Most jinn stories take place at night, but mine begins at dawn. It is the seventh day of Ramadan, many years ago, and I am in my bed. My bedroom is always peaceful after fajr. Soft, blue light peaks through the blinds. The frozen waffle with peanut butter I had for sehri is making me blissfully sleepy. I’m vaguely aware that somewhere in the distance, birds are awake and shrieking like Jurassic creatures. I begin to dream.
When I wake up, there’s someone else in my bed. There shouldn’t be someone else in my bed. I am so thoroughly single that when I sense touch, I immediately think supernatural: is that a jinn’s breath on the back of my neck? Suddenly the mattress ripples and my breathing turns shallow with fear. The presence has a body and it’s moving closer to me.
It probably doesn’t have enough space on the bed, I think desperately, but when I try to scoot in I discover that I am paralyzed. I can only move my eyes, which search my room for any signs of abnormality or a break-in. Nothing. Yet there is definitely something here, the big spoon lying behind me as I tremble like a tuning fork. I start reciting ayat-ul-kursi in my head.
It seems to have no discernible effect on the situation. The mattress moves again. It’s getting out of bed. It walks to the door. Heart racing, I wait for it to enter my line of vision.
The jinn drifts across my room in the form of a woman. Mid thirties. Average height. Shoulder-length, straight brown hair with the the coloring and facial features of a character from the children’s television show Arthur. She’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses (trendy), skinny jeans (tragic), and an ugly dark blue shirt with white polka dots—what we would have called a “going out top” in the 2010s.
The woman looks distant, sad, agitated, and disappointed all at once. She pauses at the door for a second, like she’s looking for someone who isn’t here and regrets coming. And then, without a single glance my way, she turns the doorknob and disappears.
I snap back to consciousness.
I know what it sounds like. I know. I promise I’m not the type of person who thinks every weird thing that happens to me is supernatural. I actually love logic and science and ruining magical illusions with explanations. I am also aware that sleep paralysis is a well-documented neurological phenomenon. But Muslims throughout history have interpreted sleep paralysis incidents as deeply meaningful. Islam considers sleep a state during which the soul is temporarily disconnected from the body and projected into another realm of existence. In sleep paralysis—neither awake nor asleep—there’s no longer a clear line between the material world and the spiritual world inhabited by other souls, angels, and the jinn. For someone who puts a lot of faith in both the scientific process and the Qur’an, it’s a fascinating gray area.
The thing is, jinn aren’t just a folkloric belief invented long ago to explain weird stuff science couldn’t; they’re codified in the scripture itself. “And He created the jinn from a smokeless flame of fire,” the Qur’an states in verse 15 of Surah Ar-Rahman. I don’t believe in fairies or ghosts, but jinn? They’re definitely real. They are spiritual beings said to live for thousands of years, existing in a parallel realm beyond human perception—though, sometimes our worlds intersect. The most famous jinn-human encounter is also the very first one: the jinn Iblis, who tricked Adam and Hawwa in Paradise, causing their expulsion to Earth. The Qur’an and Hadith also tell of virtuous jinn who embraced Islam and pledged allegiance to Muhammad (PBUH) and of Sulaiman’s divine ability to talk to and control jinn. Islamic folklore is full of more mundane jinn-human encounters: those spooky stories passed down over several millennia, from pre-modern Arabs to your cousins you only see during the summer.
Jinn are known shapeshifters—often disguising themselves as animals or humans—so no one can know for sure their true form, though many have guessed. The 14th century mythical Islamic text Kitab al-Bulhan (Book of Wonders) contains fantastical illustrations of various types of jinn: black, horned creatures emitting flames and blue demons with four heads. One is drawn as a winged entity that swoops down to sit on the chest of a sleeping man. He is called Kabus, the Arabic word for nightmare, and he is specifically associated with sleep paralysis.
So what happened in my bedroom that morning: a neurological anomaly or a metaphysical encounter with a jinn?
I’ve had sleep paralysis a handful of times in my life, and each of those seemed like a random brain glitch. But this time was different. It was during Ramadan, for one, a time of spiritual nourishment and transcendence. But most critically, it happened while I was in the wake of a heartbreak so mind-boggling and identity-shattering that it made me question my long-standing faith in the power of logic and reason.
For the past year, I’d been trying to let go of the first person I ever loved. The affair was intense and unstable—the kind you fall into when you’re bored, frustrated, and a little self-destructive. I spent each day ping ponging between euphoria and despair. It was the first time in my life that my prefrontal cortex wasn’t in control and I was at the mercy of my emotions and my primal desires. I lost all appetite for my intellectual interests: literature, politics, even prestige television. Only love poetry made sense to me then. Mahmoud Darwish wrote about obsessive love, “You do not know if you are happy or sad, because the confusion you feel is the lightness of the earth and the victory of the heart over knowledge.” Rationality could not explain how another person was able to engulf me whole and re-code my genetic material so that the person I once was no longer existed. “Maybe I’ve fallen in love with a jinn,” I joked with my friends.
The emotional turbulence was followed by four seasons frozen in glassy-eyed pain. When Ramadan came in the spring, I was determined to shed the grief and emptiness along with the cold, and to plant seeds in the ashes of the parts of myself that died. A quiet, reflective month would fertilize my soul. At first, pushing down my pain seemed to work; I felt stronger, calmer, and more like myself again. But lost love can feel a lot like a haunting, lingering in shadowy corners of your subconscious and demanding your attention at its whims.
“All of a sudden I’m starting to go underwater again,” I wrote in my journal a few days into the month, “swallowing mouthfuls of old, salty feelings.”
When the jinn appeared in my room, it felt both like a manifestation of the emotions and memories I’d been suppressing and also a welcome distraction from them. I was drawn to the project of investigating this mysterious woman’s identity and story, something I couldn’t yet do for myself.
So that whole Ramadan, I prayed to God, but dreamt of jinn.
For what it’s worth, my apartment has always felt haunted: high ceilings with decorative molding, stained glass skylights, and not one, but two dramatic floor-to-ceiling fireplaces. The place gives off a creepy Victorian vibe. I love it. To find out who the previous occupants of my building were, I typed my address into a digital archive of historical newspapers and diligently read my way through a hundred years of Brooklyn neighborhood news and gossip.
The brownstone I live in was occupied by a man named William L. Elias and his family for nearly a century, starting in the late 1800s. I started sketching out a family tree and rough outline of their lives. Soon, a theory began to take shape in my mind: a jinn had lived in the Elias family home, taking shape as a woman. Somewhere along the way, the disguised jinn experienced something terrible—something that left an emotional wound. That’s why more than a hundred years later, she was still returning to this place.
“One thing about ghost hunting is when you start doing investigations, you’re really digging into the microhistory of your area,” the writer, speaker, and ghosthunter Deonna Kelli Sayed told me over the phone. “You’re excavating these historical stories that people don’t know about, either about specific properties or the people who lived there.”
I reached out to Sayed to help me understand my experience better. A Southern Baptist-turned-Muslim, she first started investigating the paranormal during her own major identity crisis. After a decade spent traveling around the Muslim world with her diplomat husband and his five kids from a previous marriage, Sayed found herself back in the American Deep South on the verge of divorce, alone with the kids and no idea how to be Muslim – or American—anymore. “I think I was tired of this story I’d locked myself into as this Muslim housewife with five kids, and I wanted to greet my faith again,” she told me. She ended up finding spiritual inspiration in an unlikely place: the new reality TV show Ghost Hunters. Ghost hunting, she said, confirmed the divine for her in a time of spiritual drought.
“Moments of awe are a deeply spiritual experience because they affirm that there are still mysteries in the world,” Sayed said. “They make us let go of certainty and be open to unexplained and miraculous things around us.”
I told her about my own jinn sighting, resisting the temptation to inject doubt, and instead waited silently for her assessment. “That’s really incredible,” she said when I finished. I breathed a sigh of relief. “And what makes it incredible is that it was a multisensory experience: you actually felt the body, you felt the mattress move, and then you saw something. So it couldn't have just been a bad dream or the trick of the light—there were several touchpoints. It makes it a very intriguing and authentic experience.”
Sayed said that her ghost hunting experiences have taught her that our consciousness interacts with our environment, and that there are times in our life when we’re more likely to notice the otherworldly. “You may have just been in a really good state to receive what was in your environment,” she told me.
That spring, my perceptive powers did seem tuned to a more sensitive frequency. Falling in love with a woman was like suddenly being able to see a whole new spectrum of colors. Now that I was tapped into one new dimension, it was more plausible that I could have also caught a glimpse into the realm inhabited by jinn. Maybe I had a special connection with the woman in my room; perhaps learning her story would even teach me something about mine.
I continued to pore over the archives, looking for something that could make for a worthy jinn story. The majority of the search results for my address were help wanted ads. From The Brooklyn Daily Eagle: Nov. 1912: Neat, willing, white girl, 16, assist housework (sic); no washing or cooking; three in family. But my address was also the location of three deaths—two of which were untimely—and the site of a wedding celebration for one of William’s daughters. The paper reported that it was hosted by “her mother, Mrs. Josephine Elias, and Miss Gertrude Lois Hale.” I enjoyed imagining a wedding reception happening in the same place I ate Takis and once watched a TikTok animation showing how the Himalayas formed set to “Crash” by Charli XCX, all things I was certain would send a Victorian child into a coma. I also enjoyed the fact that the wedding was hosted by two women. Interesting.
So, who was Miss Gertrude Lois Hale? She was definitely not a member of the Elias family.
When I searched her name in the archives, I learned that she was a troop leader in a youth group called the Camp Fire Girls, a chance for city girls to go into nature and appropriate Native culture. Gertrude was clearly pretty and popular—after all, she had the most honor beads on her Indian gown. Yet, there were no wedding announcements for her. I wondered what could have possibly been the nature of the relationship between an attractive, unmarried camp counselor and a middle-aged widow who, to my knowledge, never remarried after her husband died. My mind raced with possibility.
After 1932, the trail on Gertrude ran cold, but that didn’t deter my interest in her story. In my gut, I knew she was the jinn, the one who had been abandoned, haunted by her past and still haunting this house. I was too scared to look my own grief in the eye or to figure out how to incorporate my sexuality into my identity, but I found I could approach those issues indirectly, by examining every contour of Josephine and Gertrude’s relationship.
Time I previously would have spent drowning in memories of my own romantic tragedy was now spent happily fantasizing about Gertrude and Josephine. What might have happened between the two of them that made Gertrude come back here? I imagined how they met (through Josephine’s daughter, who was in Gertrude’s Camp Fire Girls troop), what drew them together (a love of Virginia Woolf), and if—wait, no, how—their relationship turned romantic.
One of the folk tales in the One Thousand and One Nights tells of Prince Janshah, who falls hopefully in love with a jinn named Shamsa and marries her. However, soon after the wedding, she flies away, sending him on an epic, dangerous hero’s journey to find her. When he finally tracks her down, they remarry. One day while swimming, Shamsa is killed by a shark. Janshah builds a tomb for her and one for himself next to it, spending the rest of his life mourning her death and awaiting his own.
The moral? If you fall in love with a jinn, you’re fucked. In Islamic folklore, the love between jinn and humans always seems to be more intense than between two humans, like “a loss of conscience that engulfs the human in its mysterious darkness,” writes Amira El-Zein in Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn. And when it’s a jinn who becomes infatuated with a human, they’ll straight up wreak havoc. Sometimes they'll disrupt the human’s relationships, like the Moroccan jinn queen Mimouna, known for interfering with her crushes’ love lives till they appease her with gifts. Other times jinn stalk or kidnap. In another tale from the One Thousand and One Nights, a jinn falls in love with and abducts the beautiful maiden al-Anqa before her wedding to her betrothed, Damir.
The existence of jinn is fundamentally ecological; it's an acknowledgment of a shared planet.
According to historian Ali A. Olomi, a culture’s jinn stories often reflect the anxieties of that society. Stories of jinn and human love, therefore, can help explain aspects of human sexuality that people find it difficult to talk about directly, like female pleasure or same-sex desire: the twist in the story about Damir and al-Anqa is that the jinn who kidnapped al-Anqa was female—a lesbian jinn.
Jinn themselves are frequently depicted as gender fluid. The Moroccan jinn Mimouna is usually known as the sister of the jinn king, Saturday. Other times, Olomi writes, she is the jinn king Saturday, just in female form. Then there’s Mardzma, the jinn queen of female warriors who likes her men brave and strong. Olomi writes that Mardzma is female in some traditions and male in others – though she always prefers men as partners. In that way, you could technically consider any human-jinn relationship to be queer.
Olomi pointed out that the fact that jinn-human love stories existed in premodern societies indicate that those cultures already made space for relationships or desires that weren’t traditional and heteronormative. “Stories about queer relationships were actually quite unremarkable in older Islamic societies,” he told me in an interview. “And there isn’t an intrinsic animosity towards queerness. It’s just what jinn do.”
Hearing Olomi say that felt like relaxing a muscle I didn’t know I’d been clenching. In the wake of my breakup, my relationship with God had gotten a little tense. The mainstream version of Islam suggested that I should be repenting and atoning for the terrible sin I committed, but I couldn’t bring myself to see it that way. In retrospect, I admit there are plenty of reasons we shouldn’t be together, but gender wasn’t one of them.
Things had gotten messy between us pretty quickly. Neither of us had been with a woman before and were not open to a same-sex relationship, but we didn’t know how to handle the very real feelings that had developed between us. I was uncomfortable with my queerness, sure, but she outright denied her sexuality and accused me of tricking her into falling in love with me. Maybe I was the trickster all along.
I knew I was doomed when one of her friends took me aside and told me, “be careful, she’s going to hurt you” and, like an out-of-body experience, I watched myself not care. Instead, I let her slowly ghost me as she fell in love and started a family with someone else. I was more than just heartbroken. I was brain-broken and soul-broken, too.
On one hand, this long, dark night of the soul felt like the perfect time to turn to my faith for help and guidance, but I didn’t know how to talk to God about this. Instead, I talked to my jinn. In Islamic cosmology, jinn are the closest beings in creation to humanity, with intellect, rationality, and free will. The Qur’an is actually addressed to both humans and jinn, considered the only two intelligent species on Earth. I stayed up late into the night, scribbling into my journal. Sometimes, I wrote directly to Gertrude, as if she could read my words, grilling her about her tragic affair and why she still wasn’t over it. I took out my frustration with myself on her, chastising her for continuing to grieve instead of moving on. “There are no answers for you in this apartment,” I told her. “Closure comes from within.”
Pretty soon, Gertrude started responding, her words originating outside myself but coming through my pen: “And how has that worked out for you?”
I’m not a morning person, and that spring I was really not a morning person. I’d wake up gasping for air during dreams so vivid they made my heart race and ears ring. I was spending almost all my time alone, but my thoughts were so loud I never had any peace or quiet. I couldn’t stop hearing Gertrude’s voice in my head. Like a movie I couldn’t turn off, I watched the worst moments of her relationship with Josephine. Lies, arguments, how it felt when their love’s expiration date came into view. I pictured them hidden away on the top floor, in my bedroom, limbs intertwined, too sad to speak.
In an indirect way, I was expressing my own pain. My friends were tired of watching me pick the same scabs over and over—Did she really love me? Why did she tell me she loved me? How could she move on so quickly when I’m still stuck here?—so I pretended to be over it. But, in my increasingly chaotic conversations with Gertrude, I could be honest. It was much easier to admit all these embarrassing thoughts and feelings to someone still hung up on a relationship 150 years in the past.
“I feel like the grief is seeping out of every pore,” I wrote in my journal, “like it’s sucking the life out of my eyes, pulling my cheeks taut, turning my hair gray, and just making me physically older.”
In The Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons, Andalusian poet Abu ‘Amir ibn Shuhayd wrote that while engulfed with grief for his departed beloved, a jinn appeared before him and helped him compose an elegy. Named Zuhayr ibn Numayr, the jinn told Ibn Shuhayd they belonged to the same tribe, but in parallel universes. After that, Shuhayd’s “jinn double” continued to appear to him with creative inspiration and eventually became a spiritual master who carried him to “the land of the jinn” to meet the jinn of many poets who lived before him.
The idea that some poets have a jinn counterpart who inspires or helps them has been around since before Islam. When the Prophet Muhammad recited the Qur’an, some Arabs chalked it up to poetic inspiration from the jinn. The Qur’an replies to these opponents in Surah Yaseen verse 69, reaffirming that what he had received was not poetic inspiration, but divine revelation through the Angel Jibril. Literary critic Ihsan Abbas maintains that Islam prohibits neither poetry nor the idea of jinn as inspiration. “It rather acknowledged that poets have their independent imaginary world,” he wrote, “and this is the meaning of [Quranic verse] ‘they roam in every valley.’”
Some poets become totally insane after traversing the land of the jinn. The Muslim poet Jarir referred to this state of affairs when he said, “It is possible to cure people from physical disease, but not from the insanity incurred after staying with jinn!”
My conversations with Gertrude were like a skeleton key that unlocked some of my heaviest stuck emotions. It turned out that all I really needed was the space to talk about them freely for as long as I wanted, without fear or shame. “I get that I can’t will my sadness away, but I don’t want to miss her forever,” I wrote to Gertrude one night, “it’s pathetic and depressing and means–”
But before I could finish the sentence, Gertrude’s response cut into the page. “It means nothing,” she said firmly, “except that you are a person who loves deeply.”
I used to think ascribing jinn responsibility for the unexplainable was a regressive view of the world. But my journey into the realm of jinn gave me something the human world could not: a lens through which I could explore my faith, spirituality, and sexuality without judgment or hostility. When I simply made room for all of my difficult emotions, I started to feel more at peace. I now see the existence of jinn more as an acceptance that humanity is not alone. Olomi pointed out to me that Islamic cosmology rejects human supremacy—rather, Muslims believe that we need to respect and share space with other creatures. Existence of jinn is fundamentally ecological; it’s an acknowledgment of a shared planet.
Our relationship to jinn is like our relationship with the unknown, our obsession with understanding and controlling everything. As we learn to surrender to what we cannot control, we find we have less to fear. We can come to accept that we can’t ever really know what jinn are, who Gertrude Hale was, whether someone really loved you or not. Through that acceptance, we find some kind of freedom.
