Slender Man

Obviously I couldn’t make an urban legends blog and not talk about the legend himself, Slendy.

So how did Slender Man come about? Because I’m sure we all remember being in middle school and downloading the Slender Man game where you had to collect all the pages before Slender Man caught you. Or perhaps you remember seeing all those (obviously real) pictures of Slender Man lingering in the back of photos.

Well, Slender actually took his first breath of life in an online forum almost a decade ago. A user named Victor Surge posted a pair of images on the comedy website Something Awful and explained that they were found in the library of a small town.

In these images, Slendy is portrayed as a tall, dark, faceless figure dressed in a black suit. This became the Slender Man we all know and love. His legend grew and grew as more people put him into photos (sometimes with tentacles growing out of his back) and they created the story of how he abducted children and killed them.

People ate this idea up, they started to insert him into 16th century woodcuts and hieroglyphs. They wrote news articles about him. People even started to make videos in which they see Slendy. All of this to grow this legend.

However, this legend quickly escalated and became very dark. In May 2014, three 12-year-old girls went to the park the morning after a sleepover and only two came back. Two of the girls had planned on luring their friend out there and sacrificing her to Slender Man. She was barely hanging on to life when police found her and she told them that her best friend had done this to her. The police found the other two girls walking near a highway carrying a kitchen knife and a backpack full of water, clothes, granola bars, and photos of their families so they could remember them when they got to the mansion of Slender Man. Sadly, the girl passed away. The two other girls were charged and sentenced to 40 and 25 years in a psychiatric hospital.

In 2018 a trailer for the new film “Slender Man” was released in August. The movie has since been released.

So although we all like to joke around about the faceless, tall man in a suit that we so lovingly refer to as Slendy, we have to remember that some people actually became so submerged into this legend that they caused harm.

PS if you’ve never played the Slender Man game and really like to feel like your heart is gonna burst, 10/10 recommend. Tis super stressful.