New 49ers quarterback Sam Darnold got a little more than he bargained for while crashing with teammate George Kittle this offseason.
Darnold, who signed a one-year deal with San Francisco in March to compete for the team’s starting QB job, was living in Kittle’s pool house while he tried to find a place of his own. In a recent interview with Pardon My Take, Darnold relayed a creepy experience he had while staying at Kittle’s place.
“I woke up, and you know how sometimes you have a dream and then you wake up and you feel like you can’t move for like maybe four or five seconds, whatever it is?” Darnold said, as transcribed by NBC Sports Bay Area. “And you know, I felt that, and I woke up, it was like 3 a.m., went to go take a pee and, you know, came back, fell right asleep. And then, that next night, the same thing happened, and I couldn’t, like, I had to keep focusing on this thing … there was something else in the room.”
It sounds like Darnold is describing sleep paralysis, which can include sensing what some people call a “sleep paralysis demon.” There’s even a medical term for sensing or seeing something in the room with you while in a state between sleep and waking: “hypnagogic hallucinations.”
Darnold said he’d never experienced anything like that before and still got freaked out relaying the story to the podcast hosts.
“[I]t was just like super, super weird, and it just felt like when I woke up there was something, like, holding on to me, and then that next night, I … felt that something was in the room with me, and it was … the freakiest thing,” he said. “I’m getting chills talking about it right now, but that’s never happened to me before.”
Darnold infamously said during a 2019 game against the Patriots that he was “seeing ghosts” on the field, but it sounds like what he experienced in Kittle’s pool house was even scarier.
