The Slender Man
In June 2009 a user named Victor Surge posted two black and white photographs to the Something Awful forums. Each showed a tall, impossibly thin figure in a dark suit, faceless, watching children from the edge of a wood. Within days other users were building on the story. Within years it had become something harder to explain.
The spread
Pull
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Year
"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 once.
"Victor Surge
From fiction to faith
Victor Surge has said repeatedly that the Slender Man was a creative exercise, not a warning. The Something Awful community treated it as collaborative fiction from the start. What no one predicted was that some young readers, already struggling, would not make that distinction.
The stabbing victim survived. One attacker was found not guilty by reason of mental disease. The other was sentenced to 40 years as an adult.
Surge has expressed regret about the harm connected to the character, while maintaining that the original creation was clearly fictional.