When Art Bell opens the phone lines, you never know what’s going to happen. Such was the case on July 24, 2015, during Midnight in the Desert’s first Open Lines show, and the long-awaited return of my personal favorite – Open Time Lines.
Now, most people listening that night assumed that one particular caller was simply acting. Perhaps he was. But the story he shared cast the unsettling nature of the so-called Black Eyed Children in a light I’d never considered before. Are they, the terrifying children with eyes black as shark eyes, actually time travelers?
That one unusual caller insisted they were, in fact, forcing him to travel through time:
“…every time that it happens to me, I lose a little bit of who I used to be, Mr. Bell. Every time they force me to time travel, I lose a little bit of myself…I need to warn your listeners. Do not answer for these children with black eyes. They are real, Mr. Bell. They are very real, and they will…take you. They will not kill you, but they will make you disappear. Your soul, Mr. Bell, is gone. They will take your soul.
They force me to travel in time, back and forth, back and forth…in the future hundreds of years, I’ve been back hundreds of years…I miss my family, Mr. Bell. I’ve had a wife, I had children…but I’m lost to time. I’ve lost them all. I can’t even remember what they look like…because when I close my eyes, all I see are these children staring at me soullessly, forcing me to do their bidding…”
Curiously enough, an article at Mysterious Universe published on January 29, 2013 shares an encounter in Pennsylvania, in which the victim describes the children as eerily out of place – or perhaps time. While the encounter happened in 2008, the strange children appeared to wear clothing from the 1980s, and “just didn’t seem to fit with the time period.”
But the question still remains: What is their nefarious purpose? If they are time travelers, and if they do force people to travel through time, why? And if they’re not time travelers, could they possibly exist outside of time as some form of demonic or even extraterrestrial entities?
The common legend of the Black Eyed Children involves encounters with young children who possess purely black eyes. They appear as if from a void, and ask their unsuspecting victims for help, or if they need help. Sometimes, they will ask to be invited into the victim’s home or, in the Pennsylvania case, the victim’s car.
What happens if you accept?
Perhaps Art Bell’s unfortunate caller found out the hard way.
