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.
The Russian Sleep Experiment
A text that first appeared online around 2010: five prisoners, a sealed chamber, a gas that prevents sleep, fifteen days of observation and what they become by the end of it. It is presented as a declassified report from a Soviet laboratory in the 1940s. No laboratory, no report and no mention of any of it exists before 2010, and the photograph that travels with the text is an animatronic mask sold in Halloween shops. The story spread so widely that it still resurfaces regularly as a "declassified document".
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