Laura Wright 
Most legendary creatures have no birthday.
Nobody knows who first imagined the vampire.
The earliest ghost story disappeared thousands of years ago.
Folklorists can trace fragments of werewolf traditions through centuries, but there is no single person who can reasonably stand up and say:
I invented the werewolf.
Slender Man is different.
We know where he was born.
We know when.
We even know who created him.
On June 10, 2009, a man using the name Victor Surge posted two altered photographs to an Internet forum.
Within a few years, people were claiming to see the creature in real life.
That makes Slender Man something extraordinarily rare.
He is a monster whose transformation from fiction into folklore happened while millions of people were watching.
Something Awful
The story began on the forums of a comedy website called Something Awful.
Users were participating in a thread called “Create Paranormal Images.”
The idea was simple.
Take ordinary photographs and alter them to create something frightening.
One participant, Eric Knudsen, posting under the username Victor Surge, submitted two black-and-white photographs showing children.
But there was someone else in the pictures.
Standing in the background was an impossibly tall, thin figure.
He wore a dark suit.
His limbs were unnaturally long.
And where his face should have been, there was almost nothing.
Knudsen called him:
The Slender Man.
A Monster Created From Nothing
There is no mystery concerning whether Knudsen invented the character.
He said so himself.
When another Something Awful user asked where Slender Man came from, Knudsen explained that he had made the idea up, drawing upon various things that frightened him. Even the name, he said, came to him while creating the original submission.
That should have been the end of it.
A clever artist created a frightening character for an Internet contest.
Everyone enjoyed it.
The thread eventually disappeared into the enormous graveyard of forgotten Internet discussions.
Except Slender Man didn’t disappear.
Other people began adding to him.
Everybody Builds the Monster
This is where Slender Man stopped behaving like an ordinary fictional character.
Normally, a character belongs to a particular story.
Dracula belongs to Bram Stoker’s novel.
Freddy Krueger belongs to A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Pennywise belongs to Stephen King’s It.
There are rules.
There is a canon.
Slender Man developed differently.
Internet users began creating their own photographs.
They wrote stories.
They invented encounters.
One person supplied a characteristic.
Someone else supplied another.
Contradictions didn’t matter.
That is exactly how traditional folklore develops.
Except instead of changing as stories traveled from village to village over hundreds of years, Slender Man changed as he traveled from computer to computer.
A process that once required generations happened in months.
What Is Slender Man?
Eventually, a recognizable creature emerged.
Slender Man is usually described as extraordinarily tall and unnaturally thin.
Some stories place him around eight feet tall.
Others make him considerably larger.
His skin is pale.
His arms and legs are disproportionately long.
He has little or no hair.
Most importantly:
He has no face.
He usually wears a dark gray or black business suit with a white shirt.
Sometimes the tie is black.
Sometimes red.
And sometimes long, tentacle-like appendages emerge from his back.
There is something almost absurd about the description.
An impossibly tall supernatural creature wandering through the woods dressed like a corporate attorney shouldn’t be frightening.
Somehow, it is.
He Stands Among the Trees
One feature remained particularly consistent.
Slender Man doesn’t usually charge at his victims.
He watches them.
He stands at the edge of the woods.
Behind a tree.
At the end of a road.
Somewhere in the background of a photograph.
You don’t necessarily notice him immediately.
That was part of the brilliance of the original images.
The children occupy the foreground.
Then your eye wanders.
And there he is.
Watching.
The effect became fundamental to the legend.
Slender Man is frightening because he may have been there for some time before you noticed him.
Children
Children became especially important to the mythology.
The original photographs showed groups of children, and Knudsen’s accompanying fictional captions suggested disappearances connected with the mysterious figure. Later contributors expanded upon that idea.
Some stories claimed Slender Man kidnapped children.
Others said he stalked them.
In some versions, children disappeared into another world and left behind only pieces of clothing.
Other stories portrayed him almost paradoxically as a protector.
There was never one Slender Man.
There were hundreds.
That is another characteristic he shares with much older folklore.
Ask ten people to describe a vampire and you’ll receive ten slightly different answers.
Slender Man acquired the same flexibility almost immediately.
An Ancient Monster With a Very Recent Birthday
Then something especially interesting happened.
People began giving Slender Man a history.
Stories appeared connecting him with Germanic traditions.
Others associated him with Celtic folklore.
Supposedly ancient images and historical accounts were circulated.
The newly created Internet monster was acquiring a past.
But we know that past wasn’t where Slender Man came from.
We have the original forum posts.
We can watch the character being created.
That makes the invented antiquity particularly fascinating.
Folklore normally moves forward.
Slender Man began moving backward.
People weren’t merely adding new stories.
They were manufacturing old ones.
Marble Hornets
Only days after the original Something Awful posts, another project dramatically expanded the mythology.
Marble Hornets began appearing on YouTube in June 2009.
Presented through found footage, the series followed characters apparently being stalked by a mysterious figure closely derived from Slender Man.
The project called its version The Operator.
Its low-budget appearance actually made it more effective.
There was no polished Hollywood monster.
There were shaky cameras.
Empty rooms.
Dark woods.
Distorted video.
And occasionally, somewhere in the background, that tall figure.
Slender Man had escaped the still photograph.
Now he could move.
The Slenderverse
Other creators followed.
Videos appeared.
Blogs appeared.
Alternate-reality games developed.
People created interconnected stories.
Characters crossed between projects.
Eventually this enormous collaborative mythology became known as the Slenderverse.
Thousands of people were now participating in the development of one fictional creature.
Nobody completely controlled him anymore.
Not even his creator.
That may be the moment when Slender Man truly became folklore.
Slender: The Eight Pages
In 2012, the creature entered another medium.
Slender: The Eight Pages was released as a free independent horror game.
The premise was remarkably simple.
The player wanders through a dark forest collecting eight pages.
There is almost nobody else around.
Except Slender Man.
The more pages the player collects, the more aggressively he appears.
There are no weapons.
You cannot kill him.
You can only run.
The game became enormously popular and introduced Slender Man to people who had never visited Something Awful or watched Marble Hornets.
Three years after his creation, an Internet contest entry had become an internationally recognizable monster.
Then something even stranger happened.
People Began Seeing Him
Reports began appearing from people claiming they had encountered Slender Man.
Some supposedly saw a tall figure near their homes.
Others reported something watching from wooded areas.
Photographs appeared.
Personal accounts circulated. Your original article was already noting these supposed sightings while the phenomenon was comparatively young.
Obviously, there is an enormous problem with treating such reports as evidence for Slender Man.
We know he was invented.
The photographs that created him were manipulated.
His creator admitted creating him.
His mythology can be followed through archived Internet posts.
There is no lost medieval manuscript required to solve the mystery.
Slender Man was born in 2009.
And yet people saw him.
Can You See Something That Doesn’t Exist?
The easiest explanation is obvious.
People knew what Slender Man looked like.
They encountered something ambiguous.
A tree.
A shadow.
A tall person standing at a distance.
Expectation supplied the missing details.
Some reports were undoubtedly hoaxes.
Others may have been dreams, jokes, misidentifications or people participating creatively in the mythology.
That should settle the matter.
And perhaps it does.
But Slender Man raises a much more interesting question.
What happens when enough people begin imagining the same monster?
Not necessarily to the monster.
To us.
For centuries, folklore developed through shared belief. People heard about a ghost, fairy, witch or creature and subsequently interpreted unusual experiences through that tradition.
Slender Man allowed us to watch the process happen almost instantaneously.
First came the story.
Then came the belief.
Then came the sightings.
Whether anything supernatural happened is almost beside the point.
A creature that unquestionably began inside someone’s imagination had entered other people’s experience.
When Fiction Became Horribly Real
Then, in 2014, Slender Man became associated with something no longer imaginary.
In Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls lured another twelve-year-old girl into a wooded area.
There, she was stabbed 19 times.
Miraculously, she survived.
The attackers told investigators that their actions were connected with their belief in Slender Man. They believed killing their friend would appease the fictional creature or demonstrate their devotion to him.
The event shocked the public.
Suddenly Slender Man wasn’t simply an entertaining example of Internet folklore.
A fictional monster had influenced events in the physical world.
No supernatural explanation was necessary.
Belief had been enough.
The Monster Changes Again
After Waukesha, it became harder to regard Slender Man with quite the same playful enthusiasm that surrounded the early phenomenon.
The character continued to appear in games, fiction and eventually film.
But something had changed.
The mythology had acquired a real tragedy.
This wasn’t something Knudsen created.
It wasn’t part of the Something Awful contest.
It wasn’t an episode of Marble Hornets.
A child nearly died.
That event belongs to the history of Slender Man now whether anyone wants it there or not.
And perhaps that demonstrates the strange power of folklore better than anything else in the story.
Stories don’t have to be true to produce real consequences.
A Modern Folklore Experiment
Slender Man may eventually prove enormously valuable to folklorists because his entire development occurred in the digital age.
We have dates.
Posts.
Images.
Videos.
Usernames.
We can watch characteristics being added.
We can identify when stories appeared.
We can observe how people changed the creature.
Traditional folklorists would give almost anything to possess such records for creatures hundreds or thousands of years old.
Imagine having the original Internet thread where someone invented the banshee.
Or the vampire.
Or the Wild Hunt.
With Slender Man, we essentially do.
Academic folklorists have consequently treated the phenomenon as an unusual example of collaborative digital folklore, in which participants actively altered the creature as they retold it.
And that may ultimately be more interesting than determining whether anyone ever really saw him.
Slender Man
We know Slender Man isn’t ancient.
He doesn’t come from forgotten Germanic folklore.
He wasn’t recorded by medieval monks.
He wasn’t lurking in nineteenth-century photographs.
Eric Knudsen created him in 2009.
That much is unusually certain.
But perhaps the certainty makes what happened afterward stranger rather than less so.
An imaginary creature was created.
Other people dreamed about him.
They wrote about him.
They drew him.
They photographed him.
They made films about him.
They encountered him in games.
Some began claiming they had actually seen him.
And eventually, two children became so consumed by the mythology that another child nearly lost her life.
Perhaps Slender Man proves something our ancestors already understood.
A thing doesn’t have to physically exist to become real in other ways.
Give a monster a name.
Give it a face, or in this case, take the face away.
Tell enough people where it lives.
Tell them what it does.
Tell them what to look for.
Then send them walking alone through the woods.
Most will see nothing.
Some will see shadows.
A few may see a figure standing among the trees.
We know exactly where Slender Man came from.
We know who invented him.
We know when.
There should be no mystery left at all.
And yet, late at night, if something extraordinarily tall is standing motionless between the trees…
knowing that may not help very much.
About the Author
