The Terror of Black-Eyed People

The killer stared down nine-year-old Jordan Williams seconds after he shot his 10th victim. It’s something that’s been burned into the young Williams memory forever.

Cabbie Derrick Bird, who’d terrorized Cumbria, UK, drove by Williams and his mother in the small resort town of Seascale, when Bird pulled alongside 64-year-old cyclist Michael Pike, leveled a hunting rifle out the window of his cab and fired. Bird was less than six feet away from Williams as the shot tore through Pike.

“There was blood everywhere,” Williams told the UK’s Daily Record on June 4, 2010. “It was horrible.”

As the cabbie drove slowly by, staring at Williams, the boy noticed something odd about the man – something unnatural.

“The crazy driver stared me in the eyes, and my mum,” Williams said. “He looked a bit mad. He had his eyes like a hawk staring at something. His eyes were black.”

Dead black.

“We were like that for seven seconds but it felt a lot longer,” Williams said. “I didn’t run. I don’t know why.”

Bird killed two more people before turning the gun on himself.

Stories of Black-Eyed People – whose eyes are voids with no iris, no whites – are always threatening and always terrifying. However, these stories are usually not reported in the mainstream press, unlike this story of the cabbie in the Daily Record.

What are these human-like beings whose eye sockets reflect nothing but darkness? Monsters? Extraterrestrials? Something more sinister? Most people who see them don’t want to find out. Susan from New Orleans is one of these people.

As Susan stepped through the doorway of a grocery store in 2004, a man in his late 20s or early 30s dressed in an old-fashioned black suit stepped past her. She immediately knew something was wrong.

“This all happened in a second’s time,” Susan said. “As my head raised up my eyes made a direct contact with a man coming out of the store going the opposite way. There were no eyes, just deep black holes of space. A total void where sockets and eyes should be.”

The man was not blind. He walked confidently and directly.

“Oh man, did my radar go off,” Susan said. “My inner voice told me to get the hell away so I hurried my steps into the grocery store.”

Inside the store she looked to see if anyone else reacted to the black-eyed man, but everyone seemed normal.

“For many years now I have tried to put this behind me, only discussing this with my husband,” Susan said. “I didn’t want to give much credence to this being because this was the most profound evilness I have ever experienced. It was too terrifying for me to think about.”

That terror has also visited Stephen Dawson of Manchester, UK.

Dawson moved from his mother’s place into his own flat in the mid-1990s. The flat was the bottom floor of a converted house owned by his mother’s boyfriend.

“Which meant no deposit, which was a bonus,” Dawson said. “I have always been very independent and finally having the opportunity to have my own space and freedom kind of went to my head as I settled in for the first night there.”

Dawson sat reading in bed, the doors to the front room closed and the sound of urban traffic playing in the background, when he felt something wrong.

“Without warning, I began sensing someone at the bottom of my bed,” he said. “I gently placed my book down and looked directly in front of me. I could see nothing and the more I looked at the emptiness the more intense the feeling got.”

As Dawson turned back to his book, he realized all he could hear was his heartbeat. No horns, no music from passing cars, nothing.

“I was no more then a couple of sentences into (the book) when the temperature dropped considerably followed by a feeling of dread and almost terror,” Dawson said. “I was frozen with fear for what seemed like hours but in reality was probably only seconds.”

When Dawson dragged his eyes from the book and focused on the end of his bed, he saw the bedroom doors slowly open.

“I don’t mind saying it was squeaky bum time for me, but try as I did I couldn’t help but look,” Dawson said. “The doors continued to slowly open, but instead of seeing my front room all I could see was total darkness.”

Then he saw the girl. A pale girl dressed in black stood at the end of his bed.

“I was transfixed on her face watching as her mouth opened and shut but with no sound coming from it,” Dawson said. “It was then I was drawn upwards to what was by far the most terrifying part of the night.”

He looked into her eyes and saw nothing but darkness.

“It wasn’t an impression of darkness, but was literally darkness,” Dawson said. “No pupils, no whites of the eyes, nothing just a blackness.”

As Dawson looked into that blackness, he felt those dark voids pull him toward sleep.

“It took one hell of an effort to break myself away from it,” he said. “As I did I shut my eyes and kept it that way till I felt (the entity) dissipate and then go.”

When the feeling of oppression left his bedroom and the noise of urban life began seeping back into the night, Dawson opened his eyes and the black-eyed girl was gone.

“I didn’t get any sleep on that first night,” he said. “I stayed there for just over a year and in all that time I never saw the girl again but was aware of the same presence. Years later I went back to show a new tenant around (which) was followed by the return of the same feeling of dread and heaviness of the atmosphere. I decided to bravely wait outside.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.