1
The Old Hag in Newfoundland
The Canadian province of Newfoundland is an island in the North Atlantic off the east coast of Canada. Its 42,734 square miles provide a home for a population of only a little more than 570,000âabout the same area as Pennsylvania but roughly one-twentieth the population. This sparse population, predominantly of Irish and English extraction, is concentrated on the Avalon Peninsula at the eastern end of the island, where the capital city of St. Johnâs is located. St. Johnâs is the only large city in Newfoundland, with a population of over 100,000. Most of the remaining people live in small villages scattered along the coast. A British colony until 1948, Newfoundland has been isolated from both the Old World and the New by a combination of historical factors, geography, and weather. In recent years that isolation has begun to yield, but culturally the island is still distinct and fascinating.
From 1971 to 1974 I lived and worked in St. Johnâs as a faculty member in the Folklore Department of Memorial University of Newfoundland. This Folklore Department and the associated Folklore and Language Archive are ideally located because the conservative influences of isolation have left intact in Newfoundland elements of traditional culture no longer functioning in most of the English-speaking world. My work at the university included archival duties, and I was pleased to find that the rich and extensive collections included great quantities of folk belief material, my main interest. Through the archive and field work I found that beliefs and accounts of supernatural lightsâWill-oâ-the-Wisp, Jack-oâ-Lantern, ghost ships, weather lightsâare very common, as are ghosts, omens of death, and many other categories. Even beliefs and accounts about the fairies can be found in St. Johnâs and the outports, although these are much less common now than they once were. The current distribution and the changing state of such traditions appear to support the conventional academic point of view that supernatural beliefs are survivals from a naive past and must decline as âscientific thoughtâ ascends. Newfoundland seems to have more of them than do less isolated parts of North America, and they seem to be more generally distributed. As the forces of acculturation proceed in the province, the beliefs are becoming less common, with the most rapid loss among the most acculturated portions of the population. Similar observations have been made many times all over the world for centuries and are a major part of the basis for the modern understanding of the relationships between supernatural belief, culture, and experience. I first encountered âthe Old Hagâ while working with these Newfoundland traditions.
Many Newfoundlanders are familiar with the Old Hag tradition and define it as did a university student about twenty years of age: âYou are dreaming and you feel as if someone is holding you down. You can do nothing only cry out. People believe that you will die if you are not awakened.â Brief definitions, however, are not the natural form of living traditions. In fact, they are very rarely found in this form except when a folklorist or other outsider asks questions of the âWhat is âŠâ variety. Beliefs, like values and attitudes, normally find their expressions either in action or descriptions of action, that is, narratives. Narratives are far more easily elicited, recorded, and analyzed than are spontaneous acts, and thus they provide a convenient means of examining beliefs in their natural setting. For these reasons, my data in this book consist primarily of narratives and their accompanying conversations.
The three legends1 that follow provide a much more accurate, and therefore complex, introduction to the Old Hag tradition than could any number of definitions. The first two legends were received by the archive in response to a questionnaire distributed among university students in 1970 (reproduced in the Appendix). This was called the âNightmare/Hag/Old Hagâ questionnaire because the terms ânightmareâ and âOld Hag,â or simply âHag,â were known to be related, although the nature of the relationship was not immediately clear. Eight general questions about the Old Hag were asked, but it was emphasized that a detailed account of a single experience would be the most useful form of response. The students who received the questionnaire were free either to respond from their own knowledge and experience or to interview others. The following account is presented as submitted by two female students who collected it from a sixty-two-year-old woman.2
Case 1
Yes, the people of ââ did speak of having nightmares.
Usually they said âI was hagged last night.â To my knowledge the hag was experienced most often in the nighttime, in the personâs home and it always came in human form.
I saw only one actual person who experienced the hag. It was the year 1915 and it concerns three people: Robert ââ, John ââ, and Jean ââ. Robert was the Salvation Army schoolteacher and John ââ was just an ordinary workman. Robert was trying to date Jean who was Johnâs steady girlfriend. About a month after this had been going on Robert began to be hagged. Every night when he went to bed, it was as if someone was pressing across his chestâit was as if he was being strangled. Robert became so sick that the people he boarded with thought he was going to die. But one night an old man suggested that Robert place a piece of board directly across his chest with an opened up pocket knife held between his hands. It was hoped that when the hag came to lie across his chest, the hag would be killed. However, in the morning when Robert got up he found that the knife was sticking into the piece of board. Only for the board Robert would have been killed. Perhaps because the hag thought he had killed Robert that it never came back again. Robert knew that John ââ was the person who was hagging him. He put it down to jealously on Johnâs part. Both men were about the same age, between eighteen and twenty years old. In this case of hagging it was male against male.
Robert told the people that he stayed with the the hag was humanâhe could hear it coming and could recognize it but when it came he couldnât speakâhe could only make throaty noises. The hag just walked in or appeared while Robert was sleeping but he woke up while he was being hagged. Robert said that he was always lying on his back and usually he was under stress. The hag was brought about by a curse. It always affected his throat most and took his breath away.
The way to call a hag, Robert later learned, was to say the Lordâs Prayer backwards in the name of the devil. The only way to avoid the hag was by drawing blood or using the word of God and keeping the light on in the bedroom. Although Robert was hagged he always spoke freely about the whole thing whenever anyone asked him.
In contrasting such legends with brief definitions I was immediately confronted with a complication. In the definition, the experience is called âa dreamâ from which the dreamer must be âawakened.â In the narrative, âbeing haggedâ is equated with âhaving nightmares.â To anyone accustomed to the modern usage of the word ânightmare,â this suggests that being hagged is a bad dream. But the statement that âthe hag was humanâ does not make sense if âhagâ is synonymous with âdream.â Dreams are generally understood to be subjective events, yet in this narrative the hagging is said both to have been done by John and to have been âbrought about by a curse.â This apparent contradiction does not simply indicate a difference of opinion over whether these experiences are dreams or objective, supernatural events. Rather, it is a result both of the combination of several traditions around a central core and of linguistic problems resulting from efforts to describe very difficult subjective points. I shall discuss these issues further following Case 2. For the moment, let us say that in Newfoundland âthe Old Hag,â and often âthe nightmare,â are understood to be applicable to both an experience and a feature of that experience, that is, the attacker. The experience is understood by many to be a state that is different from ordinary dreams but for which there is no good alternative word. Therefore, the use of the word âdreamâ does not always rule out the traditional belief that the experience is external and supernatural, although many do regard it as simply a special class of natural dream.
The next example, submitted by a male university student, was collected from an eighty-year-old man. This text was also written out by the collector and is therefore an approximation of the verbatim statement of the informant. The studentâs written version is presented unchanged except for the omission of unnecessary descriptive comments such as âHis eyes held a unique twinkle.â The words of the reported conversation are given complete with original spelling and the studentâs efforts to record features of dialect.3
Case 2
STUDENT: Do you know anything about the old Hag?
INFORMANT: Hu? No, boy, I donât.
STUDENT: The Old Hag! Donât you know anything about the Old Hag?
INFORMANT: Noââhuââdo you mean hagginâ people? I can tell you a good one on that; I was there when it happened.
It was down on the Labrador it happened. We was fishinâ. I spose it was about fifty odd year ago. âTwas what you call a good year. We had our stages filled up with fish quicker than we could have done it fullinâ âem up with rocks. We was in the bunk house this night, and there was a fine girl, what weâd say, a bedroom girl, she was there, and one of us was tryinâ to kiss her. But she wouldnât let him do it. So he said to her, âIf you donât let me kiss you, Iâll hag you tonightâ; now she never believed he could do it, and she still wouldnât let him do it. Anyway he went home; and Brother, that was a night he hagged her! and hagged her good. She was that bad she was foaminâ at the mouth before her father heard her. She was tellinâ us about it after. Yes he give her some hagginâ.
STUDENT: How did he hag her?
INFORMANT: Hu? I canât go teilinâ it. âTis not good stuff to be tellinâ.
STUDENT: Come on. If thereâs any sin in it, Iâll take the blame. Iâm writing a paper on it.
INFORMANT: WellââIâll tell you, but donât put me name on it. âTwas like this; she went on over to her place. And as soon as she left, me buddy took off his clothes and kneeled down by the bed. I was there watchinâ him when he done it. And you know what he done? He said the Lordâs Prayer backwards; then jumped under the covers and took a knife from under the pilla and stuck it in the sideboard three or four times.
After awhile I put the kerosene lamp out and we all went to bunk. Every now and then weâd hear him bawl out, âHag, good Hag!â And thatâs how he hagged her.
STUDENT: IS the hag supposed to be an old woman or something? Because, who was he calling to when he said, âHag good Hag?â
INFORMANT: NoââHe, hisself must have hagged her; because she could see him standinâ over her with the knife; and she couldnât move because she was stopped still with fright. The foam was even cominâ out of her mouth, and her father only got her back to sense by callinâ her name backwards.
STUDENT: I thought the fellow who hagged her was supposed to be in bed when all this was going on.
INFORMANT: His spirit, his spirit was what hagged her. She said after, if sheâd have knowed he was really goinâ to hag her sheâd had a bottle ready, and finished him before heâd have hagged her.
STUDENT: What do you mean?
INFORMANT: Seeââif you swing at a spirit with a bottle, the spirit who is hagginâ you will die. So he never hagged her no more because he knowed she had a bottle ready.
The importance of variations in terminology is illustrated by the informantâs firm negative response to a question about âthe old Hagâ at the beginning of the interview. The topic would have been dropped if the student had not persisted. While doing a questionnaire study of my own on the subject, I found one respondent who was ignorant of the traditional meaning of âOld Hagâ but who knew the term âThe Hagsâ as a name for the experience. Another respondent, who was aware of the connection of the terms, said, âWe know it as âHag Rogue.â One way my mother used to awaken her father ⊠was to call his name backwards.â Although the spelling may vary, this form often occurs, apparently a corruption of the phrase âhag rodeâ or âhag rid.â In Newfoundland the verb âto hagâ is most commonly used, with âto rideâ occurring less often. Outside of Newfoundland the most common traditional expression I have found for the experience in English is âriding,â although what does the riding is usually called a âwitch,â not a âhag.â In addition to numerous variations on the words hag and ride, the experience in Newfoundland is occasionally called the âdiddiesâ or, as noted earlier, âthe nightmare.â In addition to this variety of terms used in the Newfoundland tradition to describe the basic experience, each term is sometimes held to have more than a single meaning. Not only is the experience occasionally called a dream, but other types of bad dreams are sometimes classified as the Old Hag, especially if the dream involves helplessness. The broadened connotations for the traditional terms seem to result from a process of secondary generalization in which the original meaning is the experience described in the above narratives. Why and how this broadening has happened will be discussed in connection with the old nightmare tradition. This variation in terminology, especially in oral forms that can be easily misunderstood or incorrectly pronounced, is one of several factors complicating efforts to reach strong conclusions about the distribution of the tradition.
In both ca...