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dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-n­ews/402988/Terrifying-plague-of-black-ey­ed-GHOST-children-around-the-world

Amazing

I'll tell you what, I've done quite a bit of reading up on this because I think it's fascinating as an urban legend.

The initial seed story is traceable to a specific guy, a journalist, called Brian Bethel. He reported the first ever story way back in 1998. Now he did this on a newsgroup, alt.folklore.ghost-stories, (as you would have done at the time), and the bit that's interesting is that around the same time he was discussing on other news groups whether it'd be possible to create some kind of supernatural entity just by creating a story about it and then leaving it to run. Bethel had a strong interest in occult practice, so he would have been all over the concept of Tulpas and egregores and all that jazz, and it would seem that the whole black eyed kids thing is effectively a kind of experiment in the propagation of an urban myth and also an attempt to create a real magical entity that's turned out to be really popular.

I suppose the format and the description is quite compelling and arresting, written as it is by a man who writes for a living, which is why its gained so much ground in the last 5 years or so through assorted confirmation biases and hoaxes and media scare stories.

I love this one because it's a juicy and very modern supernatural legend. And because it's in the Daily Star, obvs.

You should never read the comments.

Except these comments.

Read the comments.

A.ma.zing.

It's not really news that Cannock is terrifying.

Now we know the REAL reason it's called the black country though.