Nightmares in Hats
One of the most well-known, modern nightmare monsters is the Hat Man, a popular internet legend since the early 2000s. The Hat Man is a shadow person known for wearing a wide-brimmed hat like a fedora, and sometimes a trench coat, who stands menacingly in the corner of the room alarming paralyzed sleepers. While the image of the Hat Man seems distinctively modern, reminiscent of the hat-wearing horror movie villain Freddy Krueger from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the image of nightmares wearing hats is actually a common motif in many folklore accounts of nightmares, and can even be traced back to the first century! Ever since the connection was made between the Newfoundland nightmare monster of the “Old Hag” and “Hag attacks” to the physiological experience of waking sleep paralysis, a tremendous amount of research has discovered that, cross-culturally, many nightmare monsters and demons from mares to incubi share certain features that can be attributed to sleep paral...
