Creepin’ It Real: Black-Eyed Children

by Audrey Harper

“Please, let us in.”

Also known as black-eyed kids or BEKs, black-eyed children have become a sort of legend within the last seventy years. Tabloid coverage indicates that there were reports of people witnessing these creatures in the 1980s and even as far back as the 1950s. However, most sources state that the legend actually originated in 1996 in Abilene, Texas, when a reporter by the name of Brian Bethel described an encounter with two of these children.

Bethel recounted his story via personal email to colleagues two years after the encounter occurred. He was driving to pay off an internet bill when he decided to stop outside a movie theater to use a streetlight to write his check. All of a sudden he gets a knock on his driver side window.

When Bethel looked outside, he saw two boys wearing hoodies standing next to his car and immediately felt a rush of fear the moment he looked at them. Both of the boys had solid black, lifeless eyes. One of them asked if Bethel could give them a ride to their mother’s house so they could get money to go see a movie.

“It won’t take long. We’re just kids.”

These words rattled Bethel, so he rolled up his window and made to drive away. The boys got frustrated and shouted for him to let them in and that they could only come in if he told them it was okay.

Bethel admitted that for days after the encounter, he found that he couldn’t sleep very well, and actually felt unsafe in even trying. “I kept having this fantasy of them appearing at the foot of my bed, or waiting outside my door for me when I went outside…I have never been so terrified.” When asked what he thought the children were, Bethel called them a sort of predator, believing that they wanted something from us, possibly our very souls.

So what exactly are the black-eyed children? Paranormal experts can’t seem to decide if they’re supposed to be extraterrestrials, vampires, or demons taking on a form that resembles a child. They’ve been seen ranging in ages 6 to 16, often found hitchhiking or knocking on front doors of residential homes asking to be let in. David Weatherly, author of a book on sightings of black-eyed children, has found that there are quite a few similarities across countries. For example: the five black-eyed beings from Aisne, France or the Screaming Boy, location unknown. Each experience has elicited sensations of pure terror, with the children having incredible persuasiveness and possibly the ability to read emotions and minds, and that when a person started reacting negatively, the beings would either respond with threats or calming words.

In September 2014, a British tabloid called the Daily Star ran three front page articles stating that there had been a “rise in sightings around the world.” With the help of the internet, and how many of these stories are nearly carbon copies of Bethel’s, the legend of the black-eyed children has started to fall more into the realm of creepypasta. Many people dismiss these beings as the product of people on the internet sharing stories meant to terrify and disturb others along with horror sensations like Slenderman or Sonic.exe.

Yet there are other, older stories of the black-eyed children from before the era of the internet. The oldest story is shown in the form of a carving. A 13,500 year old carving to be a little more precise. It is of an Urfa man, found at Gobekli Tepe, and he is depicted with obsidian eyes. Viewers of this artifact have reported that it causes them to feel unsettled.

So keep in mind, not everything is as it seems. Sometimes you need to look fear in the eye and not let it inside.

Sources:

Can We Come In? – The Lore Of The Black Eyed Children – Ryan Sprague’s Hidden Auditorium by Jim Harold

Black-eyed children – Wikipedia