SLENDER MAN

THE CLAIM

That Slender Man is an ancient entity appearing in folklore and old photographs, rather than a fictional character invented on an internet forum in 2009.

THE THEORY, AS ITS PROPONENTS TELL IT

This file is here for the mechanism, because it is the only case in the cabinet where the exact moment of a myth's creation is preserved with a timestamp.

On 10 June 2009, a user posting as Victor Surge entered a Something Awful thread inviting people to create paranormal images. He posted two doctored black and white photographs of children with a tall, faceless figure in the background, and added invented captions referring to a disappearance and to a figure called the Slender Man.

Within weeks other users were adding to it. Because the character was explicitly presented as collaborative fiction, contributors invented sightings, historical woodcuts, and a mythology, and much of this was written in the voice of documentary evidence.

That voice was the whole problem. Material created as fiction, in a format that mimics found footage and archival record, propagates without its frame. Within a few years, people were encountering the mythology without ever seeing the forum thread it came from.

On 31 May 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin lured a classmate into woodland and stabbed her nineteen times, later saying they had done it to become proxies of Slender Man and to protect their families from him. The victim crawled to a road and survived. Both perpetrators were found to have significant mental illness and were committed rather than imprisoned.

WHAT IS KNOWN

The creation is fully documented. The original thread, the original post and the author's identity are all preserved, and Knudsen has spoken about it publicly.

Every claimed historical antecedent, including supposed medieval woodcuts and Egyptian depictions, was created after 2009 as part of the collaborative fiction.

The Waukesha attack happened and the facts are established in court. One perpetrator was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had been experiencing hallucinations before encountering the material.

The character has no folkloric antecedent of any kind before 10 June 2009.

EVIDENCE FOR

• Nothing supports the entity's existence. The file records the claim only to document the mechanism.

EVIDENCE AGAINST

• The creation is timestamped, attributed, and acknowledged by the author.
• The original images are doctored photographs whose sources are known.
• Every historical antecedent has been traced to post-2009 creation by identifiable contributors.
• No reference of any kind predates the forum post.

ASSESSMENT

Debunked completely, and the most useful file in the cabinet for understanding how the others form. Every element of a mythology assembled here in about five years, in public, with the participants' names attached: an origin, doctored photographic evidence, invented historical precedent, eyewitness accounts, and finally believers. Nothing was hidden and nobody conspired. The material simply travelled faster than its frame, which is precisely what OSA-036 and OSA-148 describe by different routes. A child was nearly killed by a character with a documented author and a birth date.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE THE GRADE

• Closed completely, and uniquely in this cabinet the creation is timestamped: 10 June 2009, a Something Awful forum thread, by Eric Knudsen posting as Victor Surge, who has acknowledged it publicly.
• Every claimed historical antecedent, including supposed medieval woodcuts, has been traced to post-2009 creation by identifiable contributors. No reference of any kind predates the forum post.
• The harm is entirely real. Two twelve-year-olds stabbed a classmate nineteen times in 2014; she survived. The material travelled faster than its frame, which is the mechanism this file exists to document.

FURTHER READING

• Slender Man · Wikipedia
• The original Something Awful thread, 10 June 2009 · archived
• State of Wisconsin v. Geyser and Weier, court records (2014 to 2018)