Robert Damon Schneck wrote about the Bye Bye Man in his book, The President’s Vampire, a compilation of strange tales he investigated in some of his travels chronicling high strangeness. But Robert Damon Schneck is not the source of this legend. The story originates from a group of adventurous young adults who unwittingly dabble in paranormal powers far beyond their comprehension.
If you have issues with cognito hazards or infohazards, are genuinely afraid of the paranormal, or suffer from obsessive intrusive thoughts, you should skip this story right now and never look back. Some things are better off not knowing to some people because once you know something, you can’t go back. So this is your only warning. Turn back now.
An ancient depiction of the “spirit board.”
Like so many paranormal stories, this one begins with an Ouija Board. Spirit boards have been around forever, but the Ouija Board is a relatively recent invention historically that originated as a game for children. Most people who play with Ouija Boards will have no negative experiences because it’s a game. But a few people who engage with the board have harrowing experiences.
In 1990, three friends experimented with an Ouija Board and contacted something truly eldritch. Their names were Eli, John, and Katherine.
They were interested in everything weird, walking graveyards at night and collecting local legends from around their town. They were interested in Out of out-of-body experiences and everything paranormal. So, when they came across an Ouija Board, they were instantly interested in experimenting.
Over three days, the group interacted with myriad spirits that were intermediaries for other entities. The intelligences refuted being the spirits of deceased humans and explained they were archetypes of a free-ranging consciousness. The entities all seemed to have their own individual identities and relayed “New Age” type knowledge back to the group.
They enjoyed the experience, but the group was determined to communicate with someone who was once alive, the spirit of a deceased human. They asked the entities about this, and they said it was a bad idea to do that and that they should just keep on listening to the spirit’s New Age philosophy. The spirits said such entities existed, but it might be dangerous. However, the group was determined to speak to a legitimate ghost.
After pushing the subject more and more, the spirits told the group that an entity wanted to communicate with them through the Ouija Board, but it was sinister. This response spooked Katherine, and she tried to back out. However, the others convinced her to go through with it anyway. But when they returned to the board, the spirits refused to connect them to the malicious entity of human origin.
The group persisted, and eventually, the spirits they’d been interacting with through the board relented and gave the name of the entity that wanted to communicate with them: “The Bye Bye Man.” Katherine had second thoughts when they were given this name, backed out again, and refused to continue. But they eventually came to a compromise by going through the spirits they’d already been in contact with to gain information about the Bye Bye Man.
This compromise convinced her to continue, but the spirits again refused to cooperate. So, they got the idea to “go on strike” and said they’d not use the board until the spirits finally agreed to inform them about the mysterious Bye Bye Man. After a few days, this plan worked, though the spirits delivered the Bye Bye Man story in bits and pieces over time.
In the 1920s, an albino child was sent to an orphanage in Louisiana. No one knew who his parents were, and no information about them was given to the orphanage. Since he was different and children are cruel, and this was the 1920s, the boy suffered intense social isolation. Not only did the child have to avoid direct sunlight since he had albinism, but his eyesight gradually diminished in quality as well, so his ability to play with other kids was significantly inhibited in more ways than one.
As the boy got older, he displayed more and more questionable attributes looked down upon in civilized society. The orphanage staff steadily had more and more issues with him. One fateful day he had a confrontation with the head nurse, which resulted in the woman being assaulted with scissors that permanently crippled her arm. The troubled albino youth fled the orphanage into the night and escaped any justice.
At this time in history, trains were the primary means of transportation across the country, and he found the trainyards at night to be his haven. He’d jump from train to train, traveling nationwide, unleashing his hatred of others by becoming a serial killer. He’d never get caught because he’d just hop from place to place, from kill to next kill by trains. The serial killer racked up a high kill count, but his eyesight still failed him until he eventually went blind.
Aaaaand this is the part of the interaction with the board where the story got pretty weird for the group and left the realm of normality into the straight-up paranormal. The story shifted from believable to quite literally supernatural.
The spirits of the board said the Bye Bye Man took pieces of his victims and sewed them together to create a companion for himself. The tongues and eyes of the dead were stitched together, reminiscent of Lovecraftian horror. He named the macabre amalgamation of gore Gloomsinger. The creature was hound-like and somehow was animated into life.
Gloomsinger would be his eyes and seek out new victims. When it found a new kill, the thing would let out a whistle only able to be heard by the Bye Bye Man. Whenever he heard Gloomsinger’s cry, he’d go in that direction to enact his next murder. Over time, he’d take the eyes and tongues of his victims to keep Gloomsinger’s corpse body fresh; otherwise, the hound ceased to function. He placed his victims’ eyes, tongues, and organs in a large sack called his Sack of Gore.
Years would go by, and his killings would continue, and somehow, the serial killer developed telepathy. He could sense if someone was talking about him and thinking about him. Whenever someone said his name or thought about him, it was like a psychic beacon that drew the killer’s attention. The murders of “the Bye Bye Man” had become well-known legends among the hobo camps around trainyards. The stories of his kills had spread quickly, and the notorious serial killer’s deeds went across the country from train to train.
When people said his name or were afraid, he’d travel to them, hundreds or thousands of miles even if necessary, and he’d send Gloomsinger to find them, with him not far behind to introduce them to their mortality. Those he hunted this way became his prime victims, and he relished in the chase.
The spirits said the Bye Bye Man appeared pretty creepy, with long white hair, albino skin with red eyes, glasses painted black, a tattoo on his wrist, and wore a wide-brimmed hat and a trench coat while always dragging around his Sack of Gore for Gloomsinger. When they asked the board where the Bye Bye Man was, it said, “Coming closer.”
Pretty freaky, right?
After that, Katherine broke off the experiment and refused to participate in any more Ouija Board sessions. She began waking up at 3 a.m. every night (the witching hour) in panic attacks. The witching hour is well-known to be the time of evening said to be when the paranormal is at its peak in power.
The other two were just focused more on everyday life, turning their attention to work and school. But after a while, they reunited and were disturbed by the panic attacks their friend was enduring regularly at 3 a.m. John, one of the two males out of the group, had no idea that Katherine had been suffering from these nightly panic attacks, and when he was told about it, his face went white. He, too, had been suffering from the same affliction nightly.
Later, Eli took Katherine on a walk along train tracks near Body Island, a macabre island with a dark reputation. It was named Body Island because so many bodies washed up there over the decades, and many murders had also occurred there. During the walk, Katherine suddenly had a panic attack and said she heard something Robert could not hear. She had panic attacks the rest of the day and could not be calmed or assured.
When they returned, a message from John was on the machine. He wanted to meet up as soon as possible because he had a bizarre story to tell that they just had to hear, and he said this in an incoherent, nervous tone of voice.
He said he had an “uncanny feeling” and couldn’t put his finger on it. He didn’t want to sleep on his bed for some reason, so he passed out on the floor, but during the night, he was awoken by a knock on his door. He heard Katherine outside the door say, “John, it’s time for breakfast; let’s go.” The only thing was it was the middle of the night, and as he looked around, it was clearly pitch-black. As his grogginess subsided, fear overtook him as the voice continued outside his door, and he knew there was no way it was Katherine. And the voice grew steadily more aggressive, “John, open the door!”
Would you have opened the door?
He dropped to the floor and didn’t move a muscle while looking under the door slot into the hall. He lived in a school dormitory, so the light in the hall was always on, and he could see the shadow of feet outside the door. Eventually, the person left, and he didn’t get any rest the entire night, frozen in place with terror.
When the group got back together, they told John it couldn’t have been Katherine outside his door because they were out of town at the time. They were walking around Body Island and all that weird stuff that went down there. John was forever haunted by what would have happened if he’d opened the door.
Then, the story Eli, David, and Katherine gave Robert just ends. Quite anti-climactically. This is actually pretty common concerning paranormal stories. They begin, weird stuff happens, then weird stuff stops happening, and there is no explanation or understanding. It’s one of the ways to tell a legit paranormal story from someone lying or stuff like that.
When Robert Damon Schneck tracked down this story to add to his book on urban legends and high strangeness, he could actually verify a decent amount of the story. The spirit board said the murders began near Algiers, Louisiana, in the 1920s-1930s. A series of gruesome murders took place around that time associated with a serial killer called “The Mad Butcher,” “The Cleveland Torso Killer,” and “The Mad Butcher of Kinsbury Run.” The killer’s victims were dismembered. These killings are connected to train-stops that are all connected. It’s a legitimate traveling railroad killer, just like the Bye Bye Man in the same area the Ouija Board said.
The killer was never found, and he sliced and diced up his victims just like the Bye Bye Man tale from the spirits during the Ouija Board sessions. But the surviving evidence says nothing about the decapitated heads having their eyes or tongues missing. There are still some pretty weird similarities, though.
Robert could not track down an orphanage in the area of that era, but a lot of documentation is lost to history, so it’s still possible something could turn up. But it’s also possible the spirits relaying this story were just saying things based on what they could understand in a very vague manner, which is totally a thing in Ouija Board paranormal lore. It could have actually been a Catholic School or something like that, but the spirits just can’t tell the difference in human nuance.
Spirits rarely tell things accurately, especially non-human spirits, at least in the lore. A lot of the other side they dwell on is symbolism, metaphor, and analogy. Not to mention, spirits are said to lie constantly unless compelled to tell the truth in some way.
So the story being off actually makes sense to people well-read on spirit lore and esotericism. The spirits the group interacted with through the Ouija Board could have just been relaying information in a way they understood it, or they could have been half bullshitting. But knowing this makes the drastic change in their story of the albino running away and then becoming a serial killer (relatively grounded story) to him creating a zombie dog out of tongues and eyes and tracking people through the mere thought of him.
Occultists could go on for days and days about reasons why you should never trust what a spirit/entity says.
Also of note is the power of the entity’s name, which is a common theme in the occult and folklore. It is also stated in occult knowledge that all things are connected through the mental and astral planes, so indeed, according to the lore, one could be directly connected to another through thought and verbal usage of a name. It’s pretty terrifying stuff if you subscribe to these esoteric ideas.
Following along with these ideas, the Bye Bye Man could have been a tulpa the group created themselves. If this is the case, then Bye Bye Man is still out there and won’t dissipate unless fully forgotten by humanity because disturbing accounts that seem similar to the original Bye Bye Man story would continue to be reported even today.
And there are many of these accounts.
Don’t think about him. DON’T SAY HIS NAME!
Like on November 6th, 2001, three women had their throats cut in the middle of the day in Montana. The witnesses described the spitting image of The Bye Bye Man as the murderer, and the area was connected to railway stations, which is kinda his thing.
In any case, the whole thing is a disturbing tale of an Ouija Board session gone wrong, and you should never think about The Bye Bye Man or ever say his name.
Just to be safe.
SOURCE: https://www.amazon.com/Bye-Man-Other-Strange-but-True-Tales/dp/0143129724/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1692178531&sr=1-1
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