Death as a Child: The Modern Legend of the Black-Eyed Children

Brian Bethel met the black-eyed children while paying his cable bill. In 1996 in Abilene, Texas, after finishing a late shift at the local newspaper, he was sitting in his car outside a strip mall, writing a check. Suddenly, the hair on the back of his neck stood up. He noticed a group of teenagers standing close to his car. The teens asked for a ride to their mother’s house to get money for tickets—they wanted to catch a late-night showing at the mall’s movie theater.

But something struck Bethel as odd. The movie they wanted to see had already started—45 minutes ago, in fact—and the teenagers sounded much older than they appeared to be.

Then, in the dim light of the parking lot, he saw: Their eyes were completely black. He threw his car into reverse and sped away. When he glanced back, the children were gone.

Bethel later wrote about this unsettling encounter for the Abilene News-Reporter and, in the decades since, stories about the black-eyed children have cropped up in several countries. Some details change from one account to the next, but scholars and urban legend enthusiasts alike agree that the figures are an example of death personified as a child. These malevolent, otherworldly creatures exploit a widely held belief that children are inherently good. Defenses lowered, their victims allow them inside, inviting death and destruction upon themselves.

At least, that’s the idea.

Author Jason Offutt, who teaches journalism at Northwest Missouri State University, has been researching black-eyed children for more than 10 years. He has interviewed people around the world who claim they’ve encountered the children. “Their eyes are like a rat’s eyes, just black,” Offutt says of the figures’ most notable feature. “There’s no pupil, there’s no white, there’s no iris, it’s just totally black.”

In the stories, the children usually appear to be school-aged, anything from a kindergartener to a high schooler, and wear outdated clothing. In one account, the children wore new clothing with the logo of a sports team that had folded 10 years earlier.

The children are described as speaking in a monotone voice more mature than expected for their apparent age. They often repeat the same phrase. And they are insistent on being let inside, whether it’s into someone’s house or car.

The children plead at first, asking to make a phone call, use the bathroom, or catch a ride, but eventually become more aggressive, says Brigid Burke, an adjunct professor of religion at Montclair State University who has written about the urban legend.

A key element of the encounters, one that echoes older tales of devils and vampires, is that the children must be invited in to have any power over an individual. If denied, they eventually disappear or wander off—but not before terrifying their would-be victims.

“It’s scary because we don’t know what they want,” says Offutt. “We don’t know what they’re going to do when we let them in.”

“There are stories of people who have let them in and then disastrous things happen,” Burke says. According to the tales, catastrophes such as fatal accidents and cancer diagnoses follow in the children’s wake.

“They’re liminal in the sense they’re children but not quite,” Burke says. “There’s an uncanniness there because they sort of look like something that we expect but they’re not.” She adds: “In myth, [children are] supposed to represent a new beginning, a new possibility, a new birth—that’s not what these are.”

Burke says that one of her friends experienced a black-eyed child pounding on her door at 3 a.m., long before she had ever heard of the figures or read Burke’s scholarly research on the phenomenon.

The black-eyed children are not the only malevolent creatures masquerading as the vulnerable. Irish folklore warns of changelings—fairy babies swapped with humans. In some Native American traditions, particularly around California’s Lake Tahoe and Nevada’s Pyramid Lake, water babies are evil spirits (or sometimes merely overzealous guardians) whose cries lure people to their deaths. Like the black-eyed children, these much older folklore figures take advantage of “our desire to help people smaller and more helpless than we are,” Offutt says.

This tactic makes the children especially disturbing. “It seems a lot more calculated,” says Offutt, who claims to be a true believer. “I think this is what they choose to look like.”

Bethel’s tale of the parking lot encounter nearly 30 years ago was the first known mention of the black-eyed children, but the creepy concept has spread like ghostly wildfire online, even as hard evidence remains elusive.

Still, when there’s a knock at the door or a pleading figure suddenly at your car window, it’s best to get a good look at their eyes before letting them in.