Haunted Cosmos - Doppelgängers, The Uncanny Valley, & Black Eyed Kids

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Join us for our third episode of The Graveyard Shift. Tonight we're sitting down with a listener to talk about his stories of a demonic creature attacking him, his encounter with a black eyed kid, and the uncanny valley. Was the demonic creature a doppelgänger of one of his family members? Is the uncanny valley real? Listen to find out!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This episode is sponsored by: Indigo Sundries Soap Company - Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com and use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!Armored Republic: Making Tools of Liberty for the defense of every free man’s God-given rights - Text JOIN to 88027 or visit: https://www.ar500armor.com/ This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more! http://newdominiondesignco.com/This episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order. https://graytoadtallow.com/Make Humble Love’s Magnesium Cream apart of your daily routine. Visit thehumblelifestore.com and use code NCP15 for 15% off your first jarThis episode is also sponsored by Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today. https://stonecropadvisors.com/hauntedcosmosSmall batch, hand-poured candles. Welcome to the resistance. https://resistancecandles.com/Jake Muller Adventures is an immersive, mysterious, and engaging audio drama. Use code "HAUNTED" to claim 10% off all digital downloads. https://www.jakemulleradventures.com/haunted/Support the show

This episode is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap Company. Clean soap, cleaner body. In this episode of The Graveyard Shift, we hear from a good friend about some wild paranormal encounters that he had all through his life, including the uncanny valley and potentially a black-eyed kid. Tune in. And I start to see something edge into my frame of view on all fours, kind of sidestepping. And it looks oddly like my... Who would have been...

Okay. No, that's the artist recreation. Veers directly in front of my truck. See the kid disappear underneath the vehicle. When you saw in the headlights as you were getting ready to hit this kid that he almost looked like he had no eyes. This fallen angel and then the offspring that is produced is uncanny. Almost human or it's part human, but it's not actually human. Hey, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of the Graveyard Shift where we hear from listeners some of the craziest stories that they've ever had in their lives, whether it's high strangeness, paranormal, supernatural. And we are joined today by a special guest named Josh. We're going to hear some fascinating stories from him. But first, let me take the opportunity to introduce my co-host, Mr. Brian's Ove. Man, it is so good to be here, Ben. Can I just say, can I just say that you have never looked handsomer than you do in this moment? Man, I appreciate that.

I needed that. I've recently been really self-conscious about my hair because it's thinning so bad. Y'all can't see the top of my head, but if you could, you would be blinded. You will look better bald than any other man looks fully haired. I just don't, I just don't believe. Some people are without hair. I just don't. Will Smith's husband.

Will Smith's husband. Anyway, how about we let Josh say hello to the audience? Josh, why don't you introduce yourself for us? I'm Josh, a long listener to Haunted Cosmos, started out right from the first episodes, got onto the Patreon. Really? Really? Yes, sir.

Oh, thank you. Our guy. Our guy, Josh. Yeah. Be like. Josh, you have some children. Do your kids like listening to Haunted Cosmos? They do. Yeah. We're somewhat selective about some of the episodes that we let them listen to. But most of it, like our oldest, is absolutely a major fan.

Good. We're not listening to a book this time. Let's listen to Haunted Cosmos. Forget the books, man. They're worthless. Do you have a favorite episode? I do. Yeah. I guess it's kind of a toss-up because for me, there are two that were really impactful. first being the stories with Hatman in it. Oh, yeah. Kind of terrifying. Yeah. The other being sleep paralysis,

different various times dealing with certain things kind of along those same lines. So that one struck me a little hard. Yeah. Listening to it at 9 o'clock at night in the vehicle with the family and then you try to go get out of the vehicle. It's like that's not a good idea. Hey, man. That sounds like a skill issue on your part. Yeah, probably.

That's just bad planning. That's just bad planning. No, that's great. First of all, thank you for supporting a show. Absolutely. Thank you for listening to the show. And we're good friends with you. We know Josh.

We go way back. And honestly, I didn't know until I reached out to you a few weeks ago that you would have had any stories like this. And you sent me an email that was like a few, kind of a few quick high-level summaries of what you've seen and experienced. And I was absolutely blown away. So I'm really excited, actually,

to just hear from Josh. Yeah. and get an idea of the profound experiences that you've had kind of in this realm. Yeah. I like it for people to know that it's not like, that we didn't even know this. Because some people, they talk a lot about like this or that high strangeness thing or this ghost story. And you're always like a little bit. Yeah.

Did that happen? I don't know. Yeah. But when you know a guy and then you also know like, and we know you're trustworthy and reliable and all those things, honorable man. But also then you know, and a Christian, that's very important, like a member Christian, we know you well through that. But then also, like, you're not always talking about this stuff. It's not just like a constant, you know, well, let me one up the guy at the campfire or something like that.

I think it's good for listeners to know that. Yeah. That you're a reliable guy, you know, we can trust it. It reminds me a lot of something that Dwayne the Rock Johnson once said, which is let other people tell you that you're great. now this doesn't apply to your situation literally at all. But just to your point about not constantly talking about how terrible of things that you've seen in the demonic realm. But when you're asked, you pull out the Trump card and you're basically Neil Armstrong. Yeah.

Hey, well, I walked on the moon. I walked on the moon. If you believe in the moon. If you believe in that kind of thing. Yeah. But anyway, should we just let Josh take it away to it? Yeah. Tell us your story.

Whatever order, pace you want to go. We might ask a few questions, but mainly we just want to hear from you. Brian, I got bad news. The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself, and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts.

Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jes? jam all their soaps full of hormone-disrupting chemicals, they're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie. All you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business

that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone-disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to indigo sundrysoap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six-pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle.

Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men-six-pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's Soap Company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps, discount code, Haunted Cosmos, no spaces.

Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description? Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to indigo sundry soap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout,

all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified. How many demons, ghosts, or vampires are lurking in your investment portfolio. If you're invested in the S&P 500, it's probably more than you think,

since it's full of companies that actively oppose your faith. Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to help. Their faith-based portfolios redirect your hard-earned dollars away from destructive agendas and into companies making a positive impact on society. Get the demons out of your portfolio and invest in God's kingdom while you grow your wealth. Contact StoneCrop Wealth advisors today by visiting stonecropadvisors.com slash haunted cosmos. Investment advisory services offered through Stonecropp wealth advisors, LLC, are registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The nighttime is crawling with dangerous creatures.

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every piece of their ballistic armor and tactical gear is built to protect. Visit armored republic.com or text join all caps J-O-I-N to 88027 to get involved in the preparedness effort. Man, Ben, I knew we were handsome, but I didn't know we were that handsome until I saw our recent Honodin Cosmos thumbnails. Yeah, your skin looks so velvety smooth. I mean, it's unbelievable. Chris at New Dominion Design Company did an absolutely fantastic job, not only on those thumbnails, but on our recent book cover as well.

Yeah, exactly. And if you need some design work from Chris, you should go to New Dominion Design Code.com, get started there, and he'll serve you right. Man, he will make you look 50% as handsome as Ben guaranteed. So this is a story that I haven't really told a whole lot of people, maybe four or five people over time. But when I was about 10 years old, we were living in a house.

We just moved into a house a few years before. And in this space, all of the bedrooms, the main bedroom that all of us kids slept in, I have three younger siblings and all four of us shared a room up on the third level. So you had your kitchen main space on the middle floor and then down in the basement. You had a TV room, laundry room, one bedroom and a pantry. Really kind of small space. I got moved down to the basement bedroom on my own. 10 years old, pretty excited, get my own room for the first time.

It's a pretty big space, but still decided, you know, it's my first time in my own room. I don't want to be close to the door. So had my bed set up in a corner of the room where I could see directly out the door into the laundry room where we would always keep a fluorescent light turned on so that it wasn't completely dark. And there wasn't really opportunity for nightlights and stuff. I mean, there's 100 years ago.

So like nightlights were really a big thing. Stegosaurus were walking around outside. So as I'm trying to fall asleep one night, I'm feeling really unnerved, like just nervous down to my bones, can't figure out what's going on, decide that I'm going to roll over and face towards the door so that I can start planning my escape, get up to my parents' bedroom on the second floor. And as I roll over, that nervous feeling just grows in strength completely to the point that I'm almost frozen, locked up, looking down out into the laundry room, where the lights on and I start to see something edge into my frame of view, framed by the door.

And as it comes into view, it's this thing on all fours, kind of sidestepping as it's coming into view. And it looks oddly like my sister, who would have been about six years old at this point in time. When I say it looked oddly like her, it's like the features were just all. enough that it wasn't her and kind of just a dark, evil, glaring look on its face. And through as it came into view, it starts locking eyes with me. And it's just staring me down. And I can just feel this, this tension and like it hates me. It wants me dead.

It wants me gone. But as it comes into view, like my thought beforehand was, I'm going to get to mom and dad. It comes into view now. And it's almost like it's not. necessarily telepathically, but it's like the feeling of I'm in the way. You can't get to mom and dad. They can't get to you. You're stuck. This is it. And so I just kind of sat there staring at this thing thinking, this has to be fake. This can't be real. Something's wrong in my own head, but I'm 10 years old. So I don't really know any of that kind of stuff. Finally decide

blankets are the best thing in the world. I'm just going to put it over my head. Everything's going to go away. It's going to be fine. Put the blanket over my head and wait for, I don't know how long. It felt like eons. And as I'm laying there, kind of trying to calm my own nerves, I can hear what sounds like breathing. No, dude. But it's not breathing. Like something is just barely off about it. And it's just continuously going. I haven't heard anything move. And you're still under the cover? Yeah. And this continues to go on for a while with this kind of almost robotic sound of breathing and eventually start hearing it shuffle and move. Oh. Oh. It's, It's coming towards my bedroom.

And for that reason, I'm out. So it continues to edge towards my bedroom. The fear is just continuously expanded. I can't move at all. I'm locked in fear. Eventually comes into my bedroom and slams the door behind it. At that point, I started screaming as loud as I can. A couple of screams go by, and then finally mom and dad barge through the door,

switch the lights on, jump into my dad's arms, crying uncontrollably, can't even talk. Dad's trying to figure out what's going on. Yeah. I can't tell him anything. And I'm not even sure to this day if I ever really told him what I saw, what I experienced then, but dad's trying to calm and reassure the way that any father would. Like, there's probably just a bad dream. We're going to be okay.

We're going to pray. Everything's going to be all right. It never really said anything more than that. A couple of things to note with it. Well, I guess after this point, my younger brother, they decided to move him into the bedroom with me. Everything was fine when you've got company. It's not going to happen anymore.

And really didn't have anything extreme happen after that point. But years later, my brother and I were kind of recounting some of these different odd things that we've experienced through life of spiritual natures or whatever else. And that story came up. And he told one that was very similar. That was the same thing that looked oddly like our sister, hunting him and trying to catch him, trying to give him complete fear of situations. What? Dude, that's like the Kikowsky. It's exactly like the Kikowsky.

I don't want to derail us right now, but that... Have we talked about that? I think so. In an episode. In an episode. But I didn't want to derail us, but I just... It is exactly like the Kikowsky. Dude, that's crazy.

So let me ask you this. Like, your door was open when you went to bed. And then your dad had to open the door. Yeah. So that wasn't in your head. No. Like the door slammed shut. Yeah.

Dude, that is... And it slammed itself in with you. It didn't leave. and close the door, it came in and closed the door. The door was an inward swinging door. So in order for it to slam, it would have had to be inside. It would have been from inside. That, so here's some of the things that, uh, I think that it's, uh, maybe it's Carl Jung.

Maybe it's Freud. It's Freud talks about the. Ben's about to bring up. René Girard. No, I'm not going to bring up. Not yet. Or Edmund Freud. I'm not bringing it.

Segment Freud. I'm sorry. I said Edmund. What is his cousin? I'm not bringing up René Gerard yet. Okay, he's gonna. I'm just let you know he's gonna do it. But Freud brings up the terror of the uncanny a lot.

Like he wrote a whole series of essays on it. Is that where the uncanny valley comes from? Yeah, that's where it came from. He really like posited this idea that the most horrifying thing that you can ever see is something that looks so much like a human, but you know that it's not. That is creepy. Whether by the way that it moves or by just some thing in the face or some sense that you have, you're like, that is definitely not a human being, but it really is trying to look like one. And how that, for some reason, like that is this seed of terror for mankind.

And anyway, obviously that plays role in this because it looked like your sister. Right. That's creepy. But it was on all fours and it like shuffled to the side, like a crab. Yeah. Dude, that's... Artist recreation. Why did it start ground?

Dude, I don't know. Zal I'm picturing. That's really scary. Okay, so your family at the time was Christian. Your dad came in and prayed for you. Were you raised in a Christian home? Yeah, we were raised in Pentecostal Assemblies of God Church. Okay.

I'm going to say before, like, my brother and I both and my sister and my youngest brother, all four of us have dealt with different things along these lines. Like, we've all told different stories to each other. of things like sleep paralysis and things like that that just seemed kind of odd. We didn't know anything about it beforehand. Not sure whether or not to assume that it came from it, but being in a hyper-charismatic, hyper-spiritualist church, like the spiritual battle, this is something you're going to have to engage with.

Like I remember vividly at one point in time as a teenager praying, God, make me a warrior for a spirit warrior, let me see my enemy that's coming against me. and actually seeing really, really odd things after that point in time. I'm not sure where that lays into it or plays into it, but it was just interesting that all four of us had had similar-ish experiences, but my brother and I having one that was almost identical. That's wild. Yeah, so maybe we should tell people,

remind people about the Kikowsky intruder. There was this story of a brother and sister, and I'm probably going to get the details wrong, so feel free to interrupt me. But she remembered sleeping in her room. Her brother was older than her. Like eight years. Yeah, yeah, like a lot older,

which is why they didn't talk about this for a long time. They just didn't have that close of a relationship. But she was sleeping in her room upstairs, kind of single hallway, you know. And she remembers waking up with sleep paralysis one night. And she knew that there was that, like she could see through the POV of the sleep paralysis demon, that was coming down the hallway to her room.

It was like she was seeing it's from its eyes. Yes. And she knew that it was coming to her room. But she's awake. Like she just can't move. She hears, yeah, kind of some movement. And then she sees it open the door. And she sees it close the door from its perspective.

And then she can start to see this thing out of her periphery. Then it kind of gets up on the bed and it's like looming over her, this like dark, demonic presence. And I don't totally remember. how it ends, I think that maybe she just finally is able to move enough. Or it's like she blacks out or something like this thing. And then kind of wakes up in a fright, but then falls back asleep right away. Like just, you know, she's not even recognizing how terrifying of a thing this was until the next morning.

She describes it as a recurring dream. Yes. It happened many, many times. But in the dream, she's waking up in bed. And then this whole sequence would play out night after night after night. Now, when this is happening to her, her brother was so much older that he was away at college. And before he left for college, he would sleep in the same room. Yep, I would have been his room.

Yeah, it was his room. She was sleeping in a different upstairs room. So anyway, later, like much later in life, this is decades past. They're both comedy writers. They're in the same industry and they're comedy writers for a show. and they're out at a party or whatever after wrapping a season and they just start telling ghost stories. And her brother starts sharing this experience that he had

that was literally shot for shot the same thing. Exactly the same room. Hey, this happened and she's like, are you kidding me? She starts weeping in the middle of this party because she's like, you too. So they start talking and turns out that he had experienced the same thing, recurring sleep paralysis nightmare for years, seeing the same being. His was a little different,

though. And I think that this is right. The added wrinkle with him was that since she was also upstairs, but in a different room, he remembers the POV stopping at her room and him telling it, no, don't go in there, just come to my room. So he's kind of like protecting his little sister. And that was like the added wrinkle that just totally blew her away. But then this being just got in the mode of like, that's the room. I'm finally going to find the girl in that room, you know, after tormenting this young man for so many years. But it's crazy how that lines up with your experience with your little brother who saw a similar thing, if not the exact same thing. Now, another question that I had for you was when you were looking at it before you went under the covers.

you were able to see it like in the center of your field of vision. So it wasn't only looming on the periphery, which is another big thing. Like people say, I see it and then I look and it's not there. But this was like full blown right in the middle. I was the way I was laying down in my bed on my side, looking out the door,

the door was perfectly framed and it was standing right or down on its haunches right in the center of that in the laundry room. That's so, so creepy. So this was one thing you experienced. Were there other situations? Or? Yeah, there are other odd things that have happened over the years, various different counts of sleep paralysis and other kind of odd things that didn't, like listening to the black eyed children episode that you guys did, there was something that piqued my memory back to a time when I was working over in Logan and living over about 45 minutes away. And on my way home from work one night as I'm driving, I see off to the side of the road, full view.

in my headlights, there's this little kid on a bike, riding on the middle of the, right on the side of this highway. Very, like I-15? It's not I-15. Is it the highway going through like Manaway? Valley View that goes through that. Oh, yeah, dude, you don't ride bikes on that.

Really odd place for a bike to be. So, okay, that's really strange. I'm going to slow down a little bit. And as I start to slow down and get ready to pass this kid, he's going to be off to the right-hand side, veers directly in front of my truck. Like, I should have hit it. I should have hit him.

See the kid disappear. underneath the vehicle. So I slam on the brakes, get out of the car, look around, start trying to see what's going on. There's still a lot of wildlife, like birds and stuff that would be going off, but get out of the vehicle, it's completely silent, like dark, heavy silence. Can't hear anything. Yeah. And then get back in the truck and start moving. And it's like this gripping fear that stayed with me the entire time. And when I relayed it back to my wife, one of the things that she picked up on was she said, no, hold on a second, go back. You said, when you saw in the headlights as you were getting ready to hit this kid that he almost looked like he had no eyes.

What is that? And that kind of peaked to me when you guys were going through the black eye children. Like, that's kind of a weird situation. I don't know if it's just like it's happening so quick. Maybe it didn't happen like that, but I didn't hit anything. And I could see my, there was nothing there. There was nothing there. Didn't feel a bump, nothing along those lines. Went back the next day, back to work. And there's my tire marks in the middle of the road. I know something happened. Yeah. What time? This was like. 10.30 at night probably. So it's dark-ish. Yeah,

working a later shift. And that was one of the things that came to mind like, well, maybe I was just tired. I don't know. Maybe it was a figment of my imagination. But to make up that a kid comes right in front of the vehicle. Had you ever had anything like that as a figment of your imagination? Not like that, no. Yeah. See, like you're already adult at this point. It's pretty rare that in your 30s,

you're suddenly going to have the first high-level hallucination of your life. Very sophisticated. Just because you're a little bit tired from work. I'm kind of tired. Yeah, like that's, dude, that's nuts. I didn't know that. Yeah. So you're, I'm just, I'm thinking back to, in the Mothman story, who's the investigator, Keel?

Yeah. Keel gets that zone of fear. Yeah. He was driving and then all of a sudden, like literally as he's driving, he just became overcome with terror. And of course, Keel, being Keel, he stops the car. I would have been like, I drive faster. He stops the car. He gets out in the dead of night

when there's like this weird cryptid thing giving people conjunctivitis and eating their dogs. And he's like, no, I'm gonna get out of the car. And he walks and he finds like a front edge in the road to the zone of fear. When he walks in he's terrified, walks all the way to the other side and at another point like a line in the sand gets over it and there's no fear.

No fear. And he like finds both edges. And he just, and it was so strong that he considered at one point he had got on the other side of it from his car. car and he thought I could just sleep here on the side of the road. Like that's how it was terrifying it was. When you say that the experience was uncanny, like the silence, is it like that?

There was almost an unnatural, almost shift in the whole. Like it almost feels like a different world. Yeah, like you've been translated to another parallel plane. I'm just making stuff up right now. In a sense, yeah, because you, I mean, you step outside your back door. You're going to hear. You hear nature sounds. You can hear the air moving, all of that.

This is like you go into a sound booth when you're trying to record music or something. And it's complete dead silence, like just nothing. And it's a pretty wide open space. There's houses not too far away from there. There's all sorts of different stuff that's going to be going on. Can't hear anything. Like my vehicle motor is still running and I can't hear that either. It's just completely gone.

Insanely creepy. So this reminds me of we've talked about. about this in another one of the graveyard shift episodes, but how in the garden, God gives the curse and he tells Satan the whole plan. You know, the seat of the woman is going to eventually crush your head. And so that gives Satan his great strategy, which is, well, all I have to do is corrupt the seat of the woman, right? And so going back to the uncanny thing, Freud wrongly, posited that the reason we're so afraid of uncanniness is because in our deep evolutionary past, yeah, we finally developed as homeosapians.

Yeah. Homio. Homo sapiens. Whatever. Homio, Romeo. Yeah. No homeo, bro. There you go.

Yeah, I got you. And when we finally became fully conscious homo sapiens, we developed a disdain for the lesser, almost human. That were close, but not quite. Species. Because they were violent and they were like not one of us. But they were barbaric. And so we developed a kind of a revolving. towards them, and that eventually became this uncanny dread, where we're like, if we see something

uncanny, we're going to totally avoid it. And he even posited to the point about the zone fear, the fear zone, whatever, is, you know, humans have a lot more than just five senses. We have dozens of senses. And that's one of the senses that, in an evolutionary sense, developed, where we would be able to tell somehow in the air that there was this specific type of danger. Really? And it would mean that all of our other senses shut down, which is why we don't hear anything, why we don't feel the air moving.

Tap into it. Because we have to focus on this big threat. Now, obviously, he's wrong with the materialism. I made it up. Yeah, he made it up. But he's trying to explain something that he believes he's seeing in nature, right? And so he's explaining it wrong. But some later Christian thinkers who've kind of been in this zone,

a little bit more on the fringe, they've thought, well, maybe he wasn't totally wrong. to notice that, like maybe that is a thing, that we have a particular fear and aversion to the uncanny. But he's explaining it from a materialist standpoint. Could we explain it from a biblical standpoint? And they propose, yes, we could. Because if Satan wanted to corrupt the seat of the woman, how would he do that? Well, Genesis 6-4, the sons of God came down and they took for themselves wives. And they had to take upon themselves a corporeal form. And so the the line of Seth, the righteous line of Seth, is seeing this fallen angel in a corporeal form,

and then the offspring that is produced is uncanny, where it's almost human or it's part human, but it's not actually human, and it's like a monster that you should flee and fear and run from. And so that's kind of like one of the ideas is that man actually does have a sense for that because whether it's by providential grace or just by something that man was taught for generations down the line, that anytime you see something and you know it's not a human,

but it looks like a human, you had better flee if you actually care about righteousness or life or whatever because there were demons running around posing as human beings for millennia and maybe still do. And so that's where we get this uncanny. Like, I think that's a very fascinating idea.

We're excited again, made it up. But it is a fascinating idea. So black-eyed children, little demon creatures? Yeah. Just trying to, what are they trying to do? Because they're always trying to get in in other stories. In this case, they weren't trying to get in, but like the original and... Well, so there's, I was talking about this with someone some weeks back.

Like, there's... The doctrine of total depravity for man doesn't say that every human being, being is as bad as they possibly could be. Right, right? That they do as many sins as they could ever do. Right. It just says that all of man's nature to the very bottom has been corrupted and twisted by sin and now man's desire is for sin, left to his own devices outside the grace of God. They're saying that, and sorry, within that you have different dispositions. Someone is a serial killer. That is objectively more damaging and worse than someone who is not a serial killer. someone who like occasionally tells a lie.

Steals birthday money. Exactly. From their sibling. Yes. Yeah. Or someone. Yeah. Exactly.

And I was saying, well, what if the same could be true for the fallen spirits where they're not all literally the devil? Like the, and they don't all do as much wickedness as they possibly could ever do. But they have personality as well because they do. I mean, that's one of the tenets of reformed angelology and is that the angels are personal. They have individuality. Because they're a unique intelligence. And so you have some angels, fallen angels, sorry, like demons,

that want to very explicitly in a way that's very terrifying and terrible destroy mankind. And they'll do that in different ways, but maybe one of those ways, is by making themselves into a, uncanny lure that terrifies. Like, it's just pure terrify. Versus another kind of trick that they might try to pull depending on disposition is,

I'm going to actually make you feel really good. Yeah, right. I'm going to give you a lot of happiness. I'm going to give you what you want. I'm going to give you all these gifts, you know? And by doing that, I'm going to win you over to this, like, laugh spell that'll actually pull you away from God. Which we saw in the first graveyard shift with the psychedelics.

Exactly. And whether that is the right mechanics doesn't really matter. The point is both of those things clearly happen. Right. Where some of them are more overtly, very visibly, terrifying, terrible, dreadful, and other ones are even very visibly benevolent, quote, unquote, and beneficent towards man, quote, unquote. And then there's a whole spectrum in between of different deceptions. Dang.

So the black eye kids would be like. On the one side. A demonic intelligence that is very much like, I just loves to terrify you. I want to make you, you know, want to destroy things. Yeah. I want all that. Yeah. So it's just kind of a more low brow form of demonic oppression and deception.

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I guess one other thing that, similar different types of situations that have happened along the lines of like sleep paralysis. There was one time in particular that comes to memory that stood out as, yeah, this wasn't a figment of imagination because of external proofs that made it obvious that something weird was going on. So my wife and I were staying at a friend's house. She had a spare bedroom set up in the basement space, TV, pull out couch, all of that kind of stuff. So we're sleeping on the couch, the couch bed. And it's right around roughly midnight based off of the time we went to sleep.

And, you know, she's asleep. I haven't really been able to yet. Just kind of lay in there. And start feeling this kind of oppressive feeling similar to my experience from when I was 10. It's just like, okay, this is creepy. The room's really dark. So I'm not going to be able to see anything. But that's freaking me out a little bit.

And as I'm laying there, like you felt something. something come into the room, a presence looming in the door that, again, was open. I don't sleep with the door open anymore because it's just a really good way of being able to indicate that something is coming that shouldn't be there. It's also like a good fire safety practice to close the doors at night. So really like two birds on stone. Yeah. So laying in the bed, something's in the room.

And I'm recognizing like that, okay, this is really odd. I don't like this. I'm feeling really scared in this situation. And as I'm kind of sitting there thinking like, what am I going to do? I can't move. And I start hearing my wife, her breathing gets really heavy, like speeds up. She's kind of twitching in bed and stuff. Something's weird.

It's bugging her too, but she hasn't woken up from it yet. And eventually, like, able to break free of that inability to speak or move and start crying out to Jesus. Like, you don't have power in this room anymore in the name of Jesus, leave us alone. And finally, it kind of raises and lifts. And my wife wakes up. She's like, what's going on? Like, what was that? I'm scared out of my mind right now.

Like, I don't know, hun, something, something was in here. And I cried out, sorry if I woke you up. She's like, no, I'm terrified right now. Dang. And that's happened a couple of different times, I guess, over the years. But that one was one where it was like there are two people here that experienced it in different ways, I guess. Yeah. Oh, yeah, totally.

One of the, I mean, I love that. I don't love that it happened to you, but I love that you brought up. I love because. brows. No, because a lot of times people can get that feeling of like that intense dread and they think I'm just, I'm in my own head. You know, I'm making too much of this. Maybe you're camping alone and you're like, I'm just being a baby, you know. But the fact that both of y'all were witnessed to it and you witness to each other about it like, no, I felt terrible. Like, and now it's gone. The practical takeaway for the listener is if you, ever,

find yourself in a situation where you feel a sudden onset feeling of existential dread, get out of that situation. Call upon the name of Christ, ask him to help you, but don't just ignore it and brush it off as like, oh, I'm just in my own head. No, maybe actually the Lord is trying to help you by giving you a sense of something scary that's close by. It's never a bad idea to call upon the Lord. Yeah, never, yeah.

You're never going to be. Even when times are good. Yeah, you're never going to be like, oh, I really. regret calling upon the Lord. Yeah, I really wasted his time. I really like, it's better when I depend on myself. Honestly, you know, I am able to really accomplish a lot more. Yeah.

No, no, no, no. Call upon the Lord. Yeah, absolutely. Call upon the Lord. That reminds me of a story that I heard, an interview. I heard the guy tell it directly on an episode of Astonishing Legends. It was one of their very first episodes, probably first 10. And he was just talking about how he would go solo backpacking all the time.

And he, you know, had this one place he wanted to go. Along a highway, he noticed a trail that just went up this river. And so he, you know, he went up there. He got, he was late from work, like getting off work. So it was like going dark when he started setting up his camp. When all of a sudden he was just like overcome with dread in this sense of like, I'm not supposed to be here. I'm absolutely not supposed to be here.

But then everything went wrong. Like his flat, it was like a movie. He dropped his flashlight. like it brings. Yeah. You know, he's like, he's got,

he's like lighting matches. It's pitch dark. He's lighting matches to like try and take a few steps down the path. He just starts hearing all these things around him, feeling things brush him. Like he's going,

he finally just yells out, I know, I'm leaving. I'm not like, I'm going. Will you like stop it? And he gets all the way down this trip like a mile, not even that long,

like a mile or two, but it takes forever because it's pitch black. And then he gets, gets back to his truck and just like, it's over, walked by this boundary and it was just, that was it. Dang. He's not a Christian, but he was like a doctor. He was not a cook.

He was a medical doctor, an ER physician who had done, like he was retired. He was like 40 years as an ear doctor. Dang. Not a big, like he didn't have any other supernatural experiences, but just, he was so certain that even though a skeptic would look and say,

but what's the evidence that something happened? He's like, well, you weren't there. Yeah. If you were there, you would have experienced it. I know what I felt. And that I do, like, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some spiritual reality to that situation that was just seeking an opportunity to terrorize or demonize or do something. And like he apparently got away.

Hopefully he called upon the name of the Lord at some point. But, you know. Genuinely, the only paranormal experience I've ever had was exactly like that. I was in college. I had grown up backpacking in the Appalachian Mountains my whole life with my dad. And I was like, well, I'm just going to go for a quick little camping trip to North Carolina and just by myself solo, you know, just get away. And I got camp set up.

Everything was great. And then it like stormed. And so I just got in the tent. I was reading a book waiting out the storm. It stopped. And I was like, well, I'll go for a hike. So I went and I was, and I remember exactly when it happened, like where on the the trail I was. It was like taking a step and I'm like, I have to go. Like this is, I'm being

watched. There's something here. I can't be here. Something bad is like definitely going to happen. And I had never felt that before, ever and since. Never felt it since. And sure enough, yeah, I went and like packed up everything. And my dad lived relatively close by. And so I called him. I was like, can I just stay at your house tonight? Like this is. Yeah. And he's like, oh yeah, yeah. Do you think, do you think there might be an element, spake a little bit? You know, we pray like God send your angels to watch over us. There's just some danger head, spiritual, physical, whatever. And God's like the means I'm going to appoint.

Is there just going to, like when the donkey. Belam is donkey. Belam's donkey, yeah. And he's like, you idiot, what are you doing? Why won't you keep going? And the donkey's like, are you kidding me right now? Am I not a good donkey? You know, but like there's an angel about to just John Wickham.

Yeah. You know, where it's like, you know, like guys are terrible at picking up signs from a girl that likes them. They'll blink and they'll, and finally, it's just the woman's like, hey, I like you. Can we do something about this? Can we date? And the angels like, what's actually going to get their attention? I know. Stuff they don't like. Uncontrollable fear. Hard confrontation. Like this guy is not that quick. Yeah. Like you're going to get a lot worse than this. Everything in you is going to say, you will die painfully if you take another step. Yeah. You know, so the angels, you're, your guardian angels just like,

there was like a grizzly bear right up there. There was a big foot. It was going to eat him. And he was like, I mean, why not? Why not? Why not? Why not? Why not us? Why not today?

Well, should we wrap this up? We should wrap it up. Josh, thank you so much for sharing those stories. Really fascinating stories. Glad that the Lord brought you out of him. And I mean, another example of just the supremacy of Christ, calling upon the name of Christ, even your dad praying over you.

Good job, dad. And then you calling on Christ with that strange feeling with your wife. That's beautiful. Yeah, that's beautiful. Love it. Yeah. All right, guys, thanks for listening to this graveyard shift, special haunted cosmos episode. We hope it was helpful to you and you enjoyed it.

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