There's a picture saved on my phone of a raccoon standing upright next to a cooler, and I cannot tell you where it came from.
Not "I forget who sent it." I mean it has no origin. I went looking, twice, using the reverse image search that is supposed to settle exactly this, and what came back was several thousand copies of the same raccoon at several thousand slightly different widths, and not one of them was first. Not one.
You can see the history on the thing if you look at it long enough, which I have, more than is reasonable. There's a strip of somebody's status bar across the top. So, a screenshot. Underneath the caption it currently has, there's a fainter caption in a different font that somebody covered up rather than removed, so it's a screenshot of a screenshot with an opinion added. The whole image has that grey-green mange around the lettering that a JPEG gets when it's been saved and re-saved and re-saved, because every save throws away a bit more of the picture and keeps a bit more of the damage, and after about the fortieth pass the raccoon's face has weather in it.
(Nobody has ever explained to me why the phone's default sharing behavior is to hand you a slightly worse copy every single time, and I've decided not to find out, the same way I've decided not to find out what's in the back of the freezer. There is an answer. It is engineering. It will not improve my week.)
The caption it has now asserts something about the raccoon that I am confident is not true. Flatly untrue, actually.
The caption it had before, under the current one, might have been the true thing. Can't read it. Somebody made a decision about that in maybe 2019 and then the decision traveled, and now every person who receives this raccoon receives it with the second caption, which is at this point simply what the raccoon means. Settled, apparently.
Anyway. A picture with no first copy isn't a strange thing. It's most pictures, and I only noticed because of the raccoon.
June 10, 2009, in a Photoshop thread on the Something Awful forums
The thread is a contest. Users are invited to take ordinary photographs and doctor them into paranormal ones, which is a game the internet had been playing for a while by then and which mostly produces exactly what you'd expect: orbs, a lady in a window, a face in a hedge. You know the genre.
A user posting as Victor Surge uploads two black and white images of children. It's a Wednesday.
In the first, a group of kids in a playground, there's a tall thin figure standing at the back in a dark suit, arms too long, no face. In the second, taken outside what the caption calls a library, the same figure is standing among children who are walking away from it.
And the part that matters, more than the figure does, is what came underneath them. He posted the pictures with text attached, written as if they'd been recovered from somewhere and somebody had been keeping records.
The two captions, which are doing all of the work
The first one, in full:
"We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…"
"1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead."
And the second:
"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'…Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence."
"1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986."
Look at what's in there. A date, a named library, a named photographer with a disappearance date attached to her down to the day, a fire, and a chain of custody, which is the detail I keep going back to, because "actual photograph confiscated as evidence" implies there's a file somewhere, and a case number, and a person whose job it was to put this in a box.
The figure itself is fine. It's a tall guy with no face, and the internet had tall guys with no faces already.
The archive is the invention. He wrote the captions in the voice of the person who came second, which is to say the voice of somebody sorting through what was left, and the effect of that is you don't arrive at the story, you arrive after it, at the paperwork. Every horror writer alive knows this trick and most of them use it for a paragraph. He used it for two sentences and then went to bed. Then he was done.
Also, "presumed dead" is doing something a bit unfair, and I want it noted. A photographer would be presumed dead only if the photographer had been searched for. The search isn't in the caption anywhere. You supply that yourself, without being asked, in about a second.
Ten days later, somebody points a camcorder at it
The thread does what threads do. Other users start posting their own Slender Man photographs, then their own accounts, and within about a week the character has a set of attributes nobody voted on: he's associated with children, he's associated with forests, he's taller in some tellings than others, and looking at him is bad for you.
On June 20, 2009, ten days after the original post, a college student named Troy Wagner uploads the first video of a YouTube series called Marble Hornets, made with Joseph DeLage and Tim Sutton. Found footage. A film student goes through old tapes from an abandoned student project and there's a figure standing at the edge of the frame that shouldn't be in the shot. By 2013 the series had over 250,000 subscribers and roughly 55 million views.
Marble Hornets is where a lot of what people now think of as canon actually got built, and none of it was in the captions. The static that corrupts a recording when he's near. The business about what happens to people who go looking. All of it gets absorbed backwards into the character as though it had been there in 1983, which of course was also never there.
Nobody is in charge. So you have a fictional figure acquiring a canon the way a building acquires a fire code, which is to say incrementally, by committee, in response to things that keep happening.
The word for all this came from copy and paste
The genre this lives in is called creepypasta, and the etymology is the least frightening thing you will read this year.
There was already a word, "copypasta," for a block of text that gets copied and pasted around the internet until everyone has seen it. Somebody around 2007 on 4chan attached "creepy" to the front for the scary ones. No deeper than that. The most successful horror form of the last twenty years is named after a clipboard function, by way of a noodle. Pasta. Truly.
Which tells you something real about the form, actually. What defines a creepypasta is how it travels. The text has to survive being pasted somewhere with the formatting stripped and the author's name gone. Anything that only works with a byline attached does not make it out of the first repost. It just stops.
Slender Man is the most successful one there has ever been, and by 2010 he had a wiki, games, a fan mythology of "proxies" and symbols, and an enormous body of amateur video, essentially none of it made by the person who made him.
Eric Knudsen, who is an unusual case, because he exists
This is where it comes apart from every other piece of folklore on this site.
We know who did it. There's a name.
Victor Surge is Eric Knudsen. He's a real, locatable, living person who posted two doctored photographs on a Wednesday, and he registered the character for copyright in 2010, and Sony's Screen Gems later acquired the motion picture rights from him. When the 2018 film went into production, the credit read "based on the character created by Eric Knudsen." Which is accurate.
Try that with anything else in this category. Nobody has the receipt for the Wendigo, and nobody is ever going to turn up with the paperwork on the hitchhiker who isn't in the back seat when you get to the address. Folklore's defining feature, the one every textbook leads with, is that it belongs to a group rather than to an author, and the way it usually gets there is that the author is lost, which takes generations and cannot be hurried.
Slender Man got there in about ten days, with the author still standing right there watching it happen, holding a copyright registration for a thing that had already stopped being his in any sense that anybody using it would recognize.
Knudsen has been graceful about all of this, and reluctant to say much. Fair enough.
Waukesha, Wisconsin. May 31, 2014.
On the morning of May 31, 2014, three twelve-year-old girls were together after a sleepover in Waukesha, a city west of Milwaukee. Two of them, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, led the third, Payton Leutner, into a wooded park. There, Geyser stabbed her nineteen times. Weier had helped plan it and urged her on.
Leutner was left in the woods. She got herself out to the edge of a road. A passing cyclist found her there and called for help.
She survived. Two of the wounds were close to fatal: one missed a major artery by a margin a surgeon later described as narrower than a human hair, and another went through her diaphragm, her liver and her stomach. She was in hospital for a week, and went back to school that September.
The two girls said they had done it for Slender Man. They had read about him online for months. They believed he was real, that he would kill their families if they refused, and that if they went through with it he would take them to live with him.
Both were charged as adults. Both were found not criminally responsible for their actions by reason of mental illness, and were committed to psychiatric institutions instead of being sent to prison.
Morgan Geyser was diagnosed in October 2014 with early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She had been having visual and auditory hallucinations since early childhood, before she had ever heard of the character. She pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide, was found not criminally responsible, and on February 1, 2018 was committed for forty years, the maximum term available. She was granted conditional release to a group home in 2025, removed her monitoring bracelet in November of that year and left, was found the next day in Illinois, and had her conditional release revoked in December 2025.
Anissa Weier was assessed as having a shared delusional disorder, described in court by a forensic psychologist as delusions she took on from Geyser, alongside persistent depression. She pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide as a party to a crime, a jury found her not criminally responsible, and on December 21, 2017 she was committed for twenty-five years. She was granted supervised release in 2021.
Payton Leutner spoke publicly for the first time in 2019, at seventeen, in an interview with ABC. She talked about what she still carried from it, including sleeping with a pair of broken scissors near her. She also said she had become interested in going into medicine, and that she wanted to put it behind her and live an ordinary life. Her mother, Stacie Leutner, had asked the court not to make her testify.
What the coverage did to three families
HBO's documentary Beware the Slenderman, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, premiered in March 2016 and was broadcast on January 23, 2017. It was made with the cooperation of both attackers' families and is largely about two children with untreated psychiatric illness and the adults who did not see it in time.
In August 2018, Sony released a horror film called Slender Man. Sony said it was not about the stabbing, and it isn't. That was never the objection.
Anissa Weier's father, Bill Weier, asked local theatres not to show it. He called it distasteful and said it was popularising a tragedy, and the sentence of his that has stayed with me since I read it is this: "All we're doing is extending the pain all three of these families have gone through." Marcus Theatres declined to screen the film in Milwaukee and Waukesha. A petition against its release gathered more than 19,000 signatures.
Three families. That count is the part that gets dropped. The reporting on this case has spent eleven years attaching a girl's name to a piece of internet horror she had no interest in, and attaching two other girls' names to the worst thing that will ever be true about them, at an age when their brains were not finished. All three sets of parents have had to watch the search results.
The folklorists took it seriously, and their argument is not the one you'd expect
There's an obvious reading here. It's that Slender Man is a hoax that got out of hand, and that the interesting question is how people came to believe a made-up thing.
That's not what the scholarship says.
Andrew Peck's paper "Tall, Dark, and Loathsome," published in the Journal of American Folklore in 2015, argues that Slender Man is a legend cycle in the full technical sense, and that the digital setting doesn't disqualify it but explains its speed. Folklore has always been defined by variation and by performance in front of a community that pushes back. Somebody tells a version, somebody else says no, in the one I heard he was outside the window, and the story adjusts. That's the mechanism. Peck's point is that a comment thread does that in an afternoon and a hearth does it in a generation, and it is otherwise the same process.
Jeff Tolbert has a term for the specific move that started it, which I like enormously: reverse ostension. Ostension is when people act out a legend they've inherited. The reverse is when people manufacture the artifacts of a legend that was never inherited, the recovered photograph and the missing photographer and the fire at the library, so that a tradition appears to have existed all along. Knudsen wrote the debris a monster would leave behind, and then a great many other people wrote the monster to fit the debris.
Shira Chess has made the related argument that the whole thing is a collective authorship experiment that happens to look like a ghost. Which it is.
None of which is a comfortable finding, exactly. It means the thing that produced this figure is the ordinary machinery by which people have always made stories together, running at a speed it has never run at before, with nothing built into it to slow it down.
The raccoon, and who made it
I still have the picture. Not deleting it. It's genuinely funny, and by now I'm attached to the archaeology of the thing, the buried caption and the mange around the letters and the strip of somebody's battery indicator from a phone that was discontinued years ago.
But I know what I'd have to do to find out who took it, and it can't be done. The origin wasn't hidden, it was distributed, into a few thousand small acts of cropping and captioning and forwarding, none of which was authorship and all of which were, and the raccoon that arrives on your phone this afternoon is the sum of every one of them with the arithmetic thrown away.
Slender Man has an author. That's the strangest fact in this entire piece and it changes nothing at all, because what reached two sick children in Wisconsin in 2014 was not the two photographs Eric Knudsen posted. It was five years of other people's additions, each one small, each one made by somebody who was only playing, and by the time it reached Waukesha nobody anywhere along that chain could look at their own contribution and find anything in it worth being sorry for.
A story with no author still got made, by everybody, one edit at a time, in pieces too small for any single person to feel the weight of, and that is the reason to be careful about what you add to one.
