Hello again R. L. Stein Story Club members. I'm Ivy, your ghostly host and keeper of those

strange and spooky tales from the hidden vault of R. L. Stein. Today is another chilling tale.

This out of this world urban legend story club members might make you wonder if it's real

or simply an internet hoax. It's called the Black Guide Children. They've been reported walking

on the sides of lonely highways looking for a ride or at gas stations waiting for passersbyes

or showing up to people's homes on cold, wintry nights wanting to use the phone or the bathroom.

They're often kids whose ages range from around 6 to 16.

They have pale skin and black eyes that are as dark as coal from lid to lid.

Many people believe they might be aliens or even vampires.

They're referred to as the Black-Eyed Children.

Though tabloid newspapers covered a similar phenomenon in the 1980s,

the first reported them that can be narrowed down happened in Abilene, Texas in 1996.

A reporter named Brian Bethel, on a ghost-related mailing list,

mentioned two sightings, one in Texas and one in Portland,

Oregon. His story was later featured on the TV show, Monstrous Mysteries in America, in 2012.

At the time, a movie, Black-Eyed Kids, was in the works, so who knows if this was a promotion for the

upcoming movie or merely a coincidence. Two years after that, in 2014, a British

tabloid, Daily Star, ran some Black-Eyed children-related stories concerning them showing up during

the sale of a haunted pub in Staffordshire. The paper claimed that sightings of the black-eyed

children were on the rise all over the world. However, this all seems to be more of an internet hoax, or at least the

kind of ghost stories that are passed from person to person, but never officially documented

in any kind of legitimate news source. The website, Snopes, lists them as legend, similar to

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