The latter began as a string of YouTube videos with no real basis in folklore. Drawing parallels between Peter Pan, the Pied Piper, Black Eyed Kids/People, MIBs, are interesting conjectures.

Slenderman is open source folklore, with people peppering it throughout memes, games, and fiction. The more people who buy into the Slenderman mythos, there’s a greater chance it’ll manifest in reality.

Will there be a Tom Slick expedition to recover its necktie? Could some future Melba Ketchum sequence its DNA and find it’s descended from opossums? Nope. It’d be more apt to compare SM to the Jersey Devil than anything else if Brian Regal is to be believed, and there’s a strong possibility of this being the case.

I believe, one day, there will be proof of elusive, relict hominids. Or at least evidence their population persisted closer to the present in terms of centuries rather than millennia.