What made Slender Man so popular was the flexibility of the concept and the highly collaborative nature. People can edit and adapt the story and images due to the mystery behind it's creation and author. In a sense, Slender Man could be considered similar to a campfire story, or urban legend, as Andrew Peck suggests, the story teller able to claim a sense of ownership over their version of the myth.
The concept of Slender Man has become so popular, and the lines between fantasy and reality so blurred, that there have even been cases of Slender Man - related incidents. In 2014, two 12 year old girls held down a classmate and stabbed her multiple times. When later questioned, the two claimed that they were following steps to become Slender Man's "proxies"after reading about it online. Later that same year, another girl of 14 supposedly set fire to her house with her mother and younger brother inside with possible connections to Slender Man who she seemed infatuated with. These are just two examples of cases that have been related to the concept, proving the cultural impact it has had on a generation of technology natives.
