Boogey Man - Global Urban Legend Exposed

After their arrests, over the course of nearly nine combined hours of interviews, they claimed that they were compelled to kill her by a monster they had encountered online. They were convinced that, once there, if they pushed farther and farther into the nearly ,acre forest, they would find the mansion in which their monster dwells and he would welcome them. Morgan and Anissa had packed for the trip: Though they were both a very young, Midwestern 12, they had been chosen for a dark and unique destiny that none of their junior-high classmates could possibly understand, drawn into the forest in the service of a force much greater and more mysterious than anything in their suburban American lives.

What drew them out there has a name: Slender Man, faceless and pale and impossibly tall. His symbol is the letter X inside a circle.

• The 7 Instant and Free Anti-Stress Secrets!
• Against All Odds.
• The Bogeyman.

G irls lured out into the dark woods — this is the stuff of folk tales from so many countries, a new-world fear of the Puritans, an image at the heart of witchcraft and the occult. Some of our best-known folk tales were passed down by teenagers, specifically teenage girls. To be an adolescent girl is, for many, to view yourself as desperately set apart, powerfully misunderstood.

A special alien, terrible and extraordinary. The flood of new hormones, shot from the glands into the bloodstream; the first charged touches, with a boy or a girl; the first years of bleeding in secret; the startling feeling that your body is suddenly hard to contain and, by extension, so are you.

You have an undiluted desire for private knowledge, for a genius shared with a select few. You bend reality regularly. There may only be one other crime, committed by girls, that closely evokes that of Morgan and Anissa. It took place 60 years earlier, in , in New Zealand. Pauline was 16, and Juliet only a few months younger. It was an unexpected friendship, as their families had little in common: Her father was the rector of the local university.

But the girls had something that drew them together: Excused from gym class, the pair spent that period walking through the yard holding hands; they spoke almost exclusively to each other. From this closeness, the two built a wholly immersive imaginative life. Pauline, who shuffled when she walked, was often ready to lash out; Juliet carried herself with the elegance and easy confidence of an aristocrat.

They dreamed of running away together to America, where their work would be published to great acclaim and adapted for film. They rode their bikes far into the countryside, took off their jackets and shoes and socks, and danced until they were exhausted. The place was vast, with a few hiking paths cleared between the young pines and outcroppings of volcanic rock. The woman collapsed, and the girls took turns bludgeoning her — about 45 blows to the head, her glasses knocked from her face, her dentures expelled from her mouth — until she was dead.

Each made the other singular and perfect. In April , Pauline wrote: It is she who is one of the main obstacles in my path.

Suddenly a means of ridding myself of the obstacle occurred to me. This notion is not a new one, but this time it is a definite plan which we intend to carry out. Peculiarly enough I have no qualms of conscience or is it peculiar we are so mad? So next time I write in this diary Mother will be dead. How odd yet how pleasing. L ike those girls in Christchurch, Morgan and Anissa were drawn to each other because of loneliness.

Each saw the other as an affirmation of her uniqueness; they shared a hidden, ritualised world. They had devoted themselves to an internet bogeyman. Like a fairytale monster, Slender Man emerged through a series of obscure clues, never fully visible. He first appeared online, in the summer of , in two vague images that were quickly passed around horror and fantasy fan forums. In the first, dated , a horde of young teenagers streams out of a wooded area toward the camera, while behind them looms a tall and pale spectral figure with its hand outstretched.

It is coupled with a message: In the second photo, dated , we see a playground full of little girls, all about six or seven years old.

In the foreground, one pauses to face the camera, smiling, as she climbs a slide; in the background, in the shade of a cluster of trees, others gather around a tall figure in a dark suit. If you look closely, you can make out wavy arms or tentacles emanating from its back. The game was to alter existing photographs using Photoshop, and then post them on other paranormal forums in an attempt to pass them off as the real thing.

The monster was deliberately vague, his story almost completely open-ended — and so the internet rushed in to make of him what it wanted. And as the story spread, it quickly lost its point of origin, becoming instead the creative nexus for hundreds of thousands of users, of a dark, sprawling, real-time fairytale. All that users knew at first was that Slender had the appearance of a lean man in a black suit, and there his humanoid features ended.

He is unnaturally tall — sometimes as tall as 3. Occasionally, when he shows himself, a ring of long, grasping black tentacles, like supple branches, emerges from his back. And he has a pronounced appetite for children. Like a gothic Pied Piper, he calls the children out and leads them away from their world, never to be seen again. And when he allows them to stay in their suburban homes, he infects them with the desire to kill, and the longing to be initiated into his darkest, innermost circle.

M organ and Anissa, among the youngest members of the Slenderverse, were quickly consumed by the swirling, open-ended storyline. They latched on to him as a source of private ritual, the linchpin of the occult universe they were building together. From the beginning, their friendship was forged by a kind of urgency. Anissa, in particular, suffered from bullying after recently transferring to their school a fact she kept from her parents and needed this months-old bond with Morgan to last.

Morgan and Anissa shared visions they claimed were tangible, hyper-realistic. Anissa told Morgan that she had seen him twice, in trees outside the window of the bus they shared to school. About an hour into the interrogation, the detective asked Anissa: Just hours earlier, during their long trek to the Nicolet forest, the girls were convinced that they had caught a glimpse of him along the way — in the suburban woods, among the trees by the highway. They could hear the rustling of him following close by.

The crimes, in both Christchurch and Waukesha, were striking in their childishness. Some of the details they had thought through were fairytale specific: That morning, Morgan brought the knife with her in the way that she might have brought a wand to a Harry Potter movie screening.

1. Saint Benny Strikes Again!
2. The Conversation.
3. Witches of America: how I became immersed in a growing movement?
4. Kids Games and Activities: Keeping your Children Safe & Occupied (Games for kids, Parenting Advice, Parenting Help, Kids Games, Occupying Children ) (Anti-aging, Aging, Health & Wellness);

And perhaps she believed that she could perform magic with a toy — but that idea brought with it no real-world consequences. Playing with a knife, of course, did. When Anissa describes her nervousness as they approached the playground that morning, the detective asked what she was most nervous about. She had never done that before. Pauline and Juliet continued to behave like immature girls, unaware of what was at stake, even after their arrest.

A detective on the case quickly seized it as evidence. Once both girls were at the station, sharing a cell, they were placed on suicide watch, but they spent their first night so a police officer would later report gossiping in their bunk beds, unconcerned about their new environment. In a courtroom packed with spectators, Pauline and Juliet were out of sync with the tone of the proceedings. In each they revealed an unusually tall, faceless man with tentacles growing from his back, watching over a group of children.



It could be argued that in a sense the Slenderman is a tulpa: Key to the dispersal of the Slenderman legend is the manner in which he transcended the medium that created him. He quickly moved from photoshopped pictures, to web stories, and then into the various other forms of media, from the webseries Marble Hornets and TribeTwelve , to video games such as Slender: The Arrival and even into the cinema in a poorly received low budget horror film.

In an age of scepticism and increasing access to information, how do we account for this growth of a mythological monster? However, even the participants of the original forum identified the risks in doing so. A user named Soakie was one of the first to identify the Slenderman as a potential tulpa, writing:. And what happens when the pictures are no longer photoshops?



• List of urban legends?
• Navigation menu;
• Kids Bible Rebus Puzzle (Bible Kids Book 1).

One terrifying answer to this question emerged in May of in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when two 12 year-old girls allegedly enticed a third 12 year-old girl to follow them into the woods a location which figures prominently in the Slenderman mythology. After doing so, they allegedly stabbed her 19 times in an attempt to prove their worth as Slenderman proxies. The victim survived, having crawled to a nearby roadside where she was discovered by a passing cyclist.

She has since recovered. It is this act, and the origins of the delusions of the two perpetrators, that is the subject of the HBO documentary. Part of the Slenderman mythology is the Slender Sickness , a fictional illness that affects those who have been in the presence of the monster.

Slender Man: the shadowy online figure blamed in grisly Wisconsin stabbing

Its symptoms include coughing fits, memory loss and, ironically, irrational acts of violence. Pets in Victorian paintings — Egham, Surrey. The history of pets and family life — Egham, Surrey.