"𝔉𝔦𝔫𝔡𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔱𝔯𝔲𝔱𝔥" creepypasta research, Slenderman & paranormal

"What Happens When the Pictures Are No Longer Photoshops?"

♱Parts of the book Contemporary legend. If you'd like to read the whole thing here is the link:

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/article/view/35103/38293

Contemporary Legend series 3, vol. 5 (2015): 62-76

"What Happens When the Pictures Are No Longer Photoshops?" Slender Man, Belief, and the Unacknowledged Common Experience

ANDREA KITTA East Carolina University

YOU never know when the perfect ethnographic moment will arrive. While attending a party that occurred shortly after the Slender Man stabbing incident, I witnessed a group of children playing. One child pulled his white t-shirt over his head, screaming "Look out! I'm Slender Man! I'm coming to get you!" as he blindly began chasing the other (now screaming) children around the yard. Upon catching his first victim, he linked arms with her and the two of them started screaming and chasing the other children as a team. I later asked the originator of the game who Slender Man was. He shrugged and said, "He's a bad man. He comes and gets you." Further discussion brought more children close by, all of whom voluntarily contributed to the conversation. As the group debated exactly who Slender Man was and what he looked like, they all were certain of a few things: he watched you, he would take you away (where or why was much debated), and he was tall, thin, wore a black suit, and didn't have a face. When I asked if they had read anything about him on the Internet, they all reported that they had not (but the older children with access to smartphones quickly looked him up) and they had not seen anything about him on television.3 When I asked where they had heard about Slender Man, they all shrugged, stating that everyone knows about Slender Man. One six-year-old girl patiently explained to me that he is "like the Boogeyman, but he lived in the woods, but he could be under your bed or in your closet."4 Slender Man is not only an Internet or popular culture phenomenon; certainly he is more than that.5 Despite his known origins on the Something Awful forum and early depictions, Slender Man has taken on a life of his own. While people continue to pay Slender Man homage on the Internet, Slender Man has a life outside the Internet in children's games, oral storytelling, and belief, highlighting a specific type of experience: the unacknowledged common experience. Slender Man is part of a larger narrative.

While there certainly is an element of collective subversive collaboration in the creation of Slender Man on the Something Awfulforum and other venues for creepypasta, there is a shared aesthetic and, at times, a shared experience that taps into something deeper than mere play. Just as Slender Man himself is complicated, so is belief in Slender Man.

As Jeffrey A. Tolbert (2013) has argued, Slender Man may be a type of reverse ostension where we have to create both the experience and the narratives. I would also argue that, at times, Slender Man is the name given to a shared experience which bridges both the experience centered hypothesis used by David Hufford (1989) with the cultural source hypothesis. Clearly there are incidents where the story comes first and the experience comes after, but we also see moments where a previous experience is attributed to Slender Man, a sort of reverse quasi-ostension. I would argue that either way, the experience still feels real. Belief, Experience, and Slender Man.

As Hufford (1982) has shown, American society has a "tradition of disbelief"; while it is traditional to believe in certain things, it is also traditional to not believe in certain things. Additionally, individuals regard the experiences of others to be up for questioning, while our own experiences are treated as dogma, or, as Hufford states more succinctly, "I know what I know, what you know, you only believe".