Write to Me About Slenderman and You!

[Comet]

Hey everybody, I'm doing a mini study on Slender Man/ Slenderman or however you want to spell it.

With that in mind, I'd like to hear from the Internet on the matter, so I come to you with a set of topics I'd like you to touch on in your answers if you want. You can be as brief or as verbose as you like, though verbosity is definitely encouraged. The main thing I'm looking for is a human touch to go along with my more academic or 'boring' research data.

So, what's your relation with the slenderman mythos? Use the following topics as guidelines, or not if you find them too restrictive:

-How and when did you find out about slenderman? Did a friend or other person tell you about it or did you find out about it on your own? Did you find out about it online or offline?
-What was your first contact with slenderman like? A scary story, a video series on YouTube, a photo you really hope is photoshopped or something else?
-How did you react (or are still reacting) to slenderman? Were you briefly unnerved, still scared witless to this day or did you perhaps laugh the whole thing off without much more thought?
-How about your friends or other people close to you? Do you have any interesting stories about their reaction to this phenomenon?

The form of your answer is up to you. I'm just really keen to hear about your individual experiences with slenderman and the emotions that went along with it.

Drop your answer right here in the thread or PM me if you prefer. You can even ask me, via PM, for an e-mail to submit your answer to if you happen to have a friend who'd like to share his thoughts without the forum in between.

Discuss, write some exciting texts. Thanks in advance for anyone interested in helping a uni student out :smallsmile:

[Winter_Wolf]

So, what's your relation with the slenderman mythos? Use the following topics as guidelines, or not if you find them too restrictive:

-How did you find out about Slenderman? Did a friend or other person tell you about it or did you find out about it on your own? Did you find about it online or offline?
-What was your first contact with slenderman? A scary story, a video series on YouTube, a photo you really hope is photoshopped or something else?
-How did you react (or are still reacting) to slenderman? Were you briefly unnerved, still scared witless or did you perhaps laugh the whole thing off without much more thought?
-How about your friends or other people close to you? Do you have any interesting stories about their reaction to this phenomenon?


Well, I first heard about Slenderman on these forums, to the best of my recollection. I don't even remember when, it's like air I suppose, in that you become aware of its existence at some point, but you couldn't rightly recollect just when that was.

The first visual was the images on Something Awful forum, and I thought that they were very well done. By the time I found out about it, Marble Hornets had quite a few episodes up on Youtube, and I watched the whole first season with anticipation. I thought I was fine, until I finished devouring everything I could get hold of at about two or three in the AM.

We have some skeletal trees outside my bedroom window, and a sad little street light that doesn't so much illuminate the darkness as illuminate itself and cast a lot of weird shadows. Don't have actual useful curtains, just those horizontal blinds that you can peer outside when lying in bed and be completely unobstructed looking in or out, by someone standing on the deck. The architectural design of this place is abysmal at best. :smallannoyed: I have poor night vision, poor eyesight in general, and a very active imagination. It wasn't so much what I did see when I looked out the window into the darkness, as what I imagined I might see that kept me from getting sleep on the first night of delving into the Slenderman thing.

Then again, I love the feeling of being frightened, and I've gotten a pretty heavy tolerance for the weird over the years, so the reaction I had to Slenderman was quite the surprise. It's strange how the simple things can sometimes just hit you just right. The feeling wore off all too quickly, though. Sadly Slendy has become so familiar that I'm just not impressed with him/it anymore. At this point if he did show up to me one night, I'd probably just ask him, "where my money, fool?"

[Sholos]

I don't remember when I first heard about it, but it was on a forum somewhere. Some creepypasta thread thing. I looked it up, and was thoroughly unimpressed. Then again, I have been thoroughly unimpressed with every piece of creepypasta I've ever seen.

[SDF]

Think I heard about it initially on here actually. Most of my exposure is Marble Hornets, but I did read the initial SA thread. I liked the story, and it gave me some good ideas for WoD games. I wasn't paranoid or freaked out by it, though. My girlfriend refuses to watch it with me. When I joked about dressing as Slendy and staring through her window she promised it would end in a groin kick and breakup.

[Savannah]

-How and when did you find out about slenderman? Did a friend or other person tell you about it or did you find out about it on your own? Did you find out about it online or offline?

I heard somewhere online (no clue where, sorry) that this Marble Hornets thing was a pretty cool horror thing, so I decided to go look it up. I don't think I even knew it was a video at the time.


-What was your first contact with slenderman like? A scary story, a video series on YouTube, a photo you really hope is photoshopped or something else?

Marble Hornets. 2am. With bedroom windows open to a tree-lined street at my back. ....yeah.

It actually took me several months after watching Marble Hornets (it was totally up by the time I watched it) and loving it to realize there was other stuff, too. I read all or almost all of the thread that spawned him, but haven't really seen anything more since then.


-How did you react (or are still reacting) to slenderman? Were you briefly unnerved, still scared witless to this day or did you perhaps laugh the whole thing off without much more thought?

Well, the first time (see above) was pretty creepy, not necessarily because of Slendy himself, but more Slendy + late at night + living in the right sort of area for him + open window. I did look over my shoulder between every video :smalltongue: I think he's quite creepy, but I'm not really bothered by him, as I don't think he actually exists (especially since reading the thread where he was created). I do have plans to use him or something similar in a roleplaying game...


-How about your friends or other people close to you? Do you have any interesting stories about their reaction to this phenomenon?

Family was decidedly unimpressed. But then, I'm the only one there who likes horror.

If you want more info, feel free to ask.

If you don't mind, I'd really like to read whatever writeup you do on the project, as I'm also really interested in Slenderman.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

I've seen one of the later videos, and a bunch of the pictures and other documentation. None of which I found particularly scary. My sister watched a lot more of the videos, though, but she says they weren't that bad. Then again, my sister is almost impossible to actually scare.

[Admiral Squish]

-How and when did you find out about slenderman? Did a friend or other person tell you about it or did you find out about it on your own? Did you find out about it online or offline?
-What was your first contact with slenderman like? A scary story, a video series on YouTube, a photo you really hope is photoshopped or something else?
-How did you react (or are still reacting) to slenderman? Were you briefly unnerved, still scared witless to this day or did you perhaps laugh the whole thing off without much more thought?
-How about your friends or other people close to you? Do you have any interesting stories about their reaction to this phenomenon?

-I found out about slendy when a person mentioned it in one of my homebrew threads on this forum. We were discussing monsters to be made for the project, and a slendy-like monster was brought up. Curious, I headed off to investigate.
-I started with a few pages of the something awful thread. Then I moved up to marble hornets before I realized what I was doing. I got to... episode 20-something, I think, before I could take no more. I stopped after the episode with the mask dude in the abandoned house.
-I was petrified. I couldn't sleep at all that first night. I had all the lights in the area turned on and couldn't stop thinking "he's behind me right now..." For about a month afterwards, I could barely sleep. I had to set up a ritual of sorts, carrying a flashlight with me to shine into dark rooms before entering them to hit the light switch. The blinds in every room I was in had to be closed, so that there was no way to see me from outside. I slept with an actual katana next to my head. It's been about a year since then and I STILL have brief moments of terror in the night, when my headlights shine on a white street sign in the gloom, or as they sweep across a dead tree in a field, or when I glimpse a lamp reflected in a dark window. I only managed to really lose the worst of it after watching a bunch of slender man parodies.
Also, after bout two months I had a strange dream about a pale woman with black hair and a face composed entirely of an mismatched assortment of eyes who stood in the middle of my bedroom and stared at me as I drifted to sleep.
-My brother LOVES the slender man stuff. He even created a Changeling:the Lost campaign based around him.

[Comet]

If you don't mind, I'd really like to read whatever writeup you do on the project, as I'm also really interested in Slenderman.

The final product will be in my native language, not English, so I suspect you wouldn't be able to get that much out of it. Which is just as well, though, since I won't have the time or resources at hand to go very in-depth with this for now. I might come around to it later for a more thorough research, but for now it's just going to be a short paper on the basics, which I reckon you're already plenty familiar with.

All this stuff you all have posted is really interesting, though! So far the stories and such feel pretty uniform in nature across the web, at least as far as I've investigated, which is quite interesting in its own way. There's something about slendy that really tickles the human imagination. And I'm running into more and more instances of slenderman being mentioned and shared outside the web, in "real life" if you want to be old-fashioned, which is again interesting.

Anyway, if anyone wants to add to the pile of stories, feel free! I doubt I'll ever get bored of reading this stuff.

[Pie Guy]

I heard about Slenderman through TvTropes. I haven't read or watched any of the series, but I have seen this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MXYC_jX2Wc)