"Slender Man" experiences log (and journal,) Alex Brandon

10/27/200-

This is the first log entry for what will hopefully be a series of investigations that I have into the mythical "Slender Man," who has been seen by a friend of mine in northern Massachusetts. I'm using a durable spiral bound notebook and a black ink pen (no erasing, which means all spelling errors stay for posterity) to write all this down with, but I will eventually transfer it all to my laptop so I can post my findings on the internet.

I'm usually not one for serious note taking, much less keeping something as pretentious as an "experience log" but for this I think it'd be important to keep my thoughts ordered and in check. Writing usually helps me do that, as I imagine it does for anyone. Before I get to the more official bits and research, I'll just get my own personal details out of the way for the sake of convenience:

I'm Alex Page Brandon, I'm 17, and my big obsession is the paranormal. Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, aliens, fairies, the occult, men in black, you name it I've at least browsed for it. I was the type of guy who'd bring in these big tomes on the paranormal -- Mysteries of the Unknown, Colin Wilson’s The Occult: A History, some stuff by von Daniken, (but he’s a crackpot) and then read them quietly in the library. I really love it, cause it gives me (a guy with a pretty boring existence) something to think about. I don't understand why some people can be so blindly skeptical about these things. Isn't it arrogant to assume we know everything there is to know about life?

While my big thing is usually aliens, as that field has the most exposure and credibility behind it, sometimes I like to delve into more obscure mysteries, although with those you run the risk of finding nothing but scary, made up stories (like a girl seeing the devil in Mexico when she went there on spring break) or the product of an LSD trip. Slender Man usually falls into the first category, as every story involving him is mostly hearsay, or downright false. What's convenient is that most people who see him end up dead in some way or another.

In modern encounters (if you believe the legends, he goes all the way back to the 16th century) Slender Man usually appears as an unnaturally slim and tall man in a suit and tie. In a lot of stories he's described as being a "tall businessman" with a featureless white face, like a slate of alabaster. Beyond that, accounts start to vary as to the size of his limbs, often cited as his most incredible feature. Some say he just has absurdly long legs and arms, others say he can stretch their length on a whim, but a lot of people say he has these weird tentacles coming out of his suit, which he uses to kill his victims or guide himself along the ground. There's a particularly creepy sketch of him in these dark woods (his favorite locale, it seems) showing the creature (pointedly, without the business suit) ten feet off the ground, suspended there by long tentacles. Right ahead of him, seemingly oblivious, is a hunter with a rifle. One guess as to who comes out of that one. The picture was supposedly sketched by a survivor, although of course no one’s ever seen him.

Slender Man is often associated with the disappearance of children and mesmerizing his victims, although they can be of any age, really. According to everyone who's ever seen "him" (and, let's be blunt, these often turn out to be bullshit) he never speaks, or gives any indication of what he wants. He's just sort of there.

That's the thing about him. There's no mind or method to it, no easily defined shape or goal, like so many other "mysterious" creatures we obsess over. I can't think of any account or story he's been in that hasn't involved pain, misery and death, and all for no reason. Or at least a reason we can understand. I think that's why the legend still persists, even if it's probably fake (although, as am I'm about to get to, he might just be real after all.) It stays in your head. The thing's like a force of nature, a shadow in the corner of your eye, that slight thump you hear during the night that doesn't let you sleep afterward, keeping you awake, wondering in the dark what it was. Alien.

The one piece of "evidence" that stands out most is the Franklin Footage from 1990. If you've never heard of that, well, it's available on for 20 something bucks (I haven't seen it myself) but you can easily find the most famous image by doing a google search right now.

I printed it out a little before I started writing this and I'm glueing it in on the next page.

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One of the last few frames, if I remember rightly. Almost everyone who saw it claimed it was bogus, which really shot down its chances of going feature length. There was a huge viral marketing thing for a while after the Franklin film went out, but bad "reviews" canned it, so mostly everyone now thinks it's just a made-up legend, like the Blair Witch Project.

... This doesn't account for sightings stretching back all the way to the 1500s, of course, but you get the point. On that frame you have the best idea you can possibly get of what this thing looks like. Faceless, stretchy, and very well tailored.

The reason I'm even writing all this is because, just yesterday, I contacted someone who claims to have seen the Slender Man. It wasn't some vague account, with smoke and shadows, no secret messages, or anything like that. This was an older man, living fifty miles or so north of me (I live in Boston,) and from what he said I think he actually saw... something.

This guy, I'll call him Ted, lives in Boxford, Essex County and he went on a forum yesterday and made a thread about seeing the Slender Man. It's a fairly popular forum, and threads move down the list very quickly if they don't catch on immediately, so it was virtually forgotten in an instant. I only happened to catch it by luck and by the time I exited it'd moved on to the second page. No one posted after Ted's initial account:

Boxford, if wikipedia is to be believed, is a heavily wooded town close to New Hampshire of about 8,000. Ted lives in a particularly foresty (not sure that's even a word) part of town, pretty far from civilization. I know that should be a red flag and everything, but those places do exist.

Last night, as he was fishing at a nearby pond he saw a reflection across the water. He looked up and saw what he described as a fairly tall looking man in a business suit, standing perfectly still. Right in view, for anyone to see. Of course, it was fairly dark and Ted's eyes probably weren't working like they used to, so his view of the "man" was rather hazy. He admitted to this himself, but he's positive there was another person out there.

Ted just went along with his fishing for a little while. He said he was trying deliberately to ignore the person until he came forward on whatever business he had, although seeing a man in such attire is almost unheard of in Boxford, because there's been no corporate penetration. Or at least that’s the explanation he gave me. For the entire time he said he felt like he was being stared at, and eventually he got so unnerved that he packed up and started to leave. According to Ted, the man across the water hadn't moved an inch the whole time.

It wasn't the last time he saw this "man," though. Starting from the pond there's apparently a dirt road that forks halfway to his house, which I guess leads to the rest of the town. It was even darker by the time Ted reached it, but he wrote that he was positive he saw the same man standing in the middle of the road where it splits. I asked him later in an email if he said he could see any sort of facial features on this person, but he said the only thing that really stood out was the white shirt underneath the suit jacket.

He did say that he felt as if he should have seen a face, though.

Since this guy hadn't tried to approach him before, Ted decided not to take any chances and went through the woods instead, taking a mile-long detour through thick underbrush just to get home. Although he didn't see the Slender Man again, he "felt" him a couple of times after that.

Since then he fed the description of the man into google and ended up on the forum, probably scared out of his mind at the knowledge of what he'd just seen.

To me, at the time, I thought he was probably seeing things and let his imagination run away from him. The cards weren't really stacked in his favor: old age, wandering mind, late at night, and ever since he looked up Slender Man's description he probably convinced himself that that's what he saw. Still...

His story sounded too vivid to ignore. It didn't seem like a curiosity he was writing about; it sounded like he was asking for help. I decided to email him, gave a bit of background, basically said I really dug what he wrote, and asked if he could email me if he ever saw the same person again. Maybe take a few pictures.

His reply really killed me; he asked if, being a transient (I live in a maternity home,) I could possibly bus up to Boxford and spend a week at his house to confirm the story. He said a second witness is always welcome and he'd like to talk this over "with a professional" such as myself.

That little joke aside, I was obviously a little skeptical. You konw waht tehy say aobut the itenret and all taht, mteineg popele yuo've nveer seen bferoe and tehn sddunely dipspaerng. The implications, especially to a guy like myself, are a bit more creepy than a eldrich monstrosity in business formal that feasts on little kids.

When I made up a few excuses as to why I couldn't do that, he dropped this bombshell: he told me I could give the staff here his address, and if I didn't call back every day they should call the police. He sent me his exact address for reference.

At the time, you wouldn't believe how excited I got. All my doubts vanished and we started rapid-fire emailing each other back and forth, talking about the bus schedule, how he'd pay for my trip back, we'd talk about what he'd seen, and maybe try to find it. We finalized the plan earlier this morning: tomorrow I'll take a Greyhound up to Boxford, get out at the station, Ted will be there to bring me to his house in his old Volvo, he'll show me the guest room, and we'll see what happens from there. After I finally logged off I felt a little dazed at how quickly it all went from that one assurance he'd given me.

... Now, of course, this doesn't discount the possibility that he'll just kidnap me and drag me halfway across the country, but you'd have to be an idiot to take a risk like that. We exchanged photos, too, just to be safe. I guess he has a right to be worried himself. Like he said, he's an older man, probably just coming into his sixties, crouching with a dog in front of a house. He had a fishing line and tackle box, almost like he'd stepped out of the story and onto my screen.

If you want the truth, I've never been out of Boston and the idea of a trip just really makes me excited. It feels like camping, like I'm going on an adventure. I'll be the first to admit that I don't expect to see anything out of the ordinary while I'm up there, but on the off chance that I do see something with Ted, I want to be well prepared for it.

It's an odd feeling, though, the idea that I might see something no one else has. I can't really articulate it, but I'll just say that I've spent most of this day trolling around Boston looking for equipment to stock up on; some flashlights, a survival kit, a camcorder (I decided against that; Slender Man tends to dislike being filmed) and even a switchblade. It took a force of will to put that last one down; for some reason I feel as if I should be armed, even though I've never gotten into a fight with anyone in my life and I can barely handle the steak knives they give us in those home ec courses.

Some part of me feels like, if I'm actually going up to Boxford tomorrow to meet a guy I've never seen before and... well you know. Part of me feels like I should prepare for the worst.

Hell, I don't even know what I'm writing here. No erasing, though. I decided that before I started writing. No erasing, ever. I don't have much to worry about, though, I'm fairly good with the whole spelling and grammar thing.

But anyway, more about my inventory in tomorrows log. For now I need to convince my counselor to let me go for the week; most of the kids here are drug addicts and stuff like that, so we're not exactly trusted to do much on our own, even though the point of maternity homes is to prepare us for life.

How can they do that if you're not allowed to take a risk every once in a while, right?