Slender Man Now Linked to Ludicrous Media Hysteria

I swear this is
an actual headline:

I spotted that on the website of KMJ, a Fresno radio operation,
but the story is circulating far more widely, since
it’s syndicated
by ABC News. (And yes, it was ABC that provided the headline.)
Here’s the lede:

A fictional horror creature popularized by
Internet memes is now linked to three violent crimes.

A week after two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls allegedly stabbed
their friend 19 times to honor Slender Man, more real-life
connections to the spooky character are emerging.

A man accused of killing two cops and a civilian before committing
suicide with his wife in Las Vegas on Sunday often dressed up in
costume as Slender Man, a neighbor told KTNV.

And a Cincinnati mom told WLWT she thinks her daughter may have
been inspired by Slender Man when she attacked her with a knife in
their kitchen, wearing a hood and white mask.

At that point the piece calms down a bit with some quotes from
Andrew Peck, a folklorist who’s less prone to panicky language.
Sadly, not all the coverage since last week’s stabbing has had the
benefit of Peck’s pacifying influence. As Bryan Alexander
writes at Infocult, this has become

a fearsome digital media story. Slenderman is a “demon
creature” spawned by the internet,
according to the Associated Press. An Australian site
refers to “an internet horror-cult that almost caused a
killing.” That’s probably the most extreme statement. Fox News

dwells on the “internet monster”.
For NBC and
the LA Times the internet meme “inspired” the
stabbings….eCanada
Now wades in further: “the girls in question became convinced
the stories of Slenderman were true and were prepared to make a
blood sacrifice of their friend in order to become proxies for the
creepy thin man. Their plight is raising concerns about the impact
of websites such as creepypasta.com which are the principal sources
for information on the paranormal.”

For the record: Creepypasta.com hosts horror
fiction. Saying it’s one of the “principal sources for information
on the paranormal” is like calling H.P.
Lovecraft the nation’s leading authority on the occult. Then
again, the boundary between alleged fact and overt fiction can get
pretty hazy sometimes. Duane Dudek of the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel
notes how one local TV station covered the
Wisconsin stabbing:

on “Studio A” on WITI, [Ted Perry] said the story
will “chill you to the bone.” But he probably wished he could take
back speculation about whether Slender Man “really exists or not,
I’m not sure at this point.”

If you’re not familiar with the Slender Man mythos, you should
read Scott Shackford’s Reason piece about
it, published in the innocent days of 2013, before he came to life and started killing
people became a media sensation. And be sure to check out
the rest of Alexander’s Infocult
post, which explores how the character’s roots in Web-based
storytelling give him a particularly creepy feel. “These exist in a
deeply social environment, getting shared, remixed, embedded,
commented upon, edited, and spread around again,” he writes. “There
are no clear boundaries around the tale, as there would be for,
say, a Hollywood movie or a novel, making the mythos more
mysterious. Users participate in many ways, which is how myths and
folklore have always spread. The digital architecture speeds up
this process and renders both process and results far more
accessible than oral stoytelling does. The internet platform or
style which made the mythos successful also makes an
anti-technology backlash more likely.”

Finally, here’s an argument that Slender Man has just been
misunderstood: