Urban Legend Inspires Real Murder
The Slender Man
Mystery Mob!
2009: An internet-driven, urban legend known as Slender Man is born. The figure is completely fictional.
2014: Three 12-year-old girls had a slumber party in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The next morning, one of them was nearly stabbed to death.
How are these two things related? And why did an internet legend become so popular in the first place? Let’s take a look at the Slender Man story and see how it inspired real murder...
But before we do, let me get those Wednesday riddle answers for you:
Riddle #1:
You're escaping a labyrinth, and there are three doors in front of you. The door on the left leads to a raging inferno. The door in the center leads to a deadly assassin. The door on the right leads to a lion that hasn't eaten in three months.
Which door do you choose?
Answer: The door with the lion. If it hasn’t eaten in 3 months, it’s long dead and you can walk right by.
Riddle #2:
Turn me on my side and I am everything. Cut me in half and I am nothing.
What am I?
Answer: The number 8. Turn it sideways and it becomes the infinity symbol. Cut it in half and you get two 0s.
Hope you could get them! We’ll be using quite a few riddles in our virtual escape room/detective series that we’re currently beta testing internally…
And stay tuned - we’ll be asking a select few of our readers to beta test sometime in June!
But anyway, back regular programming. We need to talk about this internet meme that became deadly.
The Guy Asked For Something Spooky
On June 10, 2009, Slender Man was born in a simple online photoshop contest. The challenge was to take regular photographs and turn it into something scary.
Eric Knudsen, who went by the username “Victor Surge,” joined the contest and created Slender Man: a tall, ghostly figure with a featureless face.
Then he found some black and white photos of children playing, and inserted Slender Man into the background. Images like this:
It takes a village to raise an...internet urban legend?
Knudsen’s images went viral and the steam picked up.
On June 20, 2009, just 10 days after the original posts, the YouTube channel Marble Hornets premiered with a Blair Witch Project-style found footage series named “The Operator.” It was about a film student being stalked by a Slender Man-like figure.
The 90-episode series, created by a group of film students, ran for five years and still boasts more than 500,000 subscribers.
More spinoffs came - stories, YouTube series, even a video game. Slender Man was always a tall, faceless figure with a dark suit and long arms, often with tentacles sprouting out of his back. But fans filled in the blanks of the myth with their own ideas as to what he did and why.
The Slender Man Told Me To
May 30, 2014: three 12-year-old girls had a slumber party in Waukesha, Wisconsin - Morgan Geyser, Anissa Weier, and Payton Leutner. The next morning, one of them was nearly dead.
Two of the girls, Morgan and Anissa, had stabbed Payton 19 times in the middle of the night in the woods. Then they left her there to die.
Bleeding from her arms, legs, and torso, Payton somehow dragged herself to a pathway. A bicyclist found her and called 911. (Side note, 19 times without dying has to be some sort of record. Someone should look that up.)
Morgan and Anissa later admitted to their crime. In fact, they even told the police that they had been planning the attack for months.
Their motive?
"To please the Slender Man."
Take some deeper dives, if you dare:
Nuts story, eh? Here's a New York Times article about how the Legend of the Slender Man came to be. And here's another NYT Article on the court case for the stabbing.
As always,
Stay ‘spicious
-Andy & Mark
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