Connections

Ever since the beginning, the Slender Man and its associated phenomena have born striking resemblances to folkloric entities across cultures and modern paranormal sightings. This is an extensive, sourced list of each with little regard for that unstable line between fiction and reality.

See also: Timeline, Locations, Body Count, Objects

North America

• Mississippian Mounds in Illinois dating between 900 and 1450 CE have been identified as mass graves. Photographs taken of them in modern times develop artifacts that extant tribes call ynirono or “tomb guardians”.

• At least one image of Aztecs’ human sacrifice depicts the priest without a face. Similarly, Mayans believed that Ceiba Trees were sacred and offered human sacrifices to appease a god living inside them. Since the introduction of Catholicism to Mexico, this being has either been conflated with the Devil or called the ya’axche’ wíinik (roughly, “Ceiba man”).

• Padre Flaco is a Mexican legend about a child-stealing monster of the forest; as a means of gaining victims’ trust, it has been said to resemble such respected figures as priests and soldiers.

• One story from Kentucky, anthologized in W.K. McNeil’s Ghost Stories of the American South, details the abduction of the informant’s sister by a “man walking yonder” that resembled a moving tree.

• Swamp Stories of the southeastern United States describe giant spiders that drag people underwater.

• The organically-conceived urban legend of the Black Eyed Kids has been tied into the Slender Man mythos when the Original Mythos Meta posited that the children stolen by the Slender Man become the Black Eyed Kids.

• The Original Mythos Meta also noted an uncanny resemblance between the Slender Man and an alleged “Alien Encounter Filmed In Mexico”.

• The Rake is a human-like monster with black eyes and a nightmarish voice, primarily sighted in the northeastern United States but also referenced worldwide in accounts dating as far back as the 12th century. Posts in the Original Mythos Meta noted the spiritual similarities between this tale and accounts of the Slender Man, which became clearer as both monsters played a part in events surrounding the Everyman HYBRID channel.

• The Slender Man may have left the Inhuman Handprint on the third-story window of Elizabeth Hetzler from Pennsylvania after her disappearance in 2007.

• According to Alex Kralie of Marble Hornets, who is certainly not the most reliable source of information:

How much do you know about this area? When I first moved here, I remember hearing a story that back in the 1800s they thought this place was blessed because everything would grow so fast. They would take their worst criminals, murderers, child molesters, and they would put them on trial before God out here. They would tie them up to the trees, and the idea was that they would get stretched out, kind of like a rack. They never fed or gave them water though, so they would just die of dehydration. They never cut down the bodies. They would just burn the whole tree with them still on it. They stopped doing it, though, after a kid went missing, and he finally turned up in the area where they would do the trials. He had been dismembered and strung up.

• Missing 411 is a series of books on especially mysterious disappearances at American and Canadian national parks, which often involve understated evidence of kidnapping and unusual patterns nationwide. Hmm…

• The Zodiac Killer signed his infamous coded correspondence with a symbol quite reminiscent of the Operator symbol from Marble Hornets:

South America

• The very First Appearance of the Slender Man dates back to a Brazilian cave painting from 9000 BCE.

Europe

• Another First Appearance of the Slender Man comes from an Icelandic cave painting dating back to 5000 BCE.

• Another possible origin of the Slender Man comes from the Greek myth of Nyx and Erebus’ incestuous union. In an attempt to rid humanity of the sentience gained from Prometheus’ flame of knowledge, these deities produced a mindless, nameless child that persistently haunted select people.

• According to a missing historian’s thesis in the Atlantic Historical Review, one Roman citizen’s account from the first century BCE demonstrates the influence of Gallic monster tales on Rome.

• The Withering Walkers of Norse mythology were dark elves that would drag people into the earth, which corresponds to an unusual discovery of caves containing human remains from between 700 and 1200 CE.

• Norse mythology also figures into events surrounding the Just Another Fool blog, in which an unhinged Logan Renault trades the light of an eye for knowledge in the same manner as Odin. He invokes the nine worlds of Yggdrasil in explaining that there are only nine truly conscious beings in existence: four players who received notes from his journal, you, the child born to replace Logan’s late friend Matt, Logan himself, Logan’s friend Joshua, and the Slender Man.

• The Green Man became a symbol of ill omen in the middle ages as people started depicting his countenance outside of churches.

• Josef Franz was a German artist and child prodigy from the Renaissance whose art depicts a figure with multiple limbs. It is believed to represent his descent into madness prior to his disappearance.

• Der Ritter is a woodcut from the 1540s by a German artist named Hans Freckenberg. It depicts a skeletal being with multiple limbs, which is believed to symbolize either religious wars or a plague that forced the abandonment of the Halstberg castle where the woodcut was found.

• The Three Ages of Woman and Death is a painting by German artist Hans Baldung and includes similar hourglass motifs to the art of Hans Freckenberg, his contemporary. An X-ray of the painting reveals that it originally depicted multiple arms on the figure of Death.

• Der Großmann, as depicted in a woodcut from Brandenburg, Germany and described in a journal account from 1702, was a faerie from the Black Forest that abducted children when they strayed into its domain.

• The Erlking of German and Danish folklore was the subject of “Der Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a 1782 poem where it steals a child.

• Schlankwald is another old poem translated from German.

• Fear Dubh is a Scottish legend of another monster purported to haunt woods at night.

• An old and unpopular Romanian fairy tale depicts the Tall Man as a demon indiscriminate of morality, killing a virtuous girl who refuses to sacrifice her sister.

• Small Findings on the Slender Man include a children’s game from a Romanian village wherein one child playing the role of “Mare Barbat” (“tall man”) catches another.

• According to the book British Myths, Legends and Unsolved Tales, the disappearance of twelve children from Blackburn, Lancashire in 1809 and the discovery of their remains in 1856 was anticipated by the occasional appearances of an unusually tall man a few nights prior.

• According to this BBC News article:

The BBC issued an official description: "The abstract pattern consists of two intersecting eyes which scan the globe from north to south and east to west, symbolising vision and the power of vision.

"Flashes of lightning on either side represent electrical forces and the whole form takes the shape of wings which suggest the creative possibilities of television broadcasting."

Naomi Games showed me her father's cuttings book, in which the newspapers' reaction to the symbol's unveiling is recorded. Most didn't like it.

One man wrote to the News Chronicle with an impressive list of the images conjured up by the symbol: "Menace, darkness, Germans, spiked helmet, bird of prey, baleful eye, cage, torture, bandaged head, nets, whips, thongs, aerial bombs, attacks, pincer movements and Fascist flashes."

Asia

• The Nopperabō of Japanese legend is a faceless ghost that delights in terrifying humans with its shapeshifting abilities.

Africa

• Another First Appearance of the Slender Man comes from ancient Egypt, where hieroglyphs depict a tall being called “Thief of the Gods” or “Thief of Kuk” –Kuk being a deification of darkness.

• As shown in Dark Harvest, both ancient Egyptians and an international modern cult called the Order name “Gorr’Rylaehotep” as a god from another world –the “Fourth World”, as the Order calls it. The ancient Egyptian Rite of Gorr’Rylaehotep, as recorded in the Tablet of Ancient Wisdom, details how to summon it through a Rift between worlds.

Unplaced

• An obscure grimoire by one “Nathaniel V” describes a Transformed man, whose thought processes are unknowable in spite of its potential for humanlike countenance.

• Face at the Window was an article that was re-posted into the Original Mythos thread due to its similar musings on the nature of paranoia.

• Like the Black Eyed Kids above, Shadow People are the subject of an early internet urban legend that has been connected to the Slender Man through the Original Mythos Meta. Posts there suggest that they are either the Slender Man itself in a case of mistaken identity or were created from its shadow.

• Also from the Original Mythos Meta,

+ EYES ONLY

“Slender Man is like that stupid game where you lose as soon as you think about it.”

• SCP-582 is an entry on the SCP Foundation site describing an entity nicknamed “Bundle” that, as a tulpa like the Slender Man, manifests into reality whenever it is the subject of a fictional narrative.