What is Slender Man?

• a monster?
• an alien?
• a demon?
• ...a vampire?
• an eldritch god?
• an optical illusion?
• a hallucination?
• a virus?
• a tulpa?

• something that doesn't look quite right
• something that doesn't belong where you saw it
• something pretending to be human

Slender Man is a horror character created by Eric Knudsen for the Something Awful forums in 2009. The character was adopted and developed by users on the Unfiction forums through 2010. The rest is history.

Slender Man's characteristics and attributes vary from work to work. Below is a list of Slender Man's common features in my observation, loosely ranked from most ubiquitous to most optional or quirky.

• pale empty face
• business suit and tie
• stalking behavior
• tentacles or additional limbs
• notably tall and thin
• mind control powers
• victims vanish without a trace
• recruits human servants or "proxies"
• teleportation
• disrupts electronics
• Operator Sickness (coughing, memory loss)
• association with forests and trees
• murderously violent
• limbs can stretch
• thoughtform created thru collective belief
• specifically targets children
• hangs bodies from trees
• speaks human language
• association with distorted space
• association with arson and fire
• some facial features
• hidden mouth full of jagged teeth

Folkloric Origin

From Moby-Dick (1851), Ch. 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale"

"Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves- why is this phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?"

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