Folklore · by Frater Custos · 11-minute read · updated in August

The creature that sits on your chest

In Romagna it is called Mazapégul, in the Garfagnana Linchetto, in Abruzzo Pantafica, in the Salento Carcaluru, in Sardinia Ammuntadore. They are seventeen different figures for a single experience — and what proves it is not an interpretation, but linguistics.

You wake and cannot move. Your chest is crushed under a weight, the breath will not come in, and there is someone in the room. It lasts a few seconds, perhaps a minute. Then the body releases all at once and the presence is gone.

Anyone who has been through this experience — sleep medicine calls it hypnagogic sleep paralysis — recognises the scene. What almost nobody knows is that the Italian countryside told of it for centuries, and that it coined a different name for every valley.

This article sets those names out in a row. Not out of collector's curiosity, but because their distribution says something that no single legend, taken on its own, manages to say.

The table

Look at the third column. The etymologies cluster around three roots that have nothing whatever to do with one another: crushing (calcare, to press down, in at least five forms hundreds of kilometres apart), the Latin incubus and the Greek phantom. The French cauchemar — from caucher, to press down — falls into the same pattern, and so does the Sardinian ammuntare, «to mount on top».

This is the point. Communities that did not communicate with one another, that spoke mutually unintelligible languages, independently built the same name for the same thing: something that climbs on top of you and presses. It is not a legend spreading by contact. It is the same physiological experience which, everywhere, produces the same metaphor.

The corollary is more interesting than the observation. If the core is everywhere identical, then everything that varies from area to area does not concern the phenomenon: it concerns the community that tells of it. And there the differences become documents.

The Romagnol Mazapégul wears a red cap, and whoever takes it from him holds him in his power. He is drawn to young women: he enters their rooms, falls asleep on their stomachs, courts them. It takes little malice to understand what is being spoken of: it is the socially available explanation of the female erotic dream, and in certain variants of unexplained pregnancy.

The Lucchese Linchetto concentrates his mischief on the wedding night. It is the most eloquent ethnographic detail in the whole family: a peasant community that needs an external culprit for the anxiety and the sexual failure of the first night, and builds one for itself.

The Abruzzese Pantafica is fought off in a splendid and very ancient way. Beside the bed one places a broom with many bristles, or a little bag of pulses, because the creature is compelled to count them and stays occupied until dawn. The same arithmetical compulsion of the night demons appears in Slavic and in Germanic folklore — and it is, together with the etymologies, the second strong indication of how old this belief is.

Antonio Morri, Vocabolario romagnolo-italiano, Faenza 1840, under the entry mazzapedar: «Quell’oppressione, e quasi soffocamento, che altri sente talora nel dormir supino» — that oppression, and near suffocation, which one sometimes feels when sleeping on one’s back. Not a legend: a dictionary entry.

A question remains that is worth putting honestly, and it is the one that separates this work from popularisation. Why has the Janara of Benevento, who also sits on the chests of sleepers like all the others, ended up taking on miscarriages, malformations and infant mortality as well, while the Buffardello of the Garfagnana stopped at stealing wine?

I have no answer. I have an observation: the figures that remain mischievous sprites belong to areas where witchcraft as a crime never really took hold, and those that take on blood and death appear where there were trials. Folklore is not born of the night alone. It is born of the courts as well.