DARK WEB: Slender Man

This will come as a shock to no one.

I am a sucker for a good urban legend.

Always have been.

Thinking back to sleepovers as a kid, was I terrified if someone said that we'd be trying to conjure Bloody Mary that night?

Absolutely.

Did it fascinate me nonetheless?

Sure did.

I was the first one to step up to the mirror and say her name three times.

But these are just silly things kids say to scare each other, right?

I mean, that's how I always thought about them.

After all, I lived to tell my bloody merry tale, didn't I?

But nowadays, it's different.

Kids have the internet, which means sleepovers and urban legends have seriously leveled up, especially thanks to websites like creepypasta.com.

People can share photos and drawings, personal anecdotes that only add to the lure.

And sometimes they do this to the point where the line between reality and fiction really starts to blur.

Take, for example, that tall, skinny, really creepy dude that the internet dubs Slender Man.

When stories of Slender Man took over these forums, people weren't sure what to make of it.

Was it another urban legend like Bloody Mary, or was there something more sinister going on here?

Because the Slender Man, real or not, seemed to have the power to get inside people's minds and in a pretty messed up way, to the point where it actually caused two young girls to try and murder their own best friend.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is so supernatural.

I have been in love with the internet as long as I can remember.

I had a Yahoo account as early as I think the year 2000.

I did MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, all the things.

And it's always been a huge part of my life.

But by 2009, the internet had become a huge part of life for everyone.

And part of the thrill came from just how anonymous everything was.

There was no telling whether that creepy story on Reddit was true or just someone having their fun.

Stories told around the campfire took on a whole new meaning as they made their way to the internet, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, which is how one internet monster spread to every corner of the World Wide Web and beyond.

His thin, towering body and blank, uncanny face started to appear everywhere online.

From YouTube clips to online games to fan art forums.

But when Slender Man inspired violence in real life, that's when the the fun ended and the real horror began.

I'm Rasha Pecaro.

And I'm Yvette Gentile.

And today, we're getting to the bottom of Slender Man, one of the internet's scariest monsters.

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Ah, the beautiful sounds of the early internet.

The whirring of computer fans, the tones of the dial-up, that little voice saying, you've got mail.

I can still hear it ringing in my head, right?

You've got mail.

But today's story doesn't go back that early in internet history.

No, it's not the 90s.

It's 2009, 2009, which means Facebook is in, MySpace is out, and Instagram is just a twinkle in a tech bro's eye.

If you're not checking the early versions of social media, watching YouTube, or playing World of Warcraft, you're chatting on forums.

And for a good chunk of the 2000s, the forum that generated a whole lot of internet culture was a site called Something Awful.

Something Awful was a place to share memes and chat about movies and video games.

But on June 8th, 2009, a single post on something awful took the internet by storm.

It all started when a user named Victor Serge posted two black and white photos to a thread for paranormal images.

At first, they seemed harmless, kids playing or hanging out.

But on a closer look, people realized that something strange was lurking in the background.

The first photo shows a group of a dozen or so teens all walking toward the camera in a heavily wooded area.

Each of them staring directly at the camera and all of them look kind of worried because behind them half hidden in the shadow, there's this weird figure.

He's dressed in these dark clothes that almost blend into the trees.

He's easily two, maybe even three feet taller than everyone else in the picture.

And the creepiest part of all, his face is completely blank.

Not a blank expression, just blank.

No eyes, no mouth, nothing but smooth white skin.

If the photo isn't terrifying enough, there's also the caption below it.

It says in a quote,

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, end quote.

That is way too creepy for me.

It's only hours after the first photo that Victor Serge posts another picture on the thread.

This one is at a playground full of children running and shouting happily.

And in the photo, there's a child climbing a jungle gem, smiling at the camera, blissfully unaware of the horror lurking just behind him.

Because in the distance stands a tall, creepy figure with the same black clothes, the same thin body, and the same blank face.

This time, though, there's something new, what appears to be tentacles bursting from its back.

And the caption below this photo reads, quote, one of two recovered photographs from the Sterling City Library blaze, notable for being taken the day which 14 children vanished, and for what is referred to as the Slender Man, deformities cited as film defects by officials.

Fire at library occurred one week later.

Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.

1986 photographer Mary Thomas missing since June 13, 1986.

End quote.

Okay, so it's implying that shortly after this photo was taken, 14 of the kids in the image just disappeared, including the little kid on the slide.

And then, just a week later, a library fire destroys all the other photos from that day, leaving only this one behind?

Exactly.

And the thing is, it wasn't long before both of these photos caused a huge stir on something awful.

And the creepy figure in Victor Serge's photos starts to take on a life of its own.

By June 11th, just three days later, the Something Awful threat is completely flooded with discussions about Slender Man.

Victor Serge has also posted more images.

One is a color photo someone took of themselves in an old mirror with Slender Man lurking behind them.

Another is a police report where someone has scrawled the words, quote, Slender Man kill us already, end quote.

And above, a red stain that looks eerily similar to blood.

But other users start posting their findings of Slender Man too.

The site is bombarded with photos and drawings and short stories and first-person accounts of their run-ins with Slender Man.

And eventually the thread grows to 46 pages worth of Slender Man content.

And Slender Man evolves as it jumps from one website to the next.

It's around this time that he starts appearing on another blog called Creepypasta.

A creepypasta is sort of like an internet horror story.

Anyway, in the span of just a few days, dozens of accounts appear on the Creepypasta website, detailing the horror of Slender Man.

and fleshing out exactly what he does to his victims.

Turns out, if you're unlucky enough to get caught alone with Slender Man, it's not his tentacles or even his creepy, featureless face you have to worry about.

It's his mind.

This guy doesn't just look unsettling.

He also has a strange effect on your brain.

Rumor has it, just being near Slender Man turns you into a paranoid insomniac.

constantly looking over your shoulder for him.

He has the power to affect your memory, making you wake up in the morning with no idea what happened the night before.

And that's if he doesn't wipe your memories entirely.

Getting too close to Slender Man can even make you physically ill, giving you a nasty cough the internet calls slender sickness.

And yet, in spite of all the side effects, some people are dedicated to finding Slender Man and capturing him on film.

just to prove he's real.

But any evidence of those attempts appear warped and distorted when posted online.

Almost as if Slender Man's presence has an effect on digital images.

Supernatural messing with our cameras again?

Like, why does this always happen in so many of our stories?

I wish I had the answers.

Well, it's obvious that something is drawing people to Slender Man.

But it becomes harder and harder to tell whether this is some collaborative horror fiction experiment or true accounts of a real creature.

Still, with each post, the lure of Slender Man grows.

Slender Man might have just stayed a series of images and creepy pastas if something else hadn't come to light.

Barely a week after Victor Serge's first post, on June 20th, 2009, a video appears on YouTube.

It's posted by a user named Marvel Hornets.

and it's titled Introduction.

In the video, a filmmaker named Jay explains that he's inherited a collection of tapes from his old college friend, a film student named Alex.

Back in 2006, Alex was shooting a short film called Marble Hornets, hence the name of the YouTube user.

But as the shoot went on, Alex grew more and more irritable and erratic.

Soon, Alex got so frustrated, he called the whole project off.

He gave the tapes to Jay with the instructions to burn them.

Then, Alex disappeared without a trace.

Jay decides that instead of burning the tapes, he'll go through them and use this YouTube account to keep a digital record.

After all, maybe there's some clues in there as to where his friend actually went.

From the very first tape titled Entry Number One, it becomes clear that something really freaky was going on while Alex was filming Marvel Hornets.

Entry number one is a 47 second long video with no sound.

It just shows a few frantic flashes of light, seemingly from someone running through a dark house.

In the last few seconds, the camera peers through the curtains and looks out a window onto a front porch.

Outside, it's dark and everything looks calm and still.

But then the camera pans to the right where for just a few seconds, you can catch a glimpse of something on the porch.

Something tall, thin, and featureless, and it appears to be wearing a black suit.

Well, the Marble Hornets YouTube account uploads entry after entry, the final total being something like 87 videos.

Through these, a narrative emerges.

Jay realizes that the reason why Alex abandoned his film project was because this mysterious figure kept stalking him.

On the tapes, Alex grows paranoid, complaining of missing memories, and he begins recording himself sleeping at night.

Jay, watching the videos three years later, notices distortions in the tape, missing frames, and lighting issues.

But the tapes only tell part of the story.

And Jay starts filming himself as he tries to find out what happened to Alex.

He goes to the places where Alex shot his short film.

He interviews the cast and crew, at least the ones he can still find.

But pretty quickly, Jay starts experiencing the same problems as Alex.

He's losing sleep and growing irritable.

And then he notices Slender Man's following him too.

And it's after Marvel Hornets appears on the scene that Slender Man explodes across the internet.

If you didn't know about him before, you sure as heck know him now.

He's an internet meme in a very real sense.

a replicating idea that keeps gaining detail with every person who shares his story.

Pretty soon there are Slender Man music videos, Slender Man video games, even Slender Man fan art, and of course, sexy Slender Man fan fiction.

I'm looking at you, Tumblr.

Slender Man retains his inherent creepiness and over time, he becomes like the internet's own son, everyone's favorite online cryptid, one that haunts the depths of the internet forums.

But He's also sold as a little crochet plushie on Etsy.

It feels like the initial horror of the 2009 Slenderman has been left behind.

On the internet, I mean, he's old news.

Five years after he first appeared, he's gone from a brand new nightmare to a spooky old friend.

But all of that changes in 2014 when the horror leaves the internet and becomes a very real-world problem.

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On the morning of May 31st, 2014, a cyclist named Greg Steinberg is going for his morning ride in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

It's there that he stumbles upon a horrific discovery.

At the edge of the forest park, he finds a 12-year-old girl crawling on the ground, covered in blood.

As Greg goes to help the girl, she tells him her name is Peyton Leitner.

And when she can finally muster up more words to speak, she says she's been stabbed by her best friend.

After a five-hour manhunt across Waukesha, Police discover two other 12-year-old girls walking down the highway, five miles from where Peyton was found.

The girls Anissa Weire and Morgan Geiser are carrying bags and look as if they're ready to run away.

One of them has a five-inch kitchen knife in her purse.

The other has a heavy backpack filled with clothes, snacks, and family photos.

They tell the police that the supplies are so they can get to the Nicolette National Forest 200 miles away.

That's where they were going to live in a mansion with Slender Slenderman.

Okay, let's take a step back here for a second.

I can't even imagine this happening.

I'm one of the moms of a 13-year-old girl, and it just boggles my mind that this could actually happen.

We need to walk through how we got from creepy internet urban legend to a real life stabbing.

This has turned into something horrific.

And months before the attempted murder, Anissa and Morgan were becoming increasingly obsessed with Slender Man.

They were reading about him online, watching videos, drawing him in their notebooks.

I mean, the whole shebang.

At the same time, they were trying to get their friend Peyton involved with their obsession.

But Peyton didn't want anything to do with it.

Slender Man freaked her out.

And she told Anissa and Morgan to leave her out of it.

The whole Slender Man thing quickly became a point of conflict, especially between between Peyton and Morgan.

The two girls started having fights, which Peyton's parents even noticed.

When Peyton's mom asked her what was going on, Peyton showed her the Slender Man creepypasta site, and she explained that the Slender Man stuff scared her, not just because Slender Man is creepy.

But because Morgan believes Slender Man was very real.

And as time passed, Morgan's thing for Slenderman went beyond a teen fixation.

Morgan started to believe Slender Man was communicating with her.

She even convinced Anissa that they needed to run off to the woods to live with him.

But they had to be careful with how they went about it, because Morgan told Anissa that there was a chance Slenderman could go after their families if they upset him.

And according to Morgan, the only way Slenderman would be happy with them and accept them fully was to give him a sacrifice.

So the two girls agreed they needed to kill Peyton.

This is absolutely crazy.

I can't even imagine that this was real life.

This is so heavy duty that it's very frightening.

For weeks, the girls planned the attack.

Then on Friday, May 30th, 2014, They invited Peyton to sleep over at Morgan's parents' condo for Morgan's birthday.

The night began innocently enough.

The three even went out earlier and rented roller skates at a nearby rink.

When they came back, they watched movies and talked late into the night.

It was during this part of the sleepover that Morgan and Anissa had originally planned to harm Peyton.

But at some point during the evening, the two girls changed their minds.

The next morning, however, was a brand new day.

The three girls ate breakfast and played games, with Peyton none the wiser, and then Morgan suggested three of them go to a nearby park.

The two girls lured Peyton to a heavily wooded area and suggested a game of hide and seek.

And that's where things took a dark turn.

Anissa signaled to Morgan to attack Peyton, yelling, go ballistic, go crazy.

And that's when Morgan pushed Peyton to the ground.

She then took a kitchen knife she'd stolen from her home and stabbed her friend 19

times.

By the time the attack was over, Peyton was badly injured, but she was conscious.

Morgan and Anissa told her that they'd go and get help, but that was an obvious lie because then they left her.

Peyton dragged herself out of the woods and to the edge of the path.

And that's where the cyclist Greg Steinberg found her.

As the police searched for Morgan and Anissa, Peyton was taken to the hospital where she was immediately rushed into surgery.

Though many of the stab wounds were superficial, two were incredibly dangerous.

One hit her liver and her stomach, and the other was just a millimeter away from a major artery.

After a six-hour surgery and weeks of recovery, Peyton was okay.

Several months after the attack, she was even able to return to school.

thank goodness she was i can't imagine how terrifying that must have been having someone you trust your best friend turn on you like that i'm so glad that her physical recovery went well but i'm sure it took so much longer to get over the emotional scars it's it's heartbreaking

When the police started to investigate exactly why this happened, it gets even more devastating.

In the hours after the stabbing, they they questioned Morgan and Anissa.

While Anissa showed remorse and regret for what she'd done to Peyton, Morgan showed little or no remorse.

She admitted she wanted to kill Peyton and had planned it for months.

When police asked why she would kill her best friend, she just replied, and I quote, it seemed necessary.

She told the detectives, she did it for Slenderman.

That's so chilling to hear.

Imagine finding out your best friend had a whole plan in place to kill you for an internet monster.

Yeah, I mean, that makes this

so incredibly creepy and sad that Slender Man had seemingly hopped off the screen and into reality.

Online, people had spread stories that he inspired madness, paranoia, and even violence.

And it was happening in real life, in this quiet little suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin.

You'd never think in a million years that something like this would happen.

What's worse is that Slenderman's long reach didn't stop there because just a few days later, in early June, another Slenderman attack happens.

400 miles away in Hamilton County, Ohio, an unnamed mother comes home from work to find her her teenage daughter waiting for her.

The 13-year-old girl is wearing a white mask and a hoodie.

The second her mother steps through the door, the daughter attacks her with a kitchen knife.

The mother survives with only a few minor injuries, but it isn't until her daughter is taken into custody that she begins to think that Slenderman has a connection to her attack as well.

See, her daughter had a fascination with Slenderman, writing stories about him and even making a whole Slender World in Minecraft, which is a video game where you build your own universe brick by brick.

When the mother hears about the Slender Man stabbing in Waukesha, she approaches the news worried that her daughter's actions are connected to Morgan and Anissa's.

And she's right to worry because it starts to feel like there's a pattern when a third incident happens, this time on September 4th, 2014.

A woman and her nine-year-old son in Port Ritchie, Florida, wake up early in the morning to flames filling their home.

The mother goes scrambling to find her 14-year-old daughter but is forced to evacuate before she can find her.

What she doesn't know is her daughter is safe in a park nearby and she was the one who started the fire.

Like the other incidents in Wisconsin and Ohio, the unnamed girl in Florida has a history of writing dark thoughts in her journal and a fascination with, that's right, you guessed it, Slender Man.

In this case, however, it seemed like she showed the remorse Morgan did not.

She texts her mom after the fire, apologizing for lighting it.

And she asks if her family is hurt and claims she doesn't know why she did it.

A key part of the Slender Man lore was that Slender Man himself wasn't the one attacking people in his stories.

More often, he was messing with people's minds, pushing them to hurt themselves or others.

So could this be what's happening in Wisconsin and Florida and Ohio?

I mean, was Slender Man affecting people's minds and bringing about real-life violence?

Or was something more sinister happening?

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In 2014, Slenderman leapt off the internet and into into the headlines with a series of violent crimes committed in his name.

People started to wonder if there was something more to the internet cryptid.

Like maybe something evil really was lurking in cyberspace.

Schools in Waukesha, the site of Peyton's stabbing, quickly banned Creepypasta and other Slenderman-affiliated sites.

Parents warned their friends to monitor what their kids were doing online, not just for inappropriate content or messages, but for Slender Man's influence.

So was Slender Man really the cause of all this violence?

Was he warping people's minds the way he did to Alex and Jay of the Marble Hornets videos?

Was Slender Man to blame for the stabbing in Waukesha?

It's complicated, but yes, he was the inspiration behind some of these attacks.

But Slender Man didn't make Morgan Geyser formulate a plan and find an accomplice to stab her best friend.

He didn't force the girl in Ohio to attack attack her mother or control the girl in Florida who burned her house down.

Slender Man wasn't responsible for any of those things.

Chances were this had to do with mental illness, which is why I think Slender Man's more of a symptom than a cause.

As Morgan and her friend Anissa Weier went through the justice system, It became clear that Morgan was having issues separating fiction from reality.

Both girls underwent psychiatric evaluation during which Morgan dropped a bombshell.

She'd been seeing, hearing, and feeling things that weren't there for years.

Long before the stabbing, Morgan believed she interacted with ghosts and spoke to imaginary friends.

Through multiple sessions with psychologists, Morgan was eventually diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia.

When she ended up in jail, Morgan's mental condition quickly deteriorated into full psychosis.

She reportedly believed she was having conversations with fictional characters from the Harry Potter franchise as well as with Slenderman.

It became clear that Morgan struggled to separate her delusions from reality.

Ultimately, Morgan Geiser pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide and Anisa Weire to attempted second-degree intentional homicide.

Due to the intense nature of their crimes, both were actually tried as adults despite being under 18 at the time of the crime.

They were both sent to a high-security health institute.

As of this episode airing, Anissa, who is now 22, has been released under the supervision of her parents.

Morgan, who is also 22, remains incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for 40 years.

Okay, so 12-year-old Morgan Geiser was a teen living with delusions who had violent tendencies.

She found a willing accomplice in Anissa Weire, who may have also struggled with her mental health.

It seems like if it wasn't Slenderman, there's a good chance it would have been something else that had triggered them.

The same goes for the knife attack in Ohio and the fire in Florida.

In each of those cases, while we don't know the full history, it's possible mental health played a part.

That's the thing though.

At first glance, it probably feels like some nefarious plot with Slender Man at the center.

Maybe the character himself has the power to drive people to do evil acts, but Slender Man couldn't have done that because Slender Man from day one was a complete invention.

Even the first initial poster on something awful, Victor Serge, whose real name is Eric Knudsen, never intended for Slender Man to be perceived as real.

He made the post for a paranormal Photoshop competition, and he admitted it was nothing more than fiction.

But still,

Slender Man took on a whole life of its own from there.

Marble Hornets, the web series about Slender Man, was also a work of fiction.

While it presented itself as found footage, its audience quickly latched on to the realization that it was a surreal horror web series.

Even though it felt realistic, it was far from a true story.

In the aftermath of the Waukesha stabbing, Eric Knudsen came forward to address his creation's role in the incident.

He said, quote, I'm deeply saddened by the tragedy in Wisconsin.

My heart goes out to the families of those affected by this terrible act, end quote.

In the same vein, administrators from the Creepypasta website confirmed that internet horror like Slenderman was always meant to be for fun.

They never wanted any real-life violence.

Creepypasta was, first and foremost, a creative website.

Creepypasta users even went on to host a charity live stream in the weeks after the stabbing to raise money for the victim Peyton Leitner.

Slender Man was never a real-life murderous monster.

He wasn't controlling minds or stalking through the woods.

But some folklorists argue he was one of the most elaborate examples of digital folklore.

Traditionally, folklore grows from tales that are passed down, storyteller to storyteller.

Over years of retellings, these stories acquire and refine recognizable aspects.

Take Snow White, for example.

Poison apples, evil stepmother, seven dwarves.

Exactly.

There's lots of different versions of this story depending on who's telling it.

Even the version from The Brothers Grimm, which was published in 1812, was pieced together from three different storytellers.

In the same way, Slender Man was a figure with a distinct lore that came from many different sources.

His featureless face and tentacles came from Eric Knudsen, while his amnesia powers came from Marble Hornets.

Add in a few thousand creepypastas, illustrations, and other pieces of the Slender Man puzzle.

and you have a fictional character created by the collective.

In other words, a folk character.

So folklore is usually meant to teach a lesson, right?

Like how Little Red Riding Hood is about not talking to strangers.

Right.

Or how Goldilocks and the Three Bears is about not sticking your little grubby paws into other people's porridge.

And how the Little Mermaid is about how it always works out if you change yourself for a man.

Okay,

maybe don't listen to that one.

But modern day folklore researchers argue, Slender Man basically has the same thing going on.

He represents some of the most primal human fears, the fear of the dark and the fear of the unknown.

He's the boogeyman that can get you if you venture too far into the dark forest.

In Slender Man's case, though, the real-life tragedies put an end to the character's spooky fun legacy, and in a way, to the folklore itself.

After Peyton Leitner was horrifically attacked in Slender Man's name, the internet no longer felt good about adding to the legend.

In fact, when Sony released a Slender Man movie in 2018, most horror fans felt that it was in poor taste after what happened in Waukesha.

So it seems that Slender Man was the first great internet experiment in digital folklore.

And just like all folktales, when people can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, it can have deadly consequences.

And that's where our storybook tale for today comes to an end, I'm afraid.

So sweet dreams, friends.

Good night.

Sleep tight.

Beware of the internet and don't let the Slender Man bite.

This is So Supernatural, an audio chuck original produced by Crime House.

You can connect with us on Instagram at SoSupernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com.

Join Yvette and me next Friday for an all-new episode.

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