SLENDERMAN: BLURRING THE LINES OF REALITY – The Truth Behind The Legend

The Slender Man began as two photographs and a caption, submitted to an internet forum in 2009 as nothing more than a creepy image contest. Within five years, people across the country were treating him as real – and some proved just how far that belief could go.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/Slenderman

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8ka2re

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: In 2009, a photograph appeared on an internet forum, submitted as an entry in a contest to create convincing fake paranormal images. The figure in it had no face, arms too long for its body, and a caption written like a piece of found history. Within a few years, that figure had a name recognized across the internet, a following that treated the images as more than fiction, and a reputation for turning up in places far stranger than a photo contest ever intended.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:02:02.673 = Show Open
00:03:13.025 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 1
00:09:24.860 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 2 ***
00:22:48.484 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 3 ***
00:34:59.166 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 4 ***
00:41:57.606 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 5 ***
00:54:09.889 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Slenderman: Blurring The Lines Of Reality” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9e9srj
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Originally aired: March, 2022

This episode of Weird Darkness traces the Slender Man from an internet photo contest into real-world stabbings, arson, and a wave of suicides on a South Dakota reservation, then weighs whether an invented internet legend can, in some sense, become real.It opens with the character's exact origin: on June 10th, 2009, Eric Knudsen, posting under the name Victor Surge on the forum Something Awful, submitted two doctored photographs as part of a contest to create convincing paranormal images. Each carried a caption inventing a backstory, one referencing a photographer "presumed dead" in 1983 and another tying the figure to a fire at the Stirling City Library and the disappearance of a photographer named Mary Thomas in 1986. The figure in both images, faceless and unnaturally tall with elongated arms, spread across the internet within days and took on the name Slender Man, along with a folklore of his own: a preference for woods and abandoned buildings, the ability to travel at will, and warning signs that included nosebleeds, nightmares, and sudden paranoia.From there, the...