
 
 Slender Man makes an “appearance” at the University of Virginia — one of countless doctored shots that have made the Internet rounds since 2009. ( Bob Mical/Flickr 
 
 He lurks in the background of gritty black-and-white photos — a gaunt, too-tall figure with skeletal limbs. Some say he lives in the woods and eats children, a kind of demon descended from eastern European myth. Some say he stalks human prey indiscriminately, wherever he can find it: in basements, outside half-open windows, along lonely streets late at night when only occasional headlights cut across the road. 
 
 Some say he has no face. Others, that his face looks different to everyone who sees it. But whatever they say, everyone generally agrees on one point: that Slender Man, perhaps the Internet’s best and scariest legend, is indeed a legend — an invented character who can be traced back, quite linearly, to an obscure forum where in 2009 users Photoshopped old pictures and improvised a back story for their creations. 
 
 Tragically — and chillingly — two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wis., seem to have missed all of that. On Saturday, according to local news reports, the girls lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times in some kind of tribute to Slender Man. The girl they stabbed is hospitalized in stable condition. The perpetrators will be tried as adults. 
 
 “Many people do not believe Slender Man is real,” one of the girls said, according to the criminal complaint. “[We] wanted to prove the skeptics wrong.” 
 
 But as dozens of forum posts, newspaper articles and a handful of academic papers show, there’s nothing to prove. Slender Man is a fascinating case study in the creation and codification of Internet myth. And at the end of the day, that’s all it is: a myth. 
 
 The invention of a “mythological” monster 
 
 In the myth, Slender Man has many origins: Germany’s Black Forest. Ancient Egypt. Cave paintings in Brazil purportedly depict his movements. 
 
 In real life, the story begins in the forums of Something Awful, a humor site for people who enjoy joking about things like Dungeons & Dragons, porn and 3-D printers. But the forums can take trickier turns — they’re well-known for tricky Photoshopping and general prankery. On June 8, 2009, a new forum thread invited users to “create paranormal images through Photoshop,” which many users did. But the creation of one user, Victor Surge, struck a particular chord: He posted two photos of children haunted by a tall, shadowy figure with tentacles for arms, along with blocks of ominous text: 
 
 we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence 
 
 and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time . . . 
 
 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead. 
 
 For weeks, Surge continued posting doctored photos, newspaper clippings and child’s drawings of Slender Man, gradually pulling other users into the myth. They contributed their own Photoshops and stories, drawing parallels to older legends and nudging the story along. By mid-June, the thread was solely devoted to developing the mythos of Slender Man, which now — at least according to one authoritative PDF — runs 194 pages long. 
 
 Because Slender Man was developed collaboratively, by a community of anonymous contributors, that mythos is spotty and varied — much like a more organic urban legend would be. In some stories Slender Man has multiple arms, like tentacles, and in some he has no extra appendages, at all. Sometimes he seems to kill his victims themselves, in vague, mysterious ways that the faux news stories and police reports never seem to specify, before disemboweling them and bagging their organs. Other times, Slender Man somehow compels his victims to kill each other — a particularly grim plot line, given the recent attack in Wisconsin. 
 
 In one of the faux news stories, a horse farmer named Ted Henderson shoots his wife in the chest at the Slender Man’s behest, only explaining the crime to his psychiatrist at a mental institution three years later. 
 
 TED: Ran… ran inside… got gun… Tracy crying… Judi screaming… r…ran to them… He had them… was holding them… DAUTON: Who had them? TED: Skinny fella… suite… Looking at me… Judi screaming… shoot me… SHOOOT ME SHOOT MEEEE! 
 
 “Tracy,” the couple’s six-year-old daughter, is never found. 
 
 How a horror story becomes a legend 
 
 That vagueness — the infinite mutability, the fuzzy details, the ability to adapt Slender Man to just about any time and place — is a large part of what pushed the story off the Something Awful forums and into the Internet mainstream. Slender Man gradually spread onto other niche forums, like 4chan’s paranormal board. From there, it would inspire a popular horror Web series called Marble Hornets, several indie video games and an untold trove of submemes and fan art, as well as earn prominent pages on Wikipedia and Creepypasta, a site dedicated to Internet horror stories. Creepypasta is, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the place where the Wisconsin girls first read the story of Slender Man. 
 
 By 2011, the legend had become so deeply embedded in the Web — and so divorced from its blatantly fictional origins — that even its original creator, Victor Surge, couldn’t believe how much it had spread. 
 
 “I didn’t expect it to move beyond the SA forums,” he said in an interview with the Web site Know Your Meme, later adding: 
 
 An urban legend requires an audience ignorant of the origin of the legend. It needs unverifiable third and forth [sic] hand (or more) accounts to perpetuate the myth. On the Internet, anyone is privy to its origins as evidenced by the very public Somethingawful thread. But what is funny is that despite this, it still spread. Internet memes are finicky things and by making something at the right place and time it can swell into an ‘Internet Urban Legend’. 
 
 That same year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported an entire feature on “the Internet-concocted creature… scaring today’s teens silly.” Only two years had passed since Surge invented Slender Man, and its origins, the Tribune ruled, were already “difficult to pinpoint.” 
 
 The Internet is ‘full of wicked things’ 
 
 That obscurity is, of course, responsible in part for Slender Man’s scariness: It appears to eliminate the fourth wall entirely, making Slender Man less a ghost story and more a plausible entity. The further the myth gets from its origins, the easier it is to sift out truth from fiction. “The Blair Witch Project” used some of the same techniques. 
 
 And yet the character’s appeal goes far deeper than that, says Shira Chess, an assistant professor of mass media arts at the University of Georgia and a scholar of the Slender Man myth. In fact, Chess is unsurprised that people, including teenagers, frequently buy into the Slender Man myth — in short, we’re hardwired to believe. 
 
 “We tell ourselves stories because we (humans) are storytelling animals,” she wrote in an e-mail. “And, to that end, horror stories take on a specific significance and importance because they function metaphorically — the horror stories that are the best are often metaphors for other issues that affect our lives on both cultural and personal levels.” 
 
 Slender Man, Chess says, is a metaphor for “helplessness, power differentials, and anonymous forces.” He’s an infinitely morphable stand-in for things we can neither understand nor control, universal fears that can drive people to great lengths — even, it would appear, very scary, cold-blooded lengths. 
 
 For whatever reason, Slender Man does seem to have resonated particularly among teenagers; perhaps that’s the demographic most susceptible to scary stories, or perhaps they’re the people frequenting sites like Creepypasta most often. (Creepypasta, for its part, released a statement early this morning expressing its condolences over the Wisconsin incident — and reminding critics that the site exists to share scary fiction stories, not to encourage any actual, real-life scares.) But the girls in Wisconsin, at least according to statements they made to police, truly believed Slender Man was real: He teleported and read their minds, they claimed. He watched them and threatened to kill their families. 
 
 “They hoped [their friend] would die,” Ellen Gabler wrote in the Journal-Sentinel, “and they would see Slender and know he existed.” 
 
 But Slender doesn’t exist — at least not outside of the YouTube videos, wiki pages and horror forums that have grown up around him. 
 
 Said Russell Jack, the police chief in Waukesha, “the Internet can be full of dark and wicked things.” ||||| Story highlights "Slenderman" character allegedly inspired 12-year-old girls to stab a classmate 
 
 Slenderman was born in 2009 in an online forum for people who create fake supernatural images 
 
 He's appeared in fan art, short stories, videos, video games on Web 
 
 Police: Girls said the attack was meant to impress the fictitious bogeyman 
 
 He's the Internet's own monster, a ghoul who lurks in its darkest corners and, like the Web itself, has mutated time and again to suit the dreams and desires of his devotees. 
 
 He is Slenderman, a menacing, faceless specter in a dark suit -- sometimes portrayed with octopus-like tentacles -- known to haunt children and those who seek to expose him. He was born in 2009 in an online forum for people who enjoy creating fake supernatural images. 
 
 To be clear, the origin story of the monstrous character (sometimes referred to as The Slender Man) in no way urged readers to kill to earn his favor. But Slenderman has undergone hundreds of permutations online in his five-year existence. 
 
 In June 2009, a Photoshop contest for images that appeared to be paranormal was launched in a forum on the website Something Awful . According to Know Your Meme , a blog that chronicles Web culture, the goal of the contest was to create the images and then use them to fool, or "troll," other Web users by submitting them to paranormal websites. 
 
 JUST WATCHED Cops: Online character inspired stabbing Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Cops: Online character inspired stabbing 01:47 
 
 JUST WATCHED Complaint: Suspects had multiple plots Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Complaint: Suspects had multiple plots 02:55 
 
 JUST WATCHED 12-year-old stabbing suspects arrested Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH 12-year-old stabbing suspects arrested 01:44 
 
 Site member Eric Knudsen (under the screen name "Victor Surge" ) submitted two images to the contest, both black-and-white images of children, one of which appeared to show a largely undefined figure lurking in the background. 
 
 They were presented as being from 1984, and one included the text " 'We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time...' -- 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead." (Know Your Meme has documented these posts, although links to the original thread no longer work.) 
 
 A day later, according to Know Your Meme, Knudsen added a third photo and a fictional doctor's account of a mass killing. And, from there, Slenderman's assault on the Internet began. 
 
 "Some people joked in the thread, 'Wouldn't it be funny if some of these ended up on those paranormal websites or someone said these pictures look real,' " Knudsen said in an interview this year with WNYC's "TLDR" podcast. "But I don't think anyone really expected that to happen." 
 
 Other Something Awful users began creating their own Slenderman stories. And they spread to other sites. Over the past five years, he's appeared in fan art, short stories, videos, video games and other media all over the Web. 
 
 A Google search for "Slenderman" on Tuesday returned more than 4 million results. 
 
 "Marble Hornets" is one of the most popular permutations. It's a video series on YouTube, presented in "Blair Witch Project"-like faux-documentary style, with nearly 380,000 subscribers. 
 
 Slenderman has also been a popular subject of "creepypasta," a form of Web-based short fiction. A play on the term "copypasta," which itself is derived from the keyboard action "copy-paste," creepypasta is horror fiction written with the Web in mind and, often, done in a style that makes it appear like a news item or other piece of true crime. 
 
 JUST WATCHED Police: 12-year-old stabbed by friends Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Police: 12-year-old stabbed by friends 02:15 
 
 JUST WATCHED Police: Suspects inspired by Internet Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Police: Suspects inspired by Internet 01:36 
 
 The girls accused in the Milwaukee stabbing told police they knew the character from the Creepypasta Wiki , a site that compiles such fiction. The site has issued a statement condemning the attack. 
 
 "This is an isolated incident, and does (not) represent ... the Creepypasta community as a whole," the statement reads. "This wiki does not endorse or advocate for killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line of between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a satanic cult." 
 
 Knudsen, too, has lamented losing control of his creation. 
 
 "I feel like less of a creator and more of an administrator, in a lot of respects, or the manager," he told NPR in the interview from January. Knudsen, who could not be immediately reached for comment, has filed for a copyright on the character. 
 
 "I feel like I'm Slenderman's manager, and he's out there doing his thing, and I need to just kind of watch him and take care of him." ||||| I guess I need to address this because it is now relevant. If you haven't heard already, two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls attempted to murder one of their classmates because they were inspired by the Slenderman mythology. I won't go much into details, so here is the article of the story. 
 
 According to the story, the girls read about Slenderman here on this wiki, and of course the usual response lead to hostility and blaming towards the wiki by some "very concerned parents". Some calling for the censorship and shutdown of the wiki. 
 
 Will these people succeed on their quest? Most likely not. These are the same people who think violent video games help create mass murderers, because it is convenient to blame and point fingers. 
 
 Besides the backlash, this incident shows what happens when the line of fiction and reality ceases to exist. When a person truly believes that Internet short stories are cold hard facts. When a person attempts to replicate works of fiction to the point others are harmed. And for this, I'm going to make myself loud and clear: 
 
 ALL WORKS PRESENTED ON THIS WIKI AND OTHER SITES (INCLUDING SLENDERMAN, JEFF THE KILLER, BEN, SONIC.EXE, ETC) ARE FICTIONAL STORIES AND CHARACTERS 
 
 Of course, only a small minority of people (mostly newcomers) on the wiki (and the Internet) truly believe what they read here. And for most people, they will not attempt to replicate atrocities presented in some of the literature on the wiki. Something like this was bound to happen, considering the size of the Creepypasta community. All it takes is one person to do something insane and radical in the name of someone or something. 
 
 This is an isolated incident, and does not represent or attribute the Creepypasta community as a whole. This wiki does not endorse or advocate for the killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line of between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult. 
 
 For most of you reading this, you're probably thinking this is a no-brainier that stories here are mere fiction and know that they are just mere fiction. This blog addresses to newcomers and "die-hard believers", who will otherwise, likely to believe in these stories. 
 
 Hopefully, the gruesome crime that happened in Wisconsin will not repeat itself again, and our hearts go out to the families affected by this crime. ||||| This past May, the country woke up to the news that two 12-year-old girls allegedly stabbed their friend to conjure up a mythological creature named Slender Man — a plan inspired by a story they read on a site called Creepypasta. Yes, that sentence is real. The 12-year-old suspects were charged as adults with first-degree attempted homicide, and could face up to 60 years in jail. 
 
 We understand you might have some questions about this confusing and seemingly unbelievable case. So here's a brief explainer: 
 
 What is Slender Man? What is a Slender man? 
 
 
 
 Slender Man is a fictional urban legend or horror story that was first created on an internet forum in 2009. Slender Man (also spelled Slenderman or Slendy) actually started off as a photo manipulation, by a Something Awful forum user named Victor Surge. The creature known as Slender Man has no face, no hair, is very, very thin and wears a dark suit (above). 
 
 From there, users began incorporating him into scary stories and urban legends, like Bloody Mary or other scary monsters you were probably told about as kids. 
 
 Instead of being passed around by word of mouth, the stories of Slender Man are passed around in horror story forums like Creepypasta, and Reddit's No Sleep. From there Slender Man made his way to YouTube videos like this one: 
 
 Like the variations on Bloody Mary and other urban legends, there is no strict Slender Man myth. This story portrays him kidnapping someone and whisking them away, sometimes he's jokingly portrayed like a Boogeyman-like creature, and this story paints a true, near-escape from a man that might be Slender Man. 
 
 Creepy-what? 
 
 Creepypasta. The name creepypasta doesn't seem very creepy or menacing. Its name comes from the days of email (like SPAM) when bite-sized horror stories were passed around from person to person. 
 
 Nowadays, that's evolved into sites like Creepypasta.wikia and Reddit's No Sleep forum where people post some of the scariest stories they can think of. And some of those stories involve fictional creatures like Slender Man. 
 
 Think of it as the way people share ghost stories in the age of the internet. 
 
 But those stories aren't real. 
 
 Yes. These stories are fiction. But that doesn't stop people on the forum from claiming they are real. For example in Reddit's No Sleep forum, there is a rule every story should be taken as real in order to keep the spirit of the forum intact. 
 
 But there's really no difference between stories you find on those forums and those found-footage horror blockbusters. Faux authenticity isn't a pass for murder nor does it create murder. 
 
 So these girls decided to kill someone to meet a fictional monster? 
 
 Well, according to news reports, the girls said that they were sacrificing their friend so that they could be taken by Slender Man and whisked to a mansion where they could live with him. In a sense, they made up their own myth. The AP reports: 
 
 The other girl told police they decided to kill her so they could become proxies of Slender Man, who would accept them and let them live with him in his mansion in the Nicolet National Forest. The other girl said she sees Slender Man in her dreams. She said he watches her and can read her mind and teleport. 
 
 The girls allegedly tried to kill their friend during a game of hide-and-seek, and left her bleeding in the woods. The report adds that one of the girls said she had been planning this since December. 
 
 What's happening to the people that told/are telling these Slender Man stories? 
 
 Perhaps the most-telling or prescient perspective is from Slender Man's creator, a man named Eric Knudsen (a.k.a. Victor Surge). Earlier this year, Knudsen voiced that he felt like he lost ownership of his creation. 
 
 "I feel like I'm Slenderman's manager, and he's out there doing his thing, and I need to just kind of watch him and take care of him," Knudsen had said in January. Knudsen has not spoken about the attempted murder yet. 
 
 "In the 80s people would blame Freddy Krueger for their murders after the Nightmare on Elm Street series got popular. To see Slender reach that level though is both frighting and amazing." 
 
 A thing to remember is that there are thousands of readers who read sites like Creepypasta.wikia every day and don't commit atrocities like these girls did. You could make the same analogy to television shows, video games, and movies. And you could also make the argument that these girls could have easily been inspired by movies like Saw or Hostel. 
 
 The question of agency here is on those young girls. 
 
 Creepypasta.wikia, the site where these girls allegedly found this Slender Man myth, has issued a warning about how the site is fiction and that they can't control the action of these girls: 
 
 This is an isolated incident, and does not represent or attribute the Creepypasta community as a whole. This wiki does not endorse or advocate for the killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line of between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult. 
 
 The strange pocket of the internet where these stories come from is now bracing for a meltdown and some harsh scrutiny from people reading Slender Man reports. 
 
 Reddit has a forum specifically dedicated to the Slender Man. Some readers there have already expressed concern about the attention headed their way, while others tried to distance Slender Man from the girls' actions. 
 
 "If they were insane enough to think they could become 'proxies' I'm almost certain they would do something similar to this eventually, with or without slenderman," a user explained. 
 
 And one Reddit user equated the attempted murder and attention with the mainstream success of their creation." This isn't unheard of, in the 80s people would blame Freddy Krueger for their murders after the Nightmare on Elm Street series got popular. To see Slender reach that level though is both frighting and amazing," the user wrote. 
 
 That conjures up some scenarios like copycat crimes, or some mainstream movies based on this crime. And there's something chilling about his or her observation — that this attempted murder is a form of mainstream success for Slender. 
 
 What's happens next? 
 
 On December 18, a Wisconsin deemed the two girls fit to stand trial. A joint preliminary hearing for both girlls is scheduled for February, WISN-tv reports.
– Two 12-year-old girls who allegedly stabbed their friend in the woods of Waukesha, Wis., offered a chilling explanation for their actions: They'd been driven by "Slender Man," a mythical figure who's made the rounds on the Internet since 2009. But there are no deep, mysterious roots to this legend: The Washington Post delves into "the complete, terrifying history ... of the Internet meme," finding that a little digging reveals exactly who made it up and when. It all started with a forum on humor site Something Awful asking users to "create paranormal images through Photoshop." That resulted in Slender Man, the creation of one Victor Surge, aka Eric Knudsen, who offered disturbing stories of a guy with tentacles. Knudsen is now seeking a copyright on the story, CNN reports. As Vox describes Slender Man, he's got "no face, no hair, is very, very thin and wears a dark suit." Other users began making up stories of their own as the legend migrated to other websites, including YouTube, Wikipedia, and "creepypasta" sites for scary online fiction, where the girls apparently read about it. Creepypasta Wiki has distanced itself from the attack, whose victim is reportedly in stable condition: "This wiki does not endorse or advocate for the killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line ... between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult."