Devil's Midnight

For weeks Cameron has been waking up at 3:00 in the morning. He sits up; either cries a little or calls “maa-meee.” I have tried letting him cry for a bit, but typically I end up going into his room and patting him on the back for a minute and he falls right back to sleep. I have had those occasional nights where he refuses to fall back to sleep and I end up taking him into my room and holding him… until we both fall asleep.

The key thing here is that he is always waking up at 3am. I thought it was interesting and since his dad now has him one night every other week I thought I would ask him if it happens at his house. Courtney was standing next to me while I was asking and instantly got a shocked look and said “Mom that is Devils Midnight!” She looked a little worried and told me how her girlfriend wakes up every night at that time and how her friends joke that she cannot sleep over because of it. This intrigued me and so I looked into it a little more.

It turns out that Wikipedia refers to the ‘Devil’s Hour’ as the time around 3am. Apparently, the Devil’s Hour is the exact opposite of the time Christ supposedly died at 3pm. According to Christian belief, Christ died in the “ninth hour” (after sunrise), 3pm. The inverse (or corruption) of 3pm is, 3am.

The time around 3am is also known in European folklore as ‘the Witching Hour.’ This is the time when supernatural creatures such as witches, demons and ghosts are thought to be at their most powerful, and black magic at its most effective. This hour is typically referring to the period from midnight to 3am.

Coincidentally 3am is also “The Dead of Night” because that's when the least amount of light is present. 3am is distance enough from sunset/dusk to morning’s dawn. Sun Light, even in small traces of UV and infrared from the sun can still be seen for well over an hour after sunset. But at 3am for example, during a ‘new moon’ dark sky can leave a full cover of darkness.

While looking into the 3am thing even more it is believe by some that more people die at this time of night, and that more emergency calls are made at that time of day than any other, but I could not find any proof of this. It was also stated on another site that perhaps our senses are more acute at this time of night and allow us to be more open to activity on "the other side". What I did find interesting is that 3am is a VERY common time for people to wake up all over the place.

So with all this information I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen on March 14th, Daylight Saving Time. Would demons adhere to the time change? And if Christ died on the other side of the world, wouldn’t that be in a different time zone too… so how can the Devils Hour be the same everywhere?

Well, that night at 2am Cameron woke up… awhhh a new pattern was going to develop; he would be waking at 2 each night.

NOPE I was wrong, the very next day, back to 3am and almost every night since. It is a good thing he is getting better at falling back to sleep without me coming in and patting him on the back, because even though I know better.. it is still a little freaky.