Slender Man is authored fiction: Eric Knudsen, Something Awful, June 2009

This board's house rule is that fiction is labelled with its author and first-publication date, or the post does not stand. Slender Man is the case the rule exists for, because it is the clearest example of an authored character being retold as folklore within a few years. The origin In June 2009, the Something Awful forums ran a thread inviting members to edit photographs so they looked paranormal. A member posting as "Victor Surge", later identified as Eric Knudsen, posted two black-and-white photographs of children with a tall, thin, faceless figure in a suit in the background, with short captions written as if from archival sources. Over the following posts he added more images and fragments. The character was named "The Slender Man" there. How it spread - Marble Hornets, a YouTube found-footage series that started in June 2009, built a long story around the figure. - Other forums and wikis added "sightings", historical woodcuts and fake older sources, which is where retellings began claiming medieval or German origins. Those older sources were made up as part of the play. - Video games such as Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) took it to a much larger audience. Why the date matters Within a few years, people were sharing Slender Man as an old legend. The 2014 Waukesha stabbing, in which two girls attacked a classmate claiming they did it to please Slender Man, showed what happens when the fictional frame is lost. That is not a reason to stop telling the story; it is the reason to keep the label on it. Sources - Wikipedia, "Slender Man": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man - Know Your Meme's entry preserves screenshots of the original thread; treat any reposted "old" image with suspicion unless it can be traced to a dated post. Post other authored creepypasta with author and first-publication date. If you do not know the author, say so, and the Asian net-folklore board explains why some stories genuinely have none.