Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

The Slender Man began as two photographs and a caption, submitted to an internet forum in 2009 as nothing more than a creepy image contest. Within five years, people across the country were treating him as real – and some proved just how far that belief could go.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/Slenderman

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8ka2re

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: In 2009, a photograph appeared on an internet forum, submitted as an entry in a contest to create convincing fake paranormal images. The figure in it had no face, arms too long for its body, and a caption written like a piece of found history. Within a few years, that figure had a name recognized across the internet, a following that treated the images as more than fiction, and a reputation for turning up in places far stranger than a photo contest ever intended.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:02:02.673 = Show Open
00:03:13.025 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 1
00:09:24.860 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 2 ***
00:22:48.484 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 3 ***
00:34:59.166 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 4 ***
00:41:57.606 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 5 ***
00:54:09.889 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Slenderman: Blurring The Lines Of Reality” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9e9srj
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: March, 2022

This episode of Weird Darkness traces the Slender Man from an internet photo contest into real-world stabbings, arson, and a wave of suicides on a South Dakota reservation, then weighs whether an invented internet legend can, in some sense, become real.It opens with the character's exact origin: on June 10th, 2009, Eric Knudsen, posting under the name Victor Surge on the forum Something Awful, submitted two doctored photographs as part of a contest to create convincing paranormal images. Each carried a caption inventing a backstory, one referencing a photographer "presumed dead" in 1983 and another tying the figure to a fire at the Stirling City Library and the disappearance of a photographer named Mary Thomas in 1986. The figure in both images, faceless and unnaturally tall with elongated arms, spread across the internet within days and took on the name Slender Man, along with a folklore of his own: a preference for woods and abandoned buildings, the ability to travel at will, and warning signs that included nosebleeds, nightmares, and sudden paranoia.From there, the episode turns to the Waukesha stabbing of May 31st, 2014, in Wisconsin, when twelve-year-old Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser led their friend Payton Leutner into nearby woods and stabbed her nineteen times, telling investigators the attack was meant to prove Slender Man's existence and make them his "proxies." Leutner survived and crawled to a roadside where a cyclist found her. Geyser was sentenced to forty years to life and remains held in a psychiatric facility; Weier, sentenced to twenty-five years to life, was released from institutional care in the summer of 2021 and placed under supervision.Next, the episode covers the string of incidents that followed within months: a thirteen-year-old girl's knife attack on her mother in Hamilton County, Ohio, in June 2014; a Las Vegas shooting in which the gunman, who reportedly dressed as Slender Man, killed two police officers and a bystander before killing his wife and himself; and a house fire set by a fourteen-year-old girl in Port Richey, Florida, in September 2014, who told police she had "been reading a lot" about the character online. It also details a separate wave of youth suicides on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation between late 2014 and mid-2015, which the New York Times reported topped one hundred in six months, some tied by officials to the Slender Man and to a local legend of a "suicide spirit" known as Walking Sam or the Tall Man, and a mass hanging attempt in nearby woods that a local pastor, John Two Bulls, intervened to stop.The episode also relays an account researcher Nick Redfern collected from a Pennsylvania flight attendant trainee named Lacy, who said her laptop began displaying Slender Man's face and, on one occasion, a voice, after she read Robin Swope's book Slenderman: From Fiction to Fact in 2016.The episode closes by comparing Slender Man to Spring-Heeled Jack, a figure reported across Victorian England from the 1830s onward and long suspected of being one person's stunt copied by others in later decades, before turning to researcher Peter McCue's Psychic Internet Theory and the ancient Egyptian god Ptah, weighing whether shared belief circulated across the internet might account for why so many people came to treat a fictional character as something they could encounter.

Scout Brooks just wants to survive his first day of seventh grade — but a mysterious after-school astronomy club, run by an even stranger professor, has him wondering exactly what he's signed up for.

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373

Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrors

Other stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaU

Other narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com

BlLOG POST URL: https://weirddarkness.com/scoutbrooks001
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Weird Darkness©, 2026
Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Two best friends sneak out on the first night of summer break and find a working elevator standing alone in the middle of the woods — and the moment they step inside, the way home stops making sense.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-ElevatorInTheWoods

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Elevator In The Woods” by Adrian Johnson: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-elevator-in-the-woods/

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Originally aired: August 01, 2026

Records that surfaced in the weeks after the Siders children were found also describe a set of conjoined twins who died in 2022, two more underage marriages inside the extended family, and a stalled Ohio bill that would have raised the marriage age before any of it happened.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/siderscase20260731

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

From bathing in girls’ blood to making homemade conjoined twins, we’ll look at a few famous psychopaths who are truly some of the most terrifying people in the history of the world. Plus, whether flamboyant, miserly, or paranoid, some of history’s oddest individuals put modern-day eccentricities to shame.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/oddindividuals

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdeejyx2

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:04.405 = Show Open
00:02:00.371 = Diogenes : A Crazy, Homeless Philosopher
00:04:07.881 = Tarrare: the Man Who Man Have Eaten a Baby
00:06:39.397 = Lucky Lord Byron
00:09:42.507 = Hetty Green: Taking Miserly To a New Level ***
00:12:37.752 = Henry Cyril Paget: Married His Cousin And Lived Life Luxuriously
00:15:47.020 = Carl Tanzler: He Couldn’t Live Without His Love, Even After Her Death
00:18:31.186 = Gloria Ramirez: The Toxic Woman
00:21:15.035 = Anneliese Michel: She Endured 67 Exorcisms ***
00:23:44.494 = Sawney Bean: The Scottish Cannibal
00:25:45.378 = Margaret Howe Lovatt: Intimate Relations With a Dolphin
00:28:52.014 = King Leopold II: Slaves And Slaughter For Rubber And Ivory ***
00:30:38.976 = Pol Pot: Created a Nation of Peasants, Poverty and Punishments
00:32:17.167 = Ivan IV of Russia: Better Known as Ivan The Terrible
00:33:54.318 = Elizabeth Bathory: Eternal Youth Through Murder
00:35:15.113 = Heinrich Himmler: The Second Worst Nazi
00:36:23.100 = Adolph Eichmann: Claimed He Did His Duty By Killing Millions
00:38:05.830 = Tomás de Torquemada: Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition! ***
00:39:30.531 = Josef Mengele: The Angel of Death
00:40:31.984 = Vlad Tepes: The Impaler That Inspired Dracula
00:42:03.511 = Jim Jones: The Kool-Aid Serial Killer Cult Leader
00:43:43.399 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*