When two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin blamed a creepy internet meme after they lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her within a millimeter of her life, you could practically hear Nancy Grace cackle. And here comes the panic: A mother in Cincinnati claims her 13-year-old daughter attacked her with a knife under the influence of the same fictional character, known as the Slender Man, a message-board creation that has grown into a cult figure across online mediums.
“I came home one night from work and she was in the kitchen waiting for me and she was wearing a mask, a white mask,” the woman told the local WLWT5 news. “She had her hood up and had her hands covered with her sleeves and the mask.” Her daughter, who is now being held in a juvenile detention center “mentioned playing a role,” she said. “It didn’t feel like her at all.”
After the mom heard about the Wisconsin case and examined her daughter’s drawings, she got the feeling they were linked. “We found things that she had written and she made reference to Slender Man. She also made references to killing,” said the mother. “She even created a world for Slender Man in the game Minecraft.”
Speaking to the Science of Us, an expert on the Slender Man legend said it allows kids to “flex their own creative muscles and imagine a darker side of the world — the side of the world that you are running away from as a child but are constantly being pulled into as you enter adulthood, facing these dark realities of the world and leaving innocence behind.” Parenting is probably a different issue altogether.
