Following in the footsteps of the (Part 2)

The Spanish hero 

I wrote in the previous section about Freddy Krueger and the fact that he is not the source for the hatman. This time the research goes further back to the famous figure of Don Diego de la Vega.

 De la Vega is a character created by the writer Johnston Macaulay, more than a century ago. The character is described in her book as a black-clad figure wearing a black robe, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, and a face covered with a mask that only the eyes sparkle through. This character is known to most of us as 'Zorro', one of the first superheroes who inspired the character of Batman.

 There is no way of knowing how the writer came up with the idea for the character of Zorro, who, according to the story, was born at the end of the 18th century and acted against Spanish rule in California. It is also difficult to find a resemblance between Zorro's behavior that protects the weak and between the figure that people experience during sleep paralysis, but the similarity is that one of Zorro's modus operandi was to intimidate people in their sleep after entering their bedrooms when those people see the black silhouette of a man wearing a robe and a wide-brimmed hat.

 Stefan Wagner wrote on his website "In 1997 when I was a child, I saw an episode of Zorro on TV with my mother. In the same episode, Zorro frightened his enemies with a frightening voice that he made when he was in the dark. That night, I woke up at 4:00 A.M., heard my room door open, and heard exactly the same voice..." From there, Wagner continues with a classic depiction of sleep paralysis that he associated with Zorro's character.

 The great similarity between the description of Zorro's character and the character that people see during sleep paralysis can imply that even more than a century ago people already saw during their sleep paralysis the same figure with the hat and robe that frightened them in their sleep and perhaps even the writer Macaulay experienced sleep paralysis and met the same character.

 If indeed people saw the hatman more than a century ago, it seems that the origin of that character lies in the more distant past. Indeed, if we go back a few centuries, we can find a real figure who wore a black coat and a wide-brimmed hat that for a long time terrified the peoples of Europe.

 To be continued...