ancestors
Column: El Silbón, a Venezuelan Legend About the Ancestors
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Alan D.D. recalls a Venezuelan legend of a banshee named El Silbón, “The Whistler,” and contemplates the relationship we have with our ancestors.
ancestors
Columna: El Silbón, una leyenda Venezolana sobre los Ancestros
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Alan D.D. recalls a Venezuelan legend of a banshee named El Silbón, “The Whistler,” and contemplates the relationship we have with our ancestors.
Paganism
Guest Post: The Slender Man, Fakelore, and Moral Panic
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[The following is a guest post from author and journalist Beth Winegarner. Winegarner’s latest book is “The Columbine Effect: How Five Teen Pastimes Got Caught in The Crossfire and Why Teens Are Taking Them Back.”]
On May 31, news broke that two 12-year-old Milwaukee girls, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, had stabbed a classmate 19 times and left her in the woods to die. Although those facts are startling enough on their own, much of the coverage has focused on the girls’ purported reason for the attack: they said they did it to appease the Slender Man, a fictional Internet character originally created by Eric Knudsen in 2009 during a Something Awful challenge. The Slender Man — or Slenderman, as he’s sometimes called — later joined the ranks on Creepypasta’s wiki catalog of fictional characters. Here’s what the site says about him:
Much of the fascination with Slender Man is rooted in the overall aura of mystery that he is wrapped in. Despite the fact that it is rumored he kills children almost exclusively, it is difficult to say whether or not his only objective is slaughter.