Panic World - Why Slenderman became a moral panic

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

What is the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen on the internet? For many people, it was Slenderman. This particularly lithe fellow started off as kind of a fun, spooky thing, and then of course got out of hand and caused a panic both on- and offline. We’re joined by Kaelyn Moore of Heart Starts Pounding to talk about his role taking creepypasta mainstream, and how Slenderman is still lurking in our cultural consciousness over 16 years since making his first appearance on Something Awful. Our guest Kaelyn Moore hosts Hearts Starts Pounding, a show about folklore and other creepy stuff, which you can find anywhere you listen to podcasts or @heartstartspounding on all the socials. Want to hear (and see!) our extended conversation? And enjoy other nice things like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I would love to start by asking, what is the creepiest thing you've ever seen on the internet? Oh, God. The creepiest thing has definitely been just like horrible, horrible untold violence that I've seen. Do you remember when Facebook, like, lifted the, they had, like, rules that you couldn't post dead people on Facebook anymore. And so everyone stopped doing that. And then they lifted it, but they didn't tell anyone that they lifted it. So all of a sudden, in the next day, like, everyone's feeds were flooded with, like, I got beheading videos. from like terrorist organizations and stuff,

that was maybe the creepiest thing I've seen. I remember that because like we're basically just like one switch away from seeing the worst things ever on Facebook. Like from what I understand is like people are still posting all that stuff. We just don't see it. Yeah. Yeah, we're very close to the edge. So that's a great example of something that no one should enjoy seeing.

No one should have fun with that stuff. But there's some other stuff that is meant to be fun. And today we're going to be talking about one of those things that really unites people, having fun with scary stuff, having fun with spooky stuff. And it is a nice part of the internet until it gets out of hand. And this one really got out of hand. Today we're going to be talking about Slender Man. We are finally talking about Slender Man. How it went from the good kind of scary to the bad kind of scary, the moral panic kind of scary.

And we're going to look at why this meme took off. and for better or worse became one of the defining totems of the internet age. My name is Ryan Broderick. Joining me, as always, is our producer Grant Irving, who will pop in from time to time. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. A recent theme on the show has been the world flattening into lore and jokes and sort of a weird mix of fiction and nonfiction. I want to dive a bit deeper into it this week. and next. We're going to be looking back at a moment where it feels like something started,

where some kind of thing that we're now dealing with started. And this is the moment when creepy pasta went mainstream. Joining me is the host of Hearts Starts pounding creepy pasta expert. Slender Man Savant. Kailen Moore. Hi. Welcome to the show. Hello. That was the best intro I've ever gotten. Thank you. Slender Man Savant. Some real bona fides. Yeah. What is your So you've said, like, you know, the creepiest thing you've ever seen on the internet. But like, do you have a, when we're talking specifically about creepy pasta, which for people who don't know, let me define it really quick, copy pasta is when you copy and paste random texts from the internet over and over again until it becomes a meme. Creepy pasta is effectively the like spooky supernatural equivalent of that. So do you have a favorite kind of creepy pasta?

I think honestly like Sunderman is one of my favorites. I liked the ones way back in the day that were like popping up on 4chan that felt like. they were really community involved where it was like the community building the lore. Sometimes it was just like an image that would pop up that someone had like Photoshop to make someone like really scary and there was no context. And then the next person would kind of come in and be like, oh, this is Jeff the killer. He's actually from. Jeff the killer's.

Yeah. And then you all of a sudden like the community's building on this lore that has like in time kind of shifted into like the Reddit creepypastas where you just get like this big block of text. That's like a fully baked story. There's not as much community involvement. in the lore. But I liked the ones like Sunderman and Jeff the Killer, even like more recently the backrooms

where the community is just kind of like building it. I love the back room. Yeah, same. I love the back room. I want to go there. I have a. Yeah, I feel like I. Will you tell us know what the backroom is?

So for people who aren't familiar with the backrooms, there will be a movie very shortly about them, actually, it turns out. It is basically like what if you got stuck in another dimension that was nothing but the back of like a convention center or a hotel forever. My favorite creepypasta, I wanted to double check if this even counts. And according to creepypasta.fandam.com, it does count. In 2008, there was a 4chan post. Are you familiar with who was phone?

I don't think I was familiar with that one. Wait, remind me. So I'm going to read it because it seems like someone trying to do a creepy pasta, but they were either like drunk or they like couldn't. figure out how to do it right. So it reads, so you're with your honey and you're making out when the phone rings. This is all spelled wrong. You answer it and the voice is what are you doing with my daughter? You tell your girl and she say, my dad is dead. Then who was phone? That's like that reminds me of the one that's been going around on Instagram right now that's like

the babysitter called the dad like late at night to say, hey, is your close? You're clown statue supposed to be moving. I put a blanket over it because your clown statue keeps moving like the whole night. And the dad says, leave the house now. You've disrespected my clown statue and I hate you. That's great. Before we get to Slender Man, I want to spend some time talking about what came before he ended up as everyone's weird high school boyfriends, lazy Halloween costume. So if we're talking about creepy pasta, we've got to go all the way back to sort of the beginnings of it.

How familiar are you with 4chan as a website? Like, have you used it? Have you been on it? Are you a big poster on there? Yeah, I would say big poster, long time user. No, I think 4chan was one that I was maybe late to because I was a teen girl and not a teen boy. And I feel like it was really this like teen boy space when I was kind of growing up on the internet. But then like I would hear so many scary stories about stuff that was posted there.

Scary stories and also just like real pictures and like people looking for other people and stuff. So then I just like would go on it to kind of be like, what is this thing that everyone's talking about? But not really like a poster or that much of a user of it. But I was reading like creepypastas on there. Yeah, I was never a poster because I'm like normal. Yeah. But it was it was a thing to look at. And in 2007, 4chan starts a board called X.

So like all the boards on Fortune have like letters like that's the code for the board. This one was paranormal. It was started because of the popularity of a similar board on a like 4chan spin-off at the time called 7chan. And this is from a Daily Dot article about this. So Keshe, this is so like timestamped to the mid-2000s, Keisha flashes on the screen, five characters. A male voice repeats the pop star's name three times, enunciating carefully. This video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It means something.

And 4chan's paranormal discussion board X is going to figure out what. If your experience on Fortune is limited to the racism, pornography, and trolling antics of the infamous B-board, which is the random board, what happens on X may come as a surprise, and it may just make you a believer. Okay, so that's one early example, and what's important is that these were getting popular, but as you can see in the article, they're pretty contained. And this is the swamp that Slender Man will rise out of, so to speak. So let's look at a couple scary trends that led that way. One, you already brought up, Jeff the Killer. Bring him up. You want to see Jeff? Here, hold on.

Jeff the killer is so funny to me because it's like, it's so early creepy pasta where it's clearly a 12-year-old that just learned Photoshop and just blurred all of the features on someone's face. But it really is so unconcerning. I always thought this was a Photoshop of Boxy. Like the girl who was popular. Oh, like the Rar. Yeah. I always thought this was like a scene girl from MySpace that someone fun. Photoshop. Like that's like that was the head like the head like the head canon I had as a teenager. So like I don't know why like I never I never thought about Jeff the killer is like a thing other than just like oh that's a mean Photoshop of some. Oh that's so interesting because I can't even see her straightened. Yeah. You do see like the the box dye black hair that's been like straightened. Yeah. Yeah. Actually it does kind of look like a little bit like boxy. Can one of you just describe what we're looking at without insulting boxy more my my my one true love.

So it's a face that's been stretched into sort of like a joker smile. There's no nose. The eyes have been really hollowed out. And yeah, Jeff the killer has like emo banks kind of like straightened black email hair. But also the angle that the photo's taken, it seems like this person was taking a selfie of themselves like in their closet. And they're also maybe wearing headphones. Like this actually could just be a teenager that someone took the photo of and photoshopped. Yeah.

So this is Jeff the Killer. And Jeff the Killer is probably before Slender Man, other than Slender Man, one of the most infamous pieces of creepy pasta. And I think the culture of X at this point in the early 2000s, mid-2000s is like very innocent, would you say? Does that feel right to sort of say like it didn't feel organized? Yeah. Did it even have like a shape at this point where people were building lore of like images that were being posted? I don't even know that like creepy pasta was really part of the lexicon on like that message part at the time. From my own memories, I feel like it was really tied to jump scare culture.

Like the idea that like a webpage would load and there'd be like something gross or scary on there. I remember there was a Korean comic site that made like Screamer comics where like you would scroll and there would be like a scary image in the comic. Like that was big at the time. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It was all kind of about like trolling. Yeah. I remember I wanted.

This is probably even before this, but like going on eBom's world and just seeing, just trying to like find those, like the famous one that's the Swedish commercial where like the goblin pops up and just screams at you in the middle of like the car commercial. But they were like, or like you're playing a maze game and then like just a face pops up and screams at you. Like I remember trying to seek out those videos. Like that for a while, that was like the horror of the internet. Like if you wanted to find scary videos, they kind of all were like that jump scare type of. video. And I feel like a lot of it was tied also to like the feeling of being up late at night at a computer. Like there was a, there's the internet just like felt like a creepier thing. It did because you didn't know the origin of any of this stuff. And when you're a kid,

it feels like it really could have come from anywhere. Like the image of Jeff the killer, like when you're 13, that really could be someone that lives in a basement in Japan that, you know, has been there for however. Like, you just have no context for these things. Like, this is probably just like a scene girl someone photoshopped is not really like what you're thinking. But it was just so fun back in the day because like you just didn't know where any of this stuff was coming from. So it all felt more real. Yeah. It felt like it had almost always existed in a way.

What is really interesting about this period of time is that like very quickly, you start to actually get lore and you start to get community building. So in in summer 2007, 4chan is getting really popular. And someone makes a post about what they're calling SCP1. 173. Are you familiar with the SCPs? Do you know about this? Oh, yeah. Will you remind me? It's been honestly like I'm a little rusty. SCP stands for special containment procedure and it's effectively like a crowdsource version of the X-Files. So like you come up with something creepy or scary or silly, some kind of like weird sci-fi idea. And then you add it to this ongoing list of you added to the list of SCPs all over the internet.

Yeah, I think this was maybe when I was like still a little. young to be using 4chan. Yeah. I mean, everyone should be too young to use. That is so true. That's, yeah. You should be 10 on 4chan. One thing that I find interesting is that some were written as like manuals and they were like

intentionally boring and kind of dry. But there's a pretty big one that actually just stole a whole concept from Doctor Who. It's like really boring instructions for an object that like kills you if you blink, which is literally the plot of a Dr. episode called Blink. And it's written like job instructions basically. Like you're working at this facility with this otherworldly supernatural entity. But there's an attempt to add reality to it, to make it feel real by being boring. That's still kind of something that shows up a lot in creepy pasta is like you show up to a job, you show up to a new apartment or whatever, and then you're just handed a list of rules that

maybe don't make sense to you. I mean, I have to imagine that most creepy pasta is written and shared by teenagers still. And I think almost every teenager can relate to the experience of like showing up at a job. I mean, like, I don't know what's going on and everyone else seems to know what's going on. My instinct is that good popular creepypastas do kind of reveal something relatable and interesting about like, particularly the teenage experience. Yeah. I used to stock shelves at like an Olympia's sports and like that there could have been a weird monster in the back room. Like that's a very, feels very relatable to me.

Yeah. Two years after the boring on purpose stuff, we get Slender Man, which takes all the teen vibes and makes it exciting and versatile for better and for worse. So Slender Man was invented on something awful. Now, obviously, you were a teen girl, so you might not have also been following something awful at the time. Are you familiar with the site at all? Yeah. Okay. I was a big, I was more of a something awful person than I was a Fortune person.

I like to read all the stuff on there. Yeah, because it was more like just this kind of like creepy pasta stuff, right? There was like there wasn't as many. Right. It wasn't like as many like people dying if my memory serves me. No. It was like a, it was like a fairly normal message board.

Yeah. And it had like writers and stuff. Right. Right. Yeah. The first Slender Man posts start in 2009. Eric Nudson, he posting under the name Victor Surge, makes a submission to one of the something awful Photoshop contest, which they were having all the time.

And he basically puts like a skinny. tall figure in the back of stock photos and then adds like 80s newspaper headlines and he refers to it as the Slender Man and it starts very similarly to the SCPs. It sort of starts as this like idea that everyone's adding lore to Slender Man and it starts to spread from there. And I remember seeing the original post and being totally freaked out. I remember this feature. I remember this feature. feeling like the first one that was completely, like could totally be real. Like we were laughing about Jeff the killer just looking like someone with amateur Photoshop skills kind of trying to make something scary.

But this felt professional like he looks totally real in the backs of these photos where he's standing like and the photos are all of children looking really concerned too. So it looks like he was actually just in the back of these photos and the kids knew he was there. And it's very terrifying. And I think from the beginning, it basically took off and became this huge thing. The one we're looking at right now is like a children's birthday. And then there's just like a guy in the background behind the trees.

Just barely behind the trees. Yeah. Yeah. And if I remember the original sort of idea was that these are the last photos taken of these children. If you look at the photo, like the last photo taken of someone, there's just like a tall man in the back. looking really creepy. This is a format that is still so popular today. Like how many YouTube videos are like three photos that are like three of the last photos taken before someone died. Like three photos with a terrifying backstory. Like it's just kind of something that's always been popular.

And that's exactly what these photos take feel like. It's like someone took this photo before something horrible happened. And as the viewer, like you can see the impending thing. It's like a very teenage kind of feeling like the last photo you'll ever take with someone kind of thing. I don't know. There's something, there's something romantic about a lot of these tropes in a way, like very teen, angsty, and romantic. Yeah, that's interesting.

I didn't think about it that way. I think, like, for me, as humans, like, ritual is so important to us. And a lot of times we don't, like, understand the rituals we perform. But we, like, I think about, like, religion. Like, I grew up Catholic. Like, there's so many rituals and you're also taught that, like, if you don't do the ritual the right way, you could go to hell. Like, something really horrible could happen.

And it doesn't matter if you understand it or not or if you agree with it. but like you have to do this ritual. Yeah, like a back room is scary if you like get stuck. If you like open the wrong door in a hotel and then you're like stuck there forever. Like that's scary. Like because I remember the first time I entered the back room of a hotel and I was like, uh-oh, am I in trouble? Like is there alarm going to go?

Like a lot of the more popular creepy pauses all have that kind of like young person entering the world for the first time and entering the world for the first time as a young person is a horror story. Like it genuinely is. You don't know the rules of how the world works and you're scared of like breaking them because you don't understand them. And then this in this world, if you do, there's like dire consequences. It's like folk horror created by teens to like express that, which I think is cool. I think it's a cool thing.

Yeah, I totally agree. What was your first like encounter with Slender Man and what Lord did you first hear? I don't remember exactly where I saw them, but I remember them being passed around by like kids at my high school. So I saw those and I remember the like ancientness lore, the like, oh, he's been seen in Germany. He was seen in Mesopotamia. Like there's references to Slender Man in the Bible. Like that kind of ancientness lore I think was like the part that really scared me the most that he's always been here wearing that suit. I mean, there are definitely a few agreed upon things.

Like the design of Slender Man is like even kind of debated. Like there's some with tentacles. There's some with not. There's someone he's nine feet tall. there's someone, he's just like a tall guy. You end up with like kind of this uneasy middle ground of a bunch of different ideas. I think it's just a natural consequence of using the internet to tell stories, is that like anyone can go and take it.

I mean, we did an episode about QAnon and Q&N and Q&N had like a similar problem where like no one could really agree on what Q&N was or was about. Anything successful has to be interactive, but anything interactive is inherently chaotic and thus can't really succeed long term. It's a weird problem of the internet age. There's like rules to folklore, too, spanning back thousands of years. But like some of the rules of folklore is it has to change based on the, like even if it's an agreed upon story like a witch that lives in the local woods or whatever. Like it has to change based on the audience you're telling it to.

And it changes based on like the region you're in. Like there are like certain elements of even folklore where it's not canonized. never been canonized. Like that's just how we share stories as people. But that's what helps it spread because when you're talking to a group of children, you're like editing the story a little bit to make it specifically scary to them. And when you're telling your neighbor, you're editing the story a little bit to make it specifically stick with them. So it just like helps it spread. And that's probably the same, I would imagine the same with Slender Man. It's like so many little pieces of his backstory and his appearance just change. And that's probably just depending on like the

medium he's being shared in. I mean, I would, yeah, I would say like it, you know, we're going to talk more about the sort of like meme life of it after the break. But I do think the fact it was part of a Photoshop battle is important for understanding why it became so popular, which is that you can just like easily put Slender Man in the back of a weird photo you find. And like that's kind of the whole meme. Like there's there's something interactive about it from the jump. Yeah. And this is also at the time, because what is this, 2009 that he comes out? It's like the time

2009 Yeah, it's the time when people are Like lay people can download Photoshop on their computer It's just this fun thing that like everyone can partake in And then upload the photos and add a little bit of lore to the story So the stage is set for this to blow up Creepy pasta has been around long enough to build like a pretty active community The internet is changing

And Slanderman was just this like simple menacing skinny guy in the woods taking children away And now he's about to haunt all of them America. But first, a word from our sponsors. Suits for tall men. Yeah, tall men suits. All right, so we're going to start by watching a video, part one of a little series called Marble Hornets.

Okay, so it's black. It says entry number one. After viewing a couple of tastes of finding nothing unusual, I came across a clip that doesn't fit in with the others. From what I can tell, the following footage takes place inside Alex's house, not the set for marble hornets. The audio has been removed. Either the microphone was disabled at the time, or it was taken out afterwards. Okay. That's all against a black screen. So it's someone holding a camcorder, walking through a house.

It keeps cutting out. We're like peering through a window looking at the outdoors. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. And so, okay, so Slender Man is standing on the. Oh, it worked on me. It still works on me. Yeah, I actually like got goosebumps.

So let's go back to Mr. Slender Man right here. Yeah, there he is. So like. Yeah, he looks at the camera. It's this tall man with like the white. face standing on the porch and then he like sees the camera and he looks at it and that's when the camera ducks away yeah it's so well done um so marble hornets is a the first attempt at turning slender man into something more than just a photoshop um it was created in june uh pretty quickly

after slender man like first went on something awful it was a film student and a user on something awful. It was really well constructed on YouTube where like YouTube couldn't be used to watch like linear programming yet. So they hid the videos on different channels across the web. So like it, I remember like spending an afternoon once in college like watching all of them and the feeling of like going on an internet like scavenger hunt to find the next installment of Marble Horn. It's like made me feel like I was part of it in this way that I have never really experienced since. Yeah, it's like that slew thing. Like you have to be the one to kind of uncover the hidden message by like finding all the videos and stuff. Exactly.

And funnily enough, it got so popular that even Roger Ebert tweeted about it. Okay, a man that recognizes good cinema even thinks it's cool. Okay. He wrote Marble Hornets, a YouTube serial, a forsaken indie film meets paranormal, all episodes to date. And then he linked to like a URL shortener that doesn't work anymore. And when is this? It's like 2009, 2010. So this is even before like the paranormal activities.

Exactly. Yeah. Adds to the creepiness, I think, quite a bit. But also it's like a time when that's all people had to film for YouTube. Like we only had our weird point and shoot cameras. Like I consume so much like paranormal content on Reddit now. And the biggest complaint is always like, why is this shot on a potato? Like, why are the paranormal images and like videos always shot on like these horrible camcorders?

And like that's a legitimate concern now because we have these. these amazing cameras to capture content on. But back then, you could just put up a greeny image. You can't even see anything in it. And people are trying to find the ghosts in the image. Because that's all we had. It, like, lent itself to YouTube in this really fun way that just doesn't work anymore. I think that ties into the scavenger hunt of it all.

It's like, it was grainy cameras and also, like, you still had to search for it. And I could both of you just kind of describe the experience of, like, what it was like to hunt and watch these in small clips and like how that affected the viewing and like what you knew you're watching and just like the lore of it all. Yeah, I mean, I remember where I was. I was like working in the school paper and I usually just like hang out in the office because they had like a better TV and better computers than I did. So I would just sit there and like fart around the internet.

And I remember like being past Marvel Hornets somehow. And I started like clicking through and watching them. And as I was watching them, the sun went down. But I was like so enraptured that I forgot to turn the lights on. So I was like sitting by the like the third or fourth video in like a completely dark room just like clicking around YouTube and it it felt like the internet was haunted. Like it felt and like my friend I think walked in at one point and he sat down and was watching and like it just creeped the hell out of us. It was so effective. Yeah.

Like today as someone that like uses YouTube and posts on YouTube, if you were to try something like that, you're going to get the audience yelling at you in the comments for not like delivering all of the content to them immediately. because that's just how the internet is constructed now. But you could do those kinds of like scavenger hunts back then. Yeah, kids there are just too lazy to find their own creepypasta. It's very sad. Gen Z, you know, they're too busy vaping and getting lead poisoning. So by 2010, Slender Man is now like a bona fide internet meme. It's showing up on like UFO forums.

All of the creepiest sides of the internet are really into this. They've settled on Slender Man. as like a title and they start to codify his abilities. Do you remember like the early, you mentioned the tentacles, but do you remember like the early versions of Sunder Man? Like what's his deal? He can communicate with you via telepathy. He's telepathic.

There's like an ancientness to him. And he stole children. That was like a big part of the lore too, was he was like a Pied Piper type of creature. Yes. Marvel Hornets, I think, adds in. this idea that like he slowly drives you insane. Like his appearances like make you go crazy.

And yeah, the big thing is like he's always associated with like missing children. Which mind you also is like every folklore story ever. Like we have folklore going back thousands of years that references someone stealing children. It's probably the most famous trope in all of folklore. So I think that just kind of added to the like familiar. I don't know. I feel like Slender Man has like he has like this ancient type of folklore lore that starts getting built about him. He has this like lovecraftian style look and he also is like built into the internet. So he kind of like hits these three levels of like he's modern, he's antique and

he's ancient. Yeah. And in the way that like the like any good internet meme just sort of like sucks up culture and spits it back out like his look is very men in black. Like it's very, it's a million remixes and riffs all happening simultaneously, but then open enough that people can just like play around with it, which I think if it had entered, you know, fully formed, I don't think it'd be as popular. Like, I think you kind of need the interactivity for anything on the internet to work. And he's basic enough that you can dress like him for Halloween in a pretty low budget way, which is kind, I mean, I come from like TV and film. We talk about that all the time, like when you're coming up with like costumes or like outfits for characters. Like you, the costume ability

of something really lends itself to the success of a character. I knew a juggalo in college who was really into smoking salvia and he dressed like Slender Man for Halloween one year. And I was like that sounds right. And I bet it was easier than dressing like a juggalo, like doing the face paint and stuff. Sure. Probably. I mean, that's not really a costume for him.

Like he takes off his mask and then underneath is his true face. It's a culture. Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly. I apologize to that community. Yeah. I've cut Ryan saying that on the show so many times. This might be the first time.

He just tries to talk about Juggalo's every episode. He's like, do you know that the real face of Juggalo's? I did wear the Jugglo face pan once, and I did feel very, like, free. I felt like, oh, I could just, like, do whatever I want. I could huff as much gasoline as I want now, you know? Yeah, there is part of me that wants to go do ketamine in the forest at the Juggalo concert that they do in Ohio. I think we could do another episode. We could go.

Put it on the business card. Courier, our newer overlords, can we get the budget to go to the gathering? Currier News, if you're listening, I want a huff duster dressed like a juggalo at the gathering of jugolos in Minneapolis next year. So, okay, by the fall of 2009, like this is actually moving, it's kind of astounding how fast this is moving for like pre-Facebook-y internet. Like, this is pretty quick. We're talking a span of barely six months from the first post on something awful to cultural touchstone. Yeah, it was hard to go viral back then on the internet. You didn't have moms on Facebook, just reposting stuff.

A couple years ago, I was trying to figure out, like, how, like, the earliest bits of viral content, like, what were they and how do they move around the internet for this project I was working on for The Verge? And it used to be that, like, what now takes, like, two or three days in the 2000s used to take, like, a year, if not, like, a year and a half. Wow. Like, Rick Rowling took, like, almost two years to kind of really break. It's like the Oregon Trail. Like, it's like the old ways of travel. And now we have airplanes. Yeah.

Wow. Exactly. So Slender Man is moving in a very modern, quick way. By the fall of 2009, we get the first video game, which is a Java-built browser game called Slender Invasion. I will show you it because it's fascinating. It's also in Spanish. So we've gone global by this point. Yeah. It's like a crappy game where you shoot Slender Man. Yeah. Oh, you shoot him. That's kind of sad. Yeah. You're like working for the military and your mission is to shoot Slender Man. And this won't be the last game. This is called Slender the Eight Pages. And it seems like a reskin of like mist or like one of those like point and click puzzle games. Then you like see Slender Man in the woods.

It feels very analog. It's like what I want from a Slender Man game. Exactly. This is also when we started to get our first bit of like media pickup. So the earliest news article we could find about Slender Man. Um, it's from the Star Tribune, uh, fun fact. Classic. So this is from the Minnesota Star Tribune.

And it reads, he is the slender man, a mythical predator and internet sensation. Whose greatest skills, the ability to strike terror in the hearts of teens who aren't frightened by much else. Which I feel like is now just how you could describe like any popular YouTuber, you know, like he's a mythical predator and internet sensation. So. So. And his whole crew, man. He looks more like Senderman every day. Let's bleep the names so people guess who you just talked about.

You can guess it because he keeps looking like Sender Man and he keeps giving you chocolate. That could be a lot of them. I think a lot of influencer men look like Sunder Man by the end. The more famous you get on YouTube, the more you look like Sunderland. We just know this. You become like tall and weird looking. Yeah. So the article reads he's one of the scariest things out.

there, said Dan Hughes, a senior at Matto-Medy High School. Sometimes when I'm in the basement, I tell myself, don't think about Slender Man. And of course, the more I try not to, the more I do. Hughes said that the violent shock fest like Saw and Hostel have nothing on the Slender Man. Those kinds of things are more about gore, which I don't find scary, Hughes said. The Slender Man imagery uses psychology to make you scare yourself if you think too much about it, which I actually do think is kind of exactly why Slander Man works. It's like, do you ever play the Bloody Mary game? Of course.

It's like the more you speak it into existence, the more it's going to happen. And so you don't want to speak it into existence. And that makes you kind of like think about it more and talk about it more. Yeah. This article has like an interesting observation, which I hadn't really thought about until reading it, which is that the slender man's getting popular right at the peak of torture porn in Hollywood. So it's like it's very clearly the beginning of a shift away.

from what was popular in horror. And so, like, this would also be the moment the internet is full of enough people that we can start to, like, make our own culture, like, without Hollywood. So, like, it's interesting to me that this is all happening simultaneously. Yeah, that's interesting. I actually never thought about it that way. That, yeah, they're, maybe the stuff that they're watching is tired. And so they're kind of coming up with their own horror that can exist and go viral on its own.

Which probably explains why one, another reason why it went viral. which is like people are just bored of what they're seeing on TV and in movies. And I don't know the next thing that happened after this article came out, but I'm going to guess that this was maybe the first time parents learned about Slender Man. And it just made it absolutely viral amongst like all culture now, not just the like people reading about it on the message boards. You are correct. Because this is this is the exact moment.

So this is the turning point. So the problem start when this. starts to break containment. All of a sudden, it's not people who are like in the creepypasta world that are encountering Slender Man. The creator from the Something Awful Forum, he's being interviewed about why Slemman is suddenly everywhere. A Slender Man knockoff called Enderman is added to Minecraft in 2011, in 2012, a free survival game. The second one I showed you launches. It's played on stream by a big YouTuber. And then this happens. How old is it going, bro? My name.

He could be anywhere. Okay. Okay. We're good. And Pew Dye Pie plays Slender and gets millions of views and both Biotie Pye and Slender Man enter into the cultural lexicon. That's basically how it happens. Are you saying Pew Dye Pie specifically to upset people? It's highly debated.

He can't answer that as to whether or not he just can't say the name, doesn't know it, or if he's trolling our listeners. That's right. Or trolling pew d'i pie because that guy also is not great. The mystery has to live on. Sorry. So, yeah. It is interesting hearing, yeah, just how like Slender Man really caught like every wave that was happening on the internet at the time. Like it was just such a perfect trajectory for something like this.

Yeah. I mean, and I think it's because it was so flexible. You get Slender Man in Halloween costumes. There are like teens react to Slender Man videos. You get parodies. Grant actually put in a montage for us here. Check this out. Oh, whoa, no, no, no, no, no.

Have you heard of a guy who is 10 feet tall? He spares people away because he's got no face at all. What the heck? Arms with tentacle ends. But the tragedy is he just wants to make friends. Oh, my God, I think there's something behind me. For his very best suit just to impress you, have sympathy for poor slender man. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I mean, the one I'm looking at right now is 24 million views. It's called Teens React to Slender Man. And what's really interesting here is, like, 2012, in a lot of the research I've done over the years, is like the exact year the internet turns into the current internet we have. And based on what I can see, it's because 2012 is the year that mobile phone penetration beats desktop. Like YouTube is huge now Like 2012 YouTube is probably like I mean there'll be nothing like it ever again probably Yeah I was just watching a video of like who was the most popular on YouTube throughout the last like 15 years and like

2012 was like the the last little era where it was like indie creators and then it becomes just like music video channels and vivos and like corporations and now it's like uh creators that are corporations yeah no exactly yeah 2012 is like gang of style this is the moment YouTube culture like pops and and slender man is definitely part of that because I think it's a lot of creators looking for stuff to talk about and like slender man is easy because you can just Google and like be like okay here's like the internet is still kind of hidden knowledge in 2012 yeah and so it's it's like that curation element too where like you have we've like moved away from the analog internet or I guess what felt like this like version of the internet that no longer exists and so if you're just joining the internet as like a teenager. You don't have access to that. So you're looking at these creators who are like, this is the scariest video from something awful. This is the scary. Like let me show you the scariest content. And I feel like those pages just all exploded because they were just able to like curate those posts basically. I think that's exactly right. There's also one important last piece here, which we have not mentioned, that I made a note of to bring up because I don't think it's an

accident that in 2012 you have a very big culture on Tumblr that becomes obsessed with what they call the Tumblr sexy man and many Tumblr sexy men Loki, Doctor Who, the ones they're from the Lorax. What do they all have in common? They're skinny and they wear suits. And I think it is not an accident that like a lot of people want to have sex with Slender Man because he looks like a Tumblr sexy man. Wow, Tumblr's sexiest man of the year. Slender Man 2012. Slender Man. I don't think it's an accent that like there was something for everyone with Slender Man. You can draw like sexy fan.

I remember like a lot of sexy Slender Man fan art where like the image was cut off like right at his shoulders. Like he like he didn't fit in the image. Yeah. He's tall. Ladies. He's a lot of. He's tall. He's tall and he wears a suit.

What more could you want? He's always dressed to impress guys. No, what's interesting. I remember using Tumblr a lot back in the day and specifically like being a, this is going to sound bad. But like being very. very morbidly curious about the girls that were obsessed with serial killers. Like there was a lot of fan pages for Dylan and Eric and Columbine. And there was a lot of like, I can change him, baby girl edits of horrible like Ted Bundy and

mostly the Columbine guys, I guess, is the ones that I saw. But Slender Man in a way like fits into that because he is like pure evil. He still steals children. He kills children. He drives you crazy. but he's also like, I guess I don't want to say conventionally attractive because I don't think he has a face. But he like he's tall. And so he just like also becomes part of those same girls tumbler feeds.

In 2012, I did a story about the fandom around the Aurora shooter James Holmes. And they called themselves the homesies. Oh my God. And when I wrote about them, they got mad at me. And so they photoshopped my head onto gay pornography and made a bunch of images. and made a bunch of images of me being fucked by James Holmes. Were you like a little bit proud that you made them so mad? No, it was like annoying.

It was like more annoying than I thought. Like it was like I never sort of love when the internet does that because it just means I'm going to lose my weekend. Right. Like I, but like when you shake the hornets nest stuff comes out. So yeah, they didn't like the attention because I think Tumblr cracked down on them after I wrote about it. Was there sentiment around him specifically? I am just curious. It was that photo of him with the red hair that got misreported as being Joker hair,

which seemed to have no connection. But because he shot up a screening of Batman and he had dyed red hair, people kind of assumed he was dressed like the Joker, but he was. Joker has green hair. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, didn't he picked that theater because it was going to be full. It wasn't because of Batman at all. Yeah.

Exactly, but because he had dyed his hair, a lot of local media, like, immediately reported that he was dressed like the Joker. And he's like a white guy and like women love when white guys kill people. Like they, that's just like a thing. Yeah, we love it. Tumblr girls love that. Like, you can fix him. I mean, look at Luigi Mangione. Again, I don't know if you want to include that.

Well, hold on. Let's not include him there. Because I'm talking about bad guys. I'm talking about people who do bad stuff. I believe the fifth. I can't say anything. Yeah. The amount of menswear subredits that just like,

constantly share photos of him in loafers at his hearing. They're like obsessed with Luigi Mangione's feet in a way that I think is like, they're all like, where can I buy these shoes? It's like, you don't want to buy the shoes. You just want to share the photo of his feet. Is it the feet?

I think, I feel like that photo is so perfectly staged. Like I think every element of that photo, they knew exactly what they were doing. Like the perfect loafers, the way that his ankles are crossed those little handcuffs on the, I think it is, I think they knew what they were doing.

This is the first time I'm glad we're a video podcast because you should look at Kaelin's face describing this and like a dreamy air bubble kind of pops up. I have Getty access. We can buy the photo. That is all, not to brag, but I have Getty access. So I can buy a giant print of Luigi Mangi on his feet. So this is all kind of, I think, good foundational work for where we're headed next, which is kind of a darker road. Because the internet, like I said, kind of with the James Holmes fans,

like no one's in charge. Like, no one can really tell you like how to process these things, how to share these things, how to like think about them. And fandoms curdle. They turn toxic. People take them in weird directions. And in 2014 is when we get to the slender man stabbing, which is often misremembered as a slender man murder.

the two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin who stabbed their classmate, did it inspired by Slender Man. Their classmate luckily survived with injuries. This is a summary of it from a news report at the time. The 12-year-old girls have been plotting the murder for months, police say. Morgan E. Gacer was allowed to have two friends over each year for her birthday. This year, she'd celebrate on May 30th. That is the day she and Annius.

E. Weyer would try to kill their friend during a sleepover. Weyer said that Gacer told her they should become proxies of Slender Man and kill their friend to prove themselves worthy of him. Weyer said she was surprised by Gacer's suggestion, but also excited to prove skeptics wrong and show that Slender Man really did exist. Do you remember when this happened? Yeah, I followed the story really closely when it happened. And I guess it became part of the Lord, like the proxies that there were.

Like at this point in the lore, Slender Man lived in a house in the woods and had people that would do his bidding. So that was like the proxy they were referring to becoming. You could be like an indentured servant and pledge your loyalty to Slender Man. Okay. Yeah. We're going to talk about how this changed the story of Sunder Man, how the world reacted to it, and how I think this changed the way the media thought about the importance of the internet all after the break. But first, a word from our sponsors. Little handcuffs for dainty boy ankles.

Little, little, yeah, Luigi Mangione's Loafers. Yes. What do you remember from, like, after the stabbing, like, how do you remember the media reacting to this? The media immediately kind of glommed on to this being like part of a bigger societal issue of things that were happening. This is also the time where teens started having cell phones. And so it was like just ripe for. for a story like this to come up and strike fear in every parent's heart. So I do remember it being immediately like a parable about leaving kids alone with their phones,

like letting teenagers have access to the internet. There was a lot going on with this story and a lot going on with those girls that was not shared at first. It just seemed like this was something that could happen to any kid at any school across the country. Yeah, my main sort of memory of this period was that. it was a lot of media outlets not really sort of understanding what slender man is or was not really caring but knowing that like the internet and social media was popular and they could just like sort of attach stuff to it so it was a lot like I remember having to like write multiple explainers at the time being like this is slender man this is where it comes from like it is just a meme basically like it's not it's it's not like toxic or you evil. It's just like this thing that like people have been sharing for years now. Like saying that it started from a Photoshop contest almost makes it scarier because it's this thing that started on the internet and you don't know where it started from, but your kids

are taking it so seriously because they're too young to understand and now they're killing their friends over it. This is also peak like local Facebook era. So you're getting a lot of local towns that are now on Facebook with the first time sharing local news. Yeah. That local news becomes national news. And then like the tabloids attack it and it goes like, you know, huge. And one of the first things coming from the police was that the girls were not remorseful. I do remember that. So that added.

Yes. And that, so that got like spread around really fast because these girls were minors. So like their names are not being shared. Other things about them are not being shared. But I do remember the police immediately being like, yeah, they didn't feel bad about this. Right. And remember what we said, panic world listeners. You can't trust the police in any kind of statement they give.

That's why we think that fentanyl can be absorbed through your skin. Yeah. A bunch of, I guess, like the bigger players you could say in the Slender Man lore universe have to put out statements. They say, you know, this was a fake thing that, you know, went horrible. But this does nothing to stop this turning into a very real moral panic. And stories pop up about copycats starting basically around like late 2014. A mother in Ohio says that her daughter attacking her with a knife could have been the result of Slender Man. according to this local news story,

she had her hood up and had her hands covered with her sleeves and the mask. The mother said, she said her 13-year-old daughter was obsessed with the fictional character, Slender Man. She was someone else during that attack. The mother said, we found things that she had written and made reference to Slender Man. She even created a world for Slenderman in the game Minecraft. Then you have like another story out of Florida where a 14-year-old girl was arrested

after trying to set her family's house on fire. And she had visualized. visited websites that had Sunderman on them. Which, I mean, if you're going to go through any 14-year-old browser at the time, they're going to have something Sunderman on it, but it's just an easy thing to point to. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of parents who are looking for a reason why, you know, their kid would do something horrible and then a lot of local media outlets that are happy to include Sunderman in the headline because they need traffic.

It's all leading to like a classic American moral panic. And of course, it gets topped off by Law and Order. SVU doing a slender man. Oh my God, they did a whole episode on it. That's right. They always, yeah, they always have to be there. They were screaming. Run, Zoe, run.

But he caught me and knocked me down. You saw him? Zoe, you saw his face? Yes. It was the classical man. Yeah. And then finally, weeks later, in classic New York Times fashion, you get struggling to understand.

and Slender Man in June 2014. And it's a roundup of the whole thing. The Chicago Tribune writes about it, writing. They describe the internet as a culture where dark magic is celebrated, but religion is considered bothersome. We reap what we sow. They're still saying that, though. And they aren't the only ones.

Yeah, CNN is warning parents about the dangers of Slender Man. Like, we are now full craziness in 2014, by the end of 2014. Yeah, this is a real threat that's living in your kids' phones. he is just waiting there to take over their minds, you're perfectly normal, nothing else wrong with them children, and like get them to commit murder against you or their friends, which was not the case at all. Like at that point, it's probably, again, because these girls are minors, they're, it's probably not being reported the psychological issues that they were having at the time, the mental health

component to the stabbing. Like, none of that is being. Plus, what if their friends just had bad vibes? Well, they really thought that she did because they were both like cognitively impaired in different ways. But like, yeah, it just none of that is being shared at all. We talked about this a lot in our episode about like the Blue Whale game in Russia where it's like there's a bunch of mental health issues happening with kids. They have hobbies and interests like everyone else. Something bad happens and it's left to the parents to sort of like figure out how this horrible thing happened.

Yeah. And so they're just like, oh, well, they're looking at this like creepy guy on the internet. So that's probably what did it. You know, it's a, it's very desperate. Both of the girls involved, their parents were not aware of like the extent of one of the girls had schizophrenia. The parents did not know that. They knew that her father, her biological father had schizophrenia and they never went and had her checked. And she had been suffering since she was very little.

She'd been having delusions. Turns out like all of the imaginary friends that never went away, like that was. the schizophrenia that was going untreated. And then the other girl had, I remember reading, she had a learning disability that was so severe when she went to the hospital after the attack. They actually had to check her for a TBI because they thought that maybe she had hit her head that hard.

So these are the girls that really took to the slender man. It's not the average child in America that was like having these delusions, right? It was one girl with very bad schizophrenia who was able to convince her other friends that had this like severe learning. disability that if they committed this murder, they could be proxies for Sunder Man. Right. Exactly. And that's always the way. That's always the case. Yeah. The kind of kid that's

spending all day online looking at this stuff without like any sort of parental supervision anyways, like who are just like off in their own, like they're, they're being neglected in other ways. Like it's all part of sort of a larger issue, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I remember at the time being like, oh, it's so shocking that it was two young girls that did this. And at the same time being like, of course it was two young girls that did this. Because the ability to convince your friend to do something insane is, I think, canon in a lot of like little girls' lives. Maybe I don't know. We'll see what the listeners have to say about that.

But you see, like, did you see the article that just came out about those little girls in Arizona that all plotted to murder one of the boys? in their class and they were going to stage it to look like a suicide and they were in fifth grade. I mean, did a little boy, was he, was he an asshole? Did he deserve it? I don't think so. Actually, this is going to sound crazy. I think the girls were the assholes in the situation. Well, that's surprising. I'll have to read more about that. That doesn't sound right to me. You're going to have to do your own research, of course. I'll have to do my own research on that one. No, but yeah, I think there's always whenever you get like all America whipped up into a crazy frenzy, if you dig deep enough, there's always a gender component and there's always some sort of

like attempt at hiding parental negligence. Those are like you, it's classic like Salem Witch trial bullshit. Like, and we've just been doing it for hundreds of years. And Slender Man, sort of a, uh, the new, one of the newer versions of it. But it's also kind of the moment where the mainstream media, the mainstream society starts to realize that like this internet thing is a big deal. Like it's not going away. Like memes are, they matter, basically.

Yeah. that when your kid goes on their computer at night to do their homework, they actually have access to this whole other world and that they're like participating in it, which I think a lot like my parents didn't realize that when I was growing up. They didn't know the stuff that I was doing on the internet. They thought I was just like typing up homework assignments and then like closing my laptop. No, I don't. I think you're exactly right. And luckily we have solved this problem for good, at least when it comes to Slender Man. The, uh, the end of the Slender Man story arrives about four years later with the release of the movie Slender. Slender. Man, which has an 8% on Rotten Tomatoes. I did not watch it. Have you seen it? No. 8%. Yeah.

8%. The consensus is Slender Man might be thin, but he's positively, positively robust compared to the flimsy assortment of scares generated by the would-be-chiller that bears his name. The only thing that can kill a meme is a bad IP. Yeah. It seems like it didn't really go anywhere. I also think we are talking. about this at an interesting moment because the world that invented Slender Man, the sort of early

social media world, is clearly going away and being replaced with something else, largely probably because of AI. And I do think we are due for like a spooky AI thing. I've seen beginnings of it, but I haven't seen something as big as Slender Man, but I think it's, I think we're due. I worry about this not to be one of the parents that we were kind of just laughing at, but But my worry is like, okay, in the Slender Man case, you have millions of kids that interact with Slender Man content and like nothing bad happens. And you have one girl who has schizophrenia and has these delusions that Sunder Man is real. It is like so one in a million.

But now with AI, Slanderman can talk back to you. Like you can make a Slender Man chatbot that like really interacts with you. And I think you already see people kind of losing touch with reality with chatbots, people who otherwise I don't think would. So my fear is like a 13 year old kid who doesn't really know what's real and what's fake. Anyways is like, I don't know, maybe going to start interacting with these like scary chatbots. I feel like that would be the next iteration in my mind. I mean, we're already hearing stories of people being involuntarily committed for chat chitit psychosis.

Like it is happening. Oh, really? I haven't heard that. Yeah. That's horrifying. Yeah. There's been about a dozen cases, like high profile cases of people being convinced by, the AI that, you know, they should do certain things or hurt themselves to please the AI.

So, like, this is definitely happening. But we, I haven't seen like the creation of a character or the creation of like a, of a, of an urban legend yet, you know, which I think. It was a little bit of that at the beginning. I want to say like two years ago when like the image generation component was like really shitty. It was like if you typed one thing in, it would always kind of come up with. the same shitty, scary image. Oh, yeah. That was a little bit of like, oh, AI keeps making this one cryptid.

It was like a, they were calling it like an AI cryptid. That's kind of since gone away, though. And there hasn't been anything that's like filled that space. Yeah, you're right. But it's interesting that we've already kind of hit something close. Like we're, yeah, we're clearly due for something else. Just on that point, though, that like the whole thing with these is that like you're being yes anded to just creep yourself out with other people.

And as Ryan, as you've talked about a lot, like, if you're talking to a chatbot, it's like you alone with a robot. Can it like break contain if it's not being built upon by other people? Like is it going to affect like creepy pasta on the whole if people are just creeping themselves out with like their own little Sunderman bot? I think like people just naturally share scary stories. I am not such a dumer that I think that like AI is the end of like socialization. and stuff. I think we just do it. I'm waiting for someone to figure out like what Kaling was saying, like an exploit that you can just, all of us can do closer to like the studio Ghibli stuff. Like you figure out like, oh, wow, like the AI is really good at Studio Ghibli. Like you will

figure out like the AI is good at this weird kind of horror thing that like young people are drawn to. Like I'm just sort of waiting for that moment. We are in like a creepy pasta drought right now. I think break room or back rooms is really the only thing to break through in the last. last five or so years. I was telling Grant about it, but it's, after Slender Man ended, right, we had like the creepy posse, the no sleep subreddit. And like that was just like fully written stories. And a lot of those became books.

And a lot of those books are very good. And a lot of the creepypossas are still some of my favorite ones. But then that subreddit like made a bunch of really weird rules about what you can write and what you can say and like what kinds of characters you can use. And so it just completely shut down. And there's like no good, I mean, I don't think there's much good content being posted on there now. So I do think people are like craving that like community horror that gets passed around because it's always been there. Like since the dawn of the internet, it's been there.

So like they will come up with something via like using AI. I just don't know what it would be. Yeah. If we, because I want to cash in. That's what I, that's what this whole episode's actually been about. I think this is a business opportunity. I want to make the next Laboooo. Don't we all?

We would just be able to retire if we made Labubo. I want that Labubu money. There's something clearly coming because we are in a drought. Or like we are both wrong and there's just like a completely new way of interacting online coming over the hill. But I don't think so. I think we've kind of always been doing this. Like we were drawn to campfire stories, even if they involve like a really tall, sexy man that steals your children. So what the problem that occurs is that it crosses things like Sunderman,

crossover enough that the teenagers who did the stabbing didn't know its origin. It starts one place and then it ends up in a different part of the internet where they're not tracing it. Is the internet today primed for that problem to be better or worse than when Slender Man took off? It's an inherent issue with the way that we built the internet, like the modern internet because most social platforms launched as social networks where you would share your life. They have over time morphed into content platforms. And like even the earliest years of YouTube, there were people putting like fiction up there.

They were putting like skits or sketches or whatever. But there's not an agree like if you think about TV or you think about movies, there's like an agreed upon visual language of this is fake or this is real. Like if it has actors, then you kind of assume. I'm like, okay, like this, I'm not watching something happen in real life. The internet, though, scrambles all that because the platforms that we use don't want to be defined as like this, like other than like, let's say deviant art or like, you know, maybe like a no sleep subreddit or like specific places you make to share fiction or art,

everyone else is just putting whatever they can wherever they can to get eyeballs. So you end up with this like constant, constant problem of like, is the thing I'm looking at real? Is it fake? Is it fake but meant to look real? Does it look real, but it's being filmed like it's fake because you want it to be cinematic? Like, there's no agreed upon visual language of is the thing I'm looking at on the internet art or not. And that is a problem that we have not fixed. There's no, there seems to be no even desire to fix it because like half of attention online is generated by being like, is that real? You know, like, and it's been like that for 20 years now. Um, Slanderman Man literally is one of the first big examples of, is that real?

You know, like, and, and that's how the entire attention economy functions now. And I don't see anyone stepping up to sort of say like, all right, if you're going to make something fictitious on the internet, you've got to put credits and you got to be part of the union and you got to like do all the things that like movies do to like let you know that you're watching something fictitious. We don't have that online. It's a, it's a free for all. Yeah, it's just going to get worse with AI too. Like some of the videos like I saw. this morning even a video of there was like a five-year-old girl that fell off a Disney cruise and her dad saved her she's fine but even when I was watching like the video of the the rescue I had to like ask myself like is this AI which I find myself asking more and more so like the is this real is now applying to like news and health advice and so much more than just seeing a picture of a lovecraftian demon in the woods which yeah so it's just it's a very strange time i don't know i find myself like i i often wonder if we're

going to get to a place where when we open our phones like when i have kids or like the next generation of like kids that are raised like are they going to open their phones and be like this is the fake place like everything i'm just going to go into this like world where everything's fiction and accept that or because i feel like we're splitting the difference in a weird way today we're like half the stuff we see isn't real or it's just like misinformation or It's fiction. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's very strange. It's hard to navigate. Great. Total hopelessness. That's the kind of note I like to end an episode on that. Yeah, there it was.

Thank you for coming on the show. This was a delightful conversation about my favorite creepy tall man. So yeah, thank you again. This was really, this was really fun. Thank you so much for having me. I always love talking about creepypastas and the internet and slender man. It's been a blast. If people want to follow you online, where can they do that? I'm heart starts pounding wherever you get your podcasts and also TikTok, Instagram, all socials. Yeah, check us out. We post a lot about urban legends, a lot of folklore, some creepypasta stuff. So I think anyone who likes this episode will find something they like on the heart starts pounding feed.

So Kalin and I talked about back rooms and liminal spaces for over five minutes. And Grant refuses to put it in the episode. He says it's too good. It's got to go behind a paywall. But if that's your thing, you can now watch it or listen to it on our Patreon. And you can also see a bunch of pictures of gas stations floating in space. We go pretty deep into my love of liminal spaces, photos of liminal spaces. You can go to patreon.com slash panic world and listen and or watch that right now.

Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Fielstead is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice

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