The Night a Friend Had to Roll Him Off the Couch
Around 2007 or 2008, Jonathan Seabolt had his very first experience with sleep paralysis while couch surfing at his friend Adam Mitchell’s apartment in Bluefield, Virginia, located in the old complex above New Graham Pharmacy. He woke up in the middle of the night fully aware of his surroundings but found himself completely trapped in a frozen body. Terrified and unable to speak clearly, Jonathan tried to call out to his friend. When Adam came into the room, shaking Jonathan did nothing to break the paralysis. Panicking under the assumption that he had somehow severed a nerve in his neck and paralyzed himself, Jonathan begged Adam to roll him off the couch, hoping the jarring impact of the floor would shock his body awake. Instead, Jonathan fell over like a rock and clanked onto the ground, remaining completely paralyzed. Adam eventually placed a blanket over him and laid beside him until Jonathan fell back asleep.
“I woke up fully aware, you know, I could see, look around, but I couldn’t move. I was completely trapped.”
A Family Affair and the Art of the Sleep Twitch
After the couch incident, Jonathan initially dismissed the terrifying event as a bizarre fluke. However, the episodes began occurring more frequently. Growing up in a deeply religious household, Jonathan initially worried that he was experiencing demonic possession. When he finally built up the courage to discuss the episodes with his mother, he was shocked to learn that she suffered from sleep paralysis too. The mystery deepened as they realized his sister and uncle also experienced the exact same phenomenon, revealing that they were simply a sleep paralysis family. Over years of dealing with the condition, Jonathan discovered that his episodes correlated heavily with weight and sleeping position, noting that sleeping on his back made an episode almost guaranteed. He also developed a physical technique to fight back: by focusing intense effort on firing enough nerve endings to twitch his hand, he could gradually get his blood circulating and break the physical lock.
“I started talking to my mom about it… and then she told me that she suffers from it as well… we’re just a sleep paralysis family.”
The Poltergeist Incident and the Out of Body Paradox
While standard paralysis is terrifying enough, Jonathan’s sleep issues have occasionally crossed over into the deeply surreal. While living in the Ridge View Apartments and working at GameStop, he woke up one morning preparing to take a shower before his shift. He grabbed a pair of boxers and walked into the living room, only to see his dining room chairs stacked on top of each other in a bizarre Poltergeist style arrangement. Creeped out, he turned back to his bedroom, only to be met with a shocking sight: his own physical body was still lying on the bed, fast asleep. Fearing that he might actually be dead, Jonathan tossed the boxers aside in a panic. When he woke up for real moments later, the chairs in the kitchen were perfectly normal. But when he returned to his bedroom, the boxers he had taken out during the experience were sitting on his bed, exactly where he had thrown them during his out of body state.
“The chairs from my dining room were stacked on top of each other… I go to walk back into my bedroom and when I look, my body is still on the bed. I can see my body sleeping.”
Ready for More Spooky Tales?
If you think these sleep paralysis stories are wild, you have only scratched the surface of what Jonathan and the host discuss. From local Appalachian lore and regional politics to mind bending theories about space, religion, and the afterlife, this conversation gets incredibly deep and wonderfully weird. Want to hear the full story from Jonathan himself? Check out the original episode of the podcast and dive into the chilling details!
