SLENDERMAN

Slender Man:

Excerpt: The Slender Man is a creepypasta story about a strange paranormal creature that abducts children. Slenderman is often described as being an unusually tall man, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. He has long, thin arms and legs and his face is said to be completely blank.

According to the legend, Slender Man can stretch or shorten his arms at will and has tentacle-like appendages protruding from his back. His presence can cause memory loss, insomnia, paranoia, nosebleeds and coughing fits.

Whenever the Slender Man appears, children are abducted. They say he lures them into the woods, then controls their mind and forces them to walk into his outstretched arms. They are never seen again.

A series of woodcuts were found in in Germany. They date back to the 16th Century and feature a tall man with no face, named Der Großmann. According to the inscriptions, he is a mythical creature who lives in the Black Forest and creeps out of the woods at night to spirit away bad children.

An old German journal, dated 1702, contains a chilling account:

“My child, my Lars…He is gone. Taken from his bed. All that was left was a scrap of black clothing. Lars came running into my bedroom yesterday, screaming at the top of his lungs. “The Tall Man is outside!”, he cried. When I asked him what he was talking about, he told me about Der Großmann. He said he went into the groves by our village and found one of my cows dead. It’s carcass was hanging from a tree. I thought nothing of it at first… But now, my poor Lars is gone. We must find him and leave this place before we are killed. I am sorry my son… I should have listened to you. May God forgive me.”

Another account was found in a book of collected folklore concerning supernatural creatures:

“When I was younger, a cousin of mine came to live with us. He was older than me and my sisters. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. We were the only family he had left in the world. He was the worst liar you’d ever meet. Anything he’d tell you was a lie. I liked him all right. We slept in a loft during the summer because it was cooler up there, me and him, and in the winters we slept on the floor closer to the stove. My sisters had their own room.

So one night my cousin wakes me up by punching me in the shoulder, and it’s summer so we’re up in the loft, and my first thought when he wakes me up is to just push him out, because I’m not happy at being waked up, you know? But before I can say anything he puts his hand over my mouth and even though it’s dark I can hear that he’s scared. “Listen,” he says, and so I listen real careful. It’s this scratching, like something on the roof, and the roof is right over our heads, mind you, ‘cause we’re in the loft. I was a trifle rattled, but I wasn’t having none of it. “So?” I says to him. “It’s just some raccoon or a cat.”

“No,” says John, “I heard it before I waked you up, it’s like footsteps, like someone’s walking up there.” I wasn’t taking no truck with that, I told you he was the awfullest liar. So I went back to sleep, but the next day my cousin tried to tell Pap about it, and Pap wasn’t having no truck with it, either. But one night later on, while we was all having supper, Pap sent out my youngest sister to fetch water from the pump we had in the back. After a while we heard Lily scream, and it was Ma who got up first, and then Pap. The rest of us stayed at the table because we was like to get in trouble if Lily was hurt and we was there to gloat. Soon enough, though, we heard Pap and Ma shouting too, so me and John went out to see if they needed our help. All they had was the water pail Lily carried out, and there wasn’t no other sign of her.At first I didn’t understand what was going on, with both Ma and Pap shouting, and by that time my other sisters come out and they started crying, and my cousin was just standing there in the yard looking off toward something.

“It’s the man walking yonder!” he yells, and he’s pointing out across the field. No one’s listening to him but me and he keeps saying it: “It’s the man walking yonder! It’s the man walking yonder!”

You already know it was suppertime, so you know the sun was setting and it was hard to see. But when I looked out over that field at the back of the house, the whole thing was lit up orange, and there was a row of big black trees that was the edge of the woods, you know? And I swear to you that I saw one of them trees moving, like a man walking away. But it couldn’t have been a man, ‘cause there ain’t no man that tall and skinny.

Papa seen it, too, I think. He took us inside and locked all the doors, and he made us keep still while he got out his rifle. We waited like that all night, Ma crying the whole time. When the sun come up we took a wagon into town and told folks what happened, though as I recall nothing much came of it. John ran off a few weeks later, and we got a new house closer to the mill where Papa worked. I still can’t manage to look at trees during sunset though, especially not on windy days when they all move back and forth, like a man walking away.”

The following is a witness account of an encounter with The Slender Man:

“After waking up with a jolt, the girl laid in bed a few seconds longer. Reaching over to switch on her bedside lamp, she tried to remember exactly what had stolen her sweet slumber away. When she couldn’t, the brunette swung her legs over the side of the bed and heaved herself up. Checking the time on her phone, she snorted when she saw it was midnight; the witching hour. Knowing that sleep would only evade her, she left her bedroom for the kitchen, a good cup of coffee on her mind.

As she passed by her front door, a chill ran down her spine. It’s only Winter, she told herself, focusing again on the coffee plan. Measuring out scoops, water, and preparing her cup kept her occupied, but as the dark liquid boiled, she had nothing left to keep her mind from wandering off. The chill returned and she couldn’t help but glance behind her to the front door. It stood there innocently enough, just like always. The deadbolt was still in place and she could see nothing amiss with it. Turning back to her coffee, she did her best to forget about the feeling.

With her cup in hand, she started back towards her bedroom. As she walked by the front door, she decided that a quick glance out of the peep hole would help calm her restless thoughts. The chill worsened with each step she took towards the door and further away from the safety and warmth of her blankets. She pressed her empty hand against the cold, metal door and took a deep breath before leading her eye to the peep hole.

At first, she could only see an inky blackness and somehow seemed to swirl in itself. When she blinked in surprise, the void melted away. She wished it hadn’t. In it’s place, there stood what she could only guess was once a man. The limbs were long and inhumanly awkward, with bulky joints branching off into several arms, not unlike the branches of a tree. The creature was draped in a black suit, somehow making the thing more nightmarish to her. The icing on the proverbial cake, however, was what passed as the hellish thing’s face. It was as though her mind blurred the ghastly visage to spare itself further shock and horror.

She shoved herself away from the door with the hand still pressed against it. The scalding mug of coffee fell, the liquid burning her bare legs as she fell backwards and tried to crawl away from the door. She knew, somehow, that her mind hadn’t been playing tricks on her. As she crab walked away from the door, she watched as tendrils as black as the void itself snake around through the cracks. The girl was trapped between the instinct to flee and the gut feeling to not turn her back on the door. When the door jolted, the urge to flee overcame her and she slipped in the burning liquid as she tried to make it back to her room.

She knew deep down that she was trapping herself in a corner, but she had to get away from the door. The girl was halfway down the hallway when she heard the previously locked door creak open. She screamed and slipped into a wall, cracking her chin on it and stunning her.

After that, there was only blackness.

“Nicole?” a warm, male voice snapped the woman out of her trance. As she turned around, she was met by one of her sister’s doctor’s. She nodded, not sure if she should say anything, or even if she could find her voice if she did have something to say. That morning, she had gotten an urgent phone call from the hospital, saying that her sister, Lindsay, was there. Before they had even let her see her, the doctor’s had pulled her off to the side and insisted that they talk to her about what might have happened. Phrases like ‘self-inflected’ and ‘assault’ had been thrown around and Nicole felt her mind reel.

She still hadn’t fully understood what they had been saying until she saw Lindsay with her own eyes. Her little sister had a bandage wrapped around her head, covering both of her ears as well as her eyes. They said it was to keep her now deadened eyes from drying out and to try to keep infection out of the wounds Lindsay had made to her ears. The doctors had guessed that either she or someone else had jammed a pencil into them to keep her off balance or to deafen herself against something. There was the mix of first and second degree burns on her hands, legs, and feet, from what was assumed to be the coffee her neighbors found slipped all over the entry to her apartment.

As Nicole walked into her sister’s hospital room the first time, she thought she had spied the silhouette of a man in the window. That, she knew, was impossible. Her sister’s room was on the third story of the hospital.

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