The Pantafica

The story

There is a moment, in the middle of the night, when you wake without knowing why.

Your eyes are open. You see the ceiling, the window, the shadows of the furniture. But you cannot move. You cannot speak. Something heavy presses on your chest, like a stone, and your breath seems shorter and shorter.

In Abruzzo, for this, there has always been a name.

They call her Pantafica, or Pantafa. They say she is a kind of witch, a cursed female spirit, who goes out at night and wanders through houses. She comes in without a sound. She sits on the chest of the sleeper, with all the weight of her invisible body, and takes away the breath.

The old people described her dressed in white, with eyes that seemed lit by a wrong kind of light. They said that sometimes she put her hands over people's mouths, to stop them screaming. And that among her favourite pastimes was plaiting horses' manes, at night, in the stables.

She struck children above all, some stories tell. But adults too, if they slept badly.

Her name, according to some, comes from "fantasma", ghost. Others link it to old dialect words for a bad dream. In Abruzzo it is a family name: grandmothers said it in a low voice, and grandchildren pulled the covers up to their noses.

Because stories like this do not come from nothing. They always come from something true.

And the truth, here, is simple. Millions of people, in every part of the world and in every age, have felt what the tale describes: waking in the dark, eyes open, unable to move, with a weight on the chest and a sense of presence. In each country, that feeling has had a different name. A witch, a demon, a cat, an old man. In Abruzzo it was called Pantafica.

Today doctors call it sleep paralysis. It happens when the brain wakes a moment before the body: the mind is switched on, but the muscles are still asleep. It lasts a few seconds, a few minutes at most. It does not hurt. It is not dangerous. It is one of the most frightening and most harmless things the body can do.

But people a thousand years ago did not know that. They had only the fear, and something to explain the fear.

In the province of Chieti, in the municipality of Montebello sul Sangro, there is an abandoned village that today is called Buonanotte, "good night". But its old name was Malanotte, "bad night", and it came from a feudal lord of the twelfth century, Odorisio di Malanotte. It seems made for stories of bad nights. In 2023 a film told the legend of the Pantafa, set in an imaginary village called Malanotte, based on a comic. A man with an old tape recorder travels round the village collecting the old people's tales and superstitions, and what he discovers is not easy to forget.

If one night you wake and cannot move, remember this.

There is nobody sitting on your chest. It is you, coming back from a dream. Breathe slowly. Move one finger. Then another. After a few seconds your body will answer.

And if you like, you can smile, in the dark, and say under your breath, as the old people of Abruzzo did:

"For tonight, Pantafica, you have lost."