Bakhtak

The weight arrives before anything else. A sleeper surfaces into the dark to find the breath pressed flat in his chest, something settled across his ribs that is heavy as a sodden sack and faintly warm, and when he tries to throw it off he discovers that his arms will not answer. His throat will not make a sound. He lies there in the close, stale heat of the room, certain he is awake, certain he is being crushed, and unable to do the one thing every animal does when it is frightened, which is move. In the homes of Iran this terror has a name and a body. The Bakhtak has climbed onto him again.

She is no metaphor to the people who fear her. The Bakhtak has been described as a huge black bundle, sweating and shapeless, that drops out of the dark and tries to smother whoever it lands on. Her face, where there should be a nose, carries instead a lump of clay, and from that one detail she earns one of her other names, Binigeli, the clay-nosed. She answers to Ghoul as well, and her relatives turn up under a scatter of older words across the regions, Barkhafj, Bushasb, Estanba, Faranjak, all of them circling the same shared dread of the thing that sits on the chest at night.

The clay nose has a story behind it, and the story is older than it looks. When Alexander rode east in search of the water of life, the Bakhtak went with him, then only a slave girl among his retinue. The spring was found at last and the water poured carefully into a goatskin to be carried home. Before anyone could lift it, a crow drove its beak through the skin, and the water ran out across the ground. The girl moved fast. She scooped what she could into her cupped hands and drank, and in that swallow she stopped being mortal. The crow had drunk too, in its way, and so both of them slipped past death. Alexander, who had crossed the edge of the world for that water and lost it to a bird and a servant, took his revenge on the one he could reach. He had her nose cut from her face. In its place she was given a nose of clay, and immortality with a mutilation is what turned a slave girl into a monster.

Eternity gave her strange knowledge. The Bakhtak is said to know where every treasure on earth lies hidden, every buried hoard and forgotten cache, and this is what makes her worth more than fear. The encounter in the dark is a kind of contest. She throws herself down, the sleeper wakes pinned and breathless, and his one move is to grope upward and catch hold of her nose. She will not give up the nose. To keep it she will tell him where a treasure is buried, one secret traded for her face, and then he need only wiggle a finger to break the spell and send her off into whatever part of the night she came from. Grab the nose, and the monster becomes a business partner.

Most who meet her never manage it. The whole horror of the thing is that the body refuses to obey, that the hand which should reach for her nose lies dead at the sleeper’s side while the weight presses down and the lungs labor. She is close kin in this to the Al, another female devil of Iranian folklore whose attack is broken the same way, by grabbing at her nose. Across the country her cousins keep their own habits. Around Ramhormoz they speak of the Taptapo, who carries a necklace she hangs on a nail or a tree. In the Arak region it is the Shevli, who lies on the sleeper’s chest as heavy as a mountain and stops him moving or shouting. Near Khomeyn the Shavah hangs its necklace on a drainpipe before it pounces, and its whole life is bound up in that cord.

Her power is simple and total within its small domain. She brings the nightmare, the paralysis, the conviction of suffocation, and she carries the map of every hidden fortune as a lure and a ransom. Her weakness is just as exact. The nose is the catch in her, the soft place; threaten it and she bargains, and a wagged finger is enough to end the visit. She cannot be killed, having drunk the water that put death out of reach, but she can be outwaited until morning, when the light empties the room and the weight is simply gone. The word for her has long since worn smooth into ordinary speech. In Iran today, bakhtak is just the word for nightmare, the name of the thing that sat on the chest reduced to the name of the feeling it left behind.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bakhtak?

The Bakhtak is a nightmare demon from Persian folklore that personifies sleep paralysis. It is imagined as a massive, sweating black shape that drops onto a sleeping person’s chest, crushing their breath and pinning them so they cannot move or cry out until the episode passes.

Why does the Bakhtak have a nose made of clay?

According to legend, the Bakhtak was once a slave girl in Alexander the Great’s company who drank the water of life after a crow spilled it, becoming immortal. Enraged at losing the water, Alexander had her nose cut off and replaced with a nose of clay, which is why she is also called Binigeli, meaning “clay-nosed.”

How do you stop or defeat the Bakhtak?

You cannot kill the Bakhtak, because she is immortal, but you can drive her off. The traditional method is to seize her nose while she sits on you, which forces her to bargain, and then wiggle a finger to break the paralysis and send her away.

Does the Bakhtak give treasure?

Yes. The Bakhtak is believed to know where all the treasures of the earth are hidden, and a sleeper who manages to grab her nose can force her to reveal the location of a buried treasure before she escapes, since she will trade the secret rather than lose her nose.

Is the Bakhtak the same as sleep paralysis?

The Bakhtak is the Persian folkloric explanation for the experience now known as sleep paralysis, the same role that “the Old Hag” plays in British folklore. The word “bakhtak” has even become the ordinary modern Persian word for “nightmare.”

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