Urban Legends Investigated: The Noise Coming From Inside Children

I have to admit that I have a horrible obsession with checking YouTube videos, usually late at night, that have enticing, not-scary-at-all titles like “Top 5 Scariest Urban Legends of the Internet” or “Top 15 Ghosts Caught on Camera”. Somehow, watching these videos keeps me up until late at night wondering if the shadow in the corner is just a shadow or something far more sinister. In short, I torture myself with an obsession I just can’t seem to stop.

Although I’m familiar with about a dozen urban legends, if not more, I never had the urge to blog about it… Until now. Because this one is pretty weird, and coming from me, that’s saying something.

The Noise Coming From Inside Children

That title alone is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies, right? With a title like that, you know whatever story is behind it, it will surely freak you out and probably make you wish you didn’t read it.

Well, “The Noise Coming From Inside Children”, is allegedly a horror story written by a man named Ed Kann in either the 1970s or 1990s. The story was so horrible that it freaked most of the readers out, at least judging by this review the blogger found in a newspaper magazine concerning the story.

I quote from the review: “I hated the entire experience of reading it, and only through some strange combination of obsession and masochism did I finish it.”

Well, yikes.

Because I too often suffer from obsession and masochism, of course I now absolutely had to find this story, read it, and discover what all the fuss is about.

Only problem? The story can’t be found. Anywhere.

Who is Ed Kann?

However, there’s an entire website (okay, I admit, the thing is only 4 pages long) written about the mysterious author, Ed Kann. This is the website, aptly named “Who is Ed Kann?”

From this website, if its contents are to be believed, we can gather the following:

• Ed Kann is an author whose major hit work was called “The Noise Coming From Inside Children”
• It’s a book, not a short story.
• The blogger surely is convinced it exists, but there’s no trace of it on the internet… or anywhere else.

The blog only has four posts, and they all date back to November 2010. No activity since.

Once of the commenters shows he/she has found information about Ed Kann’s identity from yet another blog, Rainwood Works. According to this blog, Ed Kann was a former member of the development team for the Nintendo RPG Game “The Secret of Evermore”.

The Secret of Evermore

However, Rainwood Works only has one post, and it dates back to September 2010. This posts makes allegations as to Ed Kann having worked on the game, and as to how his storyline was simply too disturbing to be included in the released version, hence wshy he was fired from the team.

The poster also posts some “evidence” of sorts, namely an image in which one of the characters from the game says: “How can you live with what you’ve done? Those poor chidren…” However, when playing through the game, this sentence never pops up.

Some people comment on the post, including one person who claims to be Alan Weiss, who was the concept producer of the game and was also on the development team, and who states no Ed Kann was ever involved in the project. Whether this person is really Alan Weiss or not, I can’t say for sure (although the Google profile his avatar links to only has 7 followers, but he did post a lot a while back) since people post as others all the time on the internet, and the profile isn’t that convincing. The answers sound real, but a big fan of the game probably could’ve answered those questions too.

Anyway, those comments aren’t what’s at stake here – it’s Ed Kann.

Back to Ed Kann

According to the Who Is Ed Kann? blog, the blogger first saw the name Ed Kann in relation to an event at the local library, advertised through flyers throughout the neighborhoods. The flyers were scary, Halloween-themed, showing a basement window covered by rusty bars. The flyer had a list of author and story names on it, one of the names being Ed Kann and his story “Concrete Basements”.

The blogger later found a magazine with an article about Ed Kann, his huge hit “Concrete Basements” and his upcoming release, “The Noise Coming From Inside Children”. Read the whole story about how the blogger first came upon Ed Kann here.

Now, we have two books allegedly written by author Ed Kann: “Concrete Basements” and “The Noise Coming From Inside Children”. He’s about to come up somewhere, right?

Except, he doesn’t.

An Amazon search for his name, or the title of any of his books, turns up zilch.

The books aren’t on Goodreads, Barnes&Noble, LibraryThing, or any of the usual haunts either.

Sure, you could argue, maybe the stories are too old to be on there (one theory is they actually date back from the 70s, not the 90s) or maybe they just appeared in a print magazine once, and there’s no record of them online.

Fine, I say, let’s checkWorldCat then, the largest book search machine in the world. For both titles, zero results. For Ed Kann, no results that point to any potential horror author.

The Verdict

The Verdict: It’s a hoax (with about 99% certainty, because well, stranger things have happened).

It’s a good hoax, with a solid base, especially considering the mysterious blogger didn’t pop up again since 2010 and the internet is still wondering about this story.