Regular Episode
#086 – SLENDERMAN & TULPAS
On May 31, 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times, claiming they did it to prove the reality of Slender Man and earn passage to his mansion. The victim survived — miraculously, as Joe puts it. The attack prompted urgent public debate about internet horror fiction, mental illness, and the line between fantasy and violence. This episode uses that crime as a jumping-off point for a much deeper question: where did the idea come from that collective belief can conjure something real?
🖥️ Slender Man: Origin and Mythology
Slender Man was created in 2009 by Victor Surge (real name Eric Knudsen) for a paranormal photo-manipulation contest on the Something Awful forums. The original image — a tall, faceless, suited figure lurking behind children — was almost immediately adopted by the horror-fiction community at Creepypasta, where collaborative storytelling gave the character an expanding mythology. Joe notes that Knudsen has said he no longer feels like the character’s creator — more like its manager — because the ideas long since escaped his control.
Blake draws a parallel to the writing circles of H. P. Lovecraft, where authors freely exchanged monsters and motifs. The deliberate ambiguity of Creepypasta — is this true or not? — is part of the genre’s appeal, and that productive uncertainty is exactly what some readers resolved in the wrong direction.
🔪 The Wisconsin Stabbing and “Corrupted Play”
Joe resists the two most common post-attack narratives: that the internet is to blame (and should be censored) and that the girls must be mentally ill. He calls the latter a tautology — they must be ill because they did something violent, and they did something violent because they’re ill — and argues it forecloses more useful analysis.
Instead, he draws on research into what he calls corrupted play, citing sociologist Kuya Sato‘s fieldwork with the Bōsōzoku biker gangs of Japan — largely middle-class kids who escalated roleplay until irrevocable consequences resulted. In the Waukesha case, Joe notes that the girls repeatedly deferred the violence (abandoning plans to stab the victim in her sleep, then in a park bathroom) and ultimately split moral agency at the crucial moment: one gave the order, the other held the knife. The crime, he suggests, crept up on them through months of escalating fantasy — the plan apparently originated in January 2014, five months before the attack.
He also flags the eerie prescience of a Supernatural episode titled “Hashtag Thin Man,” which aired in March 2014 and depicted ordinary people committing murders to make an internet meme seem real — the same motive the girls later cited.
👣 Ostension, Legend Tripping, and the Legend Complex
Joe introduces the folklorist Bill Ellis‘s concept of ostension — the move from telling a legend to acting it out. Legends congeal into what Ellis calls a legend complex, a carpet of related claims, and ostension is when someone physically demonstrates that complex is real, whether through faked photographs, claimed sightings, or actual enactment. A grim historical example: in 1974, a man poisoned his own son’s Halloween candy and hoped to pin blame on the pre-existing legend of tampered treats.
Legend tripping — where teenagers visit supposedly haunted or cursed sites to test the legend — is a related phenomenon. Joe cites Michael Kinsella‘s 📚 Legend Tripping Online 💵, in which Kinsella accompanied a group to an abandoned psychiatric institution and, despite his anthropological training, genuinely saw things moving in the dark. His conclusion: the ritual structure of the legend trip itself primes participants perceptually to experience what they came to find.
🧘 What “Tulpa” Actually Means — and What It Doesn’t
The claim that Slender Man might be a tulpa — a thought-form willed into physical existence by mass collective belief — gives Natasha the most to untangle. In Tibetan, the word is more accurately romanized as trulpa (or tulwa as a verb), meaning to emanate, manifest, or display. It is, crucially, a voluntary verb: Tibetan grammatically distinguishes voluntary from involuntary actions, and trulwa requires deliberate cognitive intent.
Natasha traces the word’s relatives: zutrul (illusion, a magician’s trick), and tulku — the reincarnation lineage title held by figures like the Dalai Lama, whose trul (manifest) + ku (body) makes him the nirmanakaya, the form-body of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. In the Tibetan Buddhist philosophical framework of the trikāya (three bodies of a Buddha — dharmakāya, saṃbhogakāya, nirmāṇakāya), an emanation exists to bring wisdom and compassion into the world. When the pair consulted an ethnically Tibetan scholar the same afternoon, he was distinctly unimpressed by the Slender Man comparison: these emanations are meant to help stop suffering, not make children kill each other in the woods.
🔮 Alexandra David-Néel, Theosophy, and the Western Thought-Form
The Western tulpa concept traces to Alexandra David-Néel‘s 1929 book 📚 Magic and Mystery in Tibet 💵. David-Néel — a French explorer and the first Western woman to enter Lhasa — claimed she concentrated until she materialized a tubby, Friar Tuck-style monk that others could also perceive, and that the creation eventually grew shifty and had to be “put down” (method unspecified). Joe notes that David-Néel had studied Theosophy before traveling to Tibet, and that the dangerous-creation-that-turns-on-its-master motif — closer to the Golem or Frankenstein’s monster than anything in Tibetan doctrine — appears to be thoroughly Western in origin.
Joe traced the concept of the “thought-form” back through the Theosophical Society’s journal (originally titled Lucifer — they eventually changed it). In 1891, a founding member writing as Safariel (later identified as Dr. Walter Gorn Old) described accidentally imposing a mental image of a jug onto a wicker basket, carrying it full of leaking beer upstairs, and having his companions explain his absent-mindedness as an involuntary thought-form. By 1895, Annie Besant had developed the concept fully: thoughts have subtle physical matter, attract quasi-intelligent elementals, and collective dark thoughts can produce storms, disasters, and demons. In 1901 she co-authored the book 📚 Thought Forms 💵 with Charles Leadbeater. The Western paranormal tradition — from John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies through The X-Files and Supernatural — inherited this thoroughly London-made idea and re-labeled it Tibetan.
💭 New Thought, EST, and the Persistence of Magical Thinking
The conversation broadens to the American New Thought movement and its descendants. Joe traces a line from 19th-century movements like Christian Science through EST (Erhard Seminars Training) and its offshoots (the Forum, Landmark) to contemporary phenomena like The Secret‘s law of attraction. EST founder Werner Erhard drew on both New Thought and a secondhand understanding of Zen, running hotel-room seminars designed to provoke sudden “enlightenment” through confrontation. Joe recounts a sobering moment: a Holocaust survivor at one seminar asked whether what happened to her family was the result of insufficient positive thinking — a question Erhard could not answer.
Blake also flags the growing internet phenomenon now known as the Mandela effect — the belief that conflicting memories reflect genuine alternate timelines rather than ordinary confabulation — as a 21st-century descendant of the same theosophical move: dressing magical thinking in the language of physics to give it scientific credibility.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism 💵 by Joseph Laycock
– 📚 Magic and Mystery in Tibet 💵 by Alexandra David-Néel
– 📚 Thought Forms 💵 by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater
– 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 by John A. Keel
– 📚 Legend Tripping Online 💵 by Michael Kinsella
🔗 Related Links
– Slender Man – Wikipedia
– Creepypasta – Wikipedia
– Alexandra David-Néel – Wikipedia
– Tulpa – Wikipedia
– Tulku – Wikipedia
– Trikāya (three bodies of a Buddha) – Wikipedia
– Theosophical Society – Wikipedia
– Annie Besant – Wikipedia
– New Thought – Wikipedia
– EST (Erhard Seminars Training) – Wikipedia
– Ostension in folklore – Wikipedia
– Bill Ellis (folklorist) – Wikipedia
– 2014 Slender Man stabbing – Wikipedia
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
SLENDERMAN IS AN INTERNET CREATION made for a contest on the Something Awful website. Its creator was Victor Surge (whose real name is Eric Knudsen). The character is tall, thin, faceless, wears a suit and is often shown in the background of otherwise innocent photos — sometimes with tentacles creeping shadowy from behind his back. His fictional story is that he compels children to kill.
On May 31, 2014, two young girls in Wisconsin attacked a third with a knife and alleged that their motivation was to become proxies of the Slenderman and to go live in his mansion in the woods. Why would they believe that a fictional creature was real?
Since the creation of Slenderman the character has “gone viral” and spun off numerous art and fiction stories. And some fans of the Slenderman believe that he is real — either existing already from time immemorial, or that he exists now, brought to life by the combined belief of millions of humans in the form of a living creature known as a Tulpa.
In this episode we interview Joe Laycock and Natasha Mikles, who help us find out more about Slenderman and Tulpas and the reality of their supposed ancient heritage.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas. Joe Laycock has written extensively on topics that overlap MonsterTalk’s area of interest, including the publication of a book titled Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism. (Photo Credit: Dan Addison)
Natasha Mikles is a Doctoral student at the University of Virginia focusing on Tibetan Studies.
Slenderman in the Media
Creepy Pasta is both a term meaning a specific kind of short horror fiction, as well as a website of the same name which houses many such disturbing stories. It is an altered form of copy-pasta which itself is a deliberate alteration of cut & paste.
Articles by the Interviewees
- Tracking the Tulpa — new journal article by Mikles and Laycock.
- On Slenderman
- On Nessie and Tibetan Buddhism
- On the Mothman Festival
- On EST, New Thought and Buddhism
Related Links
- Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism (book)
- Alexandra David-Néel
- Folklorist Bill Ellis
- Ostension in Folklore
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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