Call me crazy but I can’t get Slenderman out of my mind. No, I’m not killing anyone anytime soon – well at least not in real life. Last year at Phoenix Comicon, which has no shortage of cosplay, I was sitting there minding my own business and selling/signing my books like any good author would do when Slenderman walked by. Sure, he was a cosplayer – at least I thought he was – but it’s what happened next that started my fascination with the creeptastic creepypasta legend. In the middle of Phoenix Comicon where you can barely hear yourself thing and where Slenderman (the cosplayer) was a good 30 feet from me, I whispered to my friend next to me “Hey, that’s Slenderman.” and he turned around and looked at me where I caught a photo that has since mysteriously disappeared.
Ok – so he’s just a cosplayer. But it was creepy. Probably a coincidence but creepy regardless. And I was interested in this phenomena before. But add to that the stories of teenagers stabbing their friends in the name of Slenderman and the disturbing factor quickly rises.
Here’s what Wikipedia says :
The Slender Man (also known as Slenderman) is a fictional supernatural character that originated as a creepypasta Internet meme created by Something Awful forums user Eric Knudsen (also known as “Victor Surge”) in 2009. It is depicted as resembling a thin, unnaturally tall man with a blank and usually featureless face, wearing a black suit.
Stories of the Slender Man commonly feature him stalking, abducting or traumatizing people, particularly children.[1] The Slender Man is not confined to a single narrative, but appears in many disparate works of fiction, typically composed online.[2] Fiction relating to the Slender Man encompasses many media, including literature, art and video series such as Marble Hornets. Outside of online fiction, the Slender Man has had impact on popular culture, having been referenced in the video game Minecraft and generated video games of his own, such as Slender: The Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival.
Beginning in 2014, a minor moral panic occurred over the Slender Man after readers of his fiction were connected to several violent acts, particularly a near-fatal stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
The Slender Man stabbing occurred on Saturday, May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, when two 12-year-old girls allegedly lured another girl of the same age into the woods and stabbed her 19 times, purportedly in order to impress the fictional character Slender Man. After being stabbed, the victim crawled to a road and lay on a sidewalk where a cyclist found her and called 9-1-1. She was rushed to a hospital, at which point she was “one millimeter away from certain death,” according to a criminal complaint.[2] The victim was hospitalized for six days and has since recovered and returned to school.
What is Slenderman? Just a weird creepypasta urban legend gone viral? Or have we manifested more than just an internet creation?
T.M. Williams - Novelist blog 