I’m guessing you don’t want to hear about my everyday life so I will just write down the interesting and relevant parts, and for the sake of anonymity I will not mention any names.
Three days ago I woke up in the middle of the night to what sounded like heavy breathing coming from the doorway of my bedroom. Frightened I opened my eyes and looked to where I had heard the noise and I saw what appeared to be a woman. It was too dark for me to get any details of her appearance other than her height and long dark hair, but I could feel her staring straight into my soul. My heart was pounding and I tried to move but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t. So I did the only thing I could, I stared at her, terrified with an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. After a few seconds which felt like hours she just disappeared, there was no movement, no sound, one moment she was there and the next she wasn’t.
After she had disappeared I discovered that I could move again, but I didn’t move. I just continued staring at where she had stood for a few minutes. I was terrified but I managed to find enough courage to get out of bed and turn on the lights. My first thought was to search through the house and to call the police because of someone breaking in and watching me sleep, but my second thought was that it wasn’t a break in, that it wasn’t even real, just a realistic and horrifying nightmare, how else would I explain being unable to move and the woman just disappearing? So I called a close friend of mine. He was annoyed at me calling and waking him up in the middle of the night, but I told him it was important and that he needed to come over so he told me he needed a few minutes to get dressed and that he would be here as soon as possible.
Still scared and waiting for my friend, I opened google to find out if anyone had experienced something similar to what happened to me and I found something called sleep paralysis.
If you don’t know what it is, I´ll give you a summary of what I found out from Wikipedia. It’s basically your brain waking up before your body so you find yourself unable to move and when it happens you may hallucinate.
So while reading I heard someone knocking on the door, I must admit that I was scared when I heard it before remembering that I had asked someone to come over. So I walked downstairs, or rather I ran downstairs scared of the dark and opened the door and invited my friend to come inside. He commented on me being a bit shaky and asked if I was alright and why I had asked him to come over, so I told him what had happened and that I was scared of being alone. To my surprise he didn’t ask any follow up questions and he wasn’t mad or even annoyed at me, he just offered to stay up with me until the morning and to sleep with me for a day or two if it made me feel safer, I accepted his offer and asked myself what I had done to deserve such amazing friends. After chatting with him for a few minutes we took a mattress and placed it next to my bed so he could sleep there the following night and after that we went to the living room and watched tv until the morning.
Fast forward to two days ago, me and my friend had went to bed, he was laying next to me on the mattress we had placed on the floor the previous night and once again I woke up to the sound of heavy breathing but this time it wasn´t coming from the doorway, it was coming from the foot of my bed. As I opened my eyes I saw the same woman from the night before, I tried to move, I tried to scream, and I tried to alert my friend but I couldn’t. I looked into the eyes of the woman and even though it was too dark to see any details and even though the only thing I could see in the place where her eyes were supposed to be was darkness I knew that she was staring back at me. Terrified, I didn’t dare to break eye contact but then I heard a scream filled with horror, not coming from the woman but from my friend, the woman looked at the source of the noise and then once again she disappeared into thin air and I was able to move.
As if we had practiced beforehand both me and my friend jumped out of bed at exactly the same time and once I was up on my feet I walked over to the light switch and turned on the lights.
As soon as the lights were on he asked me something along the lines of what the fuck just happened, so I told him the truth, wich was that I didn’t know. He wasn’t happy with the answer he got, but it was the only one I had. After some crying from my part and a lot of swearing coming from the both of us we went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife for protection and then once again, I found myself doing some googling to find out what we had just encountered.
After maybe 30 minutes I found something interesting, I stumbled across something from some old folklore here in Sweden. It’s called a Mara there was a lot of different information and stories about it but something most of them had in common was that there was a woman sitting on your chest making you unable to move and sometimes even killing you, it had not sat on my chest but it did catch my attention since it was a part of Swedish folklore. And if it was a Mara there was a way to get rid of it. When researching it I found a spell to banish it. The only problem was that I was unable to move, much less cast a spell on it, but I had a friend with me who could help me out. So I told my friend what to say if I were to get a visit the next night. We decided to keep the lights on and that he should try to stay awake as long as possible and to try the spell if we got another visit from the woman.
Now fast forward to what happened last night.
Unlike the previous nights I wasn’t woken up by the sound of heavy breathing.
I woke up to what felt like 100 kilos on my chest and the awful smell of something rotten, I opened my eyes and saw the woman that had been tormenting me, her face centimeters from mine, and thanks to the light I could now make out some details, and I really wish I couldn’t. Her eyes were black as night and her face was that of an old woman, her skin was pale as death and her long black hair was hanging down and it looked like it had never been washed. The rotten smell I had felt was coming from her and I heard the familiar sound of her heavy breathing. The feeling of pure terror was overwhelming and then the woman’s mouth opened and with a raspy and low pitched voice she whispered “I’ll kill you”. My heart was racing and I could barely breathe due to the pressure on my chest, I have never and I don’t think I will ever be as scared as I was then. She slowly raised and moved her hands towards my throat, they were bony and her nails were long and dirty. As she placed her hands around my throat I first felt how cold they were and then she started applying pressure.
As she was choking me I finally heard it, the voice of my friend, he screamed “Mara Mara memory, in the name of the lord I banish thee, until you have counted all the birds in the sky, all the words of god and all the fish in the sea, in the name of the lord I banish thee”. As soon as he was finished the woman shrieked in pain and lunged at my friend but before she could reach him she disappeared.
Now I’m writing this after drinking 7 cups of coffee, my chest still hurts and I am terrified of going to sleep. My friend is still with me but I’m just praying that she’s gone. Every night she has been getting closer and the last time she was on my chest and told me she would kill me, I have no doubt that if the spell didn’t work I won’t wake up tomorrow.