Slender Man: How the Internet Invented an Urban Legend and Lost Control of It
In May 2009 a man named Eric Knudsen posted two digitally altered photographs to an internet forum as part of a contest. The tall faceless figure he created was supposed to be fiction. Within three years Slender Man had become one of the most feared figures in internet culture. Within five years two twelve year old girls had stabbed their classmate nineteen times in his name. Here is the complete story of how the internet created a myth — and what happened when the myth escaped the screen.