From meme to murder

A thought-form embodied, it is suggested, as a tulpa because of people’s beliefs in him, triggers two disturbed teenagers to murder

The Slenderman Mysteries

An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life Nick Redfern New Page Books 2018 Pb, 288pp, ilus, bib, $15.99, ISBN 9781632651129 The Slenderman (or “Slender Man”) began in June 2009 as a creepypasta (derived from

copypasta, itself derived from ‘cut and paste’) meme created by artist Eric Knudsen. It had been submitted to a Photoshop contest on the horror website

Something Awful, but went viral, inspiring other Slender Man stories and photos. This ‘fan fiction’ branched out into computer games and a YouTube webisode series entitled Marble

Hornets, resulting in an increasingly ornate mythology. Knudsen had tapped into a psychologically potent image: a faceless, tall, thin, dark-suited, tentacled entity, a bogeyman influenced by sources as diverse as HP Lovecraft, the Men in Black, the Shadow People and the Mad Gasser of Matoon. [See FT317:30–37]

In 2014, two 12-year-old girls, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, of Waukesha, Wisconsin, conspired to murder their best friend, Payton Lautner, as a bizarre sacrifice. They had read about Slender Man on the website

Creepypasta, where it was said that he was most often seen in the woods around suburban populations, preying primarily upon children. Both girls had experienced hallucinations of the Slender Man, and Geyser claimed to have had telepathic communications with the creature. Their sacrifice of Lautner was intended to convince the Slender Man to spare them and their families. The girls led Lautner into a nearby state forest, and Geyser stabbed her 19 times with a fiveinch steak knife; miraculously, she survived. The crime garnered worldwide notoriety. Geyser and Weier stood trial for attempted murder and were sentenced to 40 and 25 years respectively.

The crime was tragic, yet rich with psychological, sociological, criminological and folkloric complexity. In

The Slenderman Mysteries, Nick Redfern instead focuses on the less prosaic paranormal elements, principally the notion that the Slender Man may have literally acquired a life of his own; i.e. that he is a tulpa, or thought-form, given physical embodiment by virtue of enough people believing in him. As evidence of this, Redfern points to an episode of Coast to

Coast AM that aired on the late evening and early hours before the attack on Lautner. The theory is that because it reached a massive audience, this broadcast “helped cause the event,” which is an awkward – not to mention irresponsible – assertion: the perpetrators had clearly planned the murder before the episode aired. Redfern uses this Slender Man-as-tulpa notion as a springboard to propose, without much evidence, that the Internet may have, à la Skynet or The Matrix, developed its own consciousness, of which the Slender Man is one manifestation, a fiction that has become magically ‘entangled’ with reality.

Another theory is that the Slender Man existed before 2009, and that Knudsen merely tapped into something that was already there, which is like proclaiming that Stephen King invented scary clowns. Knudsen wasn’t harnessing an objective entity, but reflecting our collective fear of the unknown. His facelessness suggests a being that rests uneasily just beyond the realm of comprehension; faces generally indicate whether one intends harm or not; if something is faceless, its intentions remain inscrutable. Similarly, his tentacles suggest slithering snakes, or creatures of the deep. There’s also the standby dark mansion, dark woods and the familiar ‘taker of children’ theme, a trope that stretches back from Grimm’s fairy tales to the beginnings of storytelling; discussing the potency of the Slender Man mythology, Redfern dutifully refers to the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

In chapters where Redfern directs his attention to this reality (in his discussions of the Slender Man’s origins and influences, or its echoing of common folkloric themes), The Slenderman Mysteries substantially improves, yet even here Redfern’s research – comprising primarily a handful of interviews with other writers or experiencers – is cursory. The real world attempted murder by psychologically damaged teens and other Slender Man-related events, introduced approximately one-third of the way through, remain more mystifying than Redfern’s speculative, supernatural ‘mysteries’. They should be central to his book, yet, given the target audience, this precipitating event is almost begrudgingly raised and then quickly discarded. Redfern is at his best when he quits the armchair – or Internet – investigating, and rather fruitless speculations and contemplation of coincidences and conspiracies, and actually pauses to consider the more chilling real-world causes and implications of the phenomenon. One finds only hints of a more fascinating and disturbing book within.