The Slenderman Mysteries, page 6
There is no doubt that a gas maniac exists and has made a number of attacks. But many of the reported attacks are nothing more than hysteria. Fear of the gas man is entirely out of proportion to the menace of the relatively harmless gas he is spraying. The whole town is sick with hysteria (Taylor, 2011).
The town was sick with something else too: out-of-control fear.
Theories for who, or what, the Mad Gasser was abounded. The suspects included a local young man named Farley Llewellyn. He was someone who knew several of the victims and who had a fascination for chemistry. Nothing incriminating was found, however, to conclusively say that Llewellyn was the mastermind behind the attacks. Robbers, teenage kids, and even aliens, have all since been put forward as potential candidates for the gruesome Gasser. The answer to the riddle? There is none. Only an abundance of theories, many of them supernaturally themed.
Yet again, we see a mysterious and unsettling affair involving a gaunt, tall figure in black, and who—just like H.P. Lovecraft's Night-Gaunts and the Slenderman—had the ability to invade the sleeping-states of those unlucky souls who lived within the homes the Mad Gasser chose to target. And from whom Eric Knudsen drew inspiration.
MEN IN BLACK SUITS
The Slenderman is not the only menacing creature that wears a black suit. Make mention of the sinister MIB to most people and they will likely think of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Indeed, there is no doubt that the hugely popular trilogy of Men in Black movies has cemented the image of the MIB in the minds of millions all across the planet. The movies have achieved something else, too: They have ensured that many people assume the Men in Black are the secret employees of an equally secret government agency which investigates the UFO phenomenon in stealth. The reality, however, is far different. It's a fact that the overwhelming majority of people who have reported encounters with the MIB describe something far removed from the worlds of government, the military, or the intelligence community. Their encounters are far more Slenderman-like.
In the vast majority of MIB confrontations, the eyewitnesses describe the ominous, black-suited visitors as being pale-faced. They are often emaciated in the extreme and very tall. They typically hide their eyes behind large, wraparound, black sunglasses. There is a very good reason for this: Their eyes are often described as being larger than normal. Or, as one witness worded it, “He had huge, thyroid eyes.” They typically surface at night, when the skies are dark and the sun has set, and they use what can only be categorized as a form of “mind-control” to force their victims to open the door and invite them—not unlike the actions and tales of equally pale, black-clothed vampires of centuries long gone (Redfern, 2011).
As all of the above demonstrate, there are strong indications that the real MIB (as opposed to those created by Hollywood) are not even human. On top of that, many people who have been visited and threatened by the MIB describe how the MIB had the ability to drain them of energy, and even to provoke violent poltergeist-like activity in the home. Strange odors, such as those of a sulfur-like nature, are reported when and where the MIB are lurking around. Cases of people falling seriously ill—physically and mentally—after being in close proximity to the Men in Black are not unknown. And, on numerous occasions, people have spoken of how the MIB invaded their dreams. Just like the Slenderman.
Let's now take a closer look at a few of those similarities.
SILENCING A SAUCER-SEEKER
There is no doubt that the one person, more than any other, who brought the Men in Black to the attention of the UFO research community in the early 1950s was Albert Bender. He was a devotee of all things Ufological, a big fan of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and someone who created a successful UFO research group called the International Flying Saucer Bureau. At least, it was successful until late one night in 1953. That was when a trio of gaunt, emotionless Men in Black materialized in Bender's bedroom, in his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Echoing the saga of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon a decade earlier, Bender was overcome by a powerful smell of brimstone and plunged into a dizzy, light-headed state that left him feeling distinctly ill. Bender was almost immediately rendered immobile on the bed.
The semi-physical Men in Black telepathically warned Bender off his UFO research. It didn't take long before Bender got the bleak message. He quickly quit Ufology, only briefly returning to the scene in the early 1960s to write a book on his encounters with the MIB (Flying Saucers and the Three Men) and then leaving the subject behind him for good. Bender died in 2016 at the age of 94. Had he not quit the UFO scene when he did, and instead continued to be supernaturally attacked by the Men in Black, one has to wonder if Bender would have come close to living to that impressive old age.
Like so many witnesses to the Slenderman, and also echoing the experiences of H.P. Lovecraft with the highly dangerous Night-Gaunts, Albert Bender found to his eternal horror that the Men in Black had the ability to penetrate his dreams and manipulate them into absolute horror stories. There is also the issue of the height of the MIB and their ubiquitous black suits. Those issues, too, mirror the physical appearance of the Slenderman, as we'll now see.
MIB: TALL, TENTACLED, AND TERRIFYING
Harold T. Wilkins was a UFO researcher who, in the 1950s, wrote several books on UFOs, including what was certainly his most well-known and popular title, Flying Saucers on the Attack. Wilkins was also someone who found himself on the receiving end of a number of Men in Black–themed reports. One such report described certain, uncanny events that occurred in Los Angeles, California, in 1953 and that are highly relevant to the theme of this book. Wilkins's source of the story insisted on anonymity, but revealed that it all revolved around a particular attorney's office in downtown Los Angeles. According to Wilkins's informant, a pair of men dressed in black appeared at the building one evening and demanded to see the director of the company. The pair insisted that they be hired to investigate recent reports of missing persons in the city. Those mind-controlling skills of the MIB ensured that they were quickly, albeit briefly, hired. But there was something about the pair that was just not right. Actually, there were a few things that were just plain wrong. Horribly wrong.
Those employees who caught sight of the MIB (who spent most of their time locked in one particular office and who spoke with practically no one) said they were very skinny and were both in excess of six-and-a-half feet in height. They were described as having strange hands and fingers—the latter being extremely long and rubbery, as if they lacked joints and bones. On one occasion, according to Wilkins's notes, one of the staff saw the fingers of one of the MIB stretch to lengths of around eight or nine inches, something which, she added, made the man's hands appear to resemble huge tentacles. In days, the MIB were gone, never to be seen again. Of course, we should not understate the importance of the revelation that one of the tall and skinny Men in Black had tentacle-like fingers. We are clearly, right now, deep within the absolute black heart of Slenderman territory.
Today, there are hundreds of such MIB reports on record. Hardly any of them have even a remote bearing on the “secret agent” angle, as portrayed in the Men in Black movies. In contrast, many of the MIB reports mirror encounters with the Slenderman, and particularly so regarding the “dream-invading” abilities, the mind-controlling skills, and the supernatural powers of both. And let us not forget that both are skinny and tall, and wear nothing but black suits. No wonder the Men in Black were part and parcel of the Slenderman's development.
“TWO-DIMENSIONAL HUMAN SHAPES
Now, it's time to take a look at yet another of Knudsen's inspirations for the Slenderman, the Shadow People, which come across as appropriately shadowy equivalents of the Men in Black, hence their name. And just like the MIB and H.P. Lovecraft's Night-Gaunts, the Shadow People are definitive dream-penetrators. Natalia Kuna says that the Shadow People are “...conscious, intelligent, interdimensional beings that can move into our dimension.... Mostly they are interdimensional beings that shapeshift into various forms and move back and forth between dimensions and figurations, but some are possibly demonic creatures or even evil spirits or entities. Some are extremely evil and predatory....” (Kuna, 2017).
Jason Offutt, an acknowledged expert on the Shadow People notes:
People across the globe have reported seeing these black, two-dimensional, human shapes stalk the bedrooms and hallways of their homes. Sometimes these Shadow People ignore you, sometimes they pay all too much attention, but they are always sinister (Offutt, 2009).
In light of the that thought, it's easy to see why the Shadow People came to impact upon the creation of, and the imagery associated with, the Slenderman.
A WINGED MONSTER AND COUNTLESS DEATHS
Finally, there is the matter of yet another strange creature that has become legendary within the worlds of both fact and fiction. Its name is Mothman. It, too, played a role in the development of the Slenderman character, as Eric Knudsen has confirmed. Between the final weeks of 1966 and Christmas 1967, the residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, found themselves in a collective state of fear when sightings occurred of an ominous beast soaring across the dark skies of the town. Witnesses told the media and the local police that the creature had its lair deep somewhere within the dense woods surrounding an old, abandoned TNT storage area of the military—surely the perfect hiding place for a monster to lurk in.
Many locals described the beast as a dark-skinned, winged humanoid with bright red eyes. Blazing might be a far more apt word to use. As sightings of the Mothman increased, a dark and foreboding atmosphere quickly fell upon Point Pleasant and its residents. That atmosphere of dread reached its absolute pinnacle on December 15, 1967. It was on the evening in question that the town's old Silver Bridge collapsed into the churning waters of the Ohio River. Forty-six people lost their lives. Today, there are two primary theories for the presence of the Mothman: It was the cause of the tragedy and it was akin to a Grim Reaper–type character, or that it was there to warn people of the looming disaster, rather than personally provoke it.
Of the 46 dead, two were never found, lost to the darkness of that December night and the churning, wild waters of the river. One of them was a young girl. Thus, we see a parallel to the Slenderman affair: A child is taken by a monster and never seen again. Things didn't end there, though. The catalog of deaths had barely begun. Although things were quiet for several decades, in the late 1990s the specter of the Mothman resurfaced.
THE DEATHS CONTINUE AND ESCALATE
Jim Keith was a noted conspiracy theorist who died under extremely questionable and dubious circumstances in September 1999 after attending the annual Burning Man event in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. In his 1997 book Casebook of the Men in Black, Keith focused much of his attention on the Mothman saga, as well as the timely presence in Point Pleasant of the notorious MIB. Some said that Keith got a little too close to the truth of the Men in Black/Mothman connection and paid for it with his life. He was just 49 years old when he passed. It wasn't long before Keith's publisher and buddy, Ron Bonds, was dead too, also under controversial circumstances. Notably, back in 1991 Bonds had republished John Keel's classic book on the 1966–1967 events that went down in Point Pleasant: The Mothman Prophecies, which was first published in 1975. Interest in Keel's book reached stratospheric proportions when, in 2002, it was turned into a big-bucks movie starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. That's when the deaths began to kick in big time.
The movie hit cinemas in the United States on January 25, 2002. On that very day a funeral was taking place. It was the funeral of one of the early witnesses to the Mothman, a man named Charlie Mallette. Less than seven days after Mallette's death, there were five fatalities in Point Pleasant, all as a result of car accidents. Weeks later, Ted Tannebaum, the executive producer of The Mothman Prophecies, died from cancer.
In much the same way that the premiere of The Mothman Prophecies movie in the United States was blighted by tragedy and death, exactly the same can be said about the day on which the movie hit cinemas on the other side of the world, specifically in Australia. On May 23, 2002, a teenage boy from Fort Smith, Arkansas, named Aaron Rebsamen killed himself. His father was William Rebsamen, a skilled artist whose atmospheric imagery of the Mothman can be seen on the front cover of Loren Coleman's 2002 book, Mothman and Other Curious Encounters.
The author in the domain of the Mothman. Nick Redfern, 2014.
A month after the death of Aaron Rebsamen, a woman named Sherry Marie Yearsley was murdered; her body was dumped near an old railroad in Sparks, Nevada. She and Ron Bonds, who, as noted, had republished The Mothman Prophecies, had dated for a while. Then, as 2002 came to its close, Mothman investigator Susan Wilcox passed away from cancer. Six months later, Jessica Kaplan, who worked on The Mothman Prophecies film, died in a plane crash. The acclaimed actor Alan Bates, who had a starring role in The Mothman Prophecies, was dead shortly before the end of 2003. Then, in July 2004, Jennifer Barrett-Pellington died. She was the wife of Mark Pellington, who was none other than the director of The Mothman Prophecies.
As all of these examples demonstrate, taking the lead from potentially dangerous and supernatural beings like Mothman can be hazardous in the extreme, and particularly so when one embarks on a path toward creating an Internet meme of a horrendous type. It's at this point we have to take note of the words of the aforementioned actor, the late Alan Bates. In The Mothman Prophecies, Bates's character Alexander Leek tells Richard Gere's John Klein: “When you noticed these things, they noticed that you noticed them.”
Leek, based on John Keel, was explaining to Klein (also based on Keel) how, when one pursues the likes of Mothman—or maybe even just thinks about it—the entity has a form of “supernatural radar” or “alarm” that alerts the beast to the fact that someone is pursuing or focusing on it. John Keel experienced this very phenomenon on countless occasions when he was prowling around 1960s-era Point Pleasant after dark.
Just maybe, when Eric Knudsen took so much inspiration from emaciated, supernatural creatures dressed in black—some utterly faceless, and others with tentacle- and octopus-like digits and arms—those same creatures noticed him and decided to play a few warped and tormenting games of their very own variety. Turning the tables, perhaps. Knudsen certainly let the Slenderman loose on the Internet, but was his inspiration guided by certain things he had read or by things from other realms, rather than by his imagination? The supernatural archetypes for Knudsen's unholy offspring may have taken things to a whole new level and created a horrific and real monstrous chimera for the 21st century, something that was part-MIB, part-Night-Gaunt, part-Mad Gasser, and part-supernatural shadow: the Slenderman.
That very same chimera may have cruelly manipulated the minds of a pair of girls from Wisconsin who, in May 2014, attempted to perform a terrible sacrifice in the name of the Slenderman.
6
“CONSUMED BY THE SLENDERMAN”
Waukesha, a city of approximately 70,000 people, is located in a pleasant suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its origins date back to the early part of the 19th century, when settlers from Maine, Connecticut, and Vermont put down roots in the area, ensuring that it would soon become a bustling hive of activity. It's a city noted for its picturesque buildings, its close proximity to the huge and equally picturesque Fox River, and the fact that it was the birthplace of the late guitar legend Les Paul. Waukesha does, however, have its dark side.
In May 2014, Waukesha hit the headlines in a way that few, if any, could ever have anticipated: The dark and foreboding specter of the Slenderman descended on the city in just about the worst way possible. In many respects, the city and its people have still not forgotten the horrific events that put them firmly on the map. Chances are, given the tragic and disturbing nature of the affair, they never will forget. In a truly chilling fashion, Waukesha became inextricably linked to the Internet's most fearsome and feared monster.
Saturday, May 31st was the day on which Waukesha made what began as local news. In quick time, however, it became nationwide news. Then, ultimately and hardly surprisingly, it became nothing less than absolute worldwide news. None of that news, however, was of a positive nature. On the morning in question, two young local girls, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, viciously attacked another girl, Payton Leutner, a school friend of the pair whose nickname was Bella. It was all done in the name of the Slenderman, as incredible and baffling as that might sound. Such was the violent nature of the assault—an attack that left Leutner seriously injured—it sent shockwaves all across the city. The incident did something else, too: When the media quickly latched onto the news, the result was that millions of people were very quickly exposed to the phenomenon of the Slenderman, which is an important issue when it comes to how and under what circumstances the monster may have achieved a degree of life as a Tulpa.
How could such a terrible and terrifying thing have occurred? And why, exactly? The story sounds like something straight out of the firmly fiction-based tales that surfaced in the wake of the emergence of the Slenderman on the Internet in the summer of 2009, except for one thing: This was the real world, the one in which you and I live. Not one dominated by dark, online fantasies. The line between reality and fiction had just become even more entangled; this time in a horrifically surreal fashion.
