The child on the road

One of the creepiest urban legends is the tale of the Black-eyed Children.

The whole thing seems to have begun with a Texas man named Brian Bethel, who reported back in 1996 that he had an encounter with what appeared to be a ten-year-old child on the side of a highway near Abilene.  When he stopped to see if the child was okay, or needed a ride or something, the kid came up to Bethel's open window and said, "Please, can you help me?  I'm lost."

But when Bethel looked closer, he saw that the child's eyes were entirely black.  No white, no iris, just solid, glossy black.  Understandably, he gunned the engine and took off.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Megamoto85, Black eyes by megamoto85 (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Since then, the legend has grown by accretion, with other people pitching in with their own stories of the Black-eyed Children.  The claim is that if you let one into your car or house, you'll never be seen again, although it's hard to understand how they'd know that, given that the only ones who could verify this are the ones who did let them in.

And they were never seen again.  Right?  Or am I missing some part in the logical chain, here?

The plausibility issues notwithstanding, the idea was creepy enough that I made it the basis of my trilogy of novels called The Boundary Solution -- Lines of Sight, Whistling in the Dark, and Fear No Colors.  I hope I did it justice, because whatever else you can say about it, the concept is scary as hell.

The topic comes up because of a report out of Australia, where something really peculiar is alleged to have happened last weekend.  According to a man named Mitch Kuhne, he was driving on the Hume Highway south of Sydney when he saw what looked like a child on the road.  Here's what Kuhne said:

In the video you’ll see what we seen on our way home from racing what looked to be a child on the middle of the highway!

Instantly called 000 as we couldn’t stop as we had a huge toy hauler we were carrying and would have caused an accident, police said they were putting patrols out immediately, I called the local station after realising the dash cam would have footage and called to see where I could send it to help them so they know what it is we saw and could pinpoint the location.  I was told on the phone by the officer that there is no need to send it as the child had been collected safely and was on its way home, I felt absolutely sick when all this happened I instantly felt so much better when I was told the kid had been collected.

If you want to see the dashcam footage, you can check it out at News.com.au, at the link I posted above.  But here's a still:

There's no doubt that the video is creepy.  The figure moves as the car passes it, and you can see its shadow rotating beneath its feet, indicating it's a solid object (i.e. not a lens flare or some camera glitch).  But this isn't as creepy as the postscript -- because the Australian media covering the story contacted the police, and they denied the entire thing.

They'd searched the area after Kuhne's call, they said, and found nothing.  Furthermore, there'd been no reports of a missing person in the area.

Case closed.

If it weren't for the discrepancy, the story wouldn't be that odd; just a kid wandering where (s)he shouldn't, and getting rescued by the police.  But the police at the Macquarie Fields Police Station are now saying there was no child found, and furthermore, that Kuhne was told that after the search was complete.

"The only reason I posted the video [of the dashcam footage on social media] is because I thought the kid was safe and felt okay posting it," Kuhne said.  "Now to see that they are claiming I was never told this makes me sick."

So it's a weird story, I'll give it that.  There may not be anything to it; it could be that Kuhne made up the part about the police having confirmed they'd found a child.  (I don't mean to impugn the honesty of someone I don't know, but we have to admit that as a possibility.)  If it's the police who are lying, the next obvious question is, "Why?"  What would they have to gain by telling Kuhne the child was safe if they hadn't found any child -- or, conversely, denying the existence of the child to the media if they had found one and gotten him/her home safely?  Either way, there's something about this whole situation that doesn't add up.

Take a look at the video, and let me know what you think in the comments.  Skeptics are saying it isn't a child at all, but a bit of rubbish being blown on the wind, an animal, or a statue (although what a statue was doing in the middle of the road is a question in and of itself).  Other, less skeptical types are saying it was a ghost or an alien.

Or, possibly, a Black-eyed Child.  Gotta watch out for those.  And if that's what it was, it's a good thing Kuhne didn't stop.  Maybe that's what happened to the police -- the ones who picked up the child were never seen again.

I hear that happens sometimes.

****************************************

When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Black-eyed Children and the power of the imagination

My current fiction project, with which I am about two-thirds done, is a trilogy about a group of people fighting the threat of the "Black-eyed Children."

What are Black-eyed Children, you might ask?  Other than the obvious?

This completely creepy urban legend apparently started in 1998, when journalist Brian Bethel posted a story on a newsgroup describing an encounter he'd allegedly had.  He was sitting in his car in a parking lot in Abilene, Texas, and he was approached by two unusually eloquent children who asked him to give them a ride.  He was about to unlock his door and let them in when he noticed that their eyes were black -- no iris, no whites, just solid, glossy, inky black.  He rolled his window up and gunned the motor, and the children became angry and insistent.   Fortunately for Bethel (he claims), he was able to drive away.

Since that time, there have been numerous other reports of Black-eyed Children.  They always attempt to get the unwary to let them into a car or house, often with pitiful stories ("I'm lost and I need to get home, my parents will be so worried").  In one case, from Mexico, a Black-eyed Child begged a man to carry him, saying, "My feet hurt so much, I can't walk, and if you don't carry me, I'll never get home."  No one seems to be quite sure what the children are trying to accomplish, and I was unable to find any reports from people who'd actually acquiesced to their demands.  Maybe anyone who does what the children ask is *cue scary music* never heard from again.

This urban legend/tale of the paranormal is chilling on a number of grounds.  First, it involves children, which somehow makes it scarier.  The combination of innocence and amorality that is commonplace in perfectly normal young children has made the idea of "evil children" fruitful ground for makers of horror movies (The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Bad Seed, to name just three).  That they would somehow try to accomplish their wicked ends by wheedling their way into your home or car is a pretty shiver-inducing idea.

Then, there's the thing about the eyes.  There's something special about eyes; it is telling, I think, that they're referred to as "the windows of the soul." Stephen King writes, in his masterful analysis of horror stories, Danse Macabre:

Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of the places we can be had...  Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in common...  But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear, there was one called The Crawling Eye.  We all understand that the eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft.  Maybe that's the worst.

It's hard to know if Bethel made up the original Black-Eyed Children story, or whether he was the victim of a prank by some kids with black contact lenses (such things exist, as do slit-pupilled ones -- one of my students gave me a good scare with a pair of those, once).  Predictably, I don't believe that there really are creepy demon-children out there trying to get into people's cars.  But having their eyes be solid black certainly adds a nice little frisson to the story.

Last, I think this story is scarier for its subtlety.  When you think of the bare facts of the original tale, nothing really happened.  We are not told, and therefore are left free to imagine, what the intentions of the children were, what they'd have done to Bethel if they'd gotten into the car, and (most fundamentally) who they were.  And I don't know about you, but my imagination can come up with ghastlier explanations than anything real could possibly be.  I suspect it's even capable of exceeding the Scare Quotient of most plots from horror movies.  I'm always more frightened by what I don't see than I am by what I do -- for example,  I think that the scariest scene in The Sixth Sense is when the main character is locked in a closet by bullies, and all you hear is his gasps and screams, and thumping around -- and then silence.

Man, there could have been anything in that closet with him.

Of course, that didn't stop me from coming up with an explanation for what the Black-eyed Children are trying to accomplish for my novels.  But in order to find out what that is, you'll just have to wait until the first one in the trilogy (Lines of Sight) is published in Fall of 2018.

In any case, reports of Black-eyed Children have continued to circulate, ever since Bethel's first posting almost twenty years ago.  (Not recommended reading for night time, or when you're alone in the house...)  As you might expect, I'm not prepared to give these accounts any other explanation than human imagination and the love of a good scary tale, and possibly a well-executed prank or two.  But I have to admit that reading them does send a chill skittering its way up my spine -- just proving that even skeptics are not immune to creepy stories.

Black-Eyed Children and the power of imagination

One of the creepiest paranormal stories currently circulating has to do with the "Black-Eyed Children."

The whole thing apparently started in 1998, when journalist Brian Bethel posted a story on a newsgroup describing an encounter he'd allegedly had.  (You can read a detailed account of it here.)  He was sitting in his car in a parking lot in Abilene, Texas, and he was approached by two unusually eloquent children who asked him to give them a ride.  He was about to unlock his door and let them in when he noticed that their eyes were black -- no iris, no whites, just solid, glossy, inky black.  He rolled his window up and gunned the motor, and the children became angry and insistent.  Fortunately for Bethel (he claims), he was able to drive away.

Since that time, there have been numerous other reports of Black-Eyed Children.  They always attempt to get the unwary to let them into a car or house, often with pitiful stories ("I'm lost and I need to get home, my parents will be so worried").  In one case, from Mexico, a Black-Eyed Child begged a man to carry him, saying, "My feet hurt so much, I can't walk, and if you don't carry me, I'll never get home."  No one seems to be quite sure what the children are trying to accomplish, and I was unable to find any reports from people who'd actually acquiesced to their demands.  Maybe anyone who does what the children ask is *cue scary music* never heard from again.

This urban legend/tale of the paranormal is chilling on a number of grounds.  First, it involves children, which somehow makes it scarier.  The combination of innocence and amorality that is commonplace in perfectly normal young children has made the idea of "evil children" fruitful ground for makers of horror movies (The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Bad Seed, to name just three).  That they would somehow try to accomplish their wicked ends by wheedling their way into your home or car is a pretty shiver-inducing idea.

Then, there's the thing about the eyes.  There's something special about eyes; it is telling, I think, that they're referred to as "the windows of the soul."  Stephen King writes, in his masterful analysis of horror stories, Danse Macabre,

Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of the places we can be had...  Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in common...  But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear, there was one called The Crawling Eye.  We all understand that the eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft.  Maybe that's the worst.

It's hard to know if Bethel made up the original Black-Eyed Children story, or whether he was the victim of a prank by some kids with black contact lenses (such things exist, as do slit-pupilled ones -- one of my students gave me a good scare with a pair of those, once).  Predictably, I don't believe that there really are creepy demon-children out there trying to get into people's cars.  But having their eyes be solid black certainly adds a nice little frisson to the story.

Last, I think this story is scarier for its subtlety.  When you think of the bare facts of the original tale, nothing really happened.  We are not told, and therefore are left free to imagine, what the intentions of the children were, what they'd have done to Bethel if they'd gotten into the car, and (most fundamentally) who they were.  And I don't know about you, but my imagination can come up with ghastlier explanations than anything real could possibly be.  I suspect it's even capable of exceeding the Scare Quotient of most plots from horror movies.  I'm always more frightened by what I don't see than I am by what I do -- for example,  I think that the scariest scene in The Sixth Sense is when the main character is locked in a closet by bullies, and all you hear is his gasps and screams, and thumping around -- and then silence.

Man, there could have been anything in that closet with him.

In any case, reports of Black-Eyed Children have continued to circulate, ever since Bethel's first posting thirteen years ago.  If you'd like to read a few accounts, go to here or here.  (Not recommended reading for night time, or when you're alone in the house...)  As you might expect, I'm not prepared to give these accounts any other explanation than human imagination and the love of a good scary tale, and possibly a well-executed prank or two.  But I have to admit that reading them does send a chill skittering its way up my spine -- just proving that even skeptics are not immune to creepy stories.