Slender Man

Also Known As: also Slenderman, Slender, Slendy; called The Operator in the Marble Hornets series, and Der Grossmann in the earliest forum lore
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He appears without approaching, corrupts recorded footage into static, and induces a wasting paranoia in anyone who begins looking for him.
Role in Mythos: He is the abductor at the treeline, a silent watcher who takes children and turns young adults into his servants.
Relation to Humans: Attention is the mechanism of the whole legend, since the stories agree that investigating him is what draws him to you. He rarely attacks outright, preferring to be glimpsed at the edge of the frame until the person watching stops being able to sleep.

The photograph is black and white and badly developed. Children on a playground, mid-laugh, the grain of the paper coarse enough to see. Behind them, past the swings, at the place where the mown grass gives up and the trees begin, there is a shape that is too tall and too narrow and wearing a suit. The caption underneath says that fourteen children vanished the day it was taken, and that the photographer has been missing since June of 1986.

None of it happened. The image was made in Photoshop and posted to a comedy website called Something Awful on 10 June 2009, by a forum user calling himself Victor Surge. His name was Eric Knudsen. The thread was a competition to fake paranormal photographs, and every previous entry had been a picture and nothing else. Knudsen added captions, written as if by witnesses, and one of them read: 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. He gave the thing a name. That was the whole of it, two doctored photographs and a few lines of invented testimony, and it was enough.

Within days other posters were adding their own pictures, their own captions, their own sightings. The figure they were building had no fixed appearance, because nobody was in charge of it. What held steady was the silhouette: the height, somewhere past seven feet in most accounts, the thinness, the black suit and tie worn with the neatness of a man going to a funeral, and the face, which is white and smooth and has nothing on it. No eyes. Not closed eyes, not covered eyes. Nothing. The arms hang past the knees, and in a great many tellings they are only the beginning, because further limbs unfold from the back and reach out across a clearing like the branches of a winter tree.

He stands. That is mostly what he does. At the far edge of a field in the last light, in the coarse grain of a camcorder held by someone who has not noticed him yet, motionless while the wind moves the grass and the pines make their dry rattling sound. Look away and look back and he is closer, though nothing crossed the ground between.

The people who study this sort of thing recognised what was happening almost immediately. Jeffrey Tolbert named the process reverse ostension: instead of people acting out a legend they had inherited, an online crowd was building a legend backwards, deliberately imitating the shape of a real one so that it would feel old. The forum obliged with a past. One user, posting as Thoreau-Up, produced a tale set in sixteenth-century Germany about a figure called Der Grossmann, implying an ancestry the character had possessed for roughly a fortnight. Others supplied Brazilian cave paintings and Egyptian carvings. Andrew Peck, writing in the Journal of American Folklore in 2015, tracked how the whole thing cohered into a genuine legend cycle inside participatory media, which is a careful way of saying that a joke stopped being one. Shira Chess pointed at the older shape underneath: he is otherworldly, his motives are unreadable, his appearance shifts to suit whoever is looking, he lives in the woods, and he takes children. Those are the fairies, in a suit.

Knudsen was not coy about his sources. He named Zack Parsons’s That Insidious Beast, Stephen King’s The Mist, the reports of shadow people, the Mothman, and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon; elsewhere the Tall Man from Phantasm, Lovecraft, William Burroughs, and the fog and corridors of Silent Hill and Resident Evil. His stated aim was to make something whose motivations could barely be comprehended. He got what he asked for.

The powers accumulated by consensus rather than decree. He moves without moving, arriving in a place he was not a moment ago. He ruins recordings, filling tape and digital footage with static and rolling distortion, which is why so much of his fiction is shot on cheap cameras. Proximity brings on what the stories call Slender sickness: nosebleeds, insomnia, nightmares, coughing fits, paranoia and a slow erosion of memory. He acquires proxies, people who fall under his influence and act for him, an idea that came out of the found-footage series Marble Hornets, which ran from 2009 to 2014, called him the Operator, and marked his presence with a scrawled circle struck through by a cross. In that series a film student’s abandoned university project is handed to a friend, who watches the tapes to find out why the shoot collapsed, and who is then filmed in turn. The recursion is the point. To look for him is to be found by him.

He has no weakness in the folkloric sense. No salt, no iron, no charm, no rule of hospitality that binds him, because a figure with no canon cannot have a fixed way of being beaten. What actually limits him is stranger and more mundane. He needs to be transmitted, which ties him to screens and forums and the willingness of strangers to keep adding to him, and by the mid 2010s that willingness thinned. The blogs closed. The games and a 2018 studio film turned the silhouette into merchandise, and a monster with a licensing agreement is a monster losing its grip. Then the fan art turned kind. From the late 2010s he began appearing as a protector of bullied children, sometimes with a small girl called Skinny Sally riding on his shoulders. The folklorist Lynne McNeill noticed that this softening started shortly after 2014, which is when the story stopped being safely fictional.

On 31 May 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her. She survived, having crawled to a road where a passing cyclist found her. The attackers told investigators they had done it to become his proxies, and because they feared he would otherwise harm their families. Both were found to be seriously mentally ill and were eventually committed to psychiatric hospitals rather than prison. A national panic followed, of the kind that had previously attached itself to comic books and heavy metal records. Knudsen said publicly that he was deeply saddened and declined to be interviewed about it.

Nobody ever believed in him, and it turned out not to matter. He remains, legally, Eric Knudsen’s property. Folklorically he stopped belonging to anyone during the first week of his existence, which is a thing that had never been possible to watch happen in real time before, and is the only genuinely new item in his inventory.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who created Slender Man?

Slender Man was created by Eric Knudsen, posting under the name Victor Surge, on 10 June 2009 in a Photoshop contest thread on the Something Awful forums. He submitted two doctored black-and-white photographs with invented witness captions describing children who had vanished. Other forum users immediately began adding their own images and stories, and the character passed out of his control within days.

What does Slender Man do to people?

In the stories, Slender Man watches, follows, abducts children, and drives young adults into his service as proxies. Prolonged proximity is said to cause Slender sickness, a cluster of nosebleeds, insomnia, nightmares, paranoia and memory loss. He also corrupts video and audio recordings into static, which is why most Slender Man fiction is filmed on low-quality cameras.

Is Slender Man based on real folklore?

No. Slender Man was invented in 2009, and the ancient origins attached to him, including a sixteenth-century German figure called Der Grossmann, cave paintings and Egyptian carvings, were written by forum users after the fact to make him feel old. Folklorists have argued that he nonetheless became real folklore through the way he spread, and Shira Chess has noted how closely he resembles traditional fairy lore about otherworldly child-takers who live in the woods.

What is a Slender Man proxy?

A proxy is a human who has fallen under Slender Man’s influence and acts on his behalf, sometimes gaining abilities resembling his own. The idea originated in the found-footage web series Marble Hornets, which ran from 2009 to 2014 and called the figure the Operator. Proxies are usually depicted as puppets rather than willing servants.

What happened in the Slender Man stabbing?

On 31 May 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin stabbed a classmate in a wooded area, telling investigators afterwards that they wanted to become Slender Man’s proxies and feared he would harm their families otherwise. The victim survived. Both attackers were found to be seriously mentally ill and were committed to psychiatric hospitals, and the case set off a nationwide panic about internet horror fiction.