Direct MP3 Download: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1934329/10237092-episode-16-slenderman.mp3
Secret Grasp is a podcast all about the mysterious and difficult to explain aspects of life. We cover topics relating to the paranormal, occult, psychic, spirituality, conspiracy theories, urban legends, cryptids, UFOs, aliens, ghosts, demons, and other strange occurrences. Visit us at www.secretgrasp.com
This episode is all about Slenderman.
In the next episode we’re going to talk all about Cults.
Intro music:
50 by tobylane
Link: https://pixabay.com/music/beats-50-1280/
License: https://pixabay.com/service/license/
Outro music:
Half Mystery by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5026-half-mystery
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Show Notes:
Hello and welcome to Episode 16 of Secret Grasp.
Secret Grasp is a podcast all about the mysterious and difficult to explain aspects of life.
We cover topics relating to the paranormal, occult, conspiracy theories, urban legends, cryptids, UFOs, aliens, ghosts, demons, and other strange occurrences.
You can find us on all of the major podcasting apps. All of our links are available on our website at secretgrasp.com
Slenderman
Originated as a creepypasta on the Something Awful forum by Eric Knudsen in 2009. The thread was a Photoshop contest in which users were challenged to “create paranormal images.” Modelled after Men in Black.
Since then, he’s become a pop icon. There’s been movies and video games made after him. There’s been tons of Slenderman creepypastas, fanart, and even cosplays. The character has taken on a life of his own.
And he even inspired the Enderman enemy in Minecraft. In Minecraft, Endermen are enemies that appear at night and steal blocks, teleporting around. They generally don’t attack the player unless you look at them. Then they become enraged and attack you.
Slenderman is depicted as a very tall and tall man, usually 8 to 14 feet tall, wearing a black suit, with a featureless white face. Sometimes he’s seen having tentacles coming out of his back. Sometimes he’s also said to be able to extend his arms out unnaturally far.
Most stories and accounts have Slenderman just kind of hanging out in the background. Although there are also stories of him abducting, stalking, or just traumatizing people. Especially children.
Basically Slenderman has come to be whatever people want him to be. Some people describe him as hanging or swinging from trees using his tentacles and all kinds of other accounts. These stories and legends build on themselves over time and generally make Slenderman more and more terrifying and powerful sounding.
Sense of calm around him. Something that goes back to vampire folklore. Hypnotise or mesmerize people that look into their eyes.
Near fatal stabbing o fa 12-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
I don’t remember this happening in Waukesha. So I guess Waukesha is now famous for 2 things. Darrell Brooks (allegedly) driving through the Christmas parade killing 6 people and injuring 62 others. Plus a couple girls stabbing someone because Slenderman told them to.
Victim was stabbed 19 times. Apparently one of the stabs to her chest was within a millimeter of her heart. Her two attackers were classmates.
From Wikipedia:
When questioned later by authorities, they reportedly claimed that they wished to commit a murder as a first step to becoming proxies for the Slender Man, having read about it online.[5] They also stated that they were afraid that Slender Man would kill their families if they did not commit the murder.[35] After the perpetrators left the scene, the victim crawled out of the woods to a roadway. A passing cyclist alerted authorities, and the victim survived the attack. Both attackers have been diagnosed with mental illnesses[36] but have also been charged as adults and are each facing up to 65 years in prison.[37] One of the girls reportedly said Slender Man watches her, can read minds, and could teleport.[5]
Experts testified in court that she also said she conversed with Lord Voldemort and one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. On August 1, 2014, she was found incompetent to stand trial and her prosecution was suspended until her condition improved.[38] On November 12, 2014, a doctor judged that her condition had improved enough for her to stand trial,[citation needed] and on December 19, 2014, the judge ruled that both girls were competent to stand trial.[39] In August 2015, the presiding judge ruled that the girls would be tried as adults.[40] They were tried separately.[41] On August 21, 2017, one of the girls, now 15, pleaded guilty to being a party to attempted second-degree homicide, but claimed she was not responsible for her actions on grounds of insanity.[42] Although prosecutors alleged that she knew what she was doing was wrong, the jury determined that she was mentally ill during the attack. She will spend at least three years in a mental hospital.[43][44] On December 21, Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren sentenced Weier, then 16 years old, to be hospitalized for 25 years from the date of the crime, which would keep her institutionalized until age 37.[45]
They said Slenderman had a mansion in a nearby national park that they would go to.
Apparently they had planned the murder for 6 months. Which is surprising over the course of 6 months they didn’t come across anything that said Slenderman wasn’t real. Shows how impressionable kids are.
From Wikipedia:
Moral panic and other incidents
The stabbing in Waukesha spawned a nationwide moral panic over Slender Man across the United States.[49][50] Parents across the nation became worried about the potential dangers that stories about Slender Man might pose to their children’s safety.[49][50] Russell Jack, the police chief of Waukesha, warned that the Slender Man stabbing “should be a wake-up call for all parents” that “the internet is full of dark and wicked things”—a warning which numerous media outlets publicized.[49]
After hearing the story, an unidentified woman from Cincinnati, Ohio, told a WLWT TV reporter in June 2014 that her 13-year-old daughter had attacked her with a knife, and had written macabre fiction, some involving the Slender Man, who the mother said motivated the attack.[51]
On September 4, 2014, a 14-year-old girl in Port Richey, Florida, allegedly set her family’s house on fire while her mother and nine-year-old brother were inside. Police reported that the teenager had been reading online stories about Slender Man as well as Atsushi Ōkubo’s manga Soul Eater.[52] Eddie Daniels of the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office said the girl “had visited the website that contains a lot of the Slender Man information and stories […] It would be safe to say there is a connection to that.”[53]
During an early 2015 epidemic of suicide attempts by young people ages 12 to 24 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Slender Man was cited as an influence; the Oglala Sioux tribe president noted that many Native Americans traditionally believe in a “suicide spirit”[54][55] similar to the Slender Man.[56][57] Other Sioux describe the “Big Man”[a] as a messenger or sign, warning that society is developing in a dangerous direction.[59]
A documentary film on the incident called Beware the Slenderman, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, was released by HBO Films in March 2016, and was broadcast on HBO on January 23, 2017.[60]
After the Waukesha stabbing
The Waukesha stabbing and the negative media attention it generated irreversibly altered the Slender Man legend and the online community surrounding it.[49][50] What had previously just been a creepy horror meme to most people suddenly acquired a new level of reality that most fans of Slender Man found horrifying.[49][50] Meanwhile, by around the same time, the Slender Man character had lost much of his original popularity.[49][50] Most of the original blogs that had once been devoted to Slender Man either shut down completely or became less popular.[49] Slender Man’s presence in mainstream popular culture also contributed to a decline in how frightening he seemed to many people.[49][50]
The late 2010s also saw an increase in benevolent portrayals of Slender Man, with many depictions of him from this period portraying him as an antihero who protects victimized children from bullies, although often by violent means.[50] In some portrayals of Slender Man from the late 2010s, he has a daughter named Skinny Sally, who is portrayed as a young girl covered in cuts and bruises.[50] Slender Man sometimes is portrayed carrying Skinny Sally on his shoulders protectively.[50] Lynn McNeill, assistant professor of folklore at Utah State University, observes that the increase in benevolent portrayals of Slender Man seems to have begun shortly after the stabbing in Waukesha and states that this trend towards a benevolent Slender Man may be a reaction by fans of the character to the violence of the stabbing.[50]
Despite the decline in popular interest in Slender Man, commercial adaptations of the character continued.[49][50] In 2015, the film adaptation of Marble Hornets, titled Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story, was released on VOD, where the character was portrayed by Doug Jones.[61] In 2016, Sony Pictures subsidiary Screen Gems partnered with Mythology Entertainment to bring a Slender Man film into theatres, with the title character portrayed by Javier Botet.[62]
The film generated considerable controversy soon after it was announced, with many accusing the filmmakers of trying to capitalize off the Waukesha stabbing.[50] Bill Weier, the father of Anissa Weier, stated, “It’s absurd they want to make a movie like this… All we’re doing is extending the pain all three of these families have gone through.”[50] The progressive advocacy group Care2 created an online petition, which received over 19,000 signatures, demanding that the film not be released, labelling the film “crass commercialism at its worst” and “a naked cash grab built on the exploitation of a deeply traumatic event and the people who lived it.”[50] Sony representatives insisted that the film was based on the fictional character that had become popular online and not on the Waukesha stabbing.[50]
Upon its release in August 2018, the film Slender Man, despite being declared a box-office bomb[49] and receiving both little marketing and overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics,[63][64][49] went on to gross several times its $10 million budget worldwide.[65] David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a D, writing “a tasteless and inedibly undercooked serving of the Internet’s stalest creepypasta, Slender Man aspires to be for the YouTube era what The Ring was to the last gasps of the VHS generation. But… there’s one fundamental difference that sets the two movies apart: The Ring is good, and Slender Man is terrible.”[66] Writing for The Verge, Carli Velocci called the Slender Man movie “a nail in the coffin of a dying fandom”.[49]
Possible causes:
Probably not real since he originated from a story.
I think he’s basically a tulpa. In the sigil magic episode I explained how strong the human mind is, how you can literally create things and make them real by focusing on them. That’s what I think happened with Slenderman. He’s basically become a deity.
Could also be a demon or spirit taking advantage of the slenderman persona. In the episode on demons I talked about how deceptive demons are, and how they can masquarade as dead relatives or anything else they want.
People are suggestible. Could just be trees or other regular objects. When you hear about a monster you subconciously start looking for it everywhere.
If you’ve made it this far and you’re liking the podcast, it’d be really cool if you subscribed. Whatever podcasting platform you’re using, there should be a little subscribe button that you can click. It’s totally free, and you’ll get new episodes as soon as they come out.
Also if you want to rate and review the podcast, it’d really help us out since we’re brand new. On Apple Podcasts, go to the podcast page and scroll to the bottom where it says Ratings and Reviews. Then leave a rating and a written review.
In the next episode, I’m going to talk about communicating with spirits.
Just a reminder as well that if you have a strange, creepy, or weird real life story you’d like to share on the show, you can email me. Secretgrasp at gmail.com. You can either send an MP3 file of yourself telling the story, or write it out for me to read on the show.
We’ll be in touch soon