OLL LEWIS: The Slender Man (or the creation of a modern myth)

It is reported that in 1972 the Toronto Society for Psychical Research met with the intention of seeing if it were possible to actually invent a ghost or poltergeist. They named their “ghost” Philip Aylesford and set up a detailed biography for him containing lots of the sorts of stereotypical details you find in the most popular and clichéd creepy ghost stories: events taking place during the English civil war, a stately home, witchcraft, gypsies, a doomed love affair, a horrific execution on trumped-up charges and a violent death. The group then met in well lit rooms to visualise Philip and after a year of this moved on to séances and such like where they started to receive positive results suggesting that Philip had now become an entity independent of the TSPR.

Of course all that is pure conjecture because séances are pretty easy to fake but if you believe the TSPR account then they created some sort of tulpa or zooform phenomena, purely by believing it. Whether hoax (as I strongly suspect) or not, the story of Philip has become one of the most often quoted bits of modern folklore, is trotted out in most books written about the nature of ghosts and has become a modern myth. People all over the world have reported making some form of contact with Philip ever since.

Many people have tried to replicate the alleged success of the Philip group by attempting to create their own ghosts or zooform phenomena in the same way, and some have even gone on to become popular local folklore, like lizard-men or goat-men said to stalk lonely woodlands in the United States on the lookout for “no-good teens” and other rapscallions, for example. In the last 18 months a similar myth has grown through the internet and is starting to enter local urban mythologies all over the world: The Slender Man.

The Slender Man started off in a post in a long thread on the Something Awful Forums where people contributed fake paranormal photographs they had created. Most of the posts were either ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot or the occasional screaming face reflected in a stream or window, but The Slender Man struck a chord with people as it was something that sounded a bit more creepy than the rest of the stuff on the thread and had an intriguing back story. In the words of its poster, Victor Surge:


One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as "The Slender Man". Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.

“1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.

Buoyed by the comments his first post had received Surge added more pictures of The Slender Man to the thread, and accounts and 'evidence' of more incidents involving a tall thin man that had tentacles instead of hands and no discernible facial features. The Slender Man was often involved in incidents involving missing persons, often but not always children, and all that was left behind as evidence was a camera with pictures of The Slender Man on it, a child's drawing or hastily scrawled writing warning of The Slender Man.

The Slender Man soon started appearing on other popular websites like 4chan's paranormal board /x/ from where the fame of this Stephen-King-style creature boomed among the more internet-savvy members of the population and it flourished as a low-key internet meme. Since its introduction several people around the world have invented their own sightings, adding to the mythos of the strange man-like creature. It will be interesting to see just how this develops, and if and when people who don't know of The Slender Man's origins start to report sightings of a tall man without a face and very long fingers....