The wednesday Hag

Emma is the only daughter of an English family. She was born and raised in Brighton. Emma also has a childhood sweetheart; she’s madly in love with him. They’re dating, and their romance lasts for a while, but he’s the problematic one in the relationship. Emma does everything she can to keep the relationship going, making every possible concession. She even agrees to things she doesn’t agree with, just so they don’t break up. But sometimes it doesn’t work out; this relationship doesn’t last either. Emma is forced to part ways with the man she loves, even though she doesn’t want to—she’s left behind. For two years, she doesn’t let anyone into her life because she can’t forget the man she loved. Since it almost happened but didn’t, this relationship remains a lingering regret for Emma. Two years later, with their families’ intervention and encouragement, Emma and Tom meet. Tom is very smart, a gentleman, hardworking, and a very nice guy who works at a bank. Emma, on the other hand, is a kindergarten teacher. Emma doesn’t feel the same passionate love for Tom that she felt for her first love, but a bond of love and understanding forms between them. Tom proposes to Emma, and she happily accepts. The feeling of starting anew is more appealing than a life chained to the past. Shortly after they marry, Tom is transferred to New York through his bank, and Emma moves there with her husband. They move into an old apartment built in the 1980s; they can’t afford a more luxurious apartment due to the costs of their wedding. After a while, they start trying to have a child, but for a very long time, they are unable to conceive. They go to the doctor, and it turns out they need treatment. They embark on a years-long journey to have a baby, which takes a toll on them both materially and emotionally. Finally, when Emma turns 32, she becomes pregnant—with twins, no less. Everyone is overjoyed, but as the pregnancy progresses, Emma begins to experience changes in her emotional state. It’s natural for expectant mothers to experience emotional fluctuations. Every mother experiences pregnancy differently. Some find it more stressful, while others handle it more easily. Some experience postpartum depression after giving birth. Others get over it easily; it varies from person to person. Emma finds this process extremely difficult from the very start of her pregnancy—though it was a pregnancy she had longed for—but as her belly grows, she begins to feel alienated from her own body. Her tolerance for the world around her diminishes. When she goes to work, her intolerance for the sound of children and her lack of patience for interacting with them lead her to take maternity leave earlier than she had originally planned. After all, she’s expecting twins. Emma’s plan is to have a peaceful pregnancy; she’ll listen to music at home, watch TV, and read books. She’ll take it easy. But that’s not quite how it turns out. Throughout her pregnancy—not just during the first three months, but in the months that follow—Emma’s intolerance to smells reaches its peak. Everything smells awful; she’s bothered by every single scent. She can’t stand sounds either. Even the sound of her husband eating, drinking water, or swallowing next to her bothers Emma. But Tom is a very level-headed man; he’s extremely understanding toward Emma during this time. He even tries to swallow quietly so his wife won’t be bothered. During this period, Emma also begins a phase of self-observation and self-examination. One day, Emma looks at her belly—it’s moving… the baby is clearly moving inside. Since Emma is carrying twins, her belly is larger than a typical pregnancy. She feels a movement in her lower abdomen. It feels as though one of the babies is pressing against Emma’s lower abdomen from the inside. It presses ıt’s finger against her stomach and pulls it out toward her abdomen, feeling as though it’s tracing a shape. Emma begins to feel a sense of detachment from her own baby and her own belly. She shares this with her mother, saying, “The babies are moving in a strange way,” but her mother tells her this is normal.

Emma finds herself in another emotional state besides this one. It’s as if one of the babies is more withdrawn, more vulnerable. She gets the feeling that the other baby is more aggressive, leaving no room for the withdrawn one to move, as if it’s pushing it aside. Because the same side of her belly is always moving, and at times she even tells her mother, “It feels like one of these babies isn’t mine—only one is mine, and the other belongs to some other woman, but is inside me.” However, everyone around her, including her husband, attributes all of this to Emma’s pregnancy hormones, her being away from family, and being alone in a foreign country. Emma finally holds her babies in her arms... A girl and a boy. One of the babies is truly more vulnerable than the other; the boy is born weaker and smaller than the girl. The boy is placed in an incubator. This turns into a situation that shatters Emma’s peace of mind and throws her into turmoil. Emma is driven by two thoughts: one is the feeling that “I couldn’t protect the baby in my womb, I couldn’t look after it, I couldn’t feed or care for one of my babies properly”; the other is directed at the baby girl. She thinks things like, “This baby has taken away my other baby’s right to exist, taken its place, left no room to move, and suppressed the baby.” For a while, the doctors say the baby boy needs to stay in the hospital for care. Both Emma and Tom take their baby girl home. However, Emma goes back and forth to the hospital every day to see her baby boy, help out, and pump and leave her milk. Meanwhile, Emma doesn’t want to breastfeed her baby girl. “She’s eaten her fill—look at how chubby she’s gotten. I’ll pump the rest of my milk—I don’t have much anyway—and give it to my son,” she says. Her husband says, “That’s not right; our daughter needs your milk too,” but Emma refuses to listen. The baby boy dies shortly thereafter, and Emma is devastated by the loss of her son. She grows increasingly cold and distant toward her remaining baby girl. Meanwhile, her mother and mother-in-law try to convince her to breastfeed her baby girl. But Emma falls into a deep depression. She doesn’t even want to hold the baby in her arms; she withdraws completely, and as a result, they switch to formula. As the baby gains more weight, Emma’s anger intensifies. “The baby will become obese; she’s not getting enough to eat,” she complains every day. As a result, she starts dieting, starving herself, and even when she eats, she vomits. Her family thinks Emma will get better over time, assuming this mood is due to her being a new mother, and her husband is already providing enough support. Although her mother came to be by her daughter’s side during the birth, she returns home, thinking there’s no need to stay with her daughter any longer. One night, Emma gets up to use the bathroom; her husband is asleep. The baby’s room is at the end of the hallway—the room next to their own. She notices the door to the baby’s room slowly closing. It looks as though someone has gone inside and is gently closing the door. Emma assumes her husband has gotten up and gone into the baby’s room, but even though she’s not in the best of moods, her maternal instinct takes over. She goes to check on what’s happening in the baby’s room. The door is closed... She opens it and goes inside, but when she looks around, there’s no one there. She can’t make sense of it, but she feels uneasy, restless. She goes to the baby’s crib. She looks at the baby, who is sleeping soundly—everything seems fine. Yet a sense of unease suddenly settles over Emma. Something she can’t quite put her finger on, something that doesn’t sit right with her, is happening.

There’s a nightlight by the baby’s bedside, and she turns it on. She glances at the baby and notices something strange and long lying on top of the baby inside the crib; she picks it up and sees that it’s a clump of thick, black hair. She immediately turns on the room light, which brightens the room, and goes to look inside the crib. In the crib, there are not only strands of hair but also clipped fingernails. Emma is shocked when she sees these because there is no one else in the house besides her and her husband. She immediately picks up the baby and goes to Tom. “Tom, wake up, I found something,” she says, waking her husband. Tom tries to approach the situation logically, suggesting, “It must be from the cleaner, trying to find a reason for this. Though he’s secretly suspicious of the situation, he doesn’t want to cause his wife unnecessary worry. He calms her down, and Emma, for her part, wants to believe this excuse. Some time has passed, but Emma’s sense of unease hasn’t gone away; she feels as if there’s another woman in the house besides herself. She feels as if another woman—one she can’t see but whose presence she senses—is living there with her. It’s as if someone is wandering between the walls, crawling under the beds, into the closets, and hiding—Emma lives in a constant state of unease within the house. She even calls her mother to describe the situation, saying, “There’s someone else in the house; someone is watching us; I feel like there’s another woman living here.” Her mother tries to remain calm and optimistic. “You’re in the postpartum period; it happens. Your mind can get confused. You’re very tired, and you’re constantly on a diet,” she says, attributing it partly to health issues.

But Emma wasn’t convinced, and the uneasy atmosphere in the house persisted. This uneasy atmosphere was affecting Tom just as much. The changes in his wife’s behavior and the unease in the house were growing day by day. Once, while Tom was in the kitchen, he heard Emma calling out to him. Thinking she needed something, he went to the living room, where the voice had come from, but saw no one there. He attributed such minor incidents to his wife’s paranoid behavior; believing he was also under the influence of her words, he chose to ignore the strange occurrences in the house. One day, after putting the baby to bed, Emma said, “I’ll lie down on the couch too, just to rest my body a bit.” As she drifted between sleep and wakefulness, she suddenly jolted awake. But her vision was blurry; she couldn’t see clearly. Her gaze fell on the living room door, and even though her vision was hazy, she saw a woman peering at her through the door. Only her head is visible, as if she were peeking out secretly; her body is hidden behind the door, her long black hair cascading down toward the floor. But this head isn’t at the height one would expect for a normal person. It’s perched at the very top of the door, nearly as tall as the ceiling, watching Emma. Emma rubs her eyes, trying to get a clear view, but she can’t. She can’t even get up from where she’s lying, as if her body were paralyzed. Then the head seems to slide downward, slowly descending from the corner of the door. Within seconds, the woman is on her hands and knees, crawling toward the living room door, observing her surroundings as if trying to figure out where she is. Emma wants to scream from where she lies, but no sound comes out except a rasp. The woman begins to crawl toward Emma, moving as if she were crawling on all fours. When the woman gets close enough to Emma, Emma can see her face clearly. A deathly pale face, with the areas around her lips and eyes red and flushed. Her skin is so pale that the veins beneath it appear purple; Emma can even see the veins pulsing on her face. The woman brings her face very close to Emma’s, and Emma catches a strange, incense-like scent coming from her. The woman gets even closer to Emma and says in a hoarse voice, “This baby is mine.”

Suddenly, Emma lets out a scream and finally finds the strength to leap up from the couch where she’s been lying. At that moment, she sees the woman crawling backward from the living room toward the door, her face still turned toward Emma, staring at her with a challenging look in her eyes. The moment the woman crawls backward out of the living room, Emma runs after her because the direction the woman turns toward after leaving the living room is the same direction as her baby’s room. Emma runs into her baby’s room, goes straight to the crib, sees that the baby is asleep, but hears a breathing sound coming from the crib that doesn’t belong to the baby. Just as Emma reaches out to pick up her baby in concern, a growling sound like a dog’s growl comes from inside the crib. Though Emma is startled by the sound at first, she cannot leave her baby in the crib; she has to take the baby. With a burst of courage, she picks up her baby, along with the blanket, into her arms.

As she leaves the room, she checks on her baby and sees the thick black hair and nails tangled in the blanket; she screams at the sight. Soon after, there’s a knock at the door—it’s her downstairs neighbor, Maria. Maria has come to check on Emma because of her screams; she’s worried about Emma since she’s just given birth. Maria is older, around the same age as Emma’s mother—a woman with two children and grandchildren. She’s clearly an immigrant, doesn’t have many friends; she’s a woman who doesn’t socialize much and spends most of her days at home. Without wasting any time, Emma tells the woman everything that’s happened, crying all the while; she feels a deep sense of gratitude toward the woman for not leaving her alone at home and feels a little safer as a result. Maria tries to reassure her, saying, “Calm down, these things happen during the postpartum period,” and promises not to leave Emma alone until her husband arrives. When her husband arrives that evening, Emma tells him everything as well, saying, “There’s a woman in the house.” Her husband says, “Okay, calm down. We have a security camera inside the house.” He’s referring to the camera they set up for the baby. “I’ll pull up the footage now, and we’ll check it together,” he says. Emma feels relieved at the idea, thinking, “If there’s anything there, my husband will see it too, and he won’t treat me like I’m crazy.” They start watching the camera footage together; as they watch the view from the baby’s room, Tom fast-forwards, and even though everything looks normal, there’s a shadow on the wall in the corner of the room—the silhouette of a woman. That shadow doesn’t change at all throughout the footage they’re watching; it just sits there motionless. “Hold it for a second,” Emma says, even though Tom insists everything is normal. When Emma points out the shadow, Tom argues that it’s just a reflection and completely normal. Since Tom refuses to believe it, they drop the whole thing. Even though Tom tries to find a logical explanation for everything to reassure his wife, he senses that something is off. That night, after Emma falls asleep, Tom watches the camera footage again. The shadow is in the same spot, standing still. But this time, Tom isn’t sure—it’s as if, for a split second, the shadow moved its head... This time, Tom can’t ignore these feelings inside him, and for the first time, he’s scared. In he tdays that follow, something catches Emma’s attention. These incidents always happen on Wednesdays. So while Emma spends the rest of the week normally, whenever Wednesday rolls around, something always happens. One day, while the baby was crying in her crib again, Emma went over to her but noticed that she wasn’t making the usual baby cries. The baby was making wheezing, strange sounds, as if she were choking, and trying to cry. The baby seems to be trying to cry, but also seems to be laughing. Emma immediately calls her downstairs neighbor, Maria, saying, “Come right up—something’s wrong with my baby.” Maria rushes upstairs. She takes a look and sees that the baby is fine—she’s sleeping. Maria says to Emma, “Let’s have some coffee and talk; you seem a bit off.” They talk for a while; Emma explains her unease again, and Maria tries to reassure her. When Maria is about to leave, they open the door, and Maria’s shoes are upside down, completely turned over... The right shoe is on the left, and the left shoe is on the right, but arranged in a perfectly orderly manner. Maria looks at her shoes and then at Emma and says, “Emma, you just keep praying; I’ll think about how we can make you feel better.” Emma’s days are the same as always—the rest of the week is normal, but Wednesdays make her uncomfortable. One Wednesday, Emma has just stepped out of the shower and is applying cream to her face in the mirror when she suddenly feels a strange sensation, as if someone were standing right next to her. She turns to look, but no one is there. She continues applying the cream to her face, and the same feeling comes over her again. Emma realizes that if she turns her head to look, she won’t be able to see it because the image disappears the moment she turns. So, without moving her head at all, she turns only her eyes and catches a glimpse of a woman standing beside her. When Emma first saw this woman, she had black hair, but it was as if a transformation had taken place—the woman now had brown hair. Her hair color had lightened. It had even come close to the color of Emma’s hair. She still looked unkempt, with long hair, ugly, and a pale face, but a familiar scent was coming from the woman. The incense smell was gone, replaced by Emma’s scent. In fact, Emma felt as though the woman standing beside her was actually herself. When Emma feels as though the woman standing beside her is approaching, she bolts out of the bathroom and enters her baby’s room. She picks up her baby from the crib and cradles her close to her chest. As she looks down, she sees wet, muddy-looking footprints on the floor. The footprints lead from the baby’s crib toward the bathroom. When Emma sees this, she throws herself—along with her baby—into her downstairs neighbor’s arms, screaming. Unable to stay home alone any longer, she calls her mother and asks her to come over. Emma’s mother rushes from England to New York. She’s not at all happy with her daughter’s situation and tries to convince her to see a psychologist. “This isn’t going to work,” she says, and eventually takes her daughter to a doctor who’s the best in the field. Emma tells the psychiatrist everything that’s happened to her—everything she’s experienced and everything she thinks she’s experienced. The psychiatrist tells Emma:

"If a new mother hears voices, that’s an auditory hallucination; if she sees images, that’s a visual hallucination. If she feels disconnected from reality, becomes estranged from her baby, and experiences insomnia and agitation, we can diagnose postpartum psychosis. And in your case, this is accompanied by sleep paralysis. The person is awake but unable to move; they feel as though someone is in the room—sometimes it’s a hallucination, sometimes a sensation of pressure on the chest,” the doctor says before professionally diagnosing Emma. Then, in a fatherly tone, he adds, “Don’t read into this with supernatural meanings—it’s just the postpartum syndrome you’re familiar with, and I’ll prescribe medication for it.” Emma then opens her bag and pulls out a handkerchief. She unfolds it; she has collected and saved the hair and nails she found on the baby. Some of the hair is black, some is brown, but it’s all long. She places it in front of the doctor and asks, “So what are these, then?” The psychiatrist looks closely at the nails and hair for a long time, saying, “These nails and hair could belong to anyone. The human mind tends to associate the things it sees—or even finds—with the fear it’s experiencing, especially during periods of insomnia and intense stress.” There’s a brief pause, and then he says, “What’s important right now is this: What you’re going through is treatable; it’s a disorder. You’re not experiencing anything supernatural. Let’s start by getting your sleep and diet back on track, and you should begin taking your medication.” He then sends Emma home. Emma is following her doctor’s instructions because she wants to get better; she wants to get rid of the situation she’s in. She starts taking her medication regularly and puts her diet on hold. Her mother also moves in with Emma temporarily to support her. One night, Emma is getting ready for bed. Her mother, husband, and baby are asleep, but Emma is playing with her phone in the bedroom. A voice calls out from inside, from the kitchen. Her mother is calling Emma. Even though Emma thinks, “Wasn’t Mom asleep? Why did she get up?” she heads toward the kitchen. But with every step, her uneasiness grows. Because the voice didn’t quite sound like her mother’s. She enters the kitchen; no one is there. Only the countertop light is on; the room is dim. Emma doesn’t feel alone. Emma hears someone calling her name again. The creepy part is that Emma hears her own voice. When you first hear your own voice, you don’t recognize it. It sounds foreign to you. Emma realizes that the voice she initially thought was her mother’s is actually her own. She steps out of the kitchen, wondering what’s going on. When she steps out of the kitchen, at the end of the hallway is that woman... the one she’s always seen... the long-haired woman she feels is starting to resemble her; the woman is on her hands and knees at the end of the hallway, just as she was in the living room when Emma first saw her. And as if defying her, holding her ground... her head held high, in that crawling position. She crawls toward Emma, slowly approaching her. Emma starts screaming, and her screams wake up her mother and Tom. Her mother immediately hugs her daughter, and in the days that follow, Emma sleeps more, keeps taking her medication, and goes through a period where she needs the love of her mother and husband. After a while, things begin to return to normal; thanks to the medication, Emma starts to feel better, experience those weird feelings less often, and have fewer strange episodes. One day, while her downstairs neighbor Maria and her mother are sitting at home, Emma says, “You’re home, the baby is sleeping, so I’ll take a shower.” Emma gets in the shower. As the water flows over her, a sense of relief and calm settles over her body; all her restlessness seems to wash away, and she feels refreshed. The house they live in is a rental, so they can’t make renovations as they’d like. They don’t have a shower stall; they use a shower curtain. Emma is also happy for herself; “Finally, I have normal human problems again—my life has returned to normal,” she says. Suddenly, she senses a rustling and a movement from the other side of the shower curtain. “Mom?” she calls out, but there’s no answer—she sees only a shadow. Then she watches as the shadow begins to lower itself, as if getting into a crawling position. Emma presses her back against the bathroom wall in fear. At that moment, there’s movement beneath the shower curtain. The curtain begins to rise inward and upward, as if someone were about to step inside and stand up. Emma stares at the spot where the curtain is lifting, too terrified to scream. At that moment, she notices a dark shape on the floor, near the drain. Brown, thick hair pours out of the drain into the shower and approaches, wrapping around her feet. The hair seems intent on wrapping around Emma like a vine. Even though Emma tries to move closer to the wall, she panics because she has nowhere to go. Just then, a hand reaches in from under the shower curtain and pulls it up. But after a moment, the hand stops pulling the curtain, and all its fingers twist backward; the sound of the bones snapping in the twisted fingers echoes in Emma’s ears. Emma screams at the top of her lungs and rushes out of the shower; there’s neither a hand nor a shadow behind the shower curtain. Emma wraps herself in her bathrobe and runs to her baby’s room. As soon as she picks up her baby, she goes to her mother and Maria, sobbing as she tells them what happened in the bathroom. Maria then says, “I’m going to tell you something—you’ll be angry with me—but we need to calm this girl down. There’s something we believe in my hometown; or rather, something that’s passed down among the people. There’s something called the ‘Wednesday hag.’ You’ve been experiencing these incidents every Wednesday. As far as I know, on Wednesdays, something called the ‘Wednesday hag’ haunts new mothers. I know how to get rid of it.” So Maria and Emma’s mother first pour salt into all the drains in the house, including the bathroom and sink drains. They place a pair of scissors under the baby’s crib and a knife under the doormat; they wipe down and clean the inside of the house with vinegar water. The two women sit facing each other, recite prayers over a glass of water, and give it to Emma to drink. “We’ll do this as a daily routine,” they say. While prayers are being recited, the house is constantly being cleaned—everything is being done to rid it of negative energy. Meanwhile, Emma continues to see her psychiatrist and take her medication. And after a while, the Wednesday hag’s visits come to a complete halt, cutting off as abruptly as a knife. And this process doesn’t last for months as they had expected; within a few weeks, Emma begins to feel at ease. Her mother is going home now that everything is back to normal; the day before her mother leaves, Emma goes to see her. “Mom, what on earth did I go through? Have I gone nuts?,” she asks. Her mother just looks at her, not knowing what to say. “Sometimes a door stays open, a loss occurs, a wall thins, a threshold is crossed. The human body isn’t just flesh and blood. We have our own life energy, our emotions, our electricity. And sometimes, for some reason, this energy either rises too high or drops too low. And if that door in between breaks, if that boundary disappears, sometimes our energy clashes with other energies. You lost your baby, you rebelled, your spirit weakened, and you became a target for those energies. But those days are over,” she says.

Emma believes what her mother has told her and becomes convinced that everything that has happened to her is because of the Wednesday hag. After her mother leaves for her own home, Emma sits down at her computer and begins researching the Wednesday hag; the legends about her go like this: The Wednesday hag wants to take something. She doesn’t want the mother—she wants the baby. But it’s not the baby’s life she wants; it’s a place. She wants a place made for her within a life. Because it is said that this entity known as the Wednesday hag is an incomplete being. She is not fully in our world, nor is she entirely of the spirit world; she is a being stuck in limbo. According to belief, she does not attack suddenly; this entity works slowly. The Wednesday hag does not kill a person, but she tries to take their place.

Emma remembered sensing her own scent on the woman, hearing her own voice coming from her, and noticing that, over time, the woman had begun to resemble her. In other words, the Wednesday hag hadn’t come to the house; she had tried to take Emma’s place. After that day, Emma tried to carry on with her life as usual, but she could never be alone at home on Wednesdays again. The world we think is real might not be ours alone after all... And sometimes... the things we think we’ve gotten rid of are just waiting for the right moment...

That night, Tom woke up to a sense of unease. His wife wasn’t beside him; he figured she was probably checking on the baby again. He got out of bed to get a drink of water; the house was quieter than usual. Tom couldn’t hear Emma’s voice. She usually sang the lullabies she’d made up to calm the baby, but tonight she was silent. Instead of going to the kitchen, Tom made his way to the baby’s room; the door was ajar. He peered inside; Emma was standing by the crib, but something didn’t feel right. Emma’s back was turned toward Tom. She looked much taller, and her shoulders seemed unusual. Wider, perhaps. And her hair… It was long… Tom took a step; the floorboards creaked with every step, as if announcing his approach. Emma was motionless; she didn’t even seem to be breathing. Tom whispered, “Emma?” The woman began to turn her head very slowly. Tom’s heart sank. Because that turn didn’t look like it belonged to a human. Her neck had turned more than it should have. Tom took a step back; though he wanted to check on the baby in the crib, he was afraid to approach his wife—or at least the woman he still hoped was his wife. The face was Emma’s, but paler... And her eyes were vacant. Emma’s lips parted, her voice raspy. “Finally, she is silent,” she said. Tom’s blood ran cold. “Who’s silent?” he asked in a trembling voice, terrified of hearing the answer. The woman smiled—it wasn’t like Emma’s smile; her lips stretched almost to her cheekbones as she smiled. “The other one,” she said.

That night, for the first time in a long while, there was only one woman in the house. And Tom didn’t know her.