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"Slender Man" Stabber Wanted to Kill Friend to "Prove Skeptics Wrong" about the Supernatural

6/4/2014

23 Comments

 
I’m sure by now many of you have heard the tragic story of the two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who stabbed a friend 19 times because they were inspired by the internet meme Slender Man. The story is sad on many levels, but it was particularly disturbing how the impressionable girls thought that the internet meme had a reality beyond fiction and that by engaging in real-life violence they could join Slender Man in some sort of communion.

Slender Man was invented as a piece of art in 2009 by Eric Knudsen on the Something Awful internet forum.
The police released the affidavit describing the girls’ confession. Because of the age of the girls involved, I’m not particularly comfortable using their names, which have appeared in the media, including the Los Angeles Times, so I have redacted them from the statement below:
[Suspect 1] told police that Slender Man is the 'leader' of Creepypasta, and in the hierarchy of that world, one must kill to show dedication. [She] said that [Suspect 2] told her they should become 'proxies' of Slender Man — a paranormal figure known for his ability to create tendrils from his fingers and back — and kill their friend to prove themselves worthy of him. [Suspect 1] said she was surprised by [Suspect 2]'s suggestion, but also excited to prove skeptics wrong and show that Slender Man really did exist.
The owner of Creepypasta, an online short horror fiction website, released a statement denying that the site’s fiction bore responsibility for the girls’ behavior.
I think that most of you will understand when I say it’s hard to justify pinning blame on an entire genre of writing. Unless you’re okay with blaming the world’s ills on Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t believe that it makes sense to say paranormal writing or an interest in the macabre should be blamed or even used as an indicator of a “sick” person (as a few emails have already felt the need to call both myself and all the authors here). The human race has long held and encouraged a fascination with things that go bump in the night.
Coverage of the girls’ actions has tended to follow the typical pattern of witchcraft, vampire, and satanic cult scares, in which authorities issue dire warnings to parents about nefarious evil that corrupts the innocence of youth: “This should be a wake-up call for all parents,” Waukesha, Wisconsin police chief Russell P. Jack said. “Parents are strongly encouraged to restrict and monitor their children’s Internet usage.” Similarly, CNN reported that parents are worried now that their children are slipping into a fantasy world. One such parent, Mary Ellen Cavanagh, the mother of two teenagers, expressed distress that the line between fantasy and reality is “"thinning drastically among our youth.” She did not have evidence to support this other than CNN’s scare-mongering about the power of the internet to induce children to violence.

The Slender Man stabbings also have an uncanny echo of a recent episode of Supernatural (S09E15), based on the same internet meme, in which two disturbed young men commit murder in the name of a fictitious “Thinman,” invented as a publicity stunt by the Ghostfacers. There, however, Thinman served as an intentionally false cover for the killers’ underlying psychopathy. So far no one has blamed Supernatural for inducing anyone to kill.

This is not the first time that horror has had a direct effect on its audience. In American Exorcism (2002) Michael W. Cuneo traced the influence of The Exorcist on American exorcism rituals and belief in demonic possession and found that in the years following the film’s release the movie contributed to a spike in Americans’ belief that they or someone they knew was possessed by a demon. Similarly, ghost movies like Paranormal Activity and their non-fiction paranormal counterparts such as Ghost Hunters has apparently contributed to an increase in a belief in ghosts, at least in Britain, where belief has risen from 40 to 52 percent over the past decade, according to a 2013 survey.

What strikes me as unusual is the way that one of the girls specifically told police that her goal in stabbing her friend was the “prove skeptics wrong,” which is not something that one typically associates with those who take from fiction a belief in demonic possession, vampires, werewolves, or other traditional monsters. She is aping the language of fringe paranormal “investigators,” and here we seem to have crossed from someone who has taken fiction literally to someone who is also influenced by the (nonfiction) paranormal culture and its ideology. I’m reminded of the justification of the two men who defaced the Great Pyramid last year—they, too, said their reason was to prove a bizarre idea to a wider public, in their case that the pyramid was 10,000 years old.

It’s worth noting that within five months of Slender Man’s creation, it went from a piece of internet art to a subject of conspiracy discussion on Coast to Coast A.M. alongside other fringe topics like UFOs, ancient astronauts, and Bigfoot. It wasn’t only children who absorbed the fantasy.

Although 12-year-olds can’t be placed in the same mental category as adults, it is rather noteworthy that the girls’ bloody efforts to “prove” that a fictional supernatural creature had an underlying reality parallel to an extent what paranormal culture has argued since at least the time of Helena Blavatsky. The Theosophist wrote in the Secret Doctrine that the creators of speculative fiction had special access to the occult, which they accurately transmitted in fiction:
Our best modern novelists, who are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, begin to have, nevertheless, very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams […] [T]he clever novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen races of humanity.
Today there are groups who practice “Magick” who believe that H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, while fictional, nevertheless resulted from Lovecraft’s unconscious communion with beings from another dimension. Lovecraft assiduously reminded readers that his stories were pure fiction, but nevertheless many took the Mythos as a true account of a real ancient myth cycle.

To that end, horror fiction has not exactly made it easy to distinguish fact from fiction, and this is something that dates back to the dawn of the genre. Horror was not the only genre to make false claims for factual reality, but it is the most famous. Horace Walpole purposely published the very first horror novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as though it were a genuine Italian manuscript from centuries past. Famously, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre claimed to be a true story, as did the Blair Witch Project, which was one of the most elaborate multimedia world-building exercises of its era.

And of course urban legends all claim to be “true” stories even though they are little more than modern folklore.

Therefore, we should not be surprised that the Slender Man meme crosses the boundary between fiction and pseudo-fact. What makes it different than other urban legends is that we can mark the exact point of origin and know who created it and why. That isn’t the case for such urban legend figures as the “Hook-Man” or legendary creatures like the vampire.

Had the girls stabbed their friend to summon a demon or to engage in a vampire feast, the case would still have been shocking, but it wouldn’t have quite the same resonance. Even though demons, vampires, and the Slender Man have about the same amount of evidence in their favor, as a society we’ve decided that some myths carry weight and import, or are hallowed by tradition, while others are too recent or too tied to specific current concerns (in this case, the evil of the internet) and are therefore more threatening to our lives and families than others.

It strikes me that if the girls called it a human sacrifice to Hecate, infernal goddess of magic, or to Satan, the conversation would be very different than the same sacrifice made to Slender Man. The more interesting question is why that might be—and what that says about how our culture conceives of the realm of myth and legend. Satanic killing summons images of clandestine networks of dark seduction, though at a remove from daily life. But the internet is right there in your bedroom, making it uniquely frightening in a way that, apparently, other monsters no longer quite are. It can corrupt your children right under your nose!
23 Comments
Andy Bates
6/4/2014 06:33:17 am

John Hinckley Jr was inspired by the 1976 film "Taxi Driver" to assassinate Ronald Reagan. The 1968 Beatles Double White Album inspired the massacre of Sharon Tate.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
6/4/2014 08:47:25 am

I hadn't heard about this. Waukesha is only two counties away from me.

The reaction, though, reminds me of the film Monsters and Mazes...a friend of mine still has the pamphlet a local church gave his mother telling her that playing Dungeons and Dragons would make him lose touch with reality (it didn't).

Anyway, I hope the victim makes a quick and full recovery.

Reply
Mandalore
6/4/2014 09:11:49 am

That's what I was reminded of as well. Hopefully this will be an isolated incident that won't lead to the same witch hunt that put a good number of people in jail on very questionable evidence.

Reply
spookyparadigm
6/4/2014 08:51:41 am

I was going to write a longer thing about this, but you've hit some of the points I've been thinking about.

I don't blame the Something Awful or Creepypasta folks.

But at the same time, they are building on a long tradition of purposely hiding the line between fantasy and reality that is found most strongly in art about the supernatural or paranormal.

You mention the Blair Witch Project and the Creepypasta response namechecks Lovecraft. To that I'd add Welles' War of the Worlds adaptation and subsequent copycats that also caused panics or at least concerns (the two in South America caused riots, the excellent Buffalo one caused phone calls though no real harm), Lovecraft's Necronomicon specifically, and depending on how you view it, the Shaver Mysteries (that last may cross over into straight hoax). Lovecraft himself wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith that a weird tale works best when it is crafted with the care and versimilitude of a hoax.

This is why Slenderman worked, it took a page straight from Lovecraft with its fake news accounts, subtle glimpses, and so on.

Disturbed people find all sorts of reasons to commit violent acts, and as noted by you and others, this can be any sort of fiction or stimulus.

But stepping back from this specific case, and looking at Slenderman becoming real folklore, I do think that despite the intentions of the authors (I think this process is helped along by open source as in the Cthulhu Mythos case and the Shaver case), if you purposely blend fact and fantasy in your fiction, and your fiction is set in the murky world of paranormal and supernatural folklore and mysticism, then there is a very strong possibility some people will believe it to be real. More so than obvious fantastical tales where the line of fiction is more clearly drawn (set in a fictional world, set in the distant past or future; vs. being set here and now or in the recent past), and somewhat more so than mundane stories also assembled with hoax-like versimilitude (Sherlock Holmes does argue that this can happen).

If you don't want to be responsible for creating new folklore, don't purposely use the very attractive trick of blending fiction and fact. Again with the exception of Shaver, none of these authors were intending to really fool people outside of a story to entertain them. And yet history shows this will happen if you do it right.

Reply
Varika
6/4/2014 09:06:38 am

Even stories written with a setting of a completely different world come in for their share of True Believers. I'm reminded of a statement made by David Eddings, author of the Belgariad/Mallorean books (and the Elenium/Tamuli books) saying that his publisher wanted to print the Mrin Codex prophecy that drives the story, and Mr. Eddings said that he would only write the whole thing out if they would publish it on antique parchment paper, because he didn't want to deal with the people who would believe it was a real prophecy, despite the fact that it was an entirely fictional world.

That said, Slenderman also works because it comes from the deepest depths of the Uncanny Valley. Even knowing that it was a piece of art, the first time I saw it, I had nightmares for days. It is a very emotionally powerful image. I avoid Slenderman stuff like the plague because of that. I don't think the original artist could have avoided this particular thing becoming modern myth even if there had never been anything but one image.

I will also add that there was very definitely something else going on in those girls' lives behind this, something more than an Internet meme. Even if they truly believed it...they still WANTED to be part of something that required murder in the first place. I know they're not adult, but by 12, you know that's something that's not right.

Reply
spookyparadigm
6/4/2014 09:37:28 am

Concur on the last point. I don't think the fact-fiction effect has any impact on someone who is violent to that degree, they'll fixate on something. I'm thinking more of the chaos magickians that read spells out of the Simon Necronomicon. Or the impact of the various authors in the Shaver Mystery community on the development if UFO folklore.

It's the issue of convincing other, "normal" people it is real. I'm trying to think of many "obvious fictional" worlds or creations that ended up inducing real belief. I don't mean fannish behavior. While there may be people who somehow find spiritual value in Jedi teachings or who make up elvish names and backgrounds for themselves from Tolkien, its not like these creations escaped into the real world as folklore people actually think is real.

As for Slenderman, I found the first few Something Awful photoshop images nifty, but it never did much for me. Further, the style of writing that came with the burgeoning "mythos" (lots of named characters with Descriptive names in Capitals, too much overt worldbuilding) felt like post-White Wolf roleplaying game fiction writing. Clan Toreador, or the Torpor, or whatever. I seem to be in the distinct minority, for whenever I state I find Slenderman boring, and then I introduce someone to it, they curse at me for scaring them.

That said, I can relate to a fear-inducing primal image. Like many people, I had that reaction to the eyes on the Communion cover and some other images of Gray aliens. I got over it (more or less), but 25 years ago, I couldn't go near them without real chills.

Varika
6/4/2014 02:21:50 pm

Heh. I STILL have nightmares about Grey aliens, at 36, knowing full well that they do not exist. They seem to have taken on the role of devils for my subconscious. That is, they are what my mind comes up with to depict "there is something that is creeping you out but you do not know what." I get "there are Greys outside your window" from my brain. Like I said, this is despite knowing that there is no such thing and that they are DEFINITELY not outside my window.

That's usually when I turn off whatever I've been watching and reach for my party tunes so I can sleep...

Clint Knapp
6/4/2014 03:17:15 pm

It's a sad story, and there is obviously a great deal more wrong with the girl who came up with the idea than just finding a creepy meme on the internet. She explicitly cites the Creepypasta Wiki's page, which itself is even less-rigorous in asserting the reality of the Slender Man than the original material- which she would've been far too young to have seen while the story was being created. Hopefully the girls will get the treatment they need.

This whole Slender Man thing, like spookyparadigm above, just bores me. It's not a particularly well-written hoax, the photoshopping work is frankly absurd and amateurish, and it's really just a riff on the Hat Man with a little more attention to a back story- a creepy stalker-figure that may or may not kill you.

The fact that I didn't even hear about it until the iPad "game" was reviewed on X-Play might have something to do with my cynicism toward the whole production.

In the end, though, the blame has to fall on the parents and teachers for failing to recognize the child was mentally ill before this episode. One can rail against the terrors of the internet and the filthy minds of fiction writers, or block all the websites one wishes, but it's just a bandage- and bandages are never permanent.

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Bret Kramer link
6/4/2014 04:01:31 pm

Fictitious UFO close encounters created for a role-playing game were discovered to have been posted on a Ufologist site as real UFO encounters. The author of the plagiarized material was mostly flattered that his fakery was close enough to the untruth to pass muster.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dglist/conversations/topics/5524

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spookyparadigm
6/4/2014 05:32:01 pm

That's amazing!

Reply
.
6/4/2014 11:58:31 pm

its easy to do a Hollywood rewrite.
its done all the time. something that
is raw or authentic gets reworked...

666
6/5/2014 05:08:24 am

"its done all the time. something that
is raw or authentic gets reworked..."

Reminds me of the New Testament

spookyparadigm
6/4/2014 05:41:29 pm

So (spoilers for Delta Green, I guess) let me get this straight:

Lovecraft invents alien abduction stories in Whisperer in Darkness (tell me Whitley Strieber's upstate NY cabin in Communion isn't Akeley's), the same story that probably really does inspire Men in Black stories due to Albert Bender and Gray Barker

Delta Green squares that circle by making the Mi-Go the force behind the Grays

And real world UFO websites steal from DG to help prove the reality of alien abduction

That is, as I said, amazing. Or pathetic. Possibly both.

Reply
Stargazer
6/5/2014 05:10:27 am

I tried my best to prove that Strieber was right, but found out he was a swindler

Graham
6/5/2014 06:45:01 pm

The full text ripped from the Delta Green setting books can be found (amongst other places) at

https://it.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/newsufo2002/conversations/topics/3000

It appears to have first hit the web via a website called World of the Strange.

Reply
Gunn
6/5/2014 07:52:57 am

Jason: "Although 12-year-olds can’t be placed in the same mental category as adults, it is rather noteworthy that the girls’ bloody efforts to “prove” that a fictional supernatural creature had an underlying reality parallel to an extent what paranormal culture has argued since at least the time of Helena Blavatsky. The Theosophist wrote in the Secret Doctrine that the creators of speculative fiction had special access to the occult, which they accurately transmitted in fiction...."

From my viewpoint, this tragic story reveals no special access to the occult by the girls, but rather access to spirit entities normally associated with the occult. These girls were willing to engage in "evil" to please what they considered as being a living, unseen entity, and in doing so were drawing on the same inspiration or influence we call the occult.

The girls were engaged in occult-like behavior, but they were victims (as perpetrators) themselves and didn't realize that they were serving the interests of actual evil beings...right...impostors pretending to be Slender Man. Communion with Slender Man? No, spiritual wickedness from high places is more like it. (This is a typical Christian point of view.)

So that, in sacrificing to Slender Man, the two 12-year-old girls were unknowingly sacrificing to Satan, under the murderous influence of demons. Or is this merely inherent human wickedness, as seen in children? Which begs the question: is humanity in need of redemption because of an inherently wicked predisposition.

How is it that the normal dispositions of sweet, innocent children can become illogically twisted by self-delusion and murder? Or is it that children can be influenced by hurtful spirits, hanging around the image of a "living" Slender Man?

So, you want your children to be safe? Manage to know where they are--physically, but also on the internet. It's easy to let the TV or the computer be the baby-sitter, but there can be repercussions if the baby-sitter is an impostor.

Reply
Varika
6/5/2014 10:57:03 am

Well, the thing is, "innocence" doesn't actually, if you go all the way back to Genesis, mean goodness and light. It means a lack of knowledge of good and evil. I do believe that children are innocent--that's why they can do things that adults view as absolutely horrendous without even blinking. They haven't been taught right from wrong yet. They have not, in a sense, tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

These girls were old enough, close enough to adolescence, that something that gross a violation they should have absolutely known was wrong. I'm not going to go so far as to blame demons, mostly because I tend to view demons as people's dodge around responsibility.

There do seem to be some people that are just...born wrong, though. These girls remind me o the Mary Bell case in England in 1968. She and her friend ALSO went after other children, only there were two actual deaths involved in the Mary Bell case.

There was no Slenderman then to blame it on. As far as I know, there was no accusations of occult, either. They just....did it. For fun, apparently.

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Gunn
6/5/2014 01:46:30 pm

I agree to the point of these being "innocent" children, inasmuch as they should not be tried as adults. The thought is ridiculous. I think the court should recognize that a motivating sentiment in the attack consisted of fear...fear the two girls felt about Slender Man harming their families if the sacrifice were not made. I don't know what percent this played into the overall motivation, but I read news accounts that attributed part of their motivation to fear of Slender Man.

Obviously, these girls believed stories they read about Slender Man being real, so they acted as though he were real. Very innocent and childlike. I don't if they felt any kind of "spiritual" influence along the way, but in my opinion, this probably worked very subtly.

First they were intrigued and thrill-seeking about this perceived real demon-like personality, who could pop up on them at almost any time, according to witness on the Internet. Then the initial excitement turned to fear. This is the subtlety involved, if you believe in good and bad spirits...as millions of people do. Any number of people have heard the expression: "Fear is of the Devil."

Anyway, we can see that the girls ended up fearing this Internet spook who became real to them. They didn't attack the other girl "just for kicks." I'm saying that people--even "innocent" children, can attract evil and then be influenced by it. Which is why the internet, unattended, makes a poor choice for a baby-sitter.

Is this discussion, like, "fringe" horror for the scientific skeptic...or, is some horror, like, for real? Of course, that depends on whether angels, good and bad, are real, and if some spiritual "games" are for keeps, or only imagined. Well, Slender Man--whether real or imagined--crossed the line in the minds of these two girls and became dangerous in real life. Can bad spirits influence human behavior here on earth? I personally believe so.

I would suppose that Slender Man should be abolished, banned from the Internet, if he's boldly advocating the killing of your unsuspecting friends. Maybe his fear-mongering creator should be held publicly responsible in some way for the mischief (fear-based crime) foisted on that Wisconsin community.

Varika
6/5/2014 04:02:32 pm

I actually agree that they should not be tried as adults, but my reasoning is far simpler: why the HELL do we divide out children and adults in the penal system, if we're going to violate that whenever we feel like it? Either try everyone equally, or stop trying minors as adults entirely, it's that simple.

As for fear being the motivator, I actually sincerely doubt FEAR had anything to do with it. I don't think a belief in Slenderman really had anything to do with it, either. Slenderman was their excuse, not their reason. I'm pretty sure these two wanted the thrill of killing someone, and if they hadn't been able to point to Slenderman as their stalking horse, they'd point to the neighbor's dog or wearing synthetic fibers or eating Cheerios--whatever they thought would deflect adult censure. And it's working brilliantly for them: looka t your own reaction, that their behavior wasn't really THAT bad, they were just so SCARED.

No. Just no. We cannot let them escape taking responsibility for their actions, even if they're only 12. Children must not be allowed to remain "innocent" into adulthood; they must eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and know right from wrong. Letting them claim that they were DEFENDING themselves from SLENDERMAN....that's not self-defense, not even at 12. That's murder.

Gunn
6/6/2014 06:27:18 am

They were defending their families, not themselves. They were supposed to later join Slender Man in the forest, remember?

We can't get away from trying children as children and adults as adults. It's the system we have. The only problem I have with this present case is that the girls are only 12. If the girls were closer to adult age, it might be more acceptable, depending on the circumstances.

I'm not for letting the girls get away with their actions. I'm trying to understand their mentality, while also considering spiritual ramifications. If this girl that did the stabbing really believed in the existence of Slender Man, part of the Internet-package-deal was potential harm to one's family. This is a scare tactic commonly used by kidnappers, and for good reason...people, including children, can be led to believe harm will come to loved ones if they try to escape, don't do something, etc.

In my humblest of opinions, I don't think you can discount a DEGREE of actual fear this girl may have felt for her family, as a result of having a thrill-seeking fling with the faceless Slender Man.

Reply
skeptic
6/14/2014 03:52:58 pm

I think that most of these allegations about the reasons behind (witchcraft, believing they're vampires or pleasing fictional/legendary horror characters) are just smokescreens trying to hide some more mundane reason for the crime, like cheating or homosexuality, at the same type the perpetrators can plead insanity or something.

Reply
skeptic
6/14/2014 03:54:16 pm

At the same "TIME", not "type", gosh!

Reply
EP
6/26/2014 11:58:21 am

The talk of proving skeptics wrong is particularly odd since the attempted killing doesn't seem to have been meant to bring about anything supernatural. It's not like "the skeptics" think only Creepypasta creatures could make one child kill another.

But I suppose this goes under the heading of not putting children in the same mental category as adults...

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