When I think of evil children, I think of movies like The Omen (1976), Orphan (2009) or the aptly titled Who Can Kill a Child? (1977). Children of the Corn (1984) is fun and all, but it's a little cartoony for my taste. (That's a shame, by the way, because the short story is so good.)
But so-called evil children can and do exist. They're not just the stuff of fictional stories. Ever heard of Mary Bell (who strangled two boys when she was about 10 or 11) or Eric Smith, who killed a four-year-old in the 1990s? What possesses children to get to that point?
After Redditor mrpooks asked the online community, "What's your 'That child is evil' moment?" people shared their stories.
"I showed these neighborhood kids..."
I showed these neighborhood kids a bird's nest in a cedar tree. Later that day I noticed that a couple of branches on that tree were askew, and when I looked closer the nest was missing.
One little kid had taken the nest behind his shed and smashed each chick with a hammer.
When confronted he thought it was funny how upset everyone was. That smile on his face...
"And he was right."
I admitted a patient to the hospital for homicidal ideation and threat. He was 8. Mom and Dad had a newborn baby sister, he tried to kill her with a knife. Mom and dad both got cut up saving the baby's life. That kid was psychotic. When I asked why his parents brought him to the hospital he said "Cause I'm going to kill my sister. They can't keep me away from her forever." And he meant it. And he was right. And they actually had a nice, normal family too (highly unusual). He never went back to their house as far as I know. He stayed with us for a few weeks while we found placement in a home through the state and tried different psych meds and therapy-nothing helped. In that time he destroyed his room, attacked a nurse and twisted her breasts very hard, punched almost all the security guards at some point, peed on the floor and threw stool, threw a standing fan out of his room where it shattered on the opposite wall. A true psychopath.
"A girl I know..."
A girl I know confessed that in her early childhood she saw her mother washing and squeezing out water from a stuffed bunny and she repeated that act on her real baby rabbit pet eventually killing it.
WHAT.
Oh my.
"He got very angry at me..."
Babysitting a 5-year-old boy. He got very angry at me for some reason and pulled a knife out of his parent's knife block in the kitchen and came towards me. Luckily he was 5 so I got it from him pretty easily but it was very alarming.
More alarming was 2 minutes later when he looked me in the eye and said, "Make sure I can't reach those anymore."
"When I was about 9..."
When I was about 9, my mom asked me what I wanted to be for Halloween that year. I, as she tells it, turned to her deadpanned and said that I wanted to take kids name who I really didn't like at school and who was a bit bigger than me, and I wanted to make a slit down his back, remove everything from inside and put a zipper on the back so I could wear him like a suit.
I must have been joking, but the way my mother tells it still has me surprised I'm not a serial killer.
"Kid was throwing rocks..."
Kid was throwing rocks at a stray cat that ran and hid on the other side of a fence. Luckily, he couldn't see where the cat went because of the bushes. She came out of hiding after he left and I took her home. 13 years later and she's laying on the couch next to me.
"Not even an hour later..."
My friend had a roommate who had partial custody of his eldest daughter. She was maybe 10 years old. My friend always told me there was something wrong with her but for the first while that I had known her, she seemed alright.
Well, his roommate and girlfriend were fighting so my friend and I decided to take the girl and her younger sister down by the creek to play. I found a buried crayfish and showed the girls who both seemed really interested. I dropped the crayfish back in the water and watched this girl circle around it, looking up to see if we were watching, and when she thought we weren't, she stomped on it purposefully and killed it.
Then, when she thought we weren't looking again, she slowly dragged her younger sister to the deep end of the creek (she can't swim), making it seem like they were just playfully swimming together, and then quickly took off, leaving her sister to fall off the ledge under the water and sink beneath the surface. My friend dove in so fast to save her. It was at that point we walked them home and told her dad what was up.
"I think about that incident."
My 'friend' made me watch him feed a live rat to his ball python, and he just laughed at it much to my horror. He mocked the rat squeaking and seemed to take genuine pleasure in watching it die. Even 10+ years later it still haunts me whenever I think about that incident.
Can we not?
Poor rat.
"When I confronted him..."
When I was working as a teacher assistant, I was bringing extra paper to the classroom and a student was torturing the class pet with those pins you stick in the board and he was laughing while doing it. When I confronted him he just kept smiling at me, he didn't even say sorry or show any kind of guilt for what he did.
"When I heard about the murder..."`
When I heard about the murder of James Bulger. Those boys that killed and did unspeakable things to the poor little one are truly, truly evil.
"I've met kids..."
I teach 11-18 year old. There are some children who seriously scare me, it's not what they do but how they look at you. With some of them, it's like they have no empathy, nothing behind their eyes. Others are genuinely malicious, who want yo hurt people.
I've met kids who will literally stare at adults to creep them out (like for a solid 30 minutes). Kids who make false allegations about innocent people just because they don't like them, or because they purposefully want to ruin someone's life.
"The youngest boy..."
We used to go to my mum's friend's house a lot when I was little, and she has two boys about the same ages as my sister and me. The youngest boy used to collect snails, slugs, and occasionally frogs and stamp on them in front of me and my sister. We would both cry every time he did this, but none of the adults seemed bothered.. no idea what he's like now (~15 years on), but he was an evil little freak back then.
Have some of your own stories to share? Feel free to tell us about them in the comments section below.
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