; the nocturnal apparition was a witch, often someone with whom they had previously quarrelled. The second narrative was that of a witch; the nocturnal apparition, originally interpreted as a fairy, was reinterpreted under interrogation as the Devil.54
Both of these narratives were thus reinterpreted by the authorities as demonic, but in different ways. In the first narrative, the authorities had to question whether the witch was an autonomous agent in sending an apparition of themselves to assault the victim, or whether she or he was in fact exploiting demonic agency. The apparition could really have been the Devil, and indeed perhaps was probably the Devil. Witches’ confessions are complex narratives that contain more than one voice and one set of beliefs. In the second narrative, the authorities had a more straightforward interpretative task: the benevolent fairy was really the Devil. This was an easy deduction to make because it was usually assumed that fairies were really demons. But there remained a crucial difference between the two narratives. The first experient was a victim of someone else’s witchcraft: the second was a witch.
These narrative threads can both be paralleled in modern cases of alien abduction. Most abductees feel themselves to have been assaulted in an unwelcome way, just as the accusers of witches did. But some feel that there were positive aspects to their experience, and this may more closely parallel the experience of some witches who had apparently experienced sleep paralysis. One abductee claimed to have been given a book of universal truths and secrets that she had in her possession for several days.55 This is comparable to the way in which some witches gained magical powers from the fairies – Andrew Man and Elspeth Reoch, for instance.
The best examples of sleep paralysis in early modern Scotland are seen in the testimonies of the accusers of witches, who were convinced that the witch or the Devil had entered their rooms at night and frightened the life out of them. The recurrence of standard phrases in witnesses’ testimony, like ‘the doors and windows being closed’, may indicate that there was a recognised repertoire of ways to describe the sleep paralysis experience. Some experients had others to confirm the reality of their experience. John Cockburn’s wife and apprentice confirmed his state of fear; probably they also agreed with him that his experience should be attributed to witchcraft, and if so, this could have had a reinforcing effect. The creation of false memories can be encouraged by peer pressure, when someone else claims to ‘remember’ the non-existent phenomenon.56
Sleep paralysis is harder to find in the confessions of accused witches, but we have identified quite a few examples. Some accused witches did believe, or came to believe, that they had been involved with Satan or otherworldly creatures. In some cases, their beliefs originated with visual and auditory hallucinations experienced during sleep paralysis. Both for the accused witch and the accusers, these events were experienced as coming from the Outside-in, as an external force that manipulated them. They could never have been aware, in their early modern society and culture, where the Devil, his demons and human agents were thought of as a real threat to Christianity and society, that the origin of their belief was internal, caused by a psychological condition that produced anomalous phenomena which came from the Inside-out.
Notes
1. Spalding Misc., i, 171 (modernised). We would like to thank Dr Louise Yeoman for helpful guidance in the initial stages of our research.
2. Nicholas P. Spanos, Patricia A. Cross, Kirby Dickson and Susan C. DuBreuil, ‘Close encounters: an examination of UFO experiences’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 102 (1993), 624–32, at p. 627.
3. Owen Davies, ‘The nightmare experience, sleep paralysis, and witchcraft accusations’, Folklore, 114 (2003), 181–203.
4. Katharine J. Holden and Christopher C. French, ‘Alien abduction experiences: some clues from neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry’, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 7 (2002), 163–78, at pp. 166–70.
5. Celia Green and Charles McCreery, Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Consciousness during Sleep (London, 1994), 5.
6. J. Allan Cheyne, Steve D. Rueffer and Ian R. Newby-Clark, ‘Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: neurological and cultural construction of the night-mare’, Consciousness and Cognition, 8 (1999), 319–37.
7. Julian Goodare, ‘Flying witches in Scotland’, Chapter 9 in this volume.
8. Davies, ‘Nightmare experience’, 182–3.
9. A. Roger Ekirch, ‘Sleep we have lost: pre-industrial slumber in the British Isles’, American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 343–86, at pp. 363–74, 382.
10. Krissy Wilson and Christopher C. French, ‘The relationship between susceptibility to false memories, dissociativity, and paranormal belief and experience’, Personality and Individual Differences, 41 (2006), 1493–1502.
11. Spalding Misc., i, 148.
12. Ibid., 149.
13. Ibid., 127.
14. Quoted in J. G. Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland (Glasgow, 1835), 584.
15. ‘Unpublished witchcraft trials, part 2’, ed. A. E. Truckell, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 3rd ser., 52 (1976–1977), 95–108, at pp. 101–2.
16. Hugh V. McLachlan (ed.), The Kirk, Satan and Salem: A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire (Glasgow, 2006), 359.
17. Quoted in Dalyell, Darker Superstitions, 8.
18. Spalding Misc., i, 91; cf. Davies, ‘Nightmare experience’, 196.
19. SJC, iii, 642.
20. His case is cited by Ekirch, ‘Sleep we have lost’, 366, though Ekirch does not discuss sleep paralysis.
21. SJC, iii, 642.
22. It might have been worthwhile for the defence to attempt to exploit the prosecution’s expressed uncertainty, to argue that the nocturnal assault could not be proved if they did not prove whether the assailants were the Devil or Finnie, and to argue that if it was the Devil, then this need not have been Finnie’s responsibility. However, they instead attempted a naturalistic defence: the apparition was a ‘fantasticall dreame’, and it was impossible for a real being to enter when the doors and windows were closed. The prosecution felt it unnecessary to reply to this in detail: SJC, iii, 655, 659.
23. Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, IL, 2007).
24. David Harley, ‘Explaining Salem: Calvinist psychology and the diagnosis of possession’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996), 307–30; Brian P. Levack, ‘Demonic possession in early modern Scotland’, in Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller (eds.), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (Basingstoke, 2008), 166–84.
25. James VI was interested in what kind of people could see demonic apparitions, but not in who the apparitions might represent: James VI, Daemonologie, in his Minor Prose Works, ed. James Craigie (STS, 1982), 33, 43–4.
26. The materials for such a study would include George Sinclair, Satans Invisible World Discovered, ed. Thomas G. Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1871), and Robert Wodrow, Analecta: or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences, 4 vols., ed. Mathew Leishman (Maitland Club, 1842–3).
27. Davies, ‘Nightmare experience’, 197–9, mentioning the benandanti of Friuli.
28. Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton, 2001), ch. 4.
29. Spalding Misc., i, 172.
30. Ibid., 121.
31. Quoted in Christina Larner, Christopher H. Lee and Hugh V. McLachlan, A Source-Book of Scottish Witchcraft (Glasgow, 1977), 257.
32. Ibid.
33. SSW.
34. G. F. Black (ed.), Some Unpublished Scottish Witchcraft Trials (New York, 1941), 45–6.
35. Spalding Misc., i, 121–2.
36. Cheyne et al., ‘Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations’, 330.
37. Davies, ‘Nightmare experience’, 190–3.
38. Julian Goodare, ‘Scottish witchcraft in its European context’, in Goodare, Martin and Miller (eds.), Witchcraft and Belief, 26–50, at pp. 34–5. The concern was usually with women’s relations with incubi; succubi were rarer.
39. Davies, ‘Nightmare experience’, 186–8. For the reference to James, see his Minor Prose Works, 48.
40. William Hay, Lectures on Marriage, ed. John C. Barry (Stair Society, 1967), 127.
41. For the Canon Episcopi, see Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters (eds.), Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History (2nd edn., Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 62–3, and Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, IL, 2002), 126–37.
42. Julian Goodare, ‘Women and the witch-hunt in Scotland’, Social History, 23 (1998), 288–308, at pp. 294–7; Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), 149.
43. BL, Egerton MS 2879, fo. 5r.-v. The scribe first wrote ‘found ane come on hir’, implying a person, and then added the word ‘thing’. The phrase ‘hot nor cold’ is evidently a confused answer to a standard leading question about the coldness of the Devil’s body. The vanishing at the name of Christ may be a folkloric motif, also found in the case of Janet Cock above.
44. Holden and French, ‘Alien abduction experiences’, 170.
45. Christopher C. French, ‘Fantastic memories: the relevance of research into eyewitness testimony and false memories for reports of anomalous experiences’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10 (2003), 153–74.
46. Susan Blackmore, ‘Abduction by aliens or sleep paralysis?’, Skeptical Inquirer, 22:3 (May–June 1998), http://www.csicop.org/si/ (accessed 27 May 2010).
47. Gisli H. Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions: A Handbook (Chichester, 2003), ch. 8.
48. Gudjonsson, Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions, 389–90.
49. Alternatively to the concept of false memory, the phenomenon of ‘false belief’ has been posited, arising from loss of confidence in one’s real memories under stress: Gudjonsson, Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions, 212–13.
50. Goodare, ‘Women and the witch-hunt’, 295.
51. Diane Purkiss, ‘Sounds of silence: fairies and incest in Scottish witchcraft stories’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (London, 2001), 81–98, at pp. 83–4.
52. ‘Acts and statutes of the lawting, sheriff and justice courts within Orkney and Shetland, 1602–1644’, Maitland Miscellany, ii (1840), 189.
53. Or, as Purkiss speculates, incest – Reoch being one of two ‘women who talk about incest and fairies in the same breath’: Purkiss, ‘Sounds of silence’, 91 (emphasis in original). But Reoch did not talk about incest; she merely reported encountering a ‘blak man’ who ‘callit him selff ane farie man quha wes sumtyme her kinsman callit Johne Stewart’: Maitland Miscellany, ii, 189. Quite apart from the fact that he was dead, the distancing phrase ‘callit him selff’ shows that Reoch herself did not entirely believe that he was her kinsman. Such a doubtful relationship could hardly have been so close as to fall within the forbidden degrees of incest. The original trauma seems more likely to have been connected with James Mitchell, father of Reoch’s recently-born child, than with the ‘blak man’.
54. Witches’ visions were often of more benevolent figures, but for evidence of their moral ambiguity, see Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton, 2005), ch. 7.
55. Peter M. Rojcewicz, ‘Between one eye blink and the next: fairies, UFOs and problems of knowledge’, in Peter Narváez (ed.), The Good People: New Fairylore Essays (Lexington, KY, 1991), 479–514, at pp. 489–90.
56. Matthew B. Reysen, ‘The effects of social pressure on false memories’, Memory & Cognition, 35 (2007), 59–65.