A piercing scream wakes you up in the middle of the night.
You turn to your wife, who has also jolted awake from the horrific noise, and tell her
you’ll sort things out.
Your son has been suffering from terrible nightmares recently, to the point where he
sometimes refuses to sleep altogether.
Looks like it’s another one of those nights.
You rush down the hallway to his room, hoping you don’t have to stay up all night consoling
him again.
The kid is a real handful, but he’s been through a lot over the last few months.
You can only hope that what happened in Cambodia won’t haunt him for the rest of his life.
You enter your son’s bedroom, expecting to find him sitting up in bed and trembling.
Instead, he’s lying down and motionless.
Weird.
You approach his body, calling his name, but he doesn’t react.
Maybe he already fell asleep again.
But something’s wrong.
Is he even breathing?
Panicking, you check his pulse.
You can’t find it.
And he’s definitely not breathing either.
How could this be possible?
Just a few hours ago, he was fine.
It’s like he died in his nightmare.
Now, it’s you that lets out a scream.
If you’re planning on sleeping soon, stop this video now.
This gruesome tale will keep you tossing and turning for the entire night...
Living in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 was enough to give anyone nightmares.
The reign of dictator Pol Pot and his party, Khmer Rouge, was filled with terror and tragedy.
Over the four years the party had power, almost two million people from various minority groups
died.
That’s around a quarter of the population, making it one of the world’s worst genocides
ever.
Those who died under Pol Pot’s reign were buried in the Killing Fields: the chilling
name for mass graveyards containing victims.
Others escaped as refugees.
But little did they know that many of them would face circumstances almost as terrifying
when they arrived in the places offering them refuge.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many people died in their sleep after having nightmares.
The strangest part is, they all had one thing in common: they were male refugees from South
East Asia who fled from the Killing Fields to the USA.
American dream?
More like an American nightmare.
The phenomenon became so prevalent that it was known as the Asian Death Syndrome at the
time.
We’re yet to understand it fully.
One day in 1981, medics arrived at a refugee camp in the US after hearing that a man was
having some kind of fit in his sleep.
They found his heart contracting wildly as if he had a heart condition or was in fear.
But nobody knew who or what he was afraid of.
He was asleep, after all.
The medics did everything they could to save the man’s life, but they watched him pass
away in front of their eyes.
The case was as mysterious as it was sad — the victim was healthy, reasonably young, and
had just died for no apparent reason.
But part of the puzzle may have been his home country: the man was from Laos.
See, it wasn’t just the Cambodians that were going through a hard time during the
70s and 80s.
In Laos, the CIA had recruited the Hmong — an ethnic group in the area — to fight North
Vietnamese soldiers in the Vietnam War.
As if the Hmong didn’t have things bad enough by being disproportionately killed during
the war — the Hmong soldiers died ten times more often than their US counterparts — they
also ended up being persecuted in their own country.
When Laos became Communist, it saw the Hmong soldiers as traitors for fighting against
Vietnam.
Many ended up fleeing to the US, along with refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam.
In fact, the patient who died in a refugee camp under the supervision of medics was the
fourth Hmong man to die in the US over a nine-month period.
And, between 1981 and 1988, more than a hundred men from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia died
mysteriously in their sleep.
It might have just been a coincidence, but it’s pretty unusual for healthy and young
people to die in their sleep with no explanation.
Almost everyone who died was in their 20s and 30s.
Even more creepily, almost all the victims were men and boys.
Only one female died.
What was it about young Asian males?
And the story of one young boy makes the whole situation sound even more ominous than it
already does….
If you’re even mildly into horror movies, this story might sound familiar.
That’s because the mysterious so-called Asian Death Syndrome became the inspiration
for A Nightmare on Elm Street.
After the film director Wes Craven heard the story in the news one day, he realized it
would make the perfect plot for a horror film.
So, if you ever watch the film and Freddy Krueger is freaking you out, it’s no use
reassuring yourself that it’s “just a story.”
Sorry, but no it ain’t.
Whilst I’m at it, I may as well hurl some more creepy facts at you.
Kraven also based the character of Freddy Krueger on two people he knew in real life.
The name Freddy Krueger was inspired by a childhood bully, Fred Kruge, who tormented
Craven when he was a child.
And his appearance and overall vibe came about after Kraven was a boy at home one day and
saw a strange-looking old man walk past.
The two locked eyes, and bizarrely, the man came closer and stood outside his window,
staring at him.
After a few tense moments, the old man walked away, but he obviously left a lasting impression.
Damn, and I thought I had a twisted sense of humor.
But back to the killer dream outbreak.
The story about the man who died in his sleep might have been mysterious, but it’s nowhere
near as chilling as this one.
A Cambodian family fled from the genocide to the United States in the 1970s, ready to
start a new life.
There was just one problem: the son started having nightmares.
Just like the beginning of many good horror movies.
The boy dreamed of being chased and woke up terrified.
We’ve all had creepy dreams about someone running after us, but I guess his were a notch
above the standard nightmare, because they freaked him out so much that he avoided sleeping
altogether.
Literally, he’d force himself to go days on end without sleeping.
He must have drunk a lot of coffee.
His parents were concerned, for obvious reasons.
They tried to coax him into sleeping, to no avail.
This kid was convinced that, if he fell asleep, he’d die.
From an outsider’s perspective, it all sounds a bit melodramatic.
Maybe the kid needed some attention from his parents or something.
But bizarrely, it turned out that he wasn’t overreacting.
No matter how much double Espresso you drink, you will eventually need to sleep.
Well, despite his determination, this boy was no exception.
One day, he fell asleep.
His parents were relieved, thinking they could finally convince him he was safe whilst he
slept and the demons from his dreams could never hurt him in real life.
Oh, the irony.
Rinse and repeat — the boy fell asleep, he had a nightmare, and he started screaming.
His parents rushed in to comfort him — only to find out that he’d already died.
Incredibly, his nightmare had killed him, just like the other hundred men from Laos,
Cambodia, and Vietnam.
It made the perfect plot for a horror film — a young child who sensed danger and logical
adults who refused to believe his absurd theories.
But how was it possible that a young boy could die in his sleep?
Surely there’s a logical explanation that doesn’t involve a demon like Freddy Krueger?
Investigators tried and failed to find a medical cause of the deaths.
They found some links with an irregular heartbeat, but nobody knew what the cause of the irregular
heartbeat was.
Since then, there have been a few more theories.
One explanation was that the refugees were exposed to chemical nerve agents used during
the Vietnam war.
It sounds mildly logical, but no doctors could find any actual evidence for it.
Besides, even if the idea made some scientific sense — which it didn’t — it failed
to explain why the nerve agent would only affect males and only during the night.
Another idea was that the night terrors were a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder,
provoked by the horrific experiences of the refugees and the unfamiliar world they entered
in the USA.
But again, even though this makes some sense, there was no proper evidence for it and no
explanation why females didn’t also suffer from PTSD.
So, back to the drawing board.
Ever heard that old wive’s tale that if we die in a dream then we also die in real
life, so we always wake up from nightmares a few fractions of a second before we’re
about to die?
Sorry to disappoint — or maybe it’s a source of relief — but that’s not true.
It’s true that, when things happen in a dream, they can trigger us to have the same
physiological reactions in our waking state.
Kind of like when you’re screaming in your dream then you wake up to find you’re really
screaming.
Or when you urinate in your dream and then you wake up and realize you — oh, come on,
please say it’s not just me.
Basically, it’s theoretically possible that a dream could trigger a physiological reaction
that ends with you dying.
When people die suddenly in their sleep, it’s put down to Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death
Syndrome.
There’s a nice piece of medical jargon for you.
Some academic studies think this phenomenon could be biological or genetic, explaining
why people of the same ethnicity, age, and sex died.
Also known as Brugada syndrome, the disease is actually the most common cause of natural
death amongst the young, healthy Asian population.
It’s a rare heart rhythm disorder that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest, meaning a loss
of heart function, breathing, and consciousness.
It can happen whilst people are awake, but is most fatal whilst they’re sleeping.
Yeah, I know.
A rare genetic disease is kind of an anticlimax compared to a spooky grim reaper entering
kids’ nightmares.
But we still don’t know everything.
Since the peak in the mid and late 1980s, deaths from Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death
Syndrome, Brugada syndrome, or whatever else you want to call it, have decreased sharply.
Nobody can fully explain the decrease, so we can’t rule out any funny business or
grim reapers quite yet.
Anyway, it’s getting late.
Time to get some sleep...
Or, check out our videos “scientists reveal how dreams can kill you in real life” or
“night hag, the demon that visits you in your sleep.”