When was slender man invented

News World Opinion Business. Share this —. Follow NBC News. It's important for all of us to be aware of what children are doing and try to provide a context for interpretation.

But it's perhaps easy to see why parents might be concerned. The rapid permeation of the meme, and the fundamentally innocuous nature of it, are not immediately apparent. McKean likens Slender Man to an urban myth about an unknown person who goes around daubing people's garden gates with red paint and returns to steal their children, pets or even household appliances. Yet unlike most such tales, developed and adapted over long periods, the origins of Slender Man are absolutely clear and very recent.

The character's very design, with its inscrutable blank face, was explicitly designed with a vagueness associated with stories of the past, like the universal bogeyman, blamed for mischief of all sorts. With massive mainstream media attention, the way the meme is used could change rapidly.

It is no longer just a thing of forums and blogs. But one thing is for sure - there will be other stories. Folklore doesn't die. The Digital Human - Slender Man. Dave Dick Illustration. Image source, Gerry Fletcher. Image source, Something Awful. What is Cthulhu? Fantasy creature invented by US horror writer HP Lovecraft , Cthulhu is an ancient creature, who "waits dreaming" under the sea: "A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings" First appeared in book The Call of Cthulhu: "It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway A user named Soakie was one of the first to identify the Slenderman as a potential tulpa, writing:.

And what happens when the pictures are no longer photoshops? One terrifying answer to this question emerged in May of in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when two 12 year-old girls allegedly enticed a third 12 year-old girl to follow them into the woods a location which figures prominently in the Slenderman mythology.

After doing so, they allegedly stabbed her 19 times in an attempt to prove their worth as Slenderman proxies. The victim survived, having crawled to a nearby roadside where she was discovered by a passing cyclist. She has since recovered.

They will probably go away and fade eventually. In addition to the attack on Payton, there have been numerous other crimes connected to the fictitious Slender Man, mostly involving young teens.

After the Wisconsin stabbing, a year-old Ohio girl—believed to be obsessed with Slender Man—attacked her mom with a knife. That same year, a year-old girl from Florida reportedly set her house on fire after reading about Slender Man. Good lord. Slender Man might be scary, but the impact of fake news—or in this case, fake urban-legend-inspired news—is even scarier.