Slenderman

In this episode, we're focusing on the legendary cryptid Slenderman from American cryptozoology! How did this cryptid end up in folklore in the first place? How does it haunt it's victims into madness? Find out this week!

Transcript

INTRO:

Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

Gosh can you believe we’re halfway through January already! It’s mad how quick the weeks go, I went back into the office for the first time this week, which was wild - London is an odd place during the working week, sometimes full of actual zombies. 

Although, this doesn’t really have much to do with our monster this week - which is a creepy and modern one, but certainly one that most people know - it is the horrifying Slenderman from US folklore and cryptozoology. Which is a thing by the way.

I wouldn’t say that this monster is actually a ‘myth monster’ by definition, but it’s definitely hitting the creepy and probably made up criteria.

DESCRIPTION:

Slenderman is generally described as a spooky entity, a thin, humanoid figure who stands at least 7 feet going up to 15 foot tall, with a white featureless face and a black business style suit. In some tellings he has a mouth full of sharp teeth, but usually he uses his long, black tendrils that emerge from his back to capture his prey. He tends to live in the woods, specifically near to children’s playgrounds. 

The reason he hangs around this is so he can mostly hide away in the dark of the forests, concealing his gross black tentacles from the world, and intimidating victims from afar. The other is that children are his preferred victims, taking them off into the darkness but he also didn’t stick his nose up at adults either. 

Apparently, he stalks these victims for months, even years to intimidate and drive the person to insanity. And though he cannot move when you look at him, it seems that he can never get too far from the victim - almost teleporting to wherever they run to. Once he catches his victim, they are strung up on the tallest trees and impaled, with their internal organs removed, and then replaced in their hanging bodies. 

Why does it go after it’s victims though? What makes them special? Well in children, it’s the fascination with him that gets his attention, much like the Skinwalkers from a few weeks ago, the more attention, the more likely he is to turn up. He would also be able to slowly gain the trust of children, who have very little fear or at least, can only fear once fear is instilled by danger. With adults, it manifests in nightmares and in it’s stalking of the victim, causing what’s known as Slender Sickness - which consists of vomiting, nose bleeds, hallucinations and paranoia. You would know if Slenderman is nearby if you have electrical equipment on your person, as this will react strangely when he’s around.

It’s not known if it eats its victims in anyway - but they are very often left in a bloody mess, but sometimes Slenderman would go to lengths such as burning down the house or work of the person that was taken, and then tracking down the family and friends of the victim, stalking them to death too. 

This monster is most well known from American folklore and cryptozoology, but this has spread across the globe in a media sensation back in the noughties, and continues to this day.

ORIGIN:

There’s not really any etymology to this one this week, as it’s pretty dang obvious. However, it does have a couple of other names, such as The Tall Man, The Thin Man, The Pale One, Schlankwald and more affectionately, Slendy. These aren’t from different mythologies or anything along those lines, but actually more differing interpretations of what he looks and acts like. 

Now the history of Slenderman is a lot more interesting than just the basic description of what we’ve got here. The history of this monster, if we’re going by the mythos, is that this comes from a fourth dimension, another world by all accounts. This explains it’s crazy powers and it’s weird looks, but how long has this monster been in OUR dimension? 

Well according to stories, he’s been around since the 1600’s - stalking his way through Germany and making his rounds in children’s cautionary tales and folk stories before making it round to the US and Canada in the early 1900’s, and appearing in several photographs in the background of children’s playgrounds. 

By the early 1990’s, Slenderman had been filmed several times and followed stalking his prey, and by the 2010’s, he was fully ingrained in US folklore and ghost stories. 

But really, and most importantly, I hate to say it - this is all subject to extreme caution and suspect because I’m going to talk about the other history now. 

This monster is especially interesting, as it’s got more than one history. One that is written by people, and the other is, written by people - but isn’t that what all folklore and mythos is right? Hold onto your boots now though people, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of this monster's origin in popular culture. 

Back in the good ol’ days, in 2009, there was a site called Creepypasta - bearing in mind, the internet and especially forum internet was still VERY early. I was 14 and still on Myspace for goodness sake. Either way, it was an early internet site which people wrote their own ghost stories and conspiracy theory based tales and published them as if a completely real thing. We’ll come back to Creepypasta later on, when it comes up properly - but this is the kind of background to it at least. It does still exist by the way, so you can just go and find it.

There is actually a specific date this creature was first EVER mentioned, and that was June 10th 2009 on a forum site called Something Awful, where there was a photoshop competition held to create spooky and scary, realistic images. In this forum, a user so called Victor Surge, published two images of a seemingly normal children’s playground - yes those same images I mentioned earlier - with a horrid and looming figure of a very tall and faceless man in the background of the shot, hiding amongst the trees. He gave the character his name, Slenderman. 

What happened next on this online forum back in the noughties was truly amazing though - other users built up a story around this character and these photoshopped images, creating three books around this. And from there on, developed the mythos that I told you earlier - of this daunting character that hides in the woods to impale children who follow it. What is amazing though, is although this monster is laid out as a creature of pure fiction, the way that various authors and creators back in the day created a perfect and believable villain - which was so realistic and well written, that it merged into modern folklore. 

Which, I imagine is how literally every beast that we cover on this podcast started going around - so it’s so so interesting to actually remember it and be a part of it. Maybe in a few hundred years they’ll do the same podcast - with even more stories. 

But going back to the actual monster, the story is so intense that children who grew up in the noughties - slightly younger than myself, have ingrained this in their own beliefs. I knew, at least many children who were absolutely terrified of him after hearing rumours at school, just like old fashioned chainmail of a girl who fell down a sewer and all that jazz. From there, it went to Creepypasta, which was an infamous site even now, full of fictional monsters and stories - from Slenderman to Dead Bart from the Simpsons, Evil Squidward (I don’t remember this one’s title as much, as I’m too scared to look it up from memory) to Killer Jeff, all of which still ring very scarily in my head from my teenagedom. Creepypasta brought Slenderman to the mainstream, putting together it’s entire history and backstory for new readers and bringing in their massive, massive audience of horror readers, and unfortunately, children who have morbid curiosity and a thrill seeking dream.

Since then, it has fully become a believable character, and I can talk about this from both perspectives - from a cryptid and monster expert, to the emerging folklore of the internet generation, empowered by their imaginations and the power of social media. This is realistically how it ended up on the podcast, it’s a monster - but one that sits between the world of fiction and folklore.

However, this unfortunately did turn to the worst kind of thing back in 2014. And this is not a true crime podcast, but this monster was truly brought to life when two 12 year old girls from Wisconsin in the US believed so heavily in Slenderman killing them or their family - that they took their best friend into the woods, and stabbed her 19 times to appease Slenderman. 

Thank goodness, the girl survived and the two perpetrators were arrested and are still in juvenile facilities to this day, with a focus on recovery on their mental health issues. Despite this though, the girls believed that Slenderman protected them, and that he was going to take them off to a place where they would be free and cared for. Since then Slenderman’s image has actually been linked as a symbol of the bullied, and that Slenderman is actually there to support them.

You know what’s also kind of wild though, is that Slenderman is not in the public domain - it’s owned by someone, which is just absolutely bonkers to me! 

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Now onto cultural significance; art is a tricky one this week, as this creature did only come into the public realm in the noughties, so there’s no ‘official’ art so to say. However, the joy in this monster is the collaborative nature of its story, which is told through digital art, video games, sculpting and the photoshopped images that you can find online. You can look these up on the Creepypasta page, or just pop it into Google honestly. But it’s all going to be independent stuff though this week, go and support your local creators in their artistic endeavours! 

In movies this week, we’ve only got two - but again, I think this is because it’s quite early in the character’s history to have so many movies about it. However, there is Slenderman from 2018 and Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story from 2015. Personally, I think after the stabbing in 2014, the 2015 film could have probably been delayed for a while out of respect, but that’s just my opinion.

If you are more interested in Slenderman and this case of the three girls in the US, there is a brilliant documentary called Beware the Slenderman that came out in 2016 which went over the history of Slenderman and goes into the stabbing case and the background behind it.

For TV, there’s more, which is a bonus. We have shows such as our usual Supernatural, Lost Girl, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Big Mouth and Community.

In video games, this is where the big players come in - as after the Creepypasta went viral, the game developers Parsec Productions created ‘Slender: The Eight Pages’, where the character is chased by Slenderman through the woods whilst trying to collect warning notes from previous victims. It’s free to play, and it still holds up - so I recommend it if you’re into horror. Other ones include the sequel to this which was Slender: The Arrival and they also inspired the Enderman creatures in Minecraft. These games are also an inspiration to the Five Nights at Freddy’s game series - which is massively popular.

My book recommendations this week are The Slenderman Mysteries: An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life by Nick Redfern for specific Slendy information but for all you Creepypasta nerds, there’s a great great book on this called The Creepypasta Collection: Modern Urban Legends You Can’t Unread and the second which is The Creepypasta Collection: 20 Stories, No Sleep by MrCreepyPasta, as they are from various authors obviously.

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed?

I honestly think this is the coolest thing to have happened through the internet during this period - it’s so fascinating that one generation can completely believe a proven fictional being and we’ve seen the creation of a completely new myth monster within our lifetime, when most of the monsters we study are from centuries and centuries ago! So I think that one is really really cool.

However, the other side to this is that we have seen the really dangerous way that these folktales can be interpreted with the US criminal case, and actually it’s important that we always take these stories with a pinch of salt. I don’t imagine that the Greeks ever killed others and used their fear in a creature to justify it, but I’m not sure - I’m not centuries and centuries old. 

Either way, it’s a fantastic one to cover and one that I’ve been really excited to cover too, as it’s one that’s ingrained in my head since I was a teenager. I was a nightmare for looking up Creepypastas, and getting so scared that they would keep me up all night and I’d drive my parents crazy. My worst ones were chain emails that I would get about Japanese schoolgirls falling into sewers and killing kids, parents being skinned by their dead children - they were just a bit ridiculous. But, they did work - they did terrify me to the point of nightmares or sleeplessness, or I’d go in to my dad’s room, petrified out of my mind and white as sheet crying my eyes out at something that was clearly in my imagination. I was truly a nightmare child, especially my teenage self - for spooking myself out.

OUTRO: 

I think this one has been my favourite monster so far honestly, it has such a brilliant story to it - with both a fictional and folklore aspect. This monster really embodies the internet age of horror and jump scares, with early YouTube and forums telling ghost stories around the virtual campfire.

Next week, we’re heading to home turf for me and looking into a British folklore spirit called the Kuri. Stumble onto this monster and this ghostly figure will haunt your dreams until it drags you into its final resting place in the woods, so you can join it there. Stay on the beaten path next Thursday for this creature!

For now thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got the twitter for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The social media handles for Tiktok and Instagram are mythmonsterspodcast, and twitter is mythmonsterspod. But all of our content can be found at mythmonsters.co.uk - you can also find us on Goodpods and Patreon if you want to help me fund the podcast, ya know if you feel like it.

Come join the fun and share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

But for now, stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.