The children approach quietly, yet forcefully. They insist on coming inside your house to use the telephone or to get a drink of water. For some reason these children frighten you, and as your hand reaches up to open the door you see why. Their eyes are black. No iris, no whites, just an empty, soulless void.

Tales of Black-Eyed Children began appearing on online forums in the late 1990s. I published my first article on Black-Eyed Kids in 2008 and since then I have seen reports of these entities go from rare to common.

Explanations as to what they are include alien/human hybrids, demon-possessed children, and cryptoterrestrials. Regardless of their origin, one thing is certain – they’re terrifying.

A Ghostly Entity

Kerrie Kisner hadn’t intended to stop at the Triangle Town Center mall on her way home from Wake Tech Community College near Raleigh, North Carolina, but she did. She wished she hadn’t.

“There were very few people there that day and found it strangely eerie how quiet it was,” Kisner, 20, said. “While walking back to my car I rounded a corner and saw an older lady and a young boy. He immediately caught my attention because he was so odd looking, I had never seen anyone like him.”

The boy, about twelve years old, seemed average at first, but as Kisner watched him talk with the woman, he seemed anything but average. The boy’s black hair contrasted sharply with his pale skin; dark patches hung under his eyes. “It looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks,” Kisner said. “He had a very thin face.”

As Kisner walked closer to the pair, she heard their conversation. In a quiet, but strong voice, the boy asked the woman for help. “He stood very rigid with his hands by his sides looking at the ground as she fished around in her purse for something to give to him,” Kisner said. “As I got closer I noticed he seemed to get more and more uncomfortable.”

The boy began to shift his body when Kisner passed them on her way to her car, then he lifted his head and made eye contact with her. “I froze. His eyes were black as night, very dull, almost dead,” Kisner said. “The look he gave me has haunted me. The feeling I got from him was as though he wasn’t all there, almost ghostly.”

Eyes locked on Kisner’s, the boy turned slowly and not waiting for the older woman to give him what she dug for in her purse for, simply walked away. Kisner doesn’t know who, or what the boy was, but this memory will stick with her forever. “Ever since then the look he gave me has haunted me,” she said. “Almost like he knew what I had been thinking.”

What was this individual Kisner saw at the mall in Raleigh?

Something Undead

Experiencer Ezekiel Finch is convinced this boy, and people like him, aren’t human. At least not any more.

“I’ve run into these things more than once. Different ones in different states,” he said. “With a fair degree of certainty I can tell you what these things are, vampires.”

Finch has had two close encounters with Black-Eyed People, one in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the other in the medium-sized city on the East Coast where he lives, and chose not to identify.

“Two of my most extensive encounters were within very, very close quarters in the low 30s,” Finch said. “I watched them as closely as I could.”

Standing in the cold night amongst a small crowd of people, Finch suddenly felt uneasy. Something was wrong with two people there. First it was their black eyes flatly staring over unnatural smiles; then it was something subtler.

“People breathe all the time. They inhale before speaking, and that’s it,” Finch said. “When they did speak you didn’t see anything. Not a damn thing. Everyone else had visible breath, they didn’t.”

Finch stood watching the pair chatting with the people around them. Steam rose from everyone else’s mouths. “Not a thing from them,” he said. Finch studied them closely for the next ten minutes and saw why their breath wasn’t visible in the cold night – they weren’t breathing. “No movement from the torso at all. Still as a corpse.”

Black-Eyed People have become a staple in conversations of the strange and unknown, and almost every reported encounter is eerily similar. Children, as young as six years old to adult age, approach people alone or with a partner and beg for help; please let us in, give us a ride, follow us here. Permission to enter is also a legendary trait of a vampire.

“They ask permission for a simple reason, if someone invites you into their home they are less likely to call the cops on you,” Finch said. “You invite them in, you feel sorry for them, drink with them, buy drugs from them, (have sex with) them, whatever angle they used to get you to open the door they can catch you off guard, then BAM, you find out why they are actually there.”

Finch’s second encounter wasn’t from across a parking lot of people – it was a little more personal.

“I had the displeasure of conversing with one as she tried to convince me it was fine for her to be invited into my home,” Finch said. “It was 30 degrees, snow on the ground, and she was wearing a tiny mini skirt and a spaghetti-strapped top just standing there.”

As he stood inside his doorway, listening to this scantily clad girl beg him to let her into his home, he thought she might be under the influence of drugs, but quickly saw something else. “There was no reaction to the cold, no visible breath, no inhaling,” he said. “She could care less about the temperature, or breathing.”

Finch said he doesn’t believe Black-Eyed People are anything short of monsters. “They want you to be at ease. They want you to feel safe, to feel like they are harmless. You want you to give them a ride or let them in,” he said. “They are predators.”

Shuffling Terror

Jim Stills stood in the parking lot in front his brick apartment building in Massachusetts, the glowing ember of his cigarette bright in the night. He soon found he wasn’t alone. “At night, I usually go stand outside to have my cigarette,” he said. “I noticed that there was a kid.”

The “kid” was about twelve to sixteen years old. Each night Stills noticed the boy walk down the street toward him; his gait was unusual. “I’ve lived in these buildings my whole life, and I’ve never seen this kid anywhere,” Stills said. ”He would show up around 10 o’clock at night and walk slowly at a sluggish pace along the main road.”

The boy would move from one building to the next, checking doors. “It was enough to spook me out so I stopped going out front at night.” But he still looked for him. Staring out his widow, Stills would see him night after night, slowly pacing up and down the street until about 3 a.m.

Eventually Stills forgot about the boy and one night went outside for a smoke. What he saw terrified him. “Standing right next to my door was the kid,” Stills said. “Standing and looking at me, asking if I could buzz him inside the building.”

The boy’s his face was covered by his hoodie, but Stills saw his eyes. “Totally black,” he said. “Not a single drop of color anywhere.”

Stills told the boy he couldn’t let him inside and bolted back inside the building, making sure the door was locked behind him. “I had this overwhelming feeling of absolute terror in my body,” he said. “I didn’t sleep and occasionally looked out my window to the boy pacing along the road. I haven’t seen him in months now, but I won’t sit out front at nighttime anymore.”

They’re monsters

An anonymous poster to my blog “Black-Eyed Children” said he battled one in the woods.

“It appeared in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl,” he wrote. “I noticed its pure black eyes. It was forceful, then aggressive. Somehow my fear changed to anger.” Anonymous said this “girl” had rows of shark-like teeth, and as it moved closer to him, “the black eyes seemed to become even darker.”

Whatever these entities are, the fact is people around the globe are encountering beings that look human, but are something else, something dark. Finch thinks they’re feeding off us. “Sorry, no alien/human hybrids. No demonically possessed school kids. No horrors from beyond time and space. (They’re) monsters,” Finch said. “Don’t let them in, don’t try to make friends with them. They aren’t Ann Rice or Twilight, more like Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy – monsters that look like people.”