Black-Eyed Kids UK

Paranormal phenomena come in many different varieties, from UFO's to ghosts to Bigfoot and more. For most people interested in these things, we are deeply curious about them, but not really afraid. Surely, don't we know even better than most that the horror stories based on the paranormal are total fiction and that the real supernatural can't do any harm? Unfortunately this is not the case. Some aspects of the paranormal are frightening and dangerous and the subject must be entered into with caution. Real horror stories do happen and one of the most alarming of all is the phenomenon of black-eyed children. This is a fairly recent development in the files of the fantastic and the first investigations into it began in the 1990's, mostly in the USA, although reports go back some years before then and in other parts of the world, as we'll see. A typical encounter goes thus: the witness' doorbell rings and she goes to answer it. Standing there is a child aged between eight and thirteen. The child immediately asks: "Can I come in? I need a drink of water." or "Can I come in and use your phone please? I won't be very long." The witness is overcome with very powerful and mixed feelings; on the one hand, a terrible maddening fear of the child, but also an almost overwhelming urge to agree to the child's request. The apparitions in these cases look like ordinary children, in the sense that they have a human body and voice and wear ordinary clothes, if usually very casual, colourless and drab. Their hair is often reported to be long and bedraggled. Their skin is often strangely pallid, unnaturally so. As you'll guess from the name, the most remarkable feature of the black-eyed children is that their eyeballs are totally black. Not just that they have a black iris or dilated pupils, but that the entire cornea where the whites, pupils and iris usually are is a deep homogenous black. The identities of the children are always unknown to the witness and also everybody in the community in which they emerge. When they walk away from the scene their subsequent movements can never be traced. They also sometimes approach people in parked cars or walk up to them in public places. Usually it's just a single entity, but they occasionally appear in pairs. Groups of more than two are extremely rare, but not unheard of.

I've included an incident like this in my new (and so far unfinished) novel The Obscurati Chronicles. Here's an extract:

    Bing bong! The doorbell rang. Glyn stood up and started walking over towards the door of the lounge when he froze. He almost yelped aloud as an inexplicable and sourceless wave of terror flooded over him. He stopped dead in his tracks.

    Bing Bong!

    Glyn trembled.

His sudden attack of fear confused him. “What the hell’s the matter?” he mumbled to himself aloud.

    Bing Bong!

    There was a shorter pause between the second and third ring than there was between the first and second, as if the caller was impatient and their business urgent. Glyn had to force himself to move; he entered the hallway and stared at the front door ahead of him. Through the panes on the door and around the frame he could see a small, slender human figure, distorted by the frosted glass. Glyn's hand shook as he reached for the latch to open the door. He fought the powerful urge not to open the door, rotated the latch and pulled.

    A boy of about ten years old stood on the doorstep. He had scruffy black hair and wore a nondescript faded blue jacket and jeans. His skin was very pasty white and his face carried no expression. It took Glyn several moments to notice something very obviously wrong with him. His eyes were completely black; not just in the sense of a black iris, but his entire eyeball. Everything between his eyelids was a featureless black, empty void. Glyn froze and stared.

    "Can I come in please?" the boy said. His voice was flat and monotone, almost mechanical like a computer-generated voice. "Can I come in and have a drink of water?"

    Afterwards, when Glyn was remembering this incident, he had trouble recalling and understanding what went on in his mind at that moment. As his eyes met the black voids where the eyes of the boy should have been his willpower diverged into two separate forces each motivated differently. One side of himself felt a deep sense sympathy and pity for the child, a longing to invite him inside and give him whatever he wanted. The other felt an overwhelming and incomprehensible horror, disgust and repulsion. These two temporary distorted manifestations of Glyn's consciousness battled each other inside his brain.

    "Can I come in please? I need to use your phone. It won't take long."

    The door felt as if it weighed ten tons, but Glyn managed to get it shut. As soon as his eye contact with the boy was broken so was the strange mental spell he was under. He ran into the kitchen and screamed aloud with terror. He blundered straight into the table, bashing his ribs which were still bruised, and turned around, pressing his back to it. The shape of the boy through the frosted glass of the door was still visible. Glyn's heart thundered in his chest like a pile driver; his breathing came in gasps. After a few minutes he saw the shape of the boy move away from the door. Glyn slowly tip-toed into the lounge and peered out of the bay window. The boy was still there. He was outside the house uncertainly walking away. The moment Glyn spotted him the boy turned his head and stared back at Glyn, even though it should have been impossible for anybody to see anything inside through the Dutch crocheted netting Glyn's mother has put up over the windows. But somehow the boy sensed Glyn's eyes on him.

    Glyn screamed again and pounded upstairs to his own bedroom at the rear of the house. He slammed the door and leaned against it. For a few minutes he just stood there, panting and weeping with fear. Every time he thought of the face of that little boy he almost yelled aloud in fright again. He half expected him to burst out of the wardrobe in his room. It was about half an hour later that Glyn emerged from his room. He made his way along the landing to his parent's bedroom at the front of the house and nervously peeped down at the street between the closed curtains. The mysterious boy was nowhere to be seen. A postman rode by on his bike and several cars passed; everything was normal.

See here for the full segment: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-obscurati-chronicles-part-16_25.html.

Who are these black-eyed kids? Some researchers have tried to connect them with aliens, ghosts, secret government human experimentation, hybrids etc, but none of these fit. There are some similarities to men-in-black encounters, but even this is only moderate. They're a unique as well as very emergent phenomenon, possibly some kind of demonic intrusion, or maybe what Muslims call the "Djinn". What strikes me when I read these reports is that in every single instance the witness does not comply with the child's request. This leads one to the chilling question of whether this means that there were those who did let the children in... and they're no longer around to tell the tale. Some Skeptics claim that the black-eyed kids are simply ordinary children who are lost or homeless; or maybe ill, hence their unhealthy demeanour. The black-eyes are simply a dazed, sickly and feverish look that the witnesses have exaggerated. I doubt this very much because the reports are perfectly clear and many different ones match up. These children's eyes are not just dull or bleary, they're totally black. As I said, investigators began by focusing on the American cases from the 1990's, but as if often the case with the paranormal, they've turned out to be a little older and far more widespread than was previously supposed. In fact there's was very interesting incident in the 1980's; and not in the United States either, but right here in Britain. The location was Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, a famous nature reserve and beauty-spot, and also a long reputed haunt of phantom black dogs, UFO's, cryptids and alien big cats. Lee Brickley, the author of the book UFO's Werewolves and the Pig-Man, Exploring England's Strangest Location- Cannock Chase, says that his aunt encountered a black-eyed girl on Cannock Chase in 1982, see: http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/black-eyed-child-returns-haunt-7846214. Last July a woman who lives in the area contacted him claiming that she'd seen the same back-eyed girl again in very similar circumstances, see: http://leebrickley.weebly.com/1/post/2013/07/cannock-chase-sees-the-return-of-black-eyed-children.html. Brickley states that the fact that this entity appears in daylight hours makes it different from the black-eyed children phenomenon reported in America. There are other differences as well, such as the loud voice of the entity and the manner that it runs away. Another Skeptic theory is that this is all a big prank being played on us by children wearing sclera contacts; this is rather like a contact lens except that it covers the entire exposed eyeball and can be decorated in various ways. These contacts have often been used in the movies and completely black ones are available. This pop video is a good example of how black sclera contacts can be used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uee_mcxvrw. That's pretty implausible when you factor in all the other features of the experience. I don't know what the black-eyed kids are. I'd like to find out, however this is one paranormal phenomenon I'd rather not learn about through first-hand experience.