I don't know about anyone else, but I've always found hallucinations just as terrifying as ghosts, which I don't believe in. While opinions vary as to the reality of ghosts, everyone acknowledges that hallucination is a real phenonomon.
This story was inspired in part by accounts like the following (spoiler alert, and don't read if easily disturbed, because it's actually more terrifying and considerably more sad than my story!):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35732480/
I remember reading many years ago of instances of people hallucinating due to leaking cigarette lighters. While that would clearly be a fire risk, I doubt whether the small amount of fuel they contain could ever induce hallucination and paralysis of the kind described in the video.
For that, we need to turn to something altogether more dangerous. Another source of inspiration for this story was a story that I believe appeared in condensed form in the venerable Reader's Digest, perhaps around 1988.
The story concerned a stroke victim who became paralysed in her home and could only groan, but managed to phone emergency services and signal her location by tapping. The operator very nearly wrote her off as a prank call. My memory is that the story was called something like "Tap Once For Yes" but when I look up that title now, I find only a book after life after death.
The particular issue highlighted at the end of the video takes lives with monotonous regularity in nearly ever country in the world, although it's not a huge killer in places like the USA or UK, but it does bump off hundreds in the USA every year. Especially tragic are cases where it's employed as a suicide method, and while not actually working, it leaves the victim with nightmarish brain damage.
However, there'll be none of that in my llittle horror story, because that's just way too dark for my taste! People spontaneously having strokes and then dying while paralysed in their own homes is probably quite common and will become more common as populations age in many countries, and people become more isolated. Not a pleasant way to go, but perhaps not the absolute worse either.
Notably, this is how Stalin died. Apparently his associates were so terrified of him that they didn't dare walk in on him unauthorised, and he was paralysed from a stroke so couldn't do anything but lie there. He died over several days. Well, it couldn't have happened to a nicer person (sarcasm!), and after all, he had recently executed a whole bunch of doctors. It's possible that no-one tended to him because they actually wanted him dead, and it's not impossible that he was poisoned.
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