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In the deep hollows of Appalachia, there is a specific kind of darkness that feels alive. It’s a heavy, weight that presses against the windows of your car, making you feel like you’re at the bottom of a cold, black ocean. Back in the late 90s, my friend Sarah and I found ourselves parked at an overlook near the edge of a state forest in West Virginia. We were eighteen, feeling invincible, and the park had technically been closed for hours.
The mountains around us were silent—no crickets, no wind, just the hum of the radio and the biting cold of a November night. The nearest town was twenty miles of hairpin turns away. We were isolated, or so we thought, until the atmosphere inside the car shifted. It wasn’t a sound; it was a sudden, sickening drop in pressure that made my ears pop.
Sarah reached for the ignition, sensing the same dread I did. She turned the key.
Click.
The battery was dead. Not just weak—stone dead. Every light on the dashboard went black at once.
We sat there in the sudden, suffocating dark, laughing nervously. But then, about thirty yards away at the edge of the tree line, something moved. At first, I thought they were deer. But as they stepped into the faint, silver glow of the moon, I realized they were children.
A group of them—maybe five or six—emerged from the brush. They weren’t wearing coats or winter gear, despite the freezing temperatures. They wore dated, drab clothing: oversized flannel shirts and muddy denim that looked decades old. They stood in a semi-circle, their movements synchronized and stiff, like they were mimicking human walking but hadn’t quite mastered the rhythm.
They didn’t run toward us. They glided.
“Is that… are those kids?” Sarah whispered, her hand trembling on the steering wheel.
They stopped about ten feet from the front bumper. In the dim light, their skin looked like damp parchment, but it was their eyes that stopped my heart. Even from ten feet away, in the dark, you could see it. There was no white. No iris. Just two gaping, oily black pits that seemed to drink in the moonlight.
The smallest of them, a girl who couldn’t have been more than seven, stepped forward. She didn’t speak with her mouth; the sound seemed to vibrate directly inside my skull.
“We are cold. Let us in. We need to use your phone to call our mother.”
Her voice was flat and hollow, like a recording played in an empty room. Sarah’s breathing became ragged. “Go away! We don’t have a phone!” she screamed, even though my Nokia was sitting right in the center console.
The children didn’t react to the shouting. They moved closer, surrounding the car. One boy, a bit older with a pale, bloated face, leaned his forehead against the driver’s side window. His skin didn’t seem to have any warmth; the glass didn’t even fog up from his breath. He stared directly at Sarah, those abyssal eyes fixed on her throat.
“It is very cold,” the boy droned. “You must invite us in. It is the rule.”
He began to tap on the glass. Not a frantic pounding, but a slow, rhythmic clink-clink-clink with a fingernail that sounded like bone on glass.
“Please, Sarah, try the car again,” I sobbed, shrinking into the passenger seat.
She wrenched the key with a desperate, guttural scream. To our shock, the engine didn’t just crank—it roared to life with a violent explosion of sound, the headlights cutting through the dark like twin swords.
In the glare of the high beams, the children didn’t flinch or squint. They just stood there, washed out and gray, their black eyes reflecting nothing. As Sarah slammed the car into reverse and spat gravel, the group didn’t chase us. They just stood perfectly still in the rearview mirror, watching us retreat.
The last thing I saw before we rounded the bend was the oldest boy. He raised a hand—not to wave, but to point. He followed our car with his finger, his head tilting at a jagged, impossible angle until we vanished into the trees.
We didn’t talk for the entire hour-long drive home. To this day, if I see a group of kids standing too still on a sidewalk, I feel that cold vacuum in my chest. Some people say they need an invitation to enter your home or your car. I just thank God that Sarah kept the doors locked, because I don’t think they wanted a phone call. I think they wanted the warmth.
👁️ Think this was disturbing?
This is one of many ghost stories we’ve featured on our YouTube channel, check out our Black-Eyed Kid stories collection.
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