Pleasant Hill

Slender Man

Invented in June 2009 by Eric Knudsen, posting as Victor Surge, for a photo-manipulation contest on the Something Awful forums: two black-and-white photographs of children with a tall thin figure in a suit added to them, and a couple of lines of caption attributed to witnesses who did not exist. The brief was to make an image look paranormal. Three years later Slender Man was living on his own — hundreds of stories, games and web series the author had nothing to do with. One of the first cases of internet folklore outgrowing any source it came from. The legend has no geography of its own: the pin sits in Pleasant Hill, Missouri, where the forum itself was run from.