Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2025
The Slender Man Cometh
By Dennis Stamey
Nobody is sure how The Grim Reaper character evolved. It draws some inspiration from the 15th century Italian fresco The Triumph of Death showing a hideous figure on horseback. But depictions of a skeletal figure brandishing a scythe can be found in other medieval artwork, especially during the 1300s when the Black Death was ravaging Europe. There’s a church in England with a wooden figurine dating from the 1600s portraying a skeleton wearing a hooded robe carrying a scythe and an hourglass. It seems that the Grim Reaper symbol had been fomenting in the collective psyche for centuries. It would make its first official appearance as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Charles Dicken’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Poe introduces a similar character that serves as the embodiment of death in his 1842 short story “The Masque of the Red Death” except this one wears a red cloak. Today, the Grim Reaper turns up in films, cartoons, and video games.
We once worked with a guy who told us that following death of his fiancé, he became suicidal. One night he had a vivid dream where the Grim Reaper appeared to him and wagged his finger as if saying this is not your time to go. Our friend soon got on with his life.
Scrolling through Reddit, we’ve found other cases of people coming face-to-face with the Grim Reaper. One contributor wrote: “My dad swears he saw the grim reaper. It was a pretty dark time in his life around that time. Anytime we ask him about it his hairs stand up. He says he was outside at night smoking a cigarette and felt someone breathing on his neck and his hairs stood up. He looked back and saw a figure wearing a hood and he couldn’t see a face.” Another commented: “When I was a teenager my mom said her bedroom door swung open and she saw the grim reaper standing in the next room. At the same time, my sister said she had woke up and opened her eyes, she saw the grim reaper standing in the room with her. Then she shut her eyes and opened them again and he was in her face. Two weeks later my grandpa died.”
As with anything on social media, we have no way of knowing if these stories are true, but we decided to include them.
Another nightmarish but fictious character that has spawned even more fear and paranoia is Slender Man. The Slender Man was created by Eric Knudsen in 2009, on an internet forum called Something Awful. The forum had a photoshop contest to see who could create the scariest paranormal image. He depicted the being as tall and thin with a black suit and a white face.
Slender Man soon went viral, becoming the subject of fanart, creepy pasta stars, cosplay, and video games. But the mythos turned deadly in 2014 when two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin stabbed a 12-year-old classmate 19 times. When questioned later by authorities, they said that they wanted to commit a murder as a first step to becoming proxies for the Slender Man. The victim survived the attack, and the assailants were arrested, tried. found to be insane and sent to psychiatric wards. This crime set off a nationwide panic and in 2015 there were nine suicides by young people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that were undoubtedly influenced by Slender Man. The Oglala Sioux tribe president noted that many Native Americans traditionally believe in a "suicide spirit.” The Sioux youth were naming Slender Man the “Tall Man Spirit” and evidently associating him with this mythical entity. A pastor at Pine Ridge said that he often counseled young people explaining that those who killed themselves “were tired of the lives they had at home, no food, with parents all intoxicated, and some were being abused, mentally or sexually.”
Regarding these suicides, early stories about this character on creepy pasta had him going after children or young adults. Some young adults were driven insane or influenced to act on its behalf, which inspired the two girls in Wisconsin to assault their classmate. Others mentioned that investigating Slender Man will cause him to be drawn to you (which sounds like the MIB being drawn to UFO investigators).
It's not surprising that there have been sightings of Slender Man, reports that have been eagerly picked up by social media. Most of these we examined seem to be bogus. But we did find a couple of interesting yarns. Someone named Zack from Texas called Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis in May of 2014 to report this encounter: “I was looking around and I saw, off a way in the woods, there was this figure out there. It was impossibly tall, dark figure. Basically featureless. I didn't realize until many years later that it was Slenderman that I had seen that day. Seeing him, standing there staring at him for a few seconds, something just told me to run. And I was at the far end. It's about a four-mile-long patch of wood. I can make it to the other side in about seven minutes. And no matter how fast I ran, every time I looked back, he was in the same spot behind me, like same distance. It wasn't until I made it to the other side. I was about halfway down the bayou that was there, I turned around, and he was just standing there, stopped. He wouldn't go any further.”
YouTuber Brie Larson discussed her Slender Man sighting from a few years ago. She said that she was awakened one night by noises outside. “I got the clearest, extremely vivid image of me standing in the window of the house I was at.” She said she was both watching herself and experiencing it at the same time. looking out the window. “And I was looking out this window and at the very end of the property there was... It wasn't that far away. I saw a really tall man wearing what looked like a black suit with no facial features, long limbs. And it was weird because it was like a really pale face, no features, but I could tell it was looking at me and I was standing there like frozen.” After a few minutes she opened her eyes and sat up in bed. “I started sitting up in bed and as soon as I was up right, in real life, this isn't a dream. This isn't a vision anymore. In real life, I was sitting on my bed. All the lights were off in the room. There was a little moonlight coming through the window which was on the right-hand side of the bed on the wall. My eyes were open, and I looked and, right beside my bed, there was a very tall man standing in my room right beside my bed. It looked like he was wearing a suit. He had long arms, long legs and no hood or anything like that. It was just his face... but there was no face. It was like, no eyes, no nothing. And he was like seven or eight inches far away from me, right?”
Larsen jumped out of bed to switch the light on and when she did, the figure had vanished.
The Slender Man, although ostensibly a concoction of the Gen Z generation, has precedence in folklore unlike the urban myth of the shadow people which seemed to have originated from an Art Bell interview. Erlkönig Is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which tells about a father and son riding through the forest at night. The boy senses a supernatural presence which the father can’t see. The Erl-King or Elf King attempts to lure the child into joining him, promising him amusements, fine clothes, and the attentions of his daughters. The boy refuses his offers, and the Erl-King says that he will then take him by force. The boy shrieks that he has been attacked and dies before they get out of the woods.
Goethe’s poem is based on European folklore about the Erlking, a sinister elf who haunts the woods and stalks children who stay there for too long, killing them with a single touch. While the Erlking is described as a bearded hobgoblin, he shares Slender Man’s appetite, as detailed in Slendy’s mythos, for luring children away from their world, especially if they are in the woods, never to be seen again. If he comes to them in their suburban homes, he infects them with the urge to murder and the desire to be initiated into his innermost circle.
A folkloric character that is closer related to Slender Man is the Fear Doirich or Gaelic for the Dark Man. He is the servant of the Fairy Queen who abducts mortals and takes them to Fairyland on his black charger. Folklorists postulate that Fairyland could also refer to the Land of the Dead and the Fairy Queen as the Queen of the Dead. Fear Doirich or Dubh supposedly haunts the footpaths and woods at night waiting to waylay an unsuspecting traveler. It’s likely that the Irish Dullahan, either a headless rider on a black horse or a coachman who carries his own head, is an offshoot of this legend. The Dullahan is supposed to carry away the souls of the dying.
There are also the blue men of the Minch, also known as storm kelpies are who according to tradition inhabit the stretch of water between the northern Outer Hebrides and mainland Scotland, looking for sailors to drown and stricken boats to sink usually by creating storms. Aside from their blue color, they resemble humans and are about the same size.
The Clutchbone of British myth is a tall skeletal creature with long arms, leathery skin, and a huge head who kidnaps young children and adolescents and carries them off to its lair deep in the forest. The pre-Columbian Taíno of the Caribbean have legends about the hupia or spirits of the deceased who are often depicted as a faceless night ghosts that kidnap small children. The yōkai or supernatural creatures of Japanese myth are sometimes featured as malevolent and faceless.
Also, there is the Death cycle lithographs of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz. In her drawing Death Reaches for a Group of Children, death is portrayed as a tall, thin, faceless creature. Could it be possible that Slender Man as well as the legends depicting a similar being and the Grim Reaper are related, maybe even one and the same, both personifications of death and the dark side of nature, archetypes that on occasion materialize into the 3D? The spectral black hounds of European lore often symbolized imminent death as did the huge black mastiff in the Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles.”
Other scary urban myths include killer clowns and black-eyed children.
Clowns, whether evil or frivolous, are part of antiquity and folklorists trace them back to the Trickster archetype. According to universal myth, the Trickster likes to deceive, and his behavior is irrational if not at times comical. Clowns, buffoons, court jesters, and even the harlequin are believed to be offshoots of his personality. As Barbara Babcock and Jay Cox explain in their article "The Native American Trickster," published in Dictionary of Native American Literature, the Trickster "eludes and disrupts all orders of things, including the analytic categories of academics."
The evil clown or Trickster is also prevalent in modern culture. There’s the Joker from DC Comics, Pennywise from Stephen King’s horror novel It, Shakes from the black comedy film Shakes the Clown, the master of ceremonies in the film Cabaret, and the obscene clowns of The Cacophony Society, a street theater group. We also have serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s clown persona Pogo the Clown, internet trolls, and diabolical clowns in haunted house exhibits. Not long ago, we were being harassed online by a psychotic character who called himself “Notsowise” employed as a scary clown at a haunted theme park.
But is the clown a modern embodiment of the Trickster? Some say that the clown’s white face is a symbol of the death mask. In medieval theater, the jester often represented death lateralizing the old saying that death makes a mockery of life's fleeting joys. As Heth Ledger’s homicidal Joker in The Dark Knight said, “Why so serious?”
Off and on since the 1980s there have reports of menacing clowns throughout the United States. Some reportedly would be hiding in the woods trying to lure children with candy (an early takeoff on Slender Man). Clown mania erupted full force in 2016 when there were sightings in America, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
In his essay “Phantom Clowns, Bogus Social Workers, and Men in Black,” published in the blog TheoFantastique for November 2011, Paul Meehan wrote: “Sometime around 1990, my family was living in Ridgewood, a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York. Our daughter attended the local public school, and one day we received a notice about a mysterious man dressed in a clown costume who was reportedly seen in the vicinity of the school attempting to lure children into a waiting car. At the time, this frightening narrative seemed like just another bizarre ordeal to be endured in anarchic 1990s-era New York City, but, oddly, the story was never covered in the local media, and there were no reports of arrests or of children actually being abducted.”
In his1983 book Mysterious America, Loren Coleman mentions phantom clown sightings early in that same decade. The first reports came from Boston, Brookline, Charlestown, Cambridge, Canton, Randolph, and other communities in that area in 1981. On May 6, the Boston police department responded to complaints about people dressed in clown outfits harassing schoolchildren at local elementary schools. Later that same month, these insidious began appearing in Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Missouri. The Kansas City clown drove a yellow van and wore a black shirt with a picture of the devil on the front and black pants with candy canes on the sides. He threatened the children with a knife, and in one instance a sword. In all these cases there were no arrests, no suspects, and no kid was reported to be abducted.
In October of 2008, there were reports in the Chicago area of a clown trying to lure children into a van with balloons. The clown was described as wearing a wig and white face paint with teardrops drawn on his cheek, He reportedly drove a white or brown van with the windows broken out.
In 2016, clowns were again trying to lure children into the woods or from school playgrounds. This time there were several arrests. The mania reached a fever pitch by August and there were fears of a clown “purge” on Halloween. While the purge did not take place, a family in Orange County, Florida, were attacked by a group of about 20 wearing masks styled after those worn in the movie The Purge.
While the phantom clowns do have an eeriness about them, the clown sightings of 2016 were likely the work of pranksters egged on by social media. There was a strange clown sighting the year before at Chicago’s Rosehill Cemetery one night in July. Around 10 p.m. Julia Graham was driving by the historic landmark with her husband when they saw a figure running toward the main gate.
“When we get closer, we realize it’s a clown, which is super weird,” she told the station. “I mean, this was somebody putting forth a lot of effort -- and being really weird.” The clown was dressed in a yellow suit and had a rainbow wig.
The clown eventually noticed the Grahams' vehicle and turned toward it and slowly waved. They captured the clown on a cell phone before he darted off into the dark. The video incidentally can be found on YouTube and it’s rather unsettling. The clown was never identified, there were no incidents of vandalism in the cemetery, nor were there other reports of mystery clowns in that vicinity. As any paranormal buff will tell you, Rosehill Cemetery has a reputation for being haunted. Whoever the clown was, he or maybe she was neither afraid of the dark nor of spooks. Was this person making some sort of art statement?
The urban legend of black-eyed children is even more popular than menacing clowns. The story seems to have originated from an incident reported by Brian Bethel, a journalist for the Abilene Reporter-News. One evening in 1996, he pulled into the Westwood Theater parking lot to write a check for his internet bill. As he wrote out his check using the theater’s marquee light, he heard a knock on his driver’s window. Looking up, he saw two kids, one about nine and the other around 13, wearing hooded sweatshirts. The older boy asked Brian for a ride to their mother’s house so they could get money to see the movie Mortal Kombat. He noticed that the boy’s voice sounded like an adult. He also thought it strange that the movie had started 45 minutes earlier. But then, Bethel noticed that both boys had pitch-black eyes, devoid of any whites. The man threw his car in reverse and sped away.
Like stories about shadow people, those of black-eyed children have taken off in recent years again due to social media. There are even several books chronicling these cases. Most of the reports say that the children speak in a monotone voice more maturely than for their age, often repeating the same phrase. And they insist on being allowed inside, whether it’s into someone’s house or car. They beg to make a phone call, use the bathroom, or catch a ride, but soon become more aggressive if someone refuses.
The black-eyed children and their insistence on wanting to come inside reminds of supernatural children in folklore enticing people to their deaths. In Scandinavian tradition, there are the mylings, spirits of unbaptized children that had been forced to roam the earth until they could persuade someone, usually by creating a ruckus, to carry them to a graveyard and bury them properly. If a person is unable to make it into the cemetery, the myling will often kill them in a rage.
Water Babies are spirits featured in the folklore of several Western Native American tribes, particularly among the Great Basin Indians. These entities are believed to inhabit bodies of water such as springs, ponds, and streams, often appearing as infants whose cries are considered an omen of impending disaster. These spirits are said to mimic the sounds of crying babies to lure in victims. Despite their malevolent nature, the Water Babies serve as metaphors for the power of nature and the necessity of maintaining harmony with it much like the kelpies of Celtic lore who eventually mutated in lake and sea monsters.
Brigid Burke, an adjunct professor of religion at Montclair State University has written about the urban legend. “There are stories of people who have let them in, and then disastrous things happen,” Burke says. According to the tales she has studied, catastrophes such as fatal accidents and cancer diagnoses follow in the children’s wake. While these stories may or may not be true, Burke admits that a black-eyed child was pounding on the door of one of her friends around. 3 a.m. This took place long before Brian Bethel’s experience.
So, we have four urban myths, if you want to consider the Grim Reaper an urban myth, that have ties to folklore and are symbols for death. While the Grim Reaper only warns of death, the others try to tempt people to their unwitting demise. This reminds us of people who are seemingly lured into the wilderness never to be seen again, the 411 cases made popular by David Paulides.
We once knew a Bigfoot researcher who did most of his investigations in a remote section of the Great Smokies near Newport, Tennessee. He once saw Bigfoot there and, on another occasion, found prints. Some of his friends were in the area one evening and heard a person crying for help. They decided not to venture into the brush to look for whoever was.
A contributor to Reddit about ten years ago mentioned that when she was a child, she was visiting a friend’s ranch somewhere in the Texas Hill Country. One night while playing hide-and-seek with some other girls, they heard somebody, apparently another young female, cry out, “help me!” They ran back to the house and the ranch owner went out with his rifle to find out who could have made the sound but never saw anyone.
This recalls another urban legend, the fleshgait, a cryptid shapeshifter that can perfectly mimic the voice and appearance of animals and humans and even copy their behavior. It's believed they can do this by occupying the victim's body or skin. Most of these creatures, like Slender Man or many of the evil clowns, stalk the woods.
The cycles of nature must have been truly unsettling to primal humans. There was a beautiful beginning to it all but also a horrible ending. Death had to follow life. Adding to the fear were treacherous terrains and sinister wildlife. This macabre face of nature became deeply engrained in the collective psyche and from it were spawned different archetypes that continue to haunt us today, images in the form of a tall gangly specter, a clown with a malicious grin, or children with black eyes, all beckoning us to join them in the cool stygian recesses of nothingness.
