The Ecology of the Hat Man
Demons and delusions as reflections of a haunted world
I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be haunted. So many of the experiences one might call spirit possession would be called, by modern medicine, psychosis. Even the belief that one is haunted or possessed can be a symptom. But in many cultures throughout history, the causality was flipped: mental health problems were understood as symptoms of a curse or spiritual intrusion.
Which came first, I wonder, the spirit or the symptom?
All this interest in haunting ties into a recent hobby of mine: reading online accounts of people’s encounters with something called the Hat Man. You may know him from that meme that goes “I can’t take Benadryl because I owe the Hat Man money.” He’s what might be thought of as a kind of demon, or perhaps merely a delusion, appearing across cultures to many hundreds of people (at least) with oddly similar accounts of their experiences.
I have never met the Hat Man personally, but I’ve had a few related sorts of experiences that incline me to believe other people’s reports of him are genuine. As Rolling Stone observes, descriptions of the Hat Man are “remarkably consistent” from one account to the next: he is tall, dark and shadowy, he wears a hat, and meeting him is typically accompanied by a…
