LEGEND: Black Eyed Children

Becoming a parent changes you on some fundamental level.

Like, literally, I feel like my whole chemistry is different now that I'm a mom.

And the mom instinct is real.

It flips on like a switch.

And not just when it comes to your own kid, but kind of all of them, really.

So, when I heard of this legend, it made me stop and think:

how would I, as a parent, react?

The case has started popping up pretty recently around the 80s or 90s.

Children between the ages of 6 and 16 who are seen knocking on people's doors asking for money or hitchhiking.

And they're said to look pretty normal unless you take a close look and realize that their eyes are completely black.

Those who have fallen for their sad little stories and let them into their cars or homes have been said to experience bizarre things, nosebleeds, power outages, even missing or or deceased pets.

So, who are these kids?

Where do they come from?

And where the heck are their parents, if they ever had parents at all?

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is So Supernatural.

Aloha, friends.

I'm Rasha Piccarrero, and I'm Yvette Gentile.

And welcome back to So Supernatural.

Today, we are peeling back the layers of one of the creepiest urban legends, the Black-Eyed Children.

And for the last several decades, people have reported seeing what appear to be young children in the most unexpected places.

Sometimes they'll just show up at your front door in the middle of the night.

And other times, they'll try to get into your car on a rainy summer evening.

But not everything with the black-eyed children is what it seems.

And if you open the door and let them in, your life might never be the same.

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So before we dive in, let me ask you, a kid knocks on your door in the middle of the night, head down, hoodie up, asking to use your phone.

Yvette, what would you do?

So first thing, if it's in the middle of the night, I'm waking up Gino to come with me to the door because I'm not that girl who stays in the bed and says, go check it out.

Like I want to see what is happening.

And we have a peephole, so I'm going to look through the peephole.

And if they are not looking at me like if they have hoods on head down something's not right because you know the eyes are the window to the soul i am definitely not opening the door and i'm probably gonna call the police i know you have a camera at your door what would you do if you saw a live feed of something like that pop up Okay, now let's imagine they slowly look up and I see that their eyes are pitch black.

Literally no white showing, just black.

Nope,

not opening the door, not even for a second.

Girl, I mean, that just gave me full body chills.

Same, it completely would freak me out.

It is the kind of thing that plays on our instincts, though, right?

Because parent or not, which I am, when we see a child in trouble, we instinctively want to help out.

It's human nature.

But what if what seemed like a child in need standing before you wasn't a child at all?

What if something far more sinister was lurking underneath?

An evil so profound that even the toughest people are left shaking after their encounters.

Let's start with an account from paranormal investigator David Weatherly's book called Black Eyed Children.

Throughout his research, he interviewed a man known as Paul.

He was a big guy from the Midwest, about 6'3, and built like a linebacker.

Not only that, Paul worked as a prison guard and studied martial arts in his spare time.

In other words, if you ever find yourself in a scary situation, Paul is the dude that you would want backing you up.

But unlike us, Paul had no real interest in the supernatural whatsoever.

He was more of a beer and sports kind of a guy.

Now, we don't know for sure, but it seems this happened sometime during the late 1990s.

So at the time, Paul's wife and young son were out of town for a few days.

So when Paul got home from work that evening, all he wanted to do was kick back with a beer and watch the game.

He changed out of his work clothes, headed to the kitchen, and started making himself a sandwich.

And that's when he heard it.

Knock, knock, knock.

It was so soft at first, he assumed it was just some random noise from outside.

But the tapping continued, quiet but insistent, methodical even.

And eventually, he realized it was someone knocking on his door.

So he put down his sandwich and went to check who it was when he peeked out the window he saw two boys standing on his porch by their size he guessed they were between 12 and 14 years old way too old to be friends with his son they wore jeans and hoodies one brown and one gray he also realized they weren't from his neighborhood he knew all of the local kids and their families So he figured they may have come from out of town looking for donations or maybe selling magazines.

But when Paul opened the door, the boys didn't say anything at all.

They just stared at the ground.

Paul waited for them to talk, but still nothing.

As the silence dragged on, the hair on the back of his neck started to rise.

He sensed that something was off about these kids, but he couldn't put his finger on what.

Finally, Paul, who was getting pretty creeped out at this point, asked them what they wanted.

That's when the boy in the gray hoodie smiled at the ground and said, and this is a quote, y'all, hey, we just wanted to stop in for a bit.

Which is not only super creepy, but super weird, because as we mentioned, Paul was sure these kids were total strangers.

But he thought maybe he could have been mistaken and decided to ask these kids if they knew who he was.

But the kid in the gray hoodie just kept staring at the ground.

Then he asked again, can we come in for a bit?

Paul leaned closer to get a better look, and that's when he saw the kid's eyes.

They were jet black.

Like from eyelid to eyelid, just complete emptiness.

The kid finally looked up at Paul, meeting his gaze, and a rush of terror washed over him.

Suddenly, Paul felt dizzy.

His legs were locked in place.

It was almost as if the boy had held him captive with his stare.

The boy then told Paul not to think about it.

Just open the door and let them in.

Paul stood there frozen, I mean, unable to move or speak.

Eventually, he snapped out of the trance and his fight-or-flight instinct kicked in.

He slammed the door shut and he barricaded himself against it.

He started screaming at the children to just leave him the heck alone.

But the knocking resumed.

Knock, knock, knock.

Paul was in full-on panic mode.

He sprinted to his bedroom, grabbed a loaded pistol, and burst out onto the porch.

But by that point, the boys were gone.

Now, they couldn't have run away because Paul had a clear view of the entire street.

To him, there was only one explanation.

They had simply vanished.

Paul was so worked up from the experience that he didn't sleep at all that night.

The next day, he ended up going door to door, asking neighbors if they had seen or heard anything about the black-eyed children, but no one had.

So he buried the experience deep down in his mind and never spoke of it again.

That is until that paranormal investigator named David Weatherly found Paul and convinced him to share his story.

Weatherly recorded this and dozens of other accounts in his 2012 book, The Black-Eyed Children.

Thanks to Weatherly's research, we have reports of black-eyed kids, or BEKs as they're often referred to, going back as far as the 1950s.

There are a few reports from the 1970s and 80s, but sightings really skyrocketed in the 90s.

And when you start looking at all of these stories, it's hard not to see a pattern emerge.

Black-eyed children usually appear to be between the ages of six and 16, although there are rare instances of adults with black eyes as well, they've shown up in weird places like parking lots, on porches, even military bases, and they're seemingly able to appear and disappear at will.

A lot of the time, they'll hide their eyes at first.

When they talk, their language is polite, sometimes too polite, like someone who is way too mature for their age.

In some cases, people have described hearing strange animalistic sounds while the kids are around.

Others have reported smells like garbage, sulfur, or rotting meat that linger after they leave.

But all BEK stories have two things in common.

Number one, the people who meet them report feeling overwhelmed with terror, like they're in the presence of pure evil.

And number two, these black-eyed beings always want to come inside.

Inside your car, your apartment, your house.

And while they may ask nicely, they rarely take no for an answer.

So Paul got real lucky.

And so did Brian Bethel, who had his own encounter with the black-eyed children sometime in 1995 or 96.

It was late at night in Abilene, Texas.

Brian was parked in a shopping center, writing a check to his internet provider.

You know, back when people still did that kind of a thing.

And the only light was the neon glow of a nearby movie theater marquee.

Brian was about to leave the car when he heard a sudden knock on the driver's side window.

He looked up and saw two boys standing there, about 9 and 12 years old.

One was pale with freckles.

The other had olive-colored skin.

But there was something kind of odd about them, almost like they had a ghostly look on their faces.

The older boy, the spokesman, as Brian calls him, asked for a ride to their house to grab money for a movie, which sounds innocent enough, right?

Except Brian immediately felt something was off.

He couldn't explain it, but this icy fear crept over him.

Still, it seems like he was considering helping them because he asked them what movie they were seeing and the spokesman said, Mortal Kombat, which was weird because the last show of the night had already started.

By the time Brian drove them anywhere and back, the movie would have been over.

So this only added to his suspicions.

But things got a whole lot creepier.

When Brian finally got a good look at the little kid's eyes, they were completely black.

And that's when the panic set in.

The older boy must have sensed Brian's fear because he got even more aggressive.

We can't come in unless you invite us, he said.

Let us in.

Brian felt like he was under some kind of mind control.

He started reaching for the door handle, but like Paul, he stopped himself just in time.

Now that feeling of being brainwashed turned into something entirely different.

Brian had the feeling he was being hunted, like he was their prey.

So he threw the car into drive and got the hell out of there.

Brian later posted an email description to his friends who then leaked the account to the rest of the internet.

Over time, it went viral and after that, people from all over the world started sharing their encounters with the BEKs and it became something of an internet urban legend.

Except unlike most urban legends, this one had plenty of eyewitnesses.

And Brian, well, he swears his encounter was real.

Even after telling the story so many times, Brian still gets scared when he recounts it.

In fact, he says it was the most terrified he's ever been in his entire life.

If you watch his interviews, Brian describes having symptoms for years after the encounter, like nightmares and flashbacks.

And look, while I'm no psychiatrist, I do have PTSD.

And from my experience, it does sound a bit like that's what he's dealing with.

And apparently these symptoms are pretty common for people who've encountered the BEKs.

The experience is said to be so traumatic, it shakes them to their core.

I mean, think about Paul from our first story.

What started as two little kids at his door asking to come inside ended up with him installing security cameras all over his home for protection.

So you gotta wonder why was a prison guard so afraid of two little kids unless there was something so supernatural going on.

But Brian and Paul might consider themselves fortunate.

They came so close to opening that door, but something inside stopped them.

Although others weren't so lucky.

And they found out what happens when you let the black-eyed children in.

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When people talk about their encounters with black-eyed children, one of the most common feelings they describe, other than terror, is a sense of being compelled.

Even though they're scared to death, people like Brian Bethel found themselves reaching for the door handle against their will.

One victim from Minneapolis, who paranormal investigator David Weatherly called Carla, encountered a BEK on her doorstep.

As the little boy repeatedly asked her to invite him in for a drink of water, a trance-like state washed over her, but she recognized the feeling immediately, hypnosis.

And I can't even imagine what that feels like because I've never been hypnotized.

You haven't been hypnotized, have you, Yvette?

I actually have been.

It was many, many years ago and I was with mom, of course.

And I was doing a regression session.

It was this woman who hypnotizes you basically and takes you back into your past lives.

And I've always been utterly and completely enthralled with Cleopatra and pharaohs.

And she said that I was a pharaoh in my last life, which was, I think, pretty spot on.

Because, you know, mom used to always say, you're such an old soul.

So yes, I have been hypnotized.

Wow, I didn't know that story about you, Yvette.

That must have been way before I was born, or I was too young to know what was going on.

Well, anyway, Carla had previously been to a hypnotherapist who used a hypnotic technique to help her quit smoking.

And from what we found, it seems like it had taken her several sessions before she was able to relax enough to slip into a trance because she really had to trust the therapist completely in order for it to work.

And even then, she could still force herself to wake up if she needed to.

However, when she met the black-eyed kid, She felt herself enter a trance instantaneously.

She didn't need to relax or trust the person in front of her.

It just happened as if by magic.

Okay, so this is something we're finding a lot in stories about BEKs, including Paul's.

When the kids told him, you don't have to think about it, just let us in.

I mean, y'all, that's some next level Jedi mind trick control right there.

Fortunately, the fear seems to help some people snap out of their trance.

And for those people, like with real hypnosis, they're able to force themselves awake.

But there are a couple stories about the ones who couldn't snap out of it.

The first story comes from a rural town in Vermont some years ago.

We're not entirely sure when, but on a cold winter night in the middle of a snowstorm, a woman we'll call Claire was awakened by a loud banging at the door.

The clock told her it was about two in the morning.

So Claire's first thought was that someone needed help.

The nearby roads were unpaved and could get really slippery, so driving around there at night was dangerous.

So of course she threw on her slippers and stumbled to the front door.

But Claire didn't see any signs of a car wreck when she looked out the window.

Not only that, the snow on the road looked fresh.

There were no tire tracks or footprints anywhere.

And yet, she still heard someone at her door.

As the knocking continued, Claire decided to wake up her husband, who will call Steve.

When Steve opened the door, he saw two children standing there, a boy and a girl.

Steve thought they couldn't be more than eight years old.

Both were staring at the ground.

And something about them was odd.

It was the middle of a snowstorm, yet they weren't dressed for winter.

Their very presence made Steve's hair stand on edge, especially when they asked to come inside.

Naturally, Claire asked the kids where their parents were.

In a calm voice, the children replied that they would be there soon.

Claire's instincts were screaming at her to be afraid, but she simply couldn't leave the two children outside in a snowstorm to freeze.

So she invited them in.

Let me guess, huge mistake.

Oh, just you wait.

While Claire went to the kitchen to make some hot cocoa, Steve interrogated the kids in the living room.

Was there an accident?

Did they walk far?

But they didn't answer any of his questions.

They just stared at the floor and repeated that their parents would be there soon.

And that's when Steve began to feel dizzy.

Claire walked into the living room to find her husband with his head in his hands.

She handed a mug to one of the kids and then she saw the eyes, coal black.

Claire was paralyzed with fear.

The kids asked to use the bathroom, barely waiting for a response before wandering down the hall together.

Meanwhile, Claire asked Steve what they should do.

But before he could open his mouth to answer, blood started gushing from his nose.

Claire ran to get him tissues, her mind racing with unanswered questions.

And that's when the power went out.

As she ran back to her husband, Claire saw the children standing in the hallway, silent and motionless.

Then, in a sing-song voice, they said, Our parents are here.

The kids then strolled out of the house, leaving the door open behind them.

Steve followed after them and noticed a black car at the end of the driveway.

Two tall men in black suits stood near it.

Then all four of them got into the car and drove off.

The power came back on 30 minutes later and the couple tried to forget their eerie encounter.

But after that night, Steve started having nosebleeds more and more often.

The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with him.

but later he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of skin cancer.

Claire also started having nosebleeds and dizzy spells after the encounter.

Her health deteriorated rapidly and her doctors had no explanation, but she believed that all of her symptoms had a single cause, the black-eyed children.

And I'm sorry, but I just need to pause for a second because those men that picked up the kids, well, they sound an awful lot like the men in black, don't they?

I mean, what were they doing at the house?

And how are they tied to the black-eyed children?

We'll circle back to the men in black later because I have to share another creepy case with you.

One that will show you just how unpredictable these BEKs are.

In David Weatherly's book, he wrote about a woman he called Sharon.

Sharon worked as a nurse in a small Iowa town.

We don't know what year, but the incident took place on a Sunday afternoon after her shift had ended.

Her young son had just spent the night with his grandparents, so Sharon picked him up on the way home from work.

She stopped at a convenience store to buy some milk and cereal, leaving her son in the car.

A few minutes later, she returned, threw the groceries onto the passenger seat, and started the engine.

But when she checked her rearview mirror, she saw something that made her want to scream at the top of her lungs.

Someone else was in the car with them.

It was a young boy, around her son's age, and his eyes were jet black.

Sharon leapt out of the car, opened the back door, and hauled her kid right out.

She ran, terrified, into the store and told the clerk that someone had broken into her vehicle.

But when she and the clerk returned to the SUV, it was empty.

The mysterious kid had vanished.

Shaken, she called her husband Tom to come get her, but she couldn't bring herself to get back in the car.

When Tom arrived, he poked around the SUV looking for signs of the boy.

There was a bad smell, like dirty diapers, but that was it.

He let Sharon take his car and said he would drive her SUV back to their house.

But en route, something made him lose control of the wheel and he crashed into a telephone pole.

When the hospital called Sharon, they told her he'd suffered a serious concussion and couldn't remember what happened, but at least he would survive.

Sharon thought the worst was behind her, but a few days later, her son came down with a cold and it kept getting worse.

Soon he developed a fever, blurred vision, and a terrible rash that the doctors couldn't explain.

Sharon felt like her family was cursed.

Then, three weeks later, just as suddenly as the symptoms appeared, they vanished.

Like we said, there are only a small handful of tales like this where people have invited the black-eyed children in.

But those stories always result in some sort of misfortune.

Usually tragic accidents or medical conditions.

One person was unexpectedly diagnosed with bladder cancer and died six months later.

As far as we can tell, there's only one woman who claimed to have physical skin-to-skin contact with the BEK.

She's referred to only as Beth in Weatherly's book.

According to Beth, a boy and a girl showed up at her apartment asking to come in one evening.

But when she refused, the girl grabbed her arm.

She said the girl's hand was as cold as ice.

Beth yanked her arm away and slammed the door.

The next day, she got sick with a bad stomach virus.

The following afternoon, someone broke into her car and stole her laptop.

On day three, she lost her job and her boyfriend of seven years left her.

Not knowing where else to go, she visited a psychic for help.

But not only did the psychic tell Beth that she was cursed, She also said she couldn't do anything to help and even offered to give Beth her money back.

Y'all, when a psychic offers your money back, you know it's not good.

Yeah, no kidding.

The question remains, though, are these children omens of bad luck or are they actually causing bad stuff to happen?

And more importantly, who or what are they?

Well, those answers might be buried in history because apparently, there's evidence that the phenomenon is a lot older than it seems.

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They look like children but they talk like adults.

Their clothes are often ill-fitting or from another time period.

And from the way people describe the black-eyed children, it's almost like they're pretending to be human and doing a really bad job of it.

They fool people for a little while, but something about them always seems off.

The problem is they seem to be able to appear and vanish whenever they want.

No one's ever captured a good photo of one, and there aren't any videos either because security cameras always seem to malfunction when they're around.

Although there was one guy who supposedly found a picture of a creepy kid with black eyes while cleaning up his digital photo album.

But the second he tried to zoom in, his whole computer crashed.

And of course, when he got it back up and running, the photo was mysteriously deleted.

Despite the lack of evidence, or maybe because of it, there are a lot of theories about who they are and where they're from.

Although the number of sightings has skyrocketed since the 1990s, some people think they've been around for a really long time.

They may even be as old as civilization itself.

In 1993, archaeologists in southeastern Turkey unearthed something that'll sound eerily familiar.

A life-size stone figure of a person dubbed Urfa Man.

Archaeologists think the object was created over 11,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest human-shaped statues ever discovered.

But here's the part that really gives me chicken skin.

His eyes.

They're these deep black obsidian stones set into the statue's face.

and there's something so haunting about them like they're watching you and they can see right into your soul and get this his mouth is missing there's just a smooth stone where his mouth should be as if he didn't need to speak because he could reach you just with his mind We don't know much about him because the civilization that made Urfaman predates written language.

But if this statue was supposed to represent some kind of black-eyed deity, maybe it was a precursor to the BEKs.

And if that's not enough to convince you, well, there are other examples of black-eyed beings that are also associated with supernatural entities.

Throughout Asia, there are legends of so-called hungry ghosts who are vengeful spirits of the deceased.

Hungry ghosts roam the afterlife, filled with the need to consume.

Whether it's food, money, or human corpses, they'll never be satisfied no matter how much they eat.

Most hungry ghost stories depict them as having big bellies, thin necks, and occasionally black eyes.

One story from southern China talks about a village that was terrorized by the ghost of a teenage girl.

The girl had pale skin, black hair, and wore a long white dress.

You can probably guess what her eyes look like.

People around the village saw her knocking on doors asking to be let inside, and those who let her in suffered terrible misfortune.

The villagers actually blamed several disasters on her wrath.

Eventually, they called for help.

They sent for a Taoist priest who performed some kind of exorcism.

After that, the villagers' good luck returned.

But if we're going to start talking about exorcisms, we need to address the supernatural elephant in the room.

We're about to talk about demons, aren't we?

We sure are, because that's actually one of the top theories about the black-eyed children.

children.

In fact, another paranormal investigator named Gary Vassey pointed out a few features of the BEKs that resembled demonic forces.

For starters, BEKs also seem to induce terror in anyone who meets them.

Then there are the eyes themselves.

And like I said earlier, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul.

So what does it mean when those windows reveal only a void?

Fully black eyes could hint at something so evil, it consumes everything inside.

That's probably why it's such a common trope in pop culture.

Remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Willow goes over to the dark side?

Or all those demons in the TV show Supernatural?

Same idea.

But it's not just a TV thing.

Lots of folks swear they've seen people's eyes turn black before doing something bad.

I mean, a woman named Donna Anderson once wrote about a time when her abusive ex-husband attacked her, and she said that his eyes turned from blue to solid black, just like a BEK.

And an actual Catholic priest agrees.

Archbishop Ronald Phelanwright was a chief exorcist with the Catholic Church.

And in an interview, he said that when real demons possess people, they can cause physical changes like, you know what?

pitch black eyes.

Well, if black-eyed kids are demons, it's possible there's real-life demon hunters too.

I say this because of one anonymous story that I found.

It starts off like a lot of the others we heard today.

Two black-eyed boys knocking on the door asking to use the phone.

The victim panicked and ran to get his gun.

When he returned, the kids were gone.

But this time, someone else was on the doorstep.

A young girl with white eyes and white hair.

Thinking she was with the others, he screamed at her to leave.

In a calm voice, she told the man she didn't want to come inside.

She wanted to know about the two BEKs.

The man told her that they'd just left and that answer seemed to satisfy her.

Then she assured him that he'd never see them again as her white eyes glowed in the darkness.

And while the guy was totally freaked out, he sensed she, whatever she was, had power and a lot of it.

But he also got the feeling she was one of the good guys.

And true to her word, the BEKs never came back.

Obviously, it's just one story.

But if it's true, then the BEKs may have something to fear themselves.

Or perhaps the girl and the boys were, I don't know, related somehow.

Like maybe they were variants of the same species.

Because I found another theory that claims BEKs are actually human alien hybrids.

And this would explain why Claire and Steve saw the men in black outside outside their home.

Those guys are always popping up when aliens are involved.

Some even think they might be aliens themselves.

Now, many people who claim to have had contact with extraterrestrials describe what's called a gray.

These are the iconic aliens you've seen on bumper stickers.

We've all seen this, the small gray body, the huge head, the big shiny black eyes.

Those eyes draw a lot of attention, right?

Well, one abductee said the eyes were hypnotic and staring into them caused hallucinations.

And when you start to put it all together, the big black eyes, the hypnotism, the feeling of paralyzing fear, and the men in black, well, you can see how alien encounters have a lot in common with the black-eyed children.

Let's unpack the hypnosis thing for a hot minute, though.

It's just a little weird to me that so many people talk about how powerful this compulsion is to open the door.

Yet almost everyone is strong enough to resist it.

If BEKs are using mind control, they seem kind of, I don't know, bad at it, which makes me think that maybe we shouldn't be looking at the BEKs themselves, but the people who saw them.

We all know that fear does stuff to us.

You're alone in the dark, in an empty house, you hear a squeak, and you imagine the sound is actually footsteps.

Well, maybe BEKs are just a bigger version of of that.

We know that in rare cases, anxiety can actually cause auditory and visual hallucinations.

You know, when you see and hear things that aren't there.

So maybe people just thought they saw black eyes because they were already scared.

It was dark.

They were just watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or whatever.

And their brains just filled the rest in.

Except why would a prison guard be terrified of two small children?

Why does misfortune always seem to come to the people that they visit?

And why do these kids always want to get inside?

For me, the fear factor thing only explains a small piece of it.

I don't think we can safely say this is all in people's heads.

And I also don't think we can safely say this is just aliens.

Especially when the details are so consistent across cases and there's still so much we don't know.

My God, I wish we had better answers.

But because BEKs can seemingly appear and disappear at will, no one's come close to gathering any photographic evidence, let alone physical evidence, which is why my best guess is this has to be something supernatural.

So, look, there's a lot we don't know about the black-eyed children.

All we can say about them is this: if one of them knocks on your door, be careful.

And whatever you do, don't let them inside.

This is So Supernatural, an audio chuck original produced by Crime House.

You can connect with us on Instagram at So Supernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com.

Join Rasha and me next Friday for an all-new episode.

So what do you think, Chuck?

Do you approve?

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