I experienced sleep paralysis twice in college. I can vouch for the sheer terror that attends the experience. I saw -- no, felt -- an evil presence to my left. I can't tell you what was evil about it or how I knew it was so nasty. But I did. As the experience progressed, it came closer. It didn't feel like my life was at risk. That was, in fact, too small. It felt like the presence was after something else, probably what you'd call my soul or my being, even though intellectually I'm a straight materialist. I woke up more scared than I've ever been in my life. Overwhelming fear. Overwhelming dread. Overwhelming fear and dread. When I read about sleep paralysis, I immediately identified that presence (which remained just to the left of my visual field) as the Old Hag.

But there is a one big difference between sleep paralysis, which impacts a substantial percentage of the global population at least once, and what the Hmong immigrants experienced in the 1980s. The Old Hag was terrifying but harmless; whatever happened in the night to the Hmong killed them.

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Adler studied the Hmong and their relationship to what they call tsog tsuam for years and years. That research forms the core of her book. Adler went out into the field. She collected dozens of experiences of sleep paralysis among the Hmong both from her own interviews and other researchers. One 49-year old Adler interviewed provided this typical experience:

I remember a few months after I first came here -- I was asleep. I turned out the light and everything, but I kind of think ... and then -- all of a sudden, I felt that -- I cannot move. I just feel it, but I don't see anything, but I -- then I tried to move my hand, but I cannot move my hand. I keep trying, but I cannot move myself. I know it is tsog tsuam. I am so scared. I can hardly breathe. I think, "Who will help? What if I die?"

She brought her background in exploring traditional belief systems to bear on attacks like the one above. She found that the nighttime attacks were part of a matrix of beliefs held by both animist and Christian Hmong. A powerful folklore had built up around tsog tsuam that included both causes and cures for the attacks.

"When the Hmong don't worship properly, do not perform the religious ritual properly or forget to sacrifice or whatever, then the ancestor spirits or the village spirits do not want to guard them," one man explained to Adler. "That's why the evil spirit is able to come and get them." And for a lot of reasons, the Hmong in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not able to worship properly.



The ethnic group fought a guerrilla war against the government of Laos with U.S. backing during the Vietnam War. When the Laotian communists won, many Hmong struck out for America to avoid reprisals. The U.S. government decided to scatter the Hmong randomly across the U.S. to 53 different cities, breaking up the immigration patterns we generally see. In short order, the Hmong organized and made a "secondary migration" to California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The immigrants ran into all kinds of problems making their way in the States. Highland Laos, where farming and hunting were the norm, was not Minneapolis-St. Paul or Fresno. Unemployment was obscenely high and the sense of community that many had enjoyed in the old country was gone.