Extra, Extra

So my father’s death was described in rather grisly (I really didn’t think they were able to give this kind of information, more for taste than security) detail in the archives of my local papers. It’s also amazing that they allowed that picture. They could never do that today, I should think, I don’t know who they did it then. But it’s clear that my father didn’t die of stab wounds.

At any rate, it yielded more clues than I could have hoped for reasonably. At the least, it confirms that it was a suspected murder, though I have yet to find follow up information indicating how the investigation went. Though considering I cannot recall my mother or myself being interviewed concerning his death, I feel that either it didn’t last long or that there never was a proper investigation at all.

After all, there was a lack of material evidence. At the time of the article, no fingerprints, tire tracks (other than those of my father’s truck), footprints (other than my father’s), or indeed anything tangible could be found pointing to a subject. The only known thing was that my father had been killed with something sharp.

However, it is was his manner of death that was especially grisly. His abdominal wall had been cut though, then ripped open. His organs had, apparently, been individually removed and subsequently replaced in the body.

Anyone reading this should know that this is a more or less typical scene from a Slender Man’s killing. There was nothing taken, except a life and the structural integrity of a person’s innards.

But perhaps the strangest part is that my father didn’t have any of the characteristic behavior of someone being stalked by a Slender Man. There was no paranoia, no obsessive observation, no frantic drawing. My father went to work every day, came home, watched TV, played with me, he even helped around the house. He was a more or less normal person to the end.

Thus there are two primary possibilities for how my father came to this state (killed by a Slender Man, but with none of the accompanying behavior changes):

One, he came upon it suddenly and tried to interfere with it (saving me/someone? If it was me, it fits with both a Slender Man coming after children and returning again when they are older if they evade it the first time).

And two, there was something different about my father. Maybe he simply hid it from me. Maybe his mentality simply made him too stubborn to give into the fear (a proto-Zeke Strahm?). Maybe he carried a mutation that made him immune to a Slender Man’s control (if the fear is caused by a Slender Man interfering with the mind directly). Maybe it was something even more farfetched and ludicrous, like my father being a Slender Man.

Of the two, the first is obviously more likely. There was a precedent for this in Just Another Fool, provided it wasn’t the rambling of a veteran driven insane. The second is unlikely, though it is possible that my father simply hid it well. My memory is foggy around that time (itself a cause for concern), so it could be that I simply forgot any subtle behavior changes my father made to hide his situation from me.

But the strangest thing perhaps was my father’s age. My father was in his early forties when he died, by far the oldest case I have come across (Strahm was 27 if I recall correctly, the oldest age I can recall given explicitly by a blog). This again may suggest that it was a more “spur of the moment” incident compared to the stalking examples typically seen. If a Slender Man had intended to claim my father as a child who escaped him previously, why wait so uncharacteristically long and apparently simply end it quickly rather than dragging it out as is typical?

So I must conclude for the moment that my father had not been pursued before his death. I will have to ask my mother for more details since she may have held even more information back due to the nature of his death.

But in the meantime, this makes me think of a subject that I have yet to discuss, and that I have not yet found any information on whatsoever.

How do the children escape? Does it simply stop or does it taper off? Why does a Slender Man wait years and years for a second attempt? Is the goal the same as with the children or is there another reason?

While I work up the nerve to open these old family wounds, I’ll try to make some sense of these questions, and hopefully come to sensible answers.

The Flower

So, there is a symbol in my old files. I had forgotten about it, but it’s been around in my backups for ten or more years now. But let’s just get it out of the way. Here’s the image (edited for size):

It looks like a flower to me, so I’ll call it as such. However, it personally reminds me of a certain type of prison, the Panopticon. This prison is constructed in a circular fashion with a central tower. The cells are such that the guards, in the tower, can view into any of them at any time. However, the tower windows are constructed in such a way that the imprisoned cannot be sure if they are looking at them or not. The point is control. The prisoners cannot see the guards, so they can never be sure when it is safe to do something… less than moral or forbade within the walls, such as escape attempts.

At any rate, there is something it reminds me of even more, as mentioned in the last post:

The Operator Symbol. Although it’s almost certainly unnecessary, a comparison follows:

This makes me wonder if I had an encounter in the past with a Slender Man, and out of boredom stylized the symbol that is so common to its appearances. However, as mentioned, I did not own a computer when this apparently was created. But I did finally realize something. And I believe this to be very significant.

The date in the file’s properties states it was created the day my father was killed. Or rather when they found him.

My father died under strange conditions. Not that his cause of death was atypical. It was obvious that he had been stabbed repeatedly, or at least that’s what anyone would tell me. It was where they found him. He was near his truck in the woods.

Up a tree. They found it odd that he would be in a tree after being killed, as the evidence suggested that he had been placed there after he almost entirely bled out. There was almost no blood on the tree itself.

That was all anyone ever told me. I was just a child at the time, it would have been cruel to tell me anything more graphic than that, I suppose. Even that was a little much.

But now, I must assume that there was something more than that to his death. The symbol’s date could simply be a taunt, trying to elicit an emotional response from me. But I can’t afford that. The tree symbolism is near constant within Slender Man lore. I can’t dismiss it out of hand as coincidence, as it may be the connection that finally led a Slender Man to me, rather than it simply finding me after I started investigating it. That’s more likely than coincidence.

However, I’ll have to look through public records to figure out if any of my assumptions are correct. I have to admit, I think I’m making too many sweeping declarations lately. My father died, therefore Slender Man involvement. I’m grasping at straws, it seems.

I will post again if I find anything.

Home Sweet Home

So I’m home for the weekend, and it’s certainly relaxing. I don’t have to see a Slender Man for a couple of days (hopefully), and the only strange sounds at night are the familiar ones of the house settling.

And no tests or coursework to worry about either.

I love being able to just kick back, sleep in, and not worry about anything except what to do with my friends, who I haven’t seen in some time. I love this laidback lifestyle. Living in a suburb of a major city. Everything you need is close by, scenery of all kinds to take in, and all the people you can stand.

Pity I can’t stand most people.

But that’s neither here nor there. In fact, this entire post is absolutely pointless. This is what blogs are supposed to be about. Just the everyday happenings of the average Joe. I wish I could go back to the beginning and ignore all the video and text that lead me down this path. It’s such a hassle to just keep up a semblance of normal life when you have to look over your shoulder out of fear of being snatched up.

It may not come across very well in my writing, but this whole experience has left me rattled. The thing about writing is that you can always edit out emotion in post, even if it’s very personal. That’s one of those things I’ve never understood about the internet. Everyone can put up a calm, dignified front easily, whether they actually are or not. But very few do, it seems. So many let their emotions get the best of them, typing up angry responses to dissenting opinions or empty taunts on message boards. It’s so pointless.

But I’m certainly not guiltless in this regard. My last post concerning The Tutorial was seething with anger at M. Just because I don’t use exclamation points doesn’t mean I’m not a little… excited. I was a little out of line, I think. I should have controlled myself better. I shouldn’t simply disregard someone’s experiences out of hand. After all, tall tales and legends grew from exaggeration and trying to make sense out of memories tainted by fear and darkness. The same can be said about the Slender Man blogs. People are just trying to make sense of their experiences. Unfortunately, they may not have the time or knowledge to make a scientific judgment.

Really, I’m shocked that I still have the time. Not only because finals are but a few short weeks away. I’ve been in this long enough that I would have thought stranger things would have happened. I’ve yet to have been “moved,” it’s never appeared closer than thirty feet, and I haven’t started making any crazy drawings, or even recording myself.

But there is something I would like to discuss. It’s a symbol. One I had long forgotten, but found today in some of my old computer files as I was backing up files on an external hard drive. I don’t know where it came from. The properties indicate it was created before I ever owned a computer, and it bears an odd similarity to, among other things, the Operator Symbol. I’ll post an overview of it tomorrow.

Insufficient Funds

Due to some poor budgeting on my part, I will not be able to do anything regarding the ultraviolet or infrared cameras at the moment. Sometimes electronics you have simply break down, and they prevent you from getting the ones that you want.

This will set back any possible experiments for some time, I assume. Unless I get some surprise income that is, which is highly unlikely.

Laughable

I’ve been looking through The Tutorial lately, and frankly, this kid is a mixed bag when it comes to reliable information. The three rules are mostly solid, except “get up high.” This one is positively ludicrous.

Slender Men go inside houses. Slender Men can traverse stairs. Slender Men can see the difference in height from one floor to another through windows. Slender Men can see people through windows. Slender Men can see people on the Xth floor while on it themselves and still recognize them as human. All of this information can be seen directly in various logs or inferred from the same.

And yet this M kid concludes that Slender Men cannot get you, or at least won’t pursue, if you are high up. Not only that, they cannot comprehend that a mere human could be taller than them. Ridiculous.

And what makes this worse is that M says, repeatedly, that what one thinks of Slender Men becomes reality for them. Most people don’t believe this tale “I have the high ground” automatic safeguard, but he implies it is near ironclad except for human limitations. And maybe I misunderstood his writing, but didn’t a Slender Man get to M while he was sleeping on a rooftop?

But what bothers me most is the insistence of rules upon something one claims to be ever-changing in response to the beliefs of humans. To quote the internet, “head meet desk.”

Don’t get me wrong, M has his heart in the right place, but his thought processes are conflicting and sometimes outright insulting to anyone with a bit of common sense.

To be fair, however, my thinking on Slender Man biology is… unconventional to say the least. But the creature in question is far from conventional itself. I daresay it goes against Earth-based evolution. It dwells in the light but has no eyes. Or at least, has no eyes optimized for the wavelengths most likely to break through the ozone layer and atmosphere in general (the visible spectrum, due to the peak wavelength of the Sun). From this do I think Slender Men are aliens? The answer is a resounding maybe. There is simply not enough information.

But I try to make conclusions based on possibilities allowable by the physics of reality. M, on the other hand, buys into this foolishness that Slender Men are not only the product of the collective consciousness of a million internet dwellers, but also that they are beyond the laws of physics.

I say, for example, Slender Men use wire-like appendages to send electrical impulses into the brain and modify behavior and even a person’s personality. A strange, even ridiculous conclusion, I know. But this is not wholly outside the realm of possibility. Humans do something similar even today, though with less malicious intentions. We can electrically stimulate sections of the mind to cause a person to feel a certain way. Science fiction came to the logical extensions of this long before I did.

What’s more, M seems to say that some of the problems caused by the presence of a Slender Man are that they try to make it fit into our world as we see it. Obviously they aren’t trying very hard, or they, too, buy into this foolishness of extradimensional entities and mentally manifested monsters so much they can’t consider reality as a plausible realm of existence. Don’t be naïve. These creatures live in the universe. Not “our” universe. The. Singular. No other qualifiers necessary. There are no bridges between realities. And if there were, you have to adapt to the new dimension, not the other way around. We only exist as we do because the universe allows creatures like us to exist within its laws. The same goes for Slender Men. Strange as they are, they follow the universe’s rules. To say otherwise is simply to fuel the fear of fairytales.

I’m cutting myself off here. This rant has gone on long enough. I’m going to go cool off.

Slender Man Characteristics

I’ve been thinking about the physical characteristics, or rather the possible ones, of a Slender Man. This is beyond height, width, color, etc. I mean physical capacities. Here are my current thoughts on said possibilities:

Biology: Nothing worthwhile can be said, other than it is clearly alive and humanoid in appearance, but is also clearly not a typical organism, as there is no clear face (and therefore entrance to the digestive tract or any external indication of sensory organs beyond touch). However, repeated reports suggest that it can see (“Sees me”). There is the possibility that the “face” does conceal a more typical arrangement, or some other portion of its body does. It may simply see in a different part of the spectrum, allowing it to see through its own skin. Alternatively, lens for its eyes may simply appear the same color as the surrounding material in the visible spectrum (compare that the external portion of the human eye has visibly transparent material, which is not transparent at all wavelengths).

Cross-Species Interface: It is possible that the creature can directly connect to the nervous system of a human being. This is evidenced by the blackouts attributed to its appearances. The most likely cause would be a thin, almost wire-like appendage (possibly either an extension of or modified tentacle) that can be easily inserted into the skin, possibly through bone, even, that can connect to and interfere with nerves electrically. This insertion, obviously, is either wiped from memory or entirely painless. This presumably has the potential of rewriting information, and even causing massive behavior changes. What changes are intended are impossible to be certain of, if any are explicitly desired. For all we know, this kind of interaction could be something akin to sex or drug usage, a pleasure-based or even necessary action.

Electronics Interface: I theorize that a similar or same appendage is used to interfere with electronics, sending impulses into them to disable, or even manipulate them. If this is sophisticated enough (as it would need to be to intelligently modify humans through the nervous system) a Slender Man could even implant information into the system, such as adding footage to a recording, either as it is being recorded or after the fact, depending on the storage medium.

These conclusions, if correct, are disturbing. Obviously I’d prefer them to be wrong, but if they are indeed correct, this might actually give an advantage. Knowing what to expect gives the opportunity to counteract.

Wearing thick clothing and a helmet (the motorcycle sort) could stave off the appendage, but it’s impossible to be completely shielded from something that passes through bone without ludicrous and costly accoutrements. Shielding electronics is easier, in that metal plating is comparatively cheap for smaller items, such as cameras, though the lens is still potentially an issue.

In the end, the most intriguing idea for me is trying to get non-visible imaging of the creature. My gut instinct is that ultraviolet is the best bet, but it could be anything. However, the imaging requires the chosen wavelength to have an external source. I can’t exactly lug around a gamma ray-emitting device for obvious reasons. Radio, on literally the other end of the spectrum, is unlikely to give me the resolution I would need for any meaningful analysis.

An ultraviolet source is much easier to obtain, or as they are commonly called, a black light. Unfortunately, the range wavelength-wise is smaller than I would like, but I actually own some currently, even if they are not on hand at the moment. This includes a small handheld one I can have on my person at all times. The only issue is a camera that can pick it up. However, I have a friend whose father likes to tinker in this sort of thing. I’ll see if he can get something jury rigged while I look for things online within my price range.

If this fails, infrared is the alternative imaging choice. It is even simpler, as normal cameras can pick up certain infrared wavelengths. However, if I were to use a normal camera, I would have to use a filter of some sort, else the infrared would be lost amid the visible light.

So there is my current plan. Secure and if necessary modify electronics to look at a monster that likely wishes to kill and/or mutilate humans, probably including myself, just so others can know about it. Oh, and it may be able to control both humans and electronics directly.

Sounds like an enjoyable pastime, doesn’t it?