Monstrum

(host) Do you ever wake up exhausted, having tossed and turned all night?

You hit snooze eight times, the walk to the coffee pot feels like a mile, and all day you're greeted with, "You look tired."

Well, maybe the hag's been ridin' you.

The boo hag, a menacing skinless monster that climbs through your window at night and rides you to steal your life force.

You wake up literally drained.

The hag comes from the rich oral folklore of the Gullah Geechee, an African diaspora community descended from enslaved people in the relatively isolated sea islands and coastal regions of the lower Atlantic.

Why did the Geechee imagine such a horrifying creature?

And why has her legend survived for centuries?

[upbeat music] The Geechee are a unique Black community living on a chain of about a hundred small islands that span more than 300 miles along the southeastern coast of the United States.

The Gullah Geechee are descendants of enslaved people of African ancestry who, beginning in the 17th century, were forced to work in the plantations along the Sea Islands.

These early enslaved people developed a shared language that combined a variety of West African languages and dialects with English.

This united the Gullah Geechee as a community that melded traditions from their homeland with new practices weaving in some truly unique folklore, passed down mostly through oral storytelling and song.

These oral traditions limit how much I can research stories, and voices from within the community really give folklore its fullest power.

Jay Najeeah, a native South Carolinian and Geechee filmmaker, wrote and directed the movie "Hag," and I want to hear more about her interpretation of this monster.

I have the privilege of being born and raised in South Carolina, and being from the low country.

So, as someone who identifies as Geechee, I grew up with so much folklore.

The first time I heard about it, I was I think nine or ten.

And I went to my granny-- I was at her house for the weekend, and I was telling her I was having a hard time sleeping.

I was, like, tossing and turning, and I felt like I couldn't get up out of the bed.

And she was like, "You have a hag on you," and I was like-- I'd never heard of that before.

(Emily) The boo hag has roots in traditional African beliefs, where the line between the natural and spiritual realms is blurred.

The physical body can be separated from the spirit, and, as the Gullah Geechee believe, even the spirit and the soul are distinct entities.

(Jay) Your soul leaves your body upon death, and its virtues that goes to heaven or hell, whereas a spirit serve a different purpose.

Benevolent spirits go on to become like a guiding light or a protector for their families, whereas malevolent or, like, unresting spirits, they torment descendants and become a boo hag.

(Emily) Geechee spiritual practices are sometimes interwoven with Christian beliefs imposed on them by their enslavers.

This is often referred to as conjure, or root work, although some outsiders label these spiritual practices merely superstition.

In Gullah Geechee stories, boo hags aren't born as monsters.

In many tales, they are witch-like, a malevolent entity.

And while hags are almost exclusively women, anyone can become one.

It's someone who's passed on in their spirit is either there's unsettled business, or they're not at rest fully, or they have a lot of, like, resentment or anger left about something they left in this mortal plane.

So when I did the research, it seemed as though there was unfinished business, and to complete that business, you are pulling the energy and siphoning from those who are still with the living.

(Emily) By day, they appear completely normal, blending in with those around them, but at night they shed their skin, hiding it somewhere nearby, and take to the skies to hunt for their next victim.

In most versions, the monster appears bright red with visible veins and spindly arms.

They can supernaturally contort their bodies, allowing them to pass through small openings like keyholes, barely cracked windows, and other small crevices of the home.

An important feature however, is that they must be permitted to enter.

Upon reaching their sleeping victim, they ride them.

When the boo hag rides their victims, it's more than just sitting on them.

They pin their prey down, inducing nightmares and sleep paralysis, while they drain their spiritual, emotional, and physical energy.

This idea of riding is in part about possession, taking control of a person's autonomy and ability to react to the attack.

In some tales, they're even more overtly vampiric, sucking blood through the nose of their victim.

The boo hag, leaving their victims paralyzed, breathless, and drained, can also be read as a metaphor for the lived experience of enslavement.

Just as the boo hag steals autonomy at night, slavery robbed the Gullah Geechee of freedom and control over their own lives.

And I think that also is so interesting when you're looking at trauma, and how trauma affects the body and the spirit.

So it's about safety, it's about protection, I think.

That's one of the really interesting things about not only the boo hag, and getting rid of it or keeping it away, but also about Gullah Geechee culture, because you're looking at how to keep yourself safe, not only from the outside forces but from what could be already inside.

(Emily) In one story, a young man unknowingly dated a boo hag.

She came from a whole family of hags, her parents and siblings included.

When the boy discovered their true nature and exposed them, the entire family was killed and their bodies burned.

Another way to defeat the boo hag is to find its hidden skin and cover it with salt and pepper.

Salt along your window sills, paint blue on windows, doors, and porch ceilings, or a broom at the end of the bed can also deter the hag and other malevolent forces.

Another story tells of a husband who covers his hag wife's skin with salt and pepper.

Unable to return to her skin, she hides under her bed covers the next morning, asking her husband for a doctor.

When a local wise man examines her, he rips off the sheet to reveal the woman's skinless bright red body.

She was thrown alive into a barrel of tar and burned.

Many boo hag stories center on deception.

For the Gullah Geechee, it's a warning about insiders with ill intent, betrayal, and the hidden dangers of daily life under oppression.

But really it's a such a culturally specific instance that happens within families and communities that are part of the Gullah Geechee ancestry.

It's about community, it's about family, and it's about loving your neighbor, and being able to like love the people who are around you enough to keep them safe.

Throughout the 1920s and '30s, the Gullah Geechee people were featured in media, but the representations were often problematically treated as an exotic tokenized snapshot of the African diaspora.

Following World War II and the Civil Rights Movement in the mid 20th century, the Geechee people became less isolated and were able to share their stories outside their sequestered communities, and in their own words.

The arrival of Black studies in higher education brought attention to Geechee culture and the stories collected earlier in the century, but it was fiction that introduced the masses to the Gullah Geechee and their stories.

Black women fiction writers like Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, whose widely read novels included Gullah folk culture, helped elevate these vibrant stories into the literary mainstream.

The movie "Daughters of the Dust" and the kids' show, "Gullah Gullah Island" helped bring positive representations of Sea Island culture into visual pop-culture territory.

More recently, in 2005, famed African American children's author Patricia C. McKissack used the boo hag as a character in her book, "Precious and the Boo Hag," to teach children the importance of obedience, and warn them about strangers.

We have to remember that the written word is very permanent, compared to Gullah Geechee oral storytelling traditions, and the malleable nature of the stories inevitably gets lost.

Performers of Geechee folklore rely on rhythm, gesture, and presence to captivate their audiences-- elements that cannot be fully captured on the page.

The stories don't lose their value as they get recorded, they are just fixed in that storyteller's interpretation.

Just as the Gullah Geechee have adapted their language and culture, in forced enslavement and isolation, the boo hag stories adjust too.

She's part of the cultural identity, and the persistence of the boo hag is a reflection of the Gullah Geechee's resilience.

After my grandmother passed, there was this realization that, like, a lot of my history that I held close to my chest was like oral tradition.

So, I really wanted to put pen to paper to really, like, memorialize not only her, but everything I grew up with and everything I learned, because so often the Black South is not talked about past the trauma that is faced by Black folk in the South.

So, I wanted them to see the entirety of the picture, not just the pieces that we're forced to look at.

Once a largely isolated community, modernity and advances in technology have resulted in more widespread exposure to the world.

This has its benefits and its drawbacks, but it seems to me that film can be a great way to keep the lore alive.

We can capture traditional storytellers spinning their tales, and we can shape the monster in ways that fit modern morals.

As a Black woman from the deep South, I know how easy it is to be like condensed into a simple expectation of what I'm supposed to be, how I'm supposed to act.

And I know for me, I don't want not only the culture, but, like, the recipes to be forgotten.

And I think that with art, with cinema, with any of that stuff, you can shed light on all facets of humanity, and it allows you to be all of yourself, not just the pieces people expect you to be.

(Emily) Like most folklore, the boo hag isn't just about a scary monster; it's a cultural memory that contributes to a living archive.

Every retelling is an act of preservation, as well as reinvention, ensuring that traditions adapt while still honoring the original voices who shaped them.

-And coastal regions... -[person sneezing] -of the Lower Atlantic-- David!

-(David) I'm sorry!

Famed African American children's author, "Patrissa" C. McKi--