After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Slenderman & Mothman: Origins of Internet Horror

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

"The internet is full of dark and wicked things" said a police chief after a shocking crime by two children claiming to be acolytes of the Slenderman. Today we unpick the origins of Slenderman - the internet's scariest creation - and link it back to the pre-internet urban legend of the Mothman. Strap in for a wild ride!Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by Ceri Houlbrook, folklorist and lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire.Edited by Tomos Delargy, Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARK.You can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast

The playground was busy that day. Children everywhere, laughing, shouting, chasing each other under the broad afternoon sky. In the centre of the picture, a boy, maybe seven, climbs the slide, his small hands gripping the warm metal rungs, his face lit with the joy of it all. Below, others play tag, their voices a jumble of happy noise. But in the playground, just beyond the edge of their games, is a figure. It waits in the shadows of a stand of trees, impossibly tall and impossibly thin. It's not clear from the photo, but it looks as if there are tentacles coming from its back.

The children in the foreground smile unaware, but in the background, another group are gathering around this figure. The photo, stamped with the seal of the City of Stirling Library's Local Studies collection, captures this perfectly. The innocence of the boy, the normalcy of a quiet afternoon at the park, and the monstrous incongruity of the figure in the background.

A snapshot of creeping dread. The kind of image that whispers that not all is right with the world. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And today we're going to be talking about Slenderman. Now, you might think of Slenderman as a modern monster, an urban legend that sprung up on the internet about 15 or so years ago. But it is part of a deeper and older history. Now, to help us explore Slender Man and that history is Dr. Kerry Holbrook. You will know Kerry if you've listened to our Harry Potter episode. She's a friend of the part and you will also know that she lectures in folklore and history at the University of Hertfordshire. Importantly, where you can do a whole MA on folklore, sign me up immediately. She also is a novelist and her debut novel, Winter's Wishful, was published last October.

And I have to say, Kerry, it has been sitting in my tree pile for quite a while now. I am so excited to get started, but welcome back to After Dark. Thank you very much. And thank you for the introduction. It's lovely to be back. We're so glad to hear it. Now, we're going to be talking about Slender Man. And this is something that I associate with internet culture, maybe chat rooms, modern urban folklore. Before we get into it, we need to establish what is, and bear with us listeners, what is creepy pasta? Now, before you answer that, Kerry, because we need an answer, Maddie, have you heard of creepy pasta? Yes, vaguely. I know generally what it is, but I'm going to let Kerry explain before I embarrass myself in terms of the internet history. When I read my notes for this episode, that's the

first time I thought it was a typo. I was like, notes for this episode, that's the first time. I thought it was a typo. I was like, creepy pasta. I don't know what that is. So Carrie help us. Well, as well as the creepy shape pasta that you can get around Halloween, it is a term that's used within folklore

to refer to creepy stories with a lot of kind of horror content that's told in very kind of short snatches of texts. that's told in very short snatches of text that's very, very easy to copy and paste so that it travels from one site to another one forum to another, growing every time it's copied over. The term itself, which does sound a bit weird, comes from the term copypasta, which essentially just refers to any text that's been copied and pasted. So it's literally creepy content that is copied and pasted.

Wow. And I love that the internet has, as we know, its own language, its own nomenclature. And I just love hearing those kind of origins of that and how folklore is continuing in the modern age in our digital world. Let's talk a little bit about Slender Man then because I am young enough, dear listener, to have heard of Slender Man at school. It was very much a thing that people talked about when I was in my young teenage years. And I have to say it's something that is still when it was mentioned that we're going to do this episode, something kind of in the periphery of my mind that was like, oh, be careful. This is this is genuinely frightening, you know, look out for the Slender Man. So who what is the Slender Man, Kerry?

Yeah, he is a kind of humanoid figure depicted as very, very thin, unnaturally tall, often with a kind of featureless white face, sometimes with long tentacle arms or tentacles coming out of his back, and usually shown wearing quite a smart black suit, which often seems a little bit incongruous with the rest of his features. It comes from 2009 and it's one of those interesting examples of folklore where we can really pinpoint its creation date. That's what's so fascinating about online folklore. You can tend to kind of say, this is where it came from. This is the person who created it. There's a digital paper trail, as it were.

Yeah. And sometimes you can't, sometimes it's impossible to follow that paper trail. But in this case, we can. And it goes back to a website, Something Awful, in 2009, and they were holding a Photoshop contest, the idea being to make some kind of horrific, creepy image. And a user called Victor Surge, which was an alias for artist Eric Knudsen, created two photographs, two black and white photographs,

one of which Antony described and another one showing older children, so kind of teenagers who seem to be walking or running away from a similar slender man in the background. So it wasn't just the photographs, there were quotes with the photographs and these quotes kind of gave the photos a narrative, gave them folklore. So the quote under the one that Anton described reads, one of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze, notable for being taken the day which 14 children vanished and what is referred to as the slender man. Deformities cited as film defects by officials.

Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. 1986, photographer Mary Thomas missing since June 13th, 1986. I am obsessed with this. I'm obsessed. It's storytelling. It is. Now, before we continue with this, in a second, Anthony, you know what's coming.

I am going to make you describe these images in more detail for our listeners. But, Kerry, is this a modern phenomenon of folklore that is instigated with images rather than words to begin with? Or is that something that happens in the past as well? I mean, it's happened a lot in the past when it comes to, say, cryptids. So just to explain what a cryptid is, those creatures or characters who are believed to exist, so a lot of people believe that they exist, a lot of people claim to have seen them, but there's no very solid evidence that they do. So obviously you have Loch Ness Monster, where the narratives around that were created from those first images. You have Bigfoot, Sasquatch, so lots of cryptids

that have been captured in images, and in the case of I think the Loch Ness Monster and the sort of famous Bigfoot photos of the 1950s and 60s. Before we go any further, I think Anthony should describe these two images for us. So we heard a little bit in the opening about the scene in this child's playground, but let's delve a little bit more into this first image because it is genuinely unsettling, with or without the haunting made up caption. Yeah, it's, it's sorry, the reason I'm pausing a little bit is because I'm trying to I'm just so struck by what Kerry said about the real deliberate manufacture of this for almost artistic purposes. And I love that. I absolutely adore it. But when I look at this image, even if I didn't know that, I see fake, if that makes sense. You know, I described it slightly in the opening, but it's a black and white photo.

But you can tell it's a sunny day. There's a child smiling towards the camera right at the very center of the thing going up, slide, other children around on the ground playing around. And then in the back left, as you view the thing under a tree in some shade is yeah what looks like a very tall, very slender man. And there are other children who have gravitated towards this figure. Now when I did look at this just in preparation for this episode, I went, I mean, nobody's going to tell me that this is supposed to be real, right? And actually, Kerry, you kind of didn't. You told me it's supposed to be invented, and it's trackably invented. And I kind of love it all the more for that. There's something more important about it because of its fabrication. I don't know, it's just that's, that was really tantalizing to say there is a competition, like freak

us out, make something. And so I value it more as a piece of something that's been made and therefore, and has then gone on to influence conversation, folklore, culture. It's fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. And how quickly it kind of entered folklore, how quickly it established itself. You know, 2009, not that long ago, but you know, as Maddie said, today to a lot of people, it still kind of strikes fear in you, even though we know that Eric Knudsen, an artist, created it for a competition. And he's come out

and said, I created it for a competition and explained the different things that inspired him, the different things he drew on in the creation. It's just so unsettling. LAREE One thing that I find deeply unsettling about this story actually is, Anthony, talk about the enjoyability, the pleasure that you can have from seeing that this is such artifice. I'm just looking at the second image here, which is some teenagers, it's a black and white photo and they're running away from a blurry, strange figure in the background. But the thing that's so terrifying about the Slender Man is that it becomes this viral internet sensation and exists in a digital universe, but it does have very real and very serious real-world implications. We spoke on our last episode together, Kerry,

about those blurring boundaries between reality and fiction and how folklore can, and folklorists indeed, can have real world effect. This is another one of those stories that's had, it's created real damage in the world, hasn't it? Tell us a little bit about the events in 2014. world, hasn't it? So tell us a little bit about the events in 2014. Yeah, so I mean, Slender Man became huge. As you said, Maddie, it went viral across the internet. There were so many video series, computer games, fiction that came out about it, and lots and lots of different stories growing up around how Slender Man tends to target children or young adults. How there's something called Slender Man tends to target children or young adults, how there's something called Slender Man Sickness where just being within its proximity can cause

kind of paranoia, violence, and how Slender Man would kind of choose children to be his proxies, to do his bidding, to become his puppets. So all these stories were coming out and in 2014 yep, something really awful happened. Two 12 year old girls in Wisconsin lured their friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times as a sacrifice to Slender Man, claiming that they wanted to commit a murder so that they could become man claiming that they wanted to commit a murder so that they could become proxies for Slender Man and they also said that they were afraid that Slender Man would kill their families if they didn't do it. Their friend survived but it's still absolutely horrific and the two girls were tried as adults and found guilty and I think face up to 65 years in jail for it. And it's not, you

know, it's not the only time that something like this has happened. Kind of throughout the 2010s, there were lots of attacks and suicide attempts with the, you know, the children or the teenagers citing Slender Man as the reason for it. So yeah, it did spark a lot of panic, obviously. The chief of police who dealt with the case, Russell Jack, is quoted as saying that the Slender Man stabbing should be a wake-up call for all parents and that the internet is full of dark and wicked things. And I think that that quote says it all about the fear of that time, about what this creation from only, you know, five years earlier had done to people, to these children.

AC It is very telling what he said there about the internet, Kerry, I thought. Because one thing, I suppose, that's difficult for us to face up to, and difficult to talk about, I guess, in many other ways, is that children do and always have throughout history killed and very often other children. It's interesting to see that as purely an internet phenomenon because actually we know that there's a much longer history to that, but that suddenly in our age, in the digital age, and as that becomes more and more prevalent, the reasons for that become linked to the internet. But actually, folklore and belief systems and fear, internet-connected or not, have always existed and have very often informed some of those murders. And they often involve

alluring children taking other children to places that are beyond boundaries. I'm thinking forests, for instance. Often you hear that in historical folklore even. What is most striking is the continuation of that rather than it being a brand new thing. This type of horrific crime has a history. This story as well has such an echo of the early modern about it. To me, we talk so much on this podcast about witch trials and early modern belief in the supernatural and the panic that that can instil in people and the way that that spreads through a community to the point where people are either verbally or physically attacking each other and seeking to kill each other because they see them as channels

of an evil coming from a different platform, a different veil, a different world, whether that's the internet or a supernatural realm. That really strikes me about this story that there are those parallels even down, Anthony, as you say, to the luring, to the woods. Unfortunately, this is a real story, but there are so many elements here of fictional stories as well as historical stories from the past that are playing out in real time with this story. Those boundaries between artifice and reality are really unsettlingly blurred. Kerry, just thinking about folklore and urban mythology, urban legends for a minute,

what's the difference there? Because I think there possibly is a difference, and not just in terminology, but how we think about these things. Certainly, when I think about folklore, I think about maybe medieval folklore, early modern folklore. I think about the Green Man. I think about George the Dragon. I think those kinds of historical elements. But urban legends I associate with the internet and with modernity. Is that the difference or is it more nuanced than that? MS Well, folklore is a kind of huge umbrella term for all informal culture. So anything that isn't institutionally taught, whether that's customs, songs, games, folk tale, and things that are passed on orally.

So folklore itself captures all of that from the past up to the present. Whereas urban legend is a kind of a subcategory of folklore, a kind of genre of it, specifically relating to stories that are told as if they are true, usually set in a specific place at a specific time, usually told by someone who says this happened to my friend or this happened to a friend of a friend, making it kind of both personalised and kind of authenticating it. It really happened. Usually urban legends are either scary or they're meant to be funny. So some of them are more like jokes, except they have quite a long narrative.

The term urban legend isn't overly accurate. It was first coined in 1931, referring specifically to legends told about New York City, so hence the urban, but then it got picked up by folklorists. And now it really refers to any modern legend. So it doesn't have to take place in a city. It just has to take place kind of in the present in a specific, you know, specified time, specified place. That's really interesting, actually, just in terms of the etymology there,

because I've never associated, even though I would have said it a lot, I've never associated the term though I would have said it a lot, I've never associated the term urban legend with an urban space. It has taken on its own meaning despite the fact that the term urban is in there, but it's really interesting to know the backstory to this. But talking about backstories actually, if we come back to Slenderman specifically, we know that he's created in 2009 and I love that piece oferman specifically, we know that he's created in 2009, and I love that piece of detail. Do we know that he has any deeper history or deeper folkloric ancestry to his beginnings in 2009? Yeah, I mean, like I said, cryptids have a very, very long history.

So those kind of human-like creatures that people claim to have seen, catch glimpses of in photographs, and they become folklore. I mean, there are examples in Britain of cryptids like this that haunt certain woodlanders and have kind of this uncanny appearance. So there's Owlman in Cornwall, which sightings have been reported since the 70s, which is literally just a large owl like human figure. There's Pigman on Canik Chase in Staffordshire. So a tall man said to have the head of a pig roaming around the woods there. I grew up in Staffordshire, Kerry, and I can confirm I've heard this story. I've never

seen him though. Exactly. So there are lots of kind of precursors to it. And in terms of what Slenderman actually looks like, you can see lots of kind of where the inspiration for him came from. Knudsen himself said that you know, some of his inspiration came from Lovecraft and Cthulhu, that kind of 1920s figure with tentacles. So you can see that in the tentacles. There's the Wendigo, the Native American, again humanoid creature that roams the woods and preys on humans and makes humans kind of, inspires in them insanity. So yeah, lots and lots of examples. And then the fact that he's there wearing a black suit, that addition is really interesting and really, I think, separates him from the other cryptids, which are

always quite natural looking, quite part of nature. Just that black suit and the idea of men in black had long history going back to the 1960s. Did Those kind of those figures in black who tend to appear after there's been a UFO sighting or a sighting of Mothman, which we might be coming back to. So the idea that these men, usually identified as men, follow some kind of paranormal experience but seem to have paranormal abilities themselves and are there to silence you, come out of nowhere and then disappear again. So lots and lots of different folkloric and historical elements kind of thrown into this very sinister Slender Man. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? These words, supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago, set in motion a chain

of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Yoniga. And across July on Gone Medieval, we are reliving the dramatic murder of Thomas Becket when he was surrounded by four of the King's knights and brutally struck down at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral. Was his murder an unfortunate accident? Did King Henry really want him dead? Was it an authorized execution or a dance intentionally choreographed to give birth to a saintly legend? Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas

Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hits. Go back to school with Rogers and get Canada's fastest and most reliable internet. Perfect for streaming lectures all day or binging TV shows all night. Save up to $20 per month on Rogers' internet. Visit rogers.com for details. We got you, Rogers. So Kerry, you've mentioned Mothman, and we thought that we'd dig a little bit deeper into this very famous urban legend from the 1960s. And I suppose have a little bit of a think about the connections that we can make between this pre-internet myth and the

Slenderman who's very much of the internet age. November 15th, 1966, in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. An old school Chevy is driving through the forests near the edge of town. At the wheel is Roger Scarberry, 18 years old, and his young wife, Linda, 19. Their friends are in the back. It wasn't until they pulled up next to the

North power plant, however, that all four of them saw the Mothman. According to police reports they filed later, the thing they saw was about seven feet tall, grey-coloured with muscular legs. It had wings on its back too, also grey. The only colour on the creature were the eyes, which glowered a fiery red in the car's headlights. In shock, Linda yelled at the driver of the car, Roger, to get away, and he swerved onto Route 62, speeding back into town. But as they fled, they saw the creature again on the hill by a large billboard, and watched

as it spread its wings and took to the sky. Even though Roger was driving at 100 miles per hour, the mothman easily caught up and began gliding back and forth over the car. It was so close they remembered hearing its wingbeats against the roof. It was only when they reached the edge of Point Pleasant that the creature veered off into the night. The next day, the local newspaper ran with the headline, Couples see man-sized bird. Creature. Something.

In the aftermath, more sightings of the Mothman were recorded across Point Pleasant. He was seen, locals claimed, lurking outside homes, chasing cars and stealing pet dogs. Now, curiously, a year later, in December 1967, tragedy struck this all-American town. The silver bridge that connected Point Pleasant to the town of Gallipolis collapsed. It was rush hour and the Ohio River was freezing cold. Forty-six people died in the disaster.

In the wake of this disaster, however, the Mothman became ever more notorious. Had it been connected to the disaster? Or was the Mothman a benevolent figure all along, one that had been sent to warn the people to the disaster? Or was the Mothman a benevolent figure all along, one that had been sent to warn the people of the town?

There are some similarities here that I can see and some differences between the Mothman and Slenderman, but obviously the Mothman is earlier in origin. So do you see a relationship between the two? Is there a traceable inheritance between them? I think what's interesting is, again, how quickly it spread, how quickly one sighting turned into 10 sightings turned into 20 sightings, and how important the media at the time was in spreading it with local newspapers, becoming international newspapers, and soon everyone knew about it. And then you had the book, The Mothman Prophecies in 1975, and that really was connecting the sightings to the bridge collapse and to the appearance of

men in black who were again popping up to quiet people about it. And then it just spread from there. And even though it's kind of, it's had its day in terms of sightings, there was this kind of this craze for kind of 10 years where people were seeing it and talking about it. And I think you can see similarities in how it spread in a kind of pre-internet world, and then obviously you get the internet and it just spreads internationally. So I think it's interesting from a folklore perspective in terms of thinking about the role of media and kind of how, I guess, eager people are to believe in something like this,

even if it's something that's frightening, there is this kind of openness to believing in it, in these narratives. And you know, The Mothman is an example of an urban legend. It took place on this night, at this place, by these people. It's all named. So that kind of very much of folklore being created in the present and authenticated by these details. In terms of some of the similarities then, Kerry, that I'm seeing between some of these stories, although there's a slight age gap, both protagonists in these stories are young, they're children, it focuses in and around children or teenagers. And both the Mothman and the Slenderman is lurking on the edges of either town or on the playground or whatever it might be. So it's something that's in the periphery of your vision.

Is that a common trope or is that something that's very specific to these modern iterations? these modern iterations? I think that's very, very common in folklore to find these cryptids, these mysterious figures lurking on the edges of civilization. So places that people do go to, so not kind of in the very heart of the forest, but at the edge of the forest. So I think there's something even more sinister about thinking that they can, I guess, penetrate civilization to an extent, you know. You're not necessarily

safe just by staying out of the heart of the woods. Even just driving down a road, you might come across them. I guess this links to other urban legends as well, that idea of the kind of the vanishing hitchhiker, the ghosts on the side of the road. They are kind of entering modern human society and I think that makes them all the scarier. Another direct link, Carrie, between the Slenderman story and the Mothman story is the figure of these men in black. Can you talk us through about how that figure moves between both stories and how it connects them? Yes. So the man in black, the person wearing a black suit kind

of dates back to the 1960s, really, when a lot of places that were seeing UFO sightings, there were lots of stories surrounding people in black appearing, usually out of nowhere and threatening people and warning them not to share the stories, stories that involved lots of kind of paranormal abilities. And it was Keel's 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies, that coined the term men in black, that was referring to men wearing black suits who were appearing in West Virginia at the time of Mothman, to again warn people not to share their stories, not to share

them with newspapers, not to get it spread further than it was already spreading. So there is that link there and I do know that Knudsen, the artist who created Slender Man, cited Mothman as one of his inspirations for Slender Man and it probably is this link to the black suit. I think it's fair to say that Slender Man's heyday now is somewhat in the past, that it's had this peak and a peak at which there was, as we've said, real terrifying violence born from it. But it seems that that story, the way that it's told, the effect that it has, has to a certain extent petered out now. What do you think the future of internet horror looks like? Are those spaces in which stories are told changing? JG Definitely. I think we've become a lot more savvy in terms of being able to recognise something

that's been created for horror content. As Anthony said, kind of looking at those photographs, in 2024 we can see that they are fake. I mean, you can't see it for definite, but there is a sense of kind of forgery behind them that maybe in 2009 people wouldn't have been quite as quick to spot. So I think these days when you get those photographs kind of circulating on social media, people are more skeptical about it, question it, but I think the impact of social media, so platforms such as Twitter or X as we're supposed to call it now, they help to create a narrative.

So a simple photograph can then be commented on, commented on, spread, and people tell stories, and I saw this, I saw that. So just kind of the popularity of social media now is kind of increasing the creation of these narratives. And then you've got AI, which is kind of a huge topic at the moment. And folklore is really interesting because it tends to reflect what people are preoccupied with,

what they're fascinated with or afraid of at that given time. And I think it's really interesting that just in the last year or two, we're starting to see things being named kind of AI created cryptids to monsters online that were created by AI. I think the first one is from 2022, a Swedish artist was using AI to kind of generate images and was putting prompts in. And then there was this creation of Loeb, L-O-A-B, who the Swedish artist named as a woman who, I mean, it's impossible to describe her, you'd have to look it up. But her features just make her innately scary.

Is she the one where, I think I saw this, where the prompts that they were putting in sort of didn't matter to a certain extent, And it was almost like she had been born from the AI and had created herself. There was a sense of sort of autonomy there that no matter what you said, she looked the same and she appeared in like different images with different prompts and would sometimes be in the background of images. And yeah, is that is that is that my right thinking that? Yeah, it's like she came out of nowhere and seems to be appearing. A ghost in the machine. Yeah, exactly. And I think there's just something terrifying about thinking that AI knows exactly

what would scare us. You can't describe it, you can't pinpoint what's so sinister about it, but something knows what's so scary about it. And yeah, the idea that she is haunting the internet is a very scary thought. One final thing before we go, which I'd love to hear your thoughts on, Kerry, is taking all of these pieces of urban legend or folklore within their specific timeframes. I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on the distinction between the belief that surrounds them or the desire to believe, making that distinction of, particularly in a younger audience that goes, well, actually, there's something very tangibly exciting about this and we can spread this amongst ourselves. The reason I'm asking is, so often, when we're talking about these things in a historical context, we often think that everybody believed this. But actually,

we know they didn't. And I'm just wondering how you tackle that tension between belief and the desire to believe in these more modern iterations. There's definitely a scale of belief. But I don't think it's a case that kind of one group of people absolutely don't believe and one group of people do. I think there's a scale there which will be determined by age, but also just personality and beliefs around other things will make somebody more predisposed to believe in it. But that desire to believe, I'm quite a cynical person, but if I'm watching a horror film, even though I know, you know, it's confined to that television screen, it will still make me scream and jump and be scared to go to bed on my own at night.

You know, so there is something about that kind of suspension of belief for a time and that desire to, you know, why do we watch horror films? What's the point? What's the point in reading horror stories? It's because we like the fear that comes with it, the thrill, the exhilaration. You only experience those emotions, those reactions if there is just a little bit of you that lets yourself believe that it's real. And I think that's the case with folklore overall. I don't think that everybody believed in fairies.

There was just a belief that maybe there was something out there, and that maybe some elements of the story were true. So I think, yeah, it's important to remember that there is kind of a nuance to levels of belief. Well, with that in mind, I think that's a great place for us to leave this discussion of Slenderman and Mothman, of course. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review, of course, wherever you get your podcasts. It will help other people to discover After Dark 2, and we can welcome them

into the After Dark community. Thank you for listening and Kerry, thank you so much for coming back. It's always a pleasure and a joy to have you. And it's great to be discussing these topics, which I think some people are familiar with, but may not know that there is a wealth of history and context to a lot of these stories. Until next time, we'll see you again soon and after dark.