Modern Urban Legends: Black Eyed Children
Content warning: The below piece features a brief mention of animal death.
“If I had given the spokesman and his friend a ride on that long-ago evening, I don’t think I would be here to type this now.” - Brian Bethel
For all intents and purposes, black eyed children or black eyed kids (BEK) are merely a creepy modern urban legend. Texas reporter Brian Bethel, however, would clearly disagree. His story of a 1996 encounter with two BEKs in Abilene seems to be the origin of the phenomena in the United States. According to Bethel, he was sitting in a parking lot in his vehicle when he was approached by two boys. They appeared to be between 9 and 12 and wore dark hoodies.
“Let Us In,” a 2020 digital rendering by Mauricio Abril
He initially cracked the window, before being suddenly overcome with an overwhelming sense of fear. The older boy explained that they needed a ride because they wanted to see Mortal Kombat, but had left their money at home. As the boy talked, Bethel’s fear continued to grow and he couldn’t pinpoint why. He looked down at the dashboard clock and saw that there was no time to take them anywhere and make it back. The last showing had already started.
The boys began to give odd, unprompted “reassurances”: it wouldn’t take long, they were just two little kids, and they didn’t have a gun or anything. Bethel looked down at his hand then, and noticed that it was nearing the lock, seemingly of its own accord. When he looked back up, he saw something that I imagine made his blood run cold. The boys stared back at him with eyes that were completely black. Bethel rolled up the window then, and the older boy began to bang on it angrily, demanding that he assist them. “We can’t come in unless you tell us its okay. Let us in!”
Bethel sped off and when he looked back, the boys were gone. There was no way they could have moved that fast and there was nowhere in the parking lot to hide.
BEKs are said to appear as children between 6 and 16, with pale skin and jet-black eyes. They are reportedly seen hitchhiking, panhandling, or appearing on the doorsteps of residences. They will persistently request access to a person’s home or vehicle, under the guise of needing to make a phone call or something similar, and they become angry if the request is denied.
And obviously, the request should always be denied.
While BEKs are almost certainly an instance of a “friend of a friend” urban legend, there are numerous online tales of encounters with them. One such account details the experience of an elderly Vermont couple.
They lived in the middle of nowhere, and one night, they heard three loud knocks on the front door. When the woman opened it, a boy and a girl stood on the other side.
“Parents will be here soon. May we come in?” they asked, without looking up. She was understandably hesitant, but eventually let them inside. While the woman went to make hot chocolate, the mysterious children sat on the couch and refused to answer any of her husband’s questions. The couple’s cat also appeared to sense that something was off, and seemed both angered and frightened by their presence. When the children asked to use the bathroom, they looked directly at the woman for the first time, revealing eyes as black as the night sky. The startled woman showed them to the bathroom, then returned to her husband and asked if he’d seen what she had. She found him covering his nose, his hand full of blood from a sudden, profuse nosebleed. As the couple tried to make sense of what was happening, the power went out and the children returned to announce: “Our parents are here.”
Walking out of the house, they met two tall, slender men who waited at the end of the driveway. The children then left with the men in a dark sedan, and the couple’s power came back on shortly after. In the following weeks, however, strange things continued to happen to them. Three out of their four cats disappeared, with a fourth was found dead in a pool of its blood. Additionally, the man continued to have nosebleeds, and when he finally went to the doctor, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of skin cancer.
Across the pond in the U.K., there have been reports of similar phenomena. In 2013, the Birmingham Mail ran a story about new sightings of a girl with “coal black pits for eyes” who had last been seen some 30 years prior. One eyewitness recounted her experience to paranormal author Lee Brickley:
“That’s when I turned round and saw a girl stood behind me, no more than 10 years old, with her hands over her eyes.
“It was as if she was waiting for a birthday cake.
“I asked if she was OK and if she had been the one screaming. She put her arms down by her side and opened her eyes.
“That’s when I saw they were completely black, no iris, no white, nothing.
“I jumped back and grabbed my daughter. When I looked again, the child was gone. It was so strange.”
In a broad sense, black eyed children are humanoid creatures, but what they are exactly is unclear. Suggestions have included ghosts, demons, vampires, extraterrestrials, and inter-dimensional beings. One thing is for sure, though, no matter what they are:
Don’t let them in.
