Tudors and the Witching Hour: Midnight Fears

Tudors and the witching hour may not be something we think about often, but in early modern England, midnight held a chilling significance. Unlike today’s expectations of uninterrupted sleep, people in Tudor times followed a pattern of “first” and “second” sleep—with a mysterious, wakeful hour or two in between. This quiet period, often occurring around midnight, was steeped in superstition and fear. The Tudors believed the witching hour was when the veil between the living and the dead thinned, spirits stirred, and witches roamed.

Exploring Tudors and the witching hour offers a fascinating glimpse into how nighttime shaped their daily lives, spiritual beliefs, and very understanding of sleep itself.

Transcript of The Witching Hour: Why Tudors Feared Waking Up at Midnight

Today, we’re going to talk about something a little different. Another nighttime video—another sleep-related, middle-of-the-night video. I’ve gone down this rabbit hole because of a book called At Day’s Close: Nighttime in Times Past, or something like that.

It’s funny—everything we talk about, all the events we focus on, obviously happen during the day when people are awake, right? But there’s this whole other half of life that happens at night. In Tudor times, and in other pre-modern societies before electricity—before the control over time that we now have with clocks, alarm clocks, lighting, and all of that—it was a very different world.

I’m at a period in my life right now where I’m up in the middle of the night quite a bit. If you are a woman of a certain age, you might relate to that. That’s all I’m going to say about that for now. But being awake so often at night has made me think a lot about what nighttime was like for people before modern conveniences—before electricity, phones, TVs, or even enough light to read by.

So I’ve really gone down this rabbit hole of nighttime—how people slept—and I think it’s absolutely fascinating. It’s one of those things you don’t really think about, but once you do, it opens up a whole new way of understanding the past.

Today, we’re going to talk about why the Tudors feared the midnight hour—the witching hour—what happened between the two sleeps, and some of the beliefs they had about that time.

Alright, to start with, let’s talk about this hour—or two—in between sleeps. It’s the middle of the night. The fire has already burned low. The last candle flickers in its holder, and then it’s out—smoke curling up into the dark. It’s midnight. And in Tudor England, this was not actually a time for sleeping. This was the time between sleeps—what some called the witching hour.

After the first period of rest, it was common to wake up naturally for an hour or so. This is the whole “two sleeps” concept, where the Tudors slept in two distinct phases: first sleep and second sleep, with time in between. This was very common before the advent of electricity and artificial lighting.

People would go to bed around sunset, wake up in the middle of the night, and spend some time praying, reading, or meditating. You might feed the fire, put fresh logs on it, or quietly spend time with family. It was generally a peaceful time in the middle of the night. Others might simply sit in stillness, listening to the sounds around them. But typically, people were awake for an hour or so during the night. Then they would go back to sleep and wake again at sunrise.

Many people loved this time—many truly enjoyed the calm and stillness it brought. But others feared it. Many Tudors believed that the hours between midnight and 2:00 a.m. were when spirits stirred, witches traveled, and the boundaries between the living and the dead grew thin.

So, like I said, Tudor sleep wasn’t like our modern sleep—or at least, not like what we think modern sleep is supposed to be. Because what I’ve realized, now that I’m often awake in the middle of the night, is that a lot of people are, too. We have this idea that you go to bed at 10 or 11, wake up at 6 or 7, and just sleep through the night uninterrupted.

But actually, a lot of people do wake up in the night. And it was especially common before artificial lighting, when people went to bed with the sunset. Most people didn’t sleep straight through the night; they slept in two phases. The first sleep typically began shortly after sundown and lasted until around midnight. After that came an hour or two of wakefulness before the second sleep.

Of course, this varied with the seasons. In winter, for example, the sun in England can set as early as 3:30 or 4:00 p.m.—and people didn’t necessarily go to bed that early—so the pattern would shift a bit depending on the time of year. But generally speaking, people would go to bed not long after sunset, sleep until midnight, wake for a while, and then sleep again until sunrise.

During that in-between time, a lot of people got up quietly. Like I said, they stoked the fire, visited the privy. Some used the time for prayer or meditation. Others reflected on their dreams, sometimes interpreting them as signs or warnings.

But it was also a time of stillness and unease. The house was dark, the village silent, and in the absence of activity, minds would wander. Nightmares lingered. Some reported strange noises—scratching at the door, a chill across the bed.

And while some were comforted by the solitude, others believed that this in-between hour wasn’t just quiet—it was open. What might slip through from the other side was always uncertain. Midnight marked a threshold. The Tudors believed it was the hour when the world became unstable, when temptation, danger, and unnatural forces grew stronger.

Ghosts were said to rise around this time. Witches were believed to leave their beds and travel in spirit, especially on feast days or holy day eves between the first and second sleeps. The body was vulnerable—and so was the soul. If you woke up between midnight and two, some said it meant the devil had passed near your bed.

Others believed it was a warning: your conscience was stirring, or your spirit was unsettled. Cunning folk—the local healers and wise women—often advised people to stay inside during these hours. If you had to go outside, carry iron or wear rosemary sewn into your sleeve.

Springtime, like we’re in now, added a whole other layer, because fertility spirits were said to roam in May—especially around Beltane, the holiday that once celebrated the shift from winter to summer. People would avoid traveling under a waning moon, and doors were often marked with chalk or pinned with branches to keep the watchers out.

The midnight hour wasn’t just a spiritual threat—it was also seen as physically dangerous. Tudor physicians believed that the body was ruled by the humors and that, at night—especially between sleeps—vapors could rise from the stomach to the brain.

These night vapors were blamed for nightmares, sleep paralysis, and visions. Some even believed that dreams at this time could be messages from the divine—or the demonic. Sleepwalking was poorly understood but widely feared. A person wandering around at night was thought to be under the influence of a spirit. Worse—a witch could be working through them.

Pregnant women were told not to be startled or exposed to fear in the night, or it might mark the babies. Midwives recorded cases of infants born in the early hours with physical deformities, and some claimed that it was the hour of birth, rather than the mother’s actions, that invited the bad luck.

As springtime came on and the days grew longer, the fear of night didn’t fade. In fact, it actually just shifted. With the return of fertility and growth, anxieties turned toward the spiritual dangers of birth, of lust, of the unpredictable forces of the natural world.

May Eve—once called Beltane—was considered especially dangerous. People tied rowan branches above doorways or left out little bowls of salt to ward off the spirits. Babies born in the weeks around May Day were said to be more susceptible to fairy theft. Midwives sometimes whispered charms during midnight births.

Even the moon was watched—a waning moon in the springtime meant a dangerous season. Animals might fall ill, crops might fail, and walking at night during that cycle was thought to attract misfortune or unseen watchers who had no business among the living.

So to the Tudors, this midnight hour in between sleeps was a whole space. It was a whole thing. It was a whole vibe. A space where the rules slipped—between first and second sleep, between yesterday and tomorrow, between the living and the dead.

What we might dismiss as simple insomnia or menopause, they saw as a warning—or an invitation. It was a time to pray, to wait, or to fear what might be coming through the cracks. And while we’ve long since abandoned the two-sleep nights—at least officially (many people still do it)—we still have this idea that you’re supposed to sleep straight through the night. Yet some things haven’t changed.

The dark is still unsettling to us. Midnight still feels strange. And sometimes, even now, when we wake up and stare at the ceiling, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re not entirely alone.

So there we go—a little bit about how the Tudors saw that midnight in-between sleep hour. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of nighttime in Tudor England the way I have, the book At Day’s Close—highly recommend it. It’s really fascinating. There’s this whole world that happens at nighttime that we just don’t think about all that much. So, highly recommend that.

Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.

She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).

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