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On a winter morning in early January 1981, Xiong Tou Xiong, a twenty-nineyear -old man, was found dead in the bed of his Portland, Oregon home. He had not been ill; his death was sudden and unexpected. Two days later, Yong Leng Thao, a forty-seven-year-old man, died on the way to a Portland hospital after his wife found him lying in his bed, unresponsive (Davidson 1981). He had been up late watching television with an uncle and had gone to bed after midnight, briefly waking his wife. Both were soon asleep. “Then came his labored breathing , so loud that it awakened her. She shook him. . . . [In the] next moments of horror, she realized that she could do nothing more” (Curry 1981, B16). Both of the men who died were Laotian Hmong refugees who had recently immigrated to the United States. Their deaths were brought to the attention of Larry Lewman, the medical examiner of Multnomah County. In reviewing recent reports, Lewman soon found two additional cases of sudden, unexpected death. Searching for further clues, he telephoned the coroner’s office in St. Paul, Minnesota, a city in which, like Portland, many Southeast Asian refugees had settled. As forensic scientist Michael McGee recalls, he was told: “We have a large Southeast Asian population here, and we can’t figure out what’s happening . We have no idea why these people are dying. Would there be any chance you guys are experiencing the same thing?” (Meier 2004). In fact, death records in St. Paul showed that four Laotian Hmong refugees had died suddenly in their sleep. A mysterious pattern was beginning to emerge: all of the victims had died unexpectedly; all were men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty; all were apparently healthy; and all had died while they were asleep. Also, in all cases for which autopsies had been conducted,1 findings were negative. Sudden deaths among the Hmong continued throughout the mid-1980s, but no medical cause could be found. In 1986, when I first learned of the 1 VVVVVVVVVVV Introduction unexplained nocturnal deaths, I was a graduate student in Los Angeles, studying traditional belief narratives. What little I had heard about the syndrome—that seemingly healthy people died in the night, on their backs, with looks of terror on their faces—was strangely evocative of the traditional nocturnal pressing spirit attacks I had been researching. I knew that these nocturnal visitations (termed “sleep paralysis” in the scientific literature) were characterized as terrifying , but ultimately harmless experiences. Still, as I continued to research the nocturnal spirit attacks in different sociocultural contexts, I became intrigued by the possibility of a relationship between the traditional nocturnal experiences and the Hmong immigrants’ sudden deaths. I began to study the pattern of the unexplained fatalities and learned that the first reported case of what would later become known as Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS) had actually occurred in 1977, with the death of Ly Doua in Orange County, California (Maxwell 1981a, 1981b). The incidence of the deaths peaked in 1981 and 1982, and it was this preponderance of cases that resulted in the recognition of a pattern that might not otherwise have been noticed until much later. The median age at death for victims of the syndrome was thirty-three, and the median length of time that they had been living in the United States before death was seventeen months. What was most striking for me, as a student of traditional narrative, however, was the fact that the symptoms of SUNDS-related events reported by epidemiologists mirrored the characteristics of the nocturnal pressing spirit attack as it has been known in folk tradition across cultures and throughout history : the victim’s impression of wakefulness, inability to move or speak, realistic perception of the immediate environment, intense fear and anxiety, lying in a supine position, feeling pressure on the chest, difficulty breathing, and awareness of a “presence” that is often seen or heard. The night-mare, as I have chosen to call this encounter (for lack of a contemporary, widely recognized term), is distinct from all other sleep phenomena, including generic “bad dreams” and night terrors. The prevalence of the night-mare is remarkably high, with 25–30 percent of healthy people around the world experiencing at least one episode. In the United States, though, the night-mare leads a paradoxical existence : the experience is simultaneously very common and little known. Across cultures and throughout history, encounters with...

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