Eyeless Jack
You wake alone in your room, disturbed by some noise close to you bed. At first when you open your eyes all you see is darkness and black. You stare straight up and listen, straining your ears to pick up the faintest and smallest of sounds, the sounds on the edge of hearing, the sounds of noise being withheld, of something deliberately trying to be silent, to stalk and to hunt. Your eyes begin to adjust. You still see only darkness, but now, with terror you begin to realise, it is not the darkness of the room, but the dark empty void staring out from the hollow eye sockets of the thing leaning over your bed… One of the most notorious mainstream creepypasta villains, Eyeless Jack is a humanoid entity who removes the organs of his victims and eats them. The character’s moniker comes from the fact that he appears in a hoodie, wearing a blue mask open at the eye sockets, which though they are leaking a black fluid, are entirely empty. In later fan-made variants on the original story Eyeless Jack is commonly found standing at the foot of the bed or leaning over his sleeping victim. In most depictions Eyeless Jack wears a blue mask and hoodie. There are two cavernous black holes where the eyes should be, whilst the rest of the facial features are either missing entirely or only suggested in shape. The image most commonly associated with the character is a photograph taken from below as if looking up at a blank faced figure with only two gaping holes where his eyes should be. This photograph, which predates  production of the actual story of Eyeless Jack, was created on November 19th 2009 by two Deviantart users nickteezy408 and Pirate-Cashoo. The image was then posted  by a user calling himself Arnon on the 4chan, amongst a collection of creepy images and crewsatures taken from video games that he claimed to have found on 4chan’s /v/. The collection was labelled as ‘nightmare fuel’ and significantly featured the deviantart image of the as yet nameless character. The image was posted on June 7th, 2010 and would not be attached to a story until Feb 2012. Like many creepypasta characters there was an ekphrastic element to Eyeless Jack’s creation, meaning that the actual story of Eyeless Jack came after or was inspired by the image. That story was eventually posted to Creepypasta by a user named Azelf5000 on February 25th 2012 and was presented as a first person account of an encounter with Eyeless Jack, detailing how he had stolen and at least partially eaten human organs. The story gained in popularity, helped by the reading on youtube by Mrcreepypasta in March of 2012. Interestingly, the original creepypasta was removed by its creator in the wake of the original Jeff the Killer story being removed. With its author expressing a desire to remove it himself before the admins of the site could. Hello, my name is Mitch. I’m here to tell you guys about an experience I had. I don’t know if it was paranormal or whatever stupid words people use to describe supernatural phenomena, but after that thing visited me, I believe in that paranormal trash, now. A week after I moved in with my brother, Edwin, after my house was foreclosed, I finished unpacking. Edwin liked the idea of me moving in, since we had not seen each other for 10 years, so I was excited, too. I soon fell asleep after I moved in. After that first week, I heard rustling noises coming from outside at about one in the morning. I thought it was a raccoon, so I ignored it and tried to fall asleep. The next morning, I told Edwin about it, and he agreed. The next night, however, I thought I heard my window opening and a loud thump, as if something entered my room. I darted up and looked around my room, but I saw nothing. The next morning, Edwin dropped his coffee cup when he saw me. He held up a nearby mirror and I saw myself. I had a large gash in my left cheek. After I was rushed to the hospital, my doctor told me that I must have been sleepwalking, but then he showed me something that made my blood turn cold. He lifted up my shirt to reveal a sewn up incision where my kidneys were. I stared into his eyes, mine widening. “You somehow lost your left kidney last night,” my doctor told me. “We don’t know how, though. Sorry, Mitch.” The next night was my breaking point. Around midnight, I woke up to see a truly horrifying sight. I was staring face to face with a creature with a black hoodie and dark blue mask with no nose or mouth staring down at me. The thing that scared me the most was that it had no eyes. Just empty, black sockets. The creature also had some black substance dripping from its sockets. I grabbed a camera from the nearby mantel and took a picture. Immediately after taking the shot, the creature lunged at me and tried to claw open my chest to get to my lungs. I stopped it by kicking it in the face. As I ran out of my room, I grabbed my wallet. I would need the money. I ran out of my brother’s house into the night. I eventually ended up in the woods near Edwin’s house and tripped on a rock. I fell unconscious and woke up in the hospital. My doctor – the same one who treated me before – entered the room. “I have good news and bad news, Mitch,” my doctor started. “The good news is that you had minor injuries, and your parents are going to pick you up.” I sighed with relief. “The bad news is that your brother has been killed by some… thing. Sorry.” My parents took me back to Edwin’s house to collect my remaining belongings, which I did. Upon entering my room, I was scared, but remained calm. I grabbed my camera and then stopped dead in my tracks. In the hallway leading to my room, I saw Edwin’s body and something small lying next to it. I retrieved it up and entered my parent’s car, not mentioning Edwin’s corpse. I looked at the thing I had picked up and nearly vomited. I was holding my stolen half-eaten kidney, with some black substance on it. Credit: Azelf5000 (a.k.a. Thunder/Joey) Publisher’s Note: The original Eyeless Jack story was inspired by a photo by DeviantArt user Nickteezy408 – which is featured on this page – and which can be found here. More classic Creepypasta stories can be found here:Laughing JackPolybius1999 Creepypasta The image of a malevolent hooded character is a common trope in folklore, with characters in european Myth such as the grim reaper and at times the devil himself having been described as wearing a hood or cowl. The most striking similarity to Eyeless Jack in this context however would be the myth of El Cucoy. A version of the universal ‘bogeyman’ figure present in most cultures El Coco or cocuy is prevalent in the spanish and portugeuese speaking world and is most commonly depicted as a hooded figure (as famously illustrated by noted painter of dark things Francesco Goya). It has been suggested that Eyeless Jack, who like El Coco, wears a hood and appears in his victim’s bedrooms at night could be a modern reimagining of this long standing mythological character. Another element of the Eyeless Jack story that has roots in older urban legends is the fear of organ theft. Stories have long existed about unfortunate travellers or hitchhikers being kidnapped, drugged and having their organs harvested for sale on the black market. Where the influence of this urban legend is most obvious however is not in the removal of the organ itself but in the idea that the wound is closed back up again and the unfortunate victim left without the organ, as this is a signature motif of these tales. The idea of these organs being stolen for consumption obviously has a long history in the cannibal stories many cultures told about far away countries, out groups  or ostracised communities.  However the trope also has more recent precedents, the most obvious being the signature line from the 1991 film The Silence of Lambs in which Hannibal Lecter details how he prepared and ate the liver of one of his victims. The other, the notorious X files episode ‘Tooms’ in which the humanoid monster also feeds on the removed livers of his victims. Though of course in the Eyeless Jack narratives the organ is changed to the kidney. The organ removal and the suggestion from it that this implies a degree of detailed medical knowledge in the Eyeless Jack character is also reminiscent of the infamous Victorian serial  Killer Jack the Ripper, who as well as sharing a name and proclivity for murder with Jack, was also thought to have had some medical background, based upon the level of expertise with which he too was able to remove specific organs. This element of the original police investigation had been a key plot point in a number of later fictionalised versions of the Jack the Ripper murders and has entered into popular culture as a well known detail of the events. There are striking similarities between the appearance of Eyeless Jack and the masks worn by the Court of Owls in DCs Batman. In those depictions the mask is white with the large dark and oval eyes similar to the original image posted on Deviantart. So striking is the similarity that some cosplayers advise seeking out the mask for these characters to use when assembling a costume of Eyeless Jack. However, whilst the ‘court of owls’ imagery could very possibly have been an influence on later depictions of Eyeless Jack and especially on fan art, the story arc in comics was not released until after the original deviant art image that would become Eyeless Jack was released. Other suggested influences upon the formation of Eyeless Jack’s appearance are the character of Jack Skelington from A nightmare before Chriatmas and images of ‘grey’ extraterrestrials both of whom are typically depicted with slender necks and sloping shoulders similar to the original image as well as, more strikingly, faces with large black spaces for eyes, in the former case because they are missing and the latter because they far larger than a human’s. Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.