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The Slender Man birth of an Urban Myth


stonehart

Paranormal Adept
The Slender Man birth of an Urban Myth
Let us start with what we do know about this particular myth as we can define in thiscase a definite moment for when this myth was first brought up and started its internet life. The Slender Man was born on the Something Awful forums in 2009 as a response to a thread setup to create your own paranormal images but it wasan image created by ‘Victor Surge’ that caught many people’s imagination.
This had something of a snowball effect and since then the preponderance of images being posted of him has made The Slender Man an internet phenomenon of the creepy sort. A quick search of YouTube will provide you with a flood of pranks, bad fakes and documentaries all vying for the searchers attention but there is one or two that are worth taking a look at.
The Marble Hornet's channel has a series about people who are being followed by aslender man and once you get past the amateur nature of the filming and acting in it the idea is quite interesting if not creepy. Putting that entire aside it is the way in which the slender man is depicted that is the main reason (if any) for watching this video but any glimpses of him tend to be very short and fuzzy if not distant in a way that is reminiscent of many of the UFO and Ghost sightings we see posted regularly.
As for the documentaries there are only two that stand out:



It should be noted that with almost all YouTube user made documentaries they tend to be a little weak but they do try to give some back ground information on this topic and of the two links posted the first one is quite well done in its way.

So what is The Slender Man?

The Slender Man is usually depicted as an unnaturally tall thin being with very long limbs or tentacles that he can change the length of, with no visible face and the ability to shape shift he is almost always seen in a suite that easily reminds me of the men in black myth. He appears to have a need to kidnap children and uses his limbs to hypnotize them so that they cannot stop themselves from walking into his embrace.
What happens to the victims is unknown but speculation has it that he may just eat them, steal their souls, take them to another dimension/alternate universe or all of the above leaving on occasion only pieces of cloths and broken phones etc as the only physical evidence of the encounter.
So is this just simply another internet meme or is there something deeper to all this?
What we do know for sure is the Slender Man is 100% made up as we know the time and date he was born and who created him but still people claim to have had sightings of The Slender man.
So what do we have here? Have we given an imaginary demonic fantasy a life of its own or was it built from a mix of other mythic beings to be reborn as a new modern myth?
For everyone here on the paracast forums you maybe wondering why I have done this post as it seems like a simple cut and dry case of a new myth being given wings and for sure that maybe all it is but I just found it interesting that even though people do not have to look far to see that it is all just a recent creation still many do claim to have had encounters with this being.
Is this a case of if enough people believe/visualise an entity it can somehow be given a life of its own?
Have we in short created a Tulpa or is it all just a case of over active imaginations?

PS: sorry I do not know why the videos a posted more than once
 
Personally I just found the whole thing fascinating as we know that it is 100% made up yet people will still run with an idea and in most cases not back track a bit and look at how and where it all began and what its authenticity is.
 
Well I think there is still an MIB phenomenon which has paranormal aspects, thats my story, and I'm sticking by it.

---------- Post added at 01:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:36 AM ----------

Vampire Tulpas.

I love Vampire genre, but I totally don't believe in any of it, as real. Any grownup who does, has some serious cognitive problems. Vlad The Impaler, was just a psychopath serial killer monster. Thats all. But alot of people are obsessed with that genre and want it to be real, and wish they were superheros-of-darkness.

Yet I never hear about -sightings- and -experiences- of/with the Ann Rice like vamps.
 
It is a tall man in a suit? This whole 'meme'(blarrghh) was started on somethingawful.com (guess you know this) and I find nothing terrifying about it at all. Maybe I'm too old.
 
It is a tall man in a suit? This whole 'meme'(blarrghh) was started on somethingawful.com (guess you know this) and I find nothing terrifying about it at all. Maybe I'm too old.

I feel very much the same.. to me it was more how this whole thing has snowballed into a new myth with its own crafted back story.

Take the guy in this video for a start.. he is either a very good actor or he really believes in this myth to the point of getting soil samples done from a sighting.


The whole thing is a made up story but still there are those who wish or must believe in the myth.
Really I dont get it.
 
I agree and don't get me wrong, it seems to have struck a cord somewhere, otherwise it wouldn't be that popular.

In my opinion, for something to 'infect minds', it needs to be more refined. Maybe it just works for teens, the idea of a 'tulpa' seems to work non the less with this 'dude'. Luckily, it seems you mostly get out what one puts into 'it'.
 
and lets not forget this fellow http://www.thisman.org/ still going strong for some two years now

i haven't paid a lot of attention to the slender man "phenomena" since it first appeared on my radar, but in every mention of it i came across there was never any pretense. by that i mean it seemed that no one tried to make anything more of it than what it was, an apparent exercise in being ground zero for a cool meme ( cool being subjective here) this you tube video was the first instance i've seen where someone tried to "play along" and had some guy...who looked like he was just getting acquainted for the first time with a teleprompter...act (again, subjective) and make like there was a real story here. i do have to go back to my disclaimer, as there may have been other go's at it, but i haven't seen them. maybe because this cultural meme was going nowhere? for some reason it reminded me of j.j. abrahm's attempt at creating a myth/backstory (or maybe it was also a meme) with the movie cloverfield and incorporating slusho and Tagruato and other clever things into fringe, star trek and for all i know, Super 8, so along w/thisman.org, mr. abrahms is going strong as well. hopefully he'll stop soon. for the masochists out there, try googling cloverfield clues and cloverfield secrets to get an idea of what i'm rambling on about

-and was that edward scissorhands on the playground w/the kids? Did someone "tulpify" him?
 
What really upsets me about this 'birth of an urban legend' is it's stemming from the Internet generation. It's roots are steeped in the Internet and, knowing how this up-and-coming generation operates, all research will be done on the Internet. There's nothing more sad than that fact. I mean my generation, at least, had the gumption to go out and do real research, and the generation before mine (the Hopkins, Friedman, etc, generation) would do extensive research and interviews. We're talking research involving the interviewing of first-hand eye witnesses (not second or third-hand), collecting trace evidence (like in the video above), and collaboration with fellow researchers and scientists.

The "believers" these days will read all this garbage on the 'Net, watch the YouTube videos, then draw their own conclusions, which for the gullible will be "OH, the Slenderman is real. I saw it on YouTube!" Utterly pathetic that an admittedly fabricated urban legend like this can be created here, propagate here, and thrive, here....on the Internet. And what's really sad is that the YouTube videos I'm seeing aren't even that compelling nor convincing!

I will say this, the SlenderMan's appearance in wearing the suit and looking a bit too much like the dude from the Hitman video game, is really no more outstanding than reports of Shadow People wearing fedoras, sombreros, or Abe Lincoln hats. *shrug* .
 
I could not agree with you more Sandanfire I see this in many ways as a sad indictment of the loss of true critical thinking. Just because you read it on the web or saw a video on it in no way makes it true and I agree with that. In short my point to this whole thing was simply to point out how easy a new meme can be made and how quickly the less critical will run with it when all it takes is a quick look into the history of the new meme and you can see just how new minted it really is.
 
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