They were told orally, interpreted and reinterpreted, added to and subtracted from, and retold with details or even broad concepts changing based on the perspective and preferences of the storyteller. But before the rise of easily-made books and eventually radio, TV, and films, our stories and their heroes and monsters actually were crowd-sourced. Growing up with the authoritative power of mass media, really since the invention of the printing press, we’ve been conditioned to learn our heroes and villains, or monsters and slayers, all the mythology around our favorite worlds and stories from the all-powerful creators, be them Disney, George Lucas, JK Rowling, Guillermo del Toro, or Stephen King. But rather than the top-down way we’re used to, such as the basics of Dracula (and thus all subsequent vampires) being defined by Bram Stoker or the framework for Frankenstein’s Monster coming down from Mary Shelley on high, TSM was fleshed out by online stories and memes by users with no ownership or authority over the original idea. Like any of our fearful creations, his story and abilities were defined. The answer is that TSM developed in an entirely new way – his characteristics (impossibly tall and thin, sometimes with tentacles), powers (teleportation, mind-reading, ability to compel), motivations (ambiguous and morphing, but always dark), and mythology all being essentially crowd-sourced openly online. But so what? How did this particular incantation of a familiar monster land in Wisconsin middle school girls’ minds?Īpparently the original Slender Man – he’s in the back. Knudsen added quotes attributed to each photograph (which you can read at Wikipedia) that imply TSL is some kind of supernatural force that abducts children or kills them or worse. He was inserted into a couple of photos of groups of children. TSM was an image of a tall, thin man, with a white, featureless face, wearing a black suit. There are better places to get the specifics on The Slender Man’s story, but for brevity’s sake… Basically, The Slender Man was created by a Something Awful user named Eric Knudsen (aka Victor Surge) in 2009. This all led me to find out about the origins of The Slender Man and his growth into some kind of monster capable of reaching into the minds of little girls. I wanted to know why this thin dude would lead two little girls to savagely attack another. Thus began one of those internet deep-dives we all have into topics we know little about when we want to know everything. “Who the fuck is The Slender Man?” I wondered.
So why did two little girls try to murder another little girl? Because they wanted to impress The Slender Man. A passing cyclist intervened, and thankfully the victim lived, even having returned to school this fall. Today I read an article about the horrifying Wisconsin attempted homicide case wherein two 12 year old girls lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times.
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