One very scary phenomenon that has captured the imagination, instilled fear, and generated a large amount of unsettling reports over the years is that of the menacing, extremely creepy Black Eyed Kids, also called simply BEKs, along with their counterparts the Black Eyed Adults. While each and every case is truly bizarre and unnerving, others go even further still, showing that not only are these mysterious entities good at scaring us, but that they on some occasions kill. Scattered amongst the many, many reports of encounters with Black Eyed Kids are those that seem to show a rather malevolent tendency for witnesses to meet with tragic misfortune and death, further casting a wicked shadow over them.
Black Eyed Kids have been reported for decades, and generally follow a certain frightening pattern. The children, usually in pairs but not always, appear mostly in rural or sparsely populated areas. They typically appear as normal children from afar, but a closer inspection will reveal that they have a sickly, pale pallor to them, and that their eyes are completely dark pools of black, without any discernible iris or pupil, akin to the eyes of a shark. Although the tales may vary in their details, these mysterious entities are almost always described as exuding an intense wave of dread and panic, and their eyes are said to have a certain disturbing, sinister, and hypnotic quality to them.
Almost every report of BEKs involve the children begging to be let into homes or vehicles. These requests often start out innocent and polite enough, usually gently asking for a ride or to use a phone, but not surprisingly due to their off-putting black eyes and clinging aura of fear the homeowner or driver will be reluctant to comply. This will cause the strange kids to become increasingly demanding, desperate, and foul-tempered, sometimes even violent, such as banging or scratching on house or car doors. Some witnesses claim that the Black Eyed Kids have the ability to sow confusion and addle the minds of their victims, possibly to make them more suggestible and inclined to bend to their wishes. One commonality to every report is that they cannot force their way in unless specifically invited, and in most cases when the menacing children eventually give up and leave the victim is left exasperated, confused, and with the profound sense that they have just avoided some sort of dire fate.
While this may all seem terrifying enough, the victim is usually left in one piece and none the worse for wear, but this is not always the case, and some more chilling accounts seem to point to these enigmatic creatures having the potential ability to do great harm. For instance, there are reports that seem to answer the question of just what exactly happens if one is to actually give in to their demands and let them in. One such report was apparently e-mailed by a frightened woman in a quiet, rural town in Vermont to the website Week in Weird, in which she claims to have let the kids inside, with disastrous consequences.
The woman claimed that in 2015 she had been sleeping at home with her husband one night when there was a sudden, very loud knock on the front door of the small rural home at approximately 2 a.m. The woman at first thought it was possibly someone who had broken down or gotten stuck on the nearby unpaved road, as there was a snowstorm raging outside at the time. A look outside the window showed that the house’s motion triggered light was on and that there were indeed footprints in the snow, but there was no sign of any car on the road nor even any evidence that any had recently driven by.
The woman woke her husband and they went downstairs to investigate, where they saw that someone was casting a shadow from outside of the front door. Still thinking it was someone in trouble, they warily opened the door to see two young children of around 8 years of age, a boy and a girl, standing in the snow outside. The two children were described as not at all dressed for winter and sporting outdated, odd- looking haircuts, and both were gazing down at the ground. Interestingly, rather than worry for them and offer help, the couple immediately felt deeply unnerved and somewhat repulsed, and rather than letting them in out of the cold merely asked where their parents were, to which the two creepy kids replied “They’ll be here soon.”
Despite the unnerving quality of the kids and their odd demeanor, the woman and her husband nevertheless became convinced that they must have gotten lost in the woods, and considering that they were woefully inappropriately dressed for the increasingly frigid weather, the husband and wife guided them in out of the snowstorm despite a strong nagging instinct at the back of their minds not to do so. Once inside, the kids were prepared something hot to drink and asked about what had happened to them and where they had come from, but every question was responded to with the kids simply saying, “Our parents will be here soon.” The woman began to notice that their voices had a sort of strange melodic quality to them, and also that for such young children they seemed to be not perturbed or nervous in the slightest to be in a stranger’s house, which somehow added to a growing, gnawing sense of menace and fear she was feeling. There was also the fact that the family’s cats, normally very friendly, were now hiding, and when she went to pet one of them it hissed and growled at her. The witness described what happened next thus:
When I walked back into the living room the kids were sitting on the couch as still as can be but my husband was holding his head in his hands. I asked him what wrong and he just said that he felt very dizzy all of a sudden but that he was fine. I turned back to the children to give them their cocoa, but when they looked at me I gasped. It took everything inside of me not to drop the mugs and run away. When they looked at me their eyes were completely black. They had no whites just giant black pupils.
When they saw that I was scared they stood up and asked if they could use the bathroom. I tried to be as composed as I could be and showed them down the hall. They went into the bathroom together and I hurried back to my husband to ask him if he had seen their eyes. He had seen them too and said that it looked like his brothers badly bruised eyes after a car accident. We were in the middle of talking about whose children they could be when my husbands nose started to bleed. He’d never had nosebleeds as long as I had known him. I just knew inside myself that this had something to do with the kids in the bathroom and I started crying while I ran to get [my husband] some tissues.
At this point the woman claims that the power in the house abruptly cut out to leave them in darkness, which provoked a short scream from the husband. She then ran back towards the living room and was startled to see the two kids standing motionless in the hallway. After a moment of heavy silence, one of the Black Eyed Children announced “Our parents are here,” after which they went to the front door, opened it, and walked back out into the snowstorm without closing it behind them. Looking outside, the woman could see through the snow a dark car out on the road with two tall men dressed all in black, who stared at the house before getting into their vehicle and driving off. The power would blink back on not long after.
Although this is already quite disturbing, things would only get worse for the couple. In the ensuing months three of their cats went missing without a trace and another was found one day dead in a pool of blood in the middle of the living room floor, apparently killed by some sort of massive internal hemorrhaging. Even worse, the husband became afflicted with constant mysterious nosebleeds and was also diagnosed with a rare form of very aggressive and terminal skin cancer. The woman herself also claimed that she was experiencing frequent nosebleeds that had no discernible cause as well as sudden spells of dizziness, and that her health had dramatically deteriorated since her meeting with the Black Eyed Kids. She ends the mail with a haunting message, saying:
I know that all of this is because I let the Black Eyed Children into my home. We’ve told everyone we could about the strange kids that showed up that night but no one else saw them and some laugh at how scared we were of the “Mennonite kids” but we know what we saw. I wish my husband had never opened the door. Feel free to publish this as a warning to others about the Black Eyed Kids. My advice would be to lock your doors, call the police, and wait for morning. Don’t make the same mistake that I did.
This particular report spurred other people to come in with their own reports of Black Eyed Kids causing physical harm or death. In one of the accounts, it is claimed that a friend had taken a road trip to Arcata, California to visit a friend and along the way he had stopped at a bar to have a drink before retiring to his hotel. While he was there, he allegedly struck up a conversation with an attractive woman working at the bar, who ended up inviting him back to her place at the end of the night. He ended up leaving his car there at the bar and going with the woman to her rather secluded house, which caused him to get a little nervous as he had no idea where he was and the area seemed rather remote and surrounded by wilderness.
Nevertheless, he went through with going into the residence and the two of them had sex. However, at some point during the night the man got up to go to the kitchen for a glass of water and claims that he saw several “small, frightening-looking children” milling about and wandering around aimlessly, and that he had been startled to see that they all had pitch black eyes. In the morning, the woman from the night before kicked the man out and made him walk the whole way back to where he had left his car. In addition to being quite understandably unsettled by the whole bizarre experience, the previously healthy and athletic young man then allegedly was diagnosed with severe bladder cancer and died within 6 months. According to the one who gave the report, the friend had insisted up to the end that the Black Eyed Kids he had seen and that mysterious woman, possibly their caretaker, had been to blame for his condition.
Black Eyed Kids have apparently been responsible for other mysterious deaths as well. In 1998 there was a report by a man named Jon Northwood, who claims that he was on his way to his car in a parking garage after a meeting, when one of the other men who had been at the meeting, named Doug, begged him to drive him around the block a few times. Jon asked Doug why he was so desperate to go drive around the block, to which the visibly shaken man claimed that there was a group of weird looking kids hanging around his own car and he wanted to go away until they left. Apparently they had asked for a ride earlier, but Doug had refused and they had not left since. Despite the oddity of his request, Jon let Doug in and when they approached the car in question there was indeed a group of three decidedly creepy looking kids milling about it dressed in what appeared to be gothic style clothing. There was also an abrupt feeling of stifling panic and irrational fear that overcame them, as if something terrible was about to happen.
Oddly, as they passed Jon claims that he had the sudden, uncontrollable compulsion to stop his car. When he did so, the youngest of the kids, a girl who appeared to be around 10 years old, came right up to the vehicle and said innocently “It's scary out there all alone, and we just wanted a ride home.” It was at this point that they could see that the kids had eyes that were solid pitch black, which was jarring enough to snap Jon out of his trance. He launched into action, putting the car in reverse and reportedly sending the vehicle squealing back to get away from them as the kids gave chase. They sped through the parking garage and managed to make it to the first floor, where they allegedly found that one of the kids had inexplicably managed to make it there ahead of them. They managed to roar past the boy and go tearing off down the road, after which the strong sense of suffocating dread they had felt subsided.
A short while later, they got up the courage to go back and see if the kids were still there or not, and pleasantly found them to be nowhere to be seen. Doug thanked Jon and got into his car to head home, pulling out to drive off with Jon right behind him. At this point he claimed that the insidious sensation of menace came crashing down upon him once again, and when Doug rushed through a yellow light his car was apparently hit by a speeding truck, killing him. When Jon looked back he said he could see the three Black Eyed Children standing not far away in the shadows, as if watching the whole deadly spectacle.
Sometimes it’s not the Black Eyed Kids, but rather Black Eyed Adults that kill, and another witness claims that these entities killed her boyfriend. The woman, who calls herself Esme, claims that in 2012 she had been living in a rural part of Bristol, England with her boyfriend. One day she claims that they had headed out for work at around 10:30 a.m. and were walking along a secluded path when they came across 4 very odd looking people coming towards them. Three were very pale, with totally black eyes, and skin that “didn’t seem to fit them,” while another was reported as being a very beautiful black woman with normal eyes. One of them, a young man of around 18 years of age, was described as having a “troll-like underbite” with what looked like protruding fangs. Oddly, the strange group was managing to completely avoid stepping in any puddles from a recent heavy rain even without looking down at their feet. Esme would say of the surreal sight:
The troll-like teenager looked dead ahead with a really angry expression on his face, and the girl looked happy but vacant, like she was hypnotized, just staring into space walking in front of him. Their clothes were modern, waterproof coats and walking boots. Apart from the girl who wasn’t wearing walking boots like she’d intended to come to the woods, she was wearing flat pumps which nobody in their right mind would wear on that path in flood season. When they had passed us we looked at each other immediately and said at the same time, “that was so weird!”. We both felt the strangeness emanating off of them, like a total sense of foreboding.
Esme goes on to claim that exactly one year after this strange encounter, her boyfriend died by drowning in a flooded part of the river adjacent to the path they had been on. According to police, apparently the boyfriend had gone in to save a girl he called “Sally,” even though no one else was there. Some locals tried to help him, but he had purportedly refused to be rescued until he rescued the girl. He would eventually drown, and when authorities searched they found only one body and no sign of this “Sally” he had been looking for, concluding that he had probably hallucinated her since he was a known drug user. Was this a vision implanted in his head by those strange entities they had encountered the previous year or merely a drug-induced hallucination? We will probably never know.
What are the Black Eyed Kids and what do they want? There have been many ideas on their nature, such as that they are some sort of demons, aliens, ghosts, or even vampires. Others think they have a connection with the equally enigmatic Men in Black, perhaps even being their children, or that they are something else totally beyond our comprehension. Still others think it is all mere urban legend or spooky lore. No one really knows for sure, but one thing we do know is that creepy reports of encounters with the Black Eyed Kids keep coming in and show no sign of waning. As disturbing and freaky as many of these accounts are, it is interesting to note that sometimes they are even more threatening, leading to disease and death. We may never know just what lies behind the Black Eyed Kids phenomenon, but deadly accounts such as these show that if they are real then they are possibly even more sinister than they already seem.