I will be the first to say I was a skeptic.

I am not one to entertain (what I consider to be) silly fantasies. I enjoy reading horror, fiction, and fantasy, but I don't believe any of that stuff, or I didn't, anyway. I am Jack Moore, and in this blog I will tell you my story of something terrible which changed my life forever. Is this thing Slender Man? I don't know. I don't know what to believe any more.

Firstly, I shall start with a little introduction to myself, whilst keeping the specifics hidden (you know my name and will shortly know my country, that is enough). I am from England, where I have lived all my life. In my teenage years, I developed an affinity for horror and gothic fiction, particularly the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, which I could read over and over again. It is there, I think, that things first started going wrong. From Lovecraft's cosmic horror came an interest in magic and gods, to which I devoted a few years of study, and during those years I came across many such entities which the Internet had spawned, though my last find was the Slender Man.

In case you do not know, the story of the Slender Man is a simple one. There is a tall, thin, faceless man in a suit. He is always hiding in the shadows, usually in fog or wooded areas. He steals away children and stalks the occasional victim, often driving them insane, causing memory loss, or killing them. Often a story will involve all three of these to some extent. He is usually accompanied by "proxies", humans that serve him for some unknown purpose. The origin of the Slender Man is unknown, his motivations are unknown, and he is terrifying.

Now, as a Lovecraft fan, you can assume (and rightly so) that I was overjoyed by this! Of course I didn't believe any of this nonsense, it's just a shared mythos with some cool stories, right? And so I probed deeper into the mythos, learning as much as I could and reading many stories, I couldn't get enough of it. Then things started happening.

I started to become irritable and snap at people I knew, I was stressed for no apparent reason. I developed a fear of the dark, something which had until that time never bothered me. And, in time, I began to feel like I was being followed. Overwork? Repressed childhood fears? Paranoia? All of these could be explanations; a psychologist friend assured me that overwork can cause such symptoms and that I should take it easy and things would get better in time. I did. They didn't.

I am writing this in one of my more lucid moments, in the asylum where I am now kept to prevent me from harming myself and others. Through this blog I shall relate my story concerning my experiences with the Slender Man.