The West Yorkshire town of Pudsey, about halfway between Leeds and Bradford, famously gave its name to Pudsey the Bear in the BBC Children in Need charity campaigns. But it also gave its name to a far more sinister figure that haunted the nightmares of many: the Pudsey Bitch Daughter…
You find yourself suddenly awake in the middle of the night unable to breathe. Panic turns to terror as a sinister figure approaches your bed and climbs on top of you as you lie utterly paralysed and unable to cry out. As the figure kneels on your chest crushing the life out of you, you see the horrible leering face of a witch and clutched in her hand is a carving knife which she raises above her head, and as you watch on spellbound in immobile horror, she plunges it into your thudding heart. You have just encountered the Pudsey Bitch Daughter.
The only historical reference I can find to the Pudsey Bitch Daughter (or ‘Dowter’ in local dialect) is in Joseph Lawson’s 1887 book Letters to the Young on Progress in Pudsey During the Last Sixty Years.[i]This suggests belief in – or at least an awareness of – the Pudsey Bitch Daughter lasted well into the early to middle nineteenth century.
But who or what was the Pudsey Bitch Daughter?
Bitch Daughters
The Bitch Daughter was a common name for a demonic witch-like figure that was said to sit upon her victim’s chest and suffocate them. A common expression was to be ‘ridden by the bitch daughter’ – in other words, to have suffered an attack from this nocturnal entity.[ii]
These attacks are what we call today sleep paralysis: your body in immobilised as it would be when you’re dreaming, but you feel fully conscious. Being paralysed increases the feeling of panic, and the sleep disorder is often accompanied by frighteningly real hallucinations or a sense of a malignant presence in your bedroom.
The experience is fairly common. One study found that around a third of college students had experienced a bout of sleep paralysis.[iii] However, other studies get very different results, and this may be down to how questions in surveys are phrased, how such experiences are viewed in the local culture or innate or cultural differences in prevalence in populations.
The experience of sleep paralysis has a common core of characteristics: feeling unable to move, negative emotions, a sense of a sinister presence and a tightness in the chest. However, the entities involved differ across cultures. In Newfoundland, it would be a hideous hag, in China it might be a ghost, in Egypt it could be a jinn and in Japan a demon.
In Europe a few centuries ago, experience of sleep paralysis would be explained as a visit from an incubus or succubus – horny demons that would have sex with their sleeping victim.
The Bitch Daughter is another way of describing these experiences, with the Pudsey Bitch Daughter being a local variant on this.
Is it the case that the experiences of sleep paralysis create the folklore around these entities, or does the retelling of these stories of nocturnal attacks make a population more likely to interpret sleep paralysis with reference to the folklore?
It’s hard to tell, and the influence may run both ways. In my own experiences of sleep paralysis (see link below), I saw a monkey faced demon sitting on my chest and crushing the life out of me. But I can’t help but wonder if this was influenced by a painting known as The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli from 178I which I was familiar with from the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Frankenstein.
Hag Stones
So how would the good people of Pudsey go about protecting themselves from the Bitch Daughter?
It’s likely that they used hag stones – pebbles, slates, flints or other stones with a natural hole in them. These would be tied to the bed with some string through the hole in the stone to ward off evil hags like the Pudsey Bitch Daughter who were wont to attack helpless victims in their sleep. Some folklore says the stones must be stolen or given to be effective, rather than found oneself, though in the available accounts it seems clear that they were passed down in families and this was thought to increase their potency.
In Yorkshire, the magic was said to be inactive until or unless the string or cord was looped through the hole and a knot tied. Furthermore, a new string had to be tied in place before cutting an old worn out one, or the magic would dissipate.
Troublesome demonic witches like the Pudsey Bitch Daughter not only haunted people in their beds. When horses were found in their stable sweating and mysteriously exhausted in the morning, it might be assumed that the animal had been ridden by witches throughout the night. A hag stone hung in the stable was thought to offer protection.[iv]
Hag stones were convenient folk magic. No rituals, blessings or magic words required. No priest, cunning man or wise woman need be employed. You didn’t even have to look for one – they were said to only work if you hadn’t been purposefully searching for one. All you did was tie a piece of string through the hole and hang it in the desired place.
Although the Pudsey Bitch Daughter has vanished into history, hag stones have not. They were still in use in parts of rural Yorkshire in the early twentieth century to guard against witchcraft.[v]
Occultist Aleister Crowley was rumoured to have cursed the town of Hastings so that whoever tried to leave would be condemned to eventually return there. The only way to escape was to take a stone with a hole in it – a hag stone – from the beach, according to local legend.[vi]
Epilogue: The Hat Man
Although the Pudsey Bitch Daughter remains elusive, she is part of a tradition of shadowy entities inhabiting the edges of our consciousness. In recent years, the Hat Man has emerged as a sinister figure haunting people’s nightmares. Victims have described this mysterious humanoid figure with his trademark Freddie Krueger fedora appearing before them when they suffered from attacks of sleep paralysis or when they had taken too much Benadryl, an over-the-counter anti-allergy medication.
Personal accounts with the Hat Man have spread since the early 2000s and become a popular internet meme.[vii] This has allowed it to spread far and wide across cultures far more effectively the Pudsey Bitch Daughter could ever dream of.
So if you happen across a stone with a hole in it, pick it up and take it home. It might get you a better night’s sleep…
For my adventures with sleep paralysis and a demon haunted light switch, see here
For more horny demons, see here
[i] Joseph Lawson (1887). Letters to the Young on Progress in Pudsey During the Last Sixty Years, p.49
[ii] Karen Stollznow (2024). Bitch: The Journey of a Word (Cambridge University Press), p.26
[iii] G. Benham, (2020). ‘Sleep paralysis in college students’, Journal of American College Health, 70(5), 1286–1291. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2020.1799807
[iv] J. Geoffrey Dent (1965). ‘The holed stone amulet and its uses’, Folk Life, 3(1), pp.68-78, doi:10.1179/flk.1965.3.1.68
[v] ‘Guard against witches’, Yorkshire Evening Post 12 April 1927, p.7
[vi] https://www.hastingsinfocus.co.uk/2021/10/26/crowleys-curse-you-can-check-out-any-time-you-like-but-you-can-never-leave/
Paul Weatherhead 