Unpleasant Dreams

For our first episode, the subject is that of Black Eyed Kids. BEKs terrify experiencers with their solid black eyeballs and odd behavior. It is a fitting start to our journey into the unknown.

Credits:

Cassandra Harold is your host.

EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold. Jim Harold is our Executive Producer.

Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media.

Sources and further reading:

Dying for more stories of alleged BEK encounters? Please see the following articles:

16 Terrifying Encounters with ‘the Black Eyed Kids’ compiled by Chrissie Stockton

10 Terrifying Stories About the Black-eyed Children compiled by Lyra Radford

Witness Reports: My Friend Died After Meeting Black Eyed Children by Greg Newkirk

Witness Reports: I Let The Black Eyed Children into my Home and Now I’m Slowly Dying by Greg Newkirk

Dying for more analysis of the phenomenon? We recommend these books as an excellent starting place:

The Black Eyed Children, 2nd ed. By David Weatherly

The Chilling, True Terror of the Black-Eyed Kids: A Monster Compilation – Second Edition By G. Michael Vasey

And, of course, the following article by the excellent Ryan Sprague:

Can we Come In? The Lore of the Black Eyed Children by Ryan Sprague

You can find EM Hilker's full article that this podcast was based upon HERE and a transcript of the podcast version below:

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Whether it’s throughout the internet or around campfires, whispered furtively from friend to friend behind pints of ale in the darkened corners of a pub, or scribbled into journals late at night, incidents of encounters with Black Eyed Kids (BEKs for short) appear to be increasing in frequency. “Black Eyed Children” were virtually unheard of until the late 1990s, but stories of encounters with these creatures are becoming more and more common as time wears on. In addition to allegedly true accounts submitted to websites and in chat rooms across the internet, Black Eyed Kids and the lore surrounding them have inspired a short, a full-length movie, dozens of books, both fact and fiction, and yes... even a tote bag. But what are these mysterious children, and where did they come from? Are they just tall tales to be told around the campfire, or something far more sinister?

There is no consensus on what a Black Eyed Kid actually is. Experiences with these entities run from encounters on roadsides to forests to fields to the very front door of the experiencer. Regardless, there’s always a feeling of strangeness and terror in the air. The black eyed child or children always ask to be let in. And always, the experiencer finds themself gazing into a disquieting pair of preternaturally, entirely black eyes.

The first written modern account of the Black Eyed Kids was penned in 1998 by Texan journalist Brian Bethel. But Bethel wasn’t just the individual who coined the term “black eyed kids.” Two years prior to his publication, Bethel found himself approached by two boys, roughly between the ages of 10 and 14, as he sat in his car and filled out a check for a nearby drop box.

Mr. Bethel’s account tells of a sudden and unexplained overwhelming sensation of illness and unease that heralded the arrival of the boys. The lead boy’s increasing urgency to gain permission to enter his car was unsettling, nearly as much as his own horror at realizing that both boys had pure black eyes -- not merely very dark human eyes but eyes lacking sclera, iris, and pupil. Their disappearance haunted him as he (wisely, it would seem) sped away into ...

They were the biggest names in spiritualism and they were also frauds. We share the sad history of The Fox Sisters on this episode of Unpleasant Dreams.

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Cassandra Harold is your host.

EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold. Jim Harold is our Executive Producer.

Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media.

Sources & Further Reading:

Abbot, Karen. “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism.” Smithsonianmag.com. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/

Retrieved 14 November 2020.

Buzzfeed Unsolved. “The Spiritual World of the Fox Sisters.” Youtube. 2 October 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPPgwh4yk2Q

Lyttelton, George. Dialogues of the Dead. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17667/17667-h/17667-h.htm Retrieved 14 November 2020.

Nickell, Joe. “A Skeleton’s Tale” Skeptical Inquirer vol 32, no 4. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2008/07/a-skeletons-tale-the-origins-of-modern-spiritualism/ Retrieved 15 November 2020.

O’Connell, Rebecca. “The Rise and Fall of Five Claimed Mediums.” MentalFloss. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69973/rise-and-fall-5-claimed-mediums Retrieved 14 November 2020.

Stuart, Nancy Rubin. “The Fox Sisters: Spiritualism’s Unlikely Founders.” Historynet. https://www.historynet.com/the-fox-sisters-spiritualisms-unlikely-founders.htm Retrieved 14 November 2020.

Wehrstein, KM and McLuhan, R. “Fox Sisters.” Psi Encyclopedia. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/fox-sisters

Retrieved 14 November 2020.

You can find EM Hilker’s full article that this podcast was based upon HERE and a transcript of the podcast version below:

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

The Fox Sisters

The spiritualism movement of the early-to-mid 1800s captured the hearts and minds of a great many people. Spiritualism was the belief that the spirits of the dead are not only able to communicate with us, but are eager to share their wisdom with the living world. Spiritualism flourished at a time when Mesmerism was a growing interest on the heels of The Second Great Awakening. This was a fifty year period of religious revivalism, and a curious populace were seeking answers amid the confusion of the day.

The Spiritualism movement has given us modern-style seances and stage mediumship; it’s what popularized commercial fortune telling. The term “seance” itself (introduced into the language sometime between 1795 and 1805) merely means a “sitting”, though the spiritual concept is older. George, First Baron Lyttleton, famously featured discussion with the deceased in his 1760’s work of fiction, Dialogues of the Dead. Seances have been divided into four categories: religious, stage mediumship, leader-assisted, and informal social seances. Although, all of the proceedings are considered a part of the spiritualism movement.

The Fox sisters are credited with launching the movement, but its origins stretch back further than that. Emmanuel Swedenborg, who lived more than a century earlier, experienced a divine revelation in which he learned that communication with the spirit world and with God is possible through a certain mental state. He felt that the body was simply a vessel for the soul, and that Hell and Heaven will attempt to influence mortals to do good or evil, though the mortal in question is free to choose their path as they wish. According to Swedenborg’s beliefs, the path to Heaven or Hell is forged by your actions in life. These ideas would eventually lead to the formation of the New Church and the Swedenborgian Church in North America.

The other oft-credited influence on the spiritualism movement is Franz Mesmer, the founder of “animal magnetism” or mesmerism (more commonly known as hypnotism in the modern day). The original concept went far beyond simply putting someone into a trance –Mesmer believed animal magnetism could hold the cure for powerful healing; the trancework was only a small part of his theories. The concept of going into a trance, however, would be...

The Bell Witch haunting is one of the oldest American hauntings on record and it is the subject of this week’s unpleasant dream.

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Cassandra Harold is your host.

EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold.

Jim Harold is our Executive Producer.

Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media.

You can find EM Hilker’s original article HERE.

Sources & Further Reading:

1868 article in the Courier-Journal: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/7660018/the-courier-journal/

An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch by Martin Van Buren Ingram https://web.archive.org/web/20021022185219/http://bellwitch02.tripod.com/the_red_book.htm

Bell Witch Folklore Centre https://web.archive.org/web/20020924085754/http://bellwitch02.tripod.com/

Bell Witch Cave official site

http://www.bellwitchcave.com/

Pat Fitzhugh’s Bell Witch site

http://www.bellwitch.org/story.htm

The Bell Witch Poltergeist by Joe Nickell

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2014/01/the-bell-witch-poltergeist/

The Terrifying True Story of the Bell Witch

http://thesouthernweekend.com/bell-witch/

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

The Bell Witch haunting is one of the most famous American hauntings on record, not only for the extent of the hauntings but because it is credited as the only American haunting to result in the death of a living person.

John Bell Sr died 200 years ago, and much of the haunting occurred years prior to that.

To date, there are a half dozen movies based on the story with more having been influenced by it; there is a doom metal band called Bell Witch, and several songs by other musicians based on the tale. It has spawned other stories and even traveled in a slightly altered form to become folklore in Mississippi, where several Bell children settled in their adulthood.

The story itself is the story of the Bell family. In the very early years of the nineteenth century, John Bell Senior came to Robertson County, Tennessee with his wife, Lucy, and their young children. They settled along the Red River, near the modern town of Adams. Bell had been a barrel-maker in his youth, but had decided to turn to farming. He was quite successful in this, and by the time of his death, his farm would boast more than three hundred acres of land. He developed a good name for himself as well, and would eventually become an elder at the local church (though later he was excommunicated for unscrupulous business dealings). He had a good life along the Red River for well over a decade, he and his wife had nine children, and they were well-liked as a family.

The “family trouble”, as the Bells would one day call it, began late in 1817. In the earliest days of the haunting, a strange creature was spied around the Bell’s farmland by a number of people. A strange mixture of dog, sometimes two-headed, and rabbit. It was large and dark and utterly unsettling. The Bell family’s slave, Dean, saw this same creature, among other bizarre and supernatural sights, multiple times on his walks in the evening to visit his wife on a nearby farm. John Bell also reportedly saw the creature lurking around on occasion.

In early 1818, seemingly supernatural activity had started within the farmhouse. The children would report hearing the sounds of rats gnawing on their bedposts in the night, but upon examination neither rat nor bite mark could be found. After this came knocking sounds and the heavy rattle of chains being dragged across their wooden floors. Sounds that all the family could hear. In time, the children would be bitten at and scratched and pinched by the air itself. Their bedsheets would be yanked off their bed as night. Pillows snatched from under their sleeping heads and thrown to the floor. John Bell Sr woke one day to find his mouth paralyzed.

One of the most famous parts of this story, or perhaps infamous, is the treatment of the Bell’s daughter, Betsy. All sources seem to agree that she was an uncommonly beautiful girl, and perhaps this is why the increasingly violent manifestations, allegedly those of a witch, centered around her. She was pinched and scratched more and worse than the ot...

Part two of our program on The Sheppard Murder case which spawned the American “Trial of The Century” before OJ. A physician is suspected of murdering his wife in a quiet, affluent 1950s Midwestern bedroom community.

Did Sam Sheppard kill Marilyn Sheppard? That is the topic of this week’s edition of Unpleasant Dreams.

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Cassandra Harold is your host. EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold. Jim Harold is our Executive Producer.

Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media.

A copy of EM Hilker’s original article can be found HERE

-PODCAST TRANSCRIPT-

Perhaps the most thorough and well-balanced of the Sheppard trials was the one held long, long after Marilyn Reese Sheppard’s death. In the first installment of this saga, we discussed the first trial of her husband and accused killer, Sam, some of the questionable decisions made by the trial judge, and the media circus that surrounded it; we also explored briefly his retrial in the 1960s where the evidence intended to prove Sam’s motive was kept from the jury and where the science of the time, much of which has been debunked over the roughly 40 years since the retrial, favoured Sam’s innocence. This was the opportunity, in many ways, to finally reach the truth; a sequestered jury untainted by a riotous media, the benefits of the 50 years of advancement in both biological and behavioral sciences , and all the evidence on the table,

At last, the chance to accurately assess whether or not Sam H. Sheppard murdered his wife. FOR THE REST OF THE TRANSCRIPT CLICK HERE

– FURTHER READING AND SOURCES –

Affleck, John. “Bailey Testifies in Sheppard Case.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 16 Feb. 2000. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

“AMSEC 04 — Richard Eberling Background Investigation.” EngagedScholarship@CSU, 9 Mar. 1995. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

“Blood 5: Transfer Bloodstains – Crime Scene.” Google Sites. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

Butterfield, Fox. “New Clues in an Old Murder Case.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Feb. 1997. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

DeSario, Jack and William D. Mason. Dr. Sam Sheppard on Trial. Kent State University Press, 2003.

“Did Ancient Teeth Decay?” ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 28 May 2008. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

Drenkhan, Patrolman Fred. “Statement given to BVPD by Esther Houk.” EngagedScholarship@CSU. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

“Fetus DNA Tests Inconclusive in ‘The Fugitive’ Murder Case.” Deseret News, Deseret News, 18 Jan. 2000. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

Finn, Peter. “Loudoun Firm Made Sam Sheppard Case Its Own.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 9 Feb. 1997. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

“Forensic Anthropology.” Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

Gilbert, Terry H., and George H. Carr. “Motion in Limine to Limit Testimony of Dr. Roger Marsters.” EngagedScholarship@CSU, 13 Mar. 2000. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

Linder, Douglas O. “Sam Sheppard.” Famous Trials, UMKC School of Law. Retrieved 9 October 2021.

Neff, James. The Wrong Man: The Final Verdict on the Dr. Sam Sheppard Murder Case. Open Road Media: 2015.

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