Slender Man

In June 2009 a Something Awful thread invited members to doctor ordinary photographs into paranormal images. A user posting as Victor Surge submitted two black-and-white pictures of children with an impossibly tall, faceless figure in a dark suit standing behind them, and captioned them with fragments of a report about missing children. The figure had no name in folklore because it had no folklore; it had been made up that week.

It first appeared in 2009, during early YouTube.

Slender Man is the clearest case of the internet producing a genuine piece of folklore under laboratory conditions, with a timestamp. Because the original was posted as a contribution to a game rather than as a story, other people were free to add to it, and thousands did — photographs, video series, games — until the character had the depth and inconsistency of something genuinely old.

In 2014 two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin stabbed a classmate, nearly killing her, and said afterwards that they had done it for Slender Man. The case dominated coverage of the character thereafter and forced a serious public argument about what internet fiction does to children who cannot yet tell it apart from reporting. Knudsen has said little publicly and declined to profit from the 2018 film.