A Portland man spent six weeks in the company of a supernatural predator and emerged emotionally drained, mildly cursed, and, by his own assessment, meaningfully improved.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this story that is easy to tell and a version that is accurate, and they are not the same story. The easy version is: man encounters supernatural predator, man survives, man files a report. The accurate version requires me to sit with the fact that Darian Okafor, thirty-four, a UX designer from Portland, Oregon, described the six weeks he spent in the company of what he believes was a succubus as — and I am quoting directly from my notes, because I wrote this down twice to make sure I had it right — ‘the most emotionally honest relationship I’ve been in since college.’ He said this without irony. He has said it to at least eight other people. I have spoken to seven of them.

Okafor contacted WTC in late March through the standard tip line. His initial message was brief and used the word ‘entity’ three times, which is, in my experience, a sign that a witness has been doing their own research and has arrived at something close to the right vocabulary without quite landing on it. I drove up to meet him the following Thursday. He made pour-over coffee, offered me a cup, and I declined in favor of my thermos, which I mention only because he later told me the smell of mine seemed to settle him down, and I noted that in my field log because I have learned to note things like that. We sat at his kitchen table for four hours. He was precise, unhurried, and did not once ask me whether I believed him. I found that more compelling than most of what he actually said.

Community Notice

What She Said, Specifically

The encounter began in February, following the end of a three-year relationship Okafor describes, with some understatement, as ‘a situation I probably stayed in too long.’ He is not certain exactly when the entity first appeared. He suspects it was gradual. What he remembers clearly is waking, on three separate occasions in the first week, with a sensation he describes as ‘someone sitting on the edge of the bed, having already been talking for a while.’ The presence communicated — and here is where I ask readers to set aside whatever they think they know about the succubus as a cataloged phenomenon, because the folklore and the reported experience are diverging in ways I find genuinely interesting — not primarily through seduction, but through what Okafor characterized as ‘very pointed observations about my patterns.’ Specifically: that he had a habit of creating emotional dependency in others as a substitute for tolerating uncertainty in himself, that he used humor to exit conversations before they became vulnerable, and that his last relationship had ended not because of his partner’s stated reasons but because he had never once asked her what she actually needed.

She wasn’t wrong. That’s what I keep coming back to. She was pulling my life force out through my chest cavity, basically, and she wasn’t wrong.

— Darian Okafor, witness, Portland, OR

Nine witnesses total have now given statements corroborating some portion of Okafor’s account. Three are close friends who observed behavioral changes during the six-week period. Two are coworkers who described him as ‘distracted but unusually direct’ in the weeks in question. One is his downstairs neighbor, who reported hearing one-sided conversations through the ceiling on multiple evenings, which she initially attributed to phone calls but which Okafor confirms were not. The remaining three prefer not to be named, for reasons I am respecting, but their accounts are consistent with the others in their broad shape. Nobody disputes that something happened to him. The disagreement, such as it is, concerns whether ‘something happened to him’ is the appropriate framing, or whether ‘something happened for him’ is closer to accurate. His therapist — whom he began seeing in April, after the encounters ceased — declined to comment on the supernatural dimension but told me, off the record, that Okafor had arrived at her office with ‘an unusually clear picture of his own behavior’ for someone presenting as a new client. She seemed professionally unsettled by this. I understood the feeling.

The Mild Curse, And What It Is Doing

The cursing is, by his account, the most mundane part of the whole business, which tells you something about how the rest of it landed. Since the encounters ended — they stopped, he says, as gradually as they started, sometime in mid-March, the presence simply thinning out over the course of a week until it was gone — Okafor has experienced a persistent inability to lie to people he loves. Not a dramatic compulsion. Not pain. Just a kind of immediate, internal resistance that he describes as ‘like trying to send a text and the send button isn’t there.’ He has told his mother he finds her new partner irritating. He told a close friend, unprompted, that he had never really read the book he’d been recommending for years. He broke off a nascent situationship after two dates by saying, clearly and without cruelty, that he was not available for what the other person was looking for. The friend forgave him. His mother is still processing. The situationship person, I am told, was relieved.

I asked him if he wanted her to come back, and he was quiet for a long time. He said, ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to want that.’ Which I thought was growth, honestly.

— Petra Vasquez, close friend and witness, Portland, OR

I have been doing this work for long enough that I know the difference between a witness who is performing credibility and a witness who simply has it. Okafor does not need you to believe him. He is not selling anything. He spent six weeks having his life force slowly drawn out of him by something old and not particularly kind, and he came out the other side with better posture, a therapist, and a working understanding of why he used to text his ex at two in the morning. I am not in the business of endorsing the methodology. The cost of this kind of clarity is real, and I would not recommend it, and the entity in question was not operating in his interest, regardless of what the outcomes happened to be. But I have sat across from a lot of people who have encountered things they cannot explain, and I can count on one hand the ones who seemed, in any meaningful sense, lighter for it. Darian Okafor is one of them. I drove home thinking about that for most of the seven hours back to Asheville. I am still thinking about it now.