The Slender Man

[mynameisbob84]

So yeah, The Slender Man! Fascinating, creepy shit, yo :shock:

It's basically a modern urban legend, evolving at hyperspeed... or cyberspeed... cos, the internet... cyberspace/cyberspeed... of forget it!

Instead of starting out as a folk tale designed to scare children into learning a life lesson and being retold and reshaped and adapted over centuries to fit whatever purpose was called for at the time, The Slender Man started out as nothing more than a forum post designed to shit people up and show off some dood's photoshop skillz.

These were the two images contained in that original forum post...





Creepy shit, yeah? There was no story attached to these images other than the fact that the... thing in the images was known as The Slender Man and "targeted children". From there, backstories and origins were birthed for The Slender Man from all corners of the internet, with more and more stories floating around as time went on. And not just stories either. This is the digital information age after all. So what would have been limited to retellings of the vague story of The Slender Man around the campfire in centuries past quickly became photographic "sightings" of The Slender Man from all over the world circulating the web...



Unearthed historical photographs...



Even video footage...



Creepy shit, right? But all harmless enough. Until...

Yesterday, two 12 year old girls lured one of their friends into the woods and stabbed her 19 times (she survived thankfully). When asked why they did it, they reportedly replied:

"The Slender Man made us do it"

Apparently, one of them had become obsessed with The Slender Man, believing him to be real, and had even had "conversations" with him in which he urged her to kill for him.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-27684258

Just horrendous stuff. But I find it completely fascinating watching a modern urban legend evolve like this in real time. Hopefully the girls in question can get the help they clearly need.

 

[Fay_Galore]

this is only semi-related but hear me out
I recently read about sleep paralyses, it's one of those things where you know you shóuldn't but somehow you just cannot nót read more about it. if you want to sleep tonight: don't

but I read some experiences from people who suffered from this and most people who do have very disturbing hallucinations. And in a way it's the same as the slender man girl, you somewhere, subconsciously, store images that you may not even recall ever seeing, and something triggers your mind to see/hear/feel these things right in front your eyes.

Do you guys sometimes have a scary dream and wonder, where did thát came from? how could I ever dream up a monster like that? I think that is fascinating. All those horrible things are stored in the mind.

 

[mynameisbob84]

this is only semi-related but hear me out
I recently read about sleep paralyses, it's one of those things where you know you shóuldn't but somehow you just cannot nót read more about it. if you want to sleep tonight: don't

but I read some experiences from people who suffered from this and most people who do have very disturbing hallucinations. And in a way it's the same as the slender man girl, you somewhere, subconsciously, store images that you may not even recall ever seeing, and something triggers your mind to see/hear/feel these things right in front your eyes.

Do you guys sometimes have a scary dream and wonder, where did thát came from? how could I ever dream up a monster like that? I think that is fascinating. All those horrible things are stored in the mind.

"The man at the foot of the bed" is the common one when it comes to sleep paralysis. It makes sense, I guess. What's scarier than being fully conscious but unable to move as you struggle to make out the figure of a stranger standing at the foot of your bed?

One way to explain the unexplainable things people often dream up is using Jungian psychology, innit. I'm not entirely convinced of it but a lot of what Jung said does make sense and would explain a lot of things. Basically the idea is that buried deep within the human unconscious is a collective unconscious, a common link between all people, between the past and the present. And within this collective unconscious there exist certain archetypes, things that all human beings are subconsciously aware of from birth without ever having them explained to us. This is why two different people from two different continents, or even two different time periods, with completely different life experiences and having been exposed to completely different cultures can have the same nightmares, the same visions of "the man at the foot of the bed", the devil, the boogeyman. The idea being that these aren't things we learn to fear through exposure to them on a cultural level, but rather we have an innate fear of them, and in sleep especially, we're more attuned to the collective unconscious, and therefore more exposed to these archetypes.

Or it could just be a load of old bollocks