6 Unsettling Facts About Slender Man

There are some legendary monsters, like vampires and trolls, that date back hundreds of years. These creatures were often meant to scare children, enforce cultural norms, explain the unexplainable, or a little bit of all these things. They have persisted and evolved across time, altered by Hollywood and memory along the way.

This is not the case for Slender Man. Created on an Internet forum in 2009, this monster is a digital creature through and through. But just like zombies and werewolves, he has become part of modern-day folklore, inspiring various video games, stories, and even gruesome crimes. 

And just like the best and most terrifying kind of monster, it’s uncannily easy to imagine you’ve seen him out of the corner of your eye, especially if you find yourself walking in the woods at dusk.

1. Slender Man was created by a Something Awful user in 2009
2. Slender Man was inspired by Stephen King, William S. Burroughs, and more
3. Slender Man has inspired fiction, video games, and movies
4. He is sometimes said to have supernatural powers
5. Slender Man has been connected to fairy folklore
6. Slender Man inspired multiple real-world violent crimes

Slender Man was created by a Something Awful user in 2009

Slender Man first emerged into cultural consciousness in a post on Something Awful, a website that started as a blog and evolved into a forum where users often shared scary stories and images.

On June 10, 2009, Something Awful user Eric Knudsen posted two black-and-white photos of children. A closer look revealed a towering, rail-thin, faceless man lurking behind them. Knudsen—who posted under the name Victor Surge—had created the images in response to a challenge asking users to share the scariest edited photos possible.

Knudsen added eerie captions to the images. “‘We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them…’ -1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead,” reads the text beneath the first one, which shows a group of children walking down a street with Slender Man behind them. 

The second shows a group of several children smiling at the camera, while kids behind them gather around the tall figure. “One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze,” the caption reads. “Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man’. … Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. – 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.”

Thanks to the chilling nature of these captions and images, Knudsen's creature took on a life of its own. The legend of Slender Man had been born.

Slender Man was inspired by Stephen King, William S. Burroughs, and more

In a 2011 interview, Knudsen reflected on some of the inspirations behind Slender Man and cited “H.P Lovecraft, Stephen King (specifically his short stories), the surreal imaginings of William S. Burroughs, and couple games of the survival horror genre; Silent Hill and Resident Evil.” 

Other influences he named were Zack Parsons’ fiction series That Insidious Beast, King’s short story “The Mist,” tales of “shadow people,” and the cryptid Mothman. His goal, he added, was to create “something whose motivations can barely be comprehended, and [which caused] unease and terror in a general population.”

Slender Man has inspired fiction, video games, and movies

Slender Man began inspiring interpretations and stories almost immediately after Knudsen made his first post. Just 10 days after the post was shared, three college film students shared a collection of short videos filmed in the style of The Blair Witch Project. These told the story of how Slender Man disrupted a college student’s film project, and were instrumental in shaping the monster’s legacy. 

By 2012, the creature was the subject of several video games, including Slender: The Eight Pages. He was also incorporated into a version of Minecraft, became popular on 4chan—the site that launched the Backrooms internet legend—and was given his own page on the horror story site Creepypasta. In 2016, the documentary Beware the Slenderman traced the monster's origins and legacy, and in 2018, he was the subject of a horror film called Slender Man.

He is sometimes said to have supernatural powers

Slender Man is generally described as an uncannily tall man wearing a suit. Famously, he also has no face, and he often possesses long, tentacle-like limbs. Across different stories, film series, and more, he has been said to possess various powers, including teleportation and mind control. 

Sometimes said to be able to stretch his height from six to 15 feet tall, he can supposedly induce paranoia, coughing fits, and nosebleeds in people investigating him or coming too close to him, at least according to some stories. Typically seen in the woods, he is sometimes said to be able to fill cameras, TVs, and other electronics with static when he is nearby.

Slender Man has been connected to fairy folklore

Slender Man has been studied extensively as an example of how folklore can be created and spread in the digital era.

“Slender Man ‘qualifies as folklore because the stories, the beliefs, the images—all of these cultural artifacts—are circulating entirely in a word-of-mouth culture, person to person,” said Lynne McNeill, an assistant professor of English at Utah State University. 

According to McNeill, Slender Man is a perfect monster for our modern era because he tends to lurk in the background unnoticed—something technology does all the time.

“You see a lot of surveillance culture,” she said. “He’s watching. He’s rarely attacking in the pictures —he’s standing in the background watching. It sort of reminds you of how Amazon is constantly tracking you online and then reaching for you, seeming like a business, but maybe with this scary wilderness of danger and intrigue.”

Slender Man has also been linked to much older creatures, including fairies, who were often blamed for kidnapping children in medieval and early modern stories—just like Slender Man. “It definitely draws on kind-of common threads seen in old mythology and folklore, and that kind of stuff,” said researcher Vivian Asimos of Slender Man’s connection to older legends. “You see these connective threads. He’s always in the forest, for instance. Which is where a lot of the evil fairies lurk.”

Knudsen also linked Slender Man to ancient creatures of yore. “Before you had angels and succubi, and then ghosts and spirits, today we have shadow people and inter-dimensional beings,” he said. “The Slender Man, and other newly created entities, are just the newest addition in the progression of a long, and very real, human tradition.” 

Still, some folklore purists have pushed back against the idea of including Slender Man in the same category as legendary monsters who have stood the test of time.

Slender Man inspired multiple real-world violent crimes

In 2014, Slender Man made his way off the screen and into the real world in a very horrific way. 

On May 31 of that year, two 12-year-old girls named Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser brought their friend Payton “Bella” Leutner into the woods of Waukesha, Wisconsin. There, the girls held her down, and Geyser stabbed her 19 times.

Leutner survived, and the girls were charged as adults. It turned out that Weier and Geyser believed that Slender Man was real and lived in the Wisconsin woods. They claimed that they had conducted the stabbing to please the monster. 

“I didn’t want to do this,” Geyser told a police officer during an interrogation. “I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t...I didn’t want to find out what would happen if we didn’t.” According to police, Geyser claimed she believed it was “necessary” to kill Leutner so she and Weier could go live in Slender Man’s mansion in the woods. 

In another tape, Weier told officers Geyser suggested they go searching for Slender Man to become his “proxies.” She also said she was “excited because I wanted proof that he existed because there were a bunch of skeptics out there saying he didn’t exist.”

Geyser was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and was sentenced to 40 years in a psychiatric hospital. She was released to a group home in 2025, but attempted to escape it that same year and was sent back to a facility. Weier, meanwhile, was diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and shared psychotic disorder and was sentenced to 25 years in psychiatric care, but was released under supervision in 2021. 

Just a week after Geyser and Weier’s crime, a 13-year-old girl living in Ohio attacked her mother with a knife, an incident her mother blamed on her daughter’s interest in Slender Man. And a few months later, a 14-year-old girl set her Florida house on fire, allegedly to please Slender Man. 

These crimes remain the most notorious real-world incidents connected to Slender Man. Of course, across time, criminals have frequently mimicked both fictional monsters and real serial killers; Slender Man is just one of the latest to join their terrifying ranks.