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| The doctored image that started it all |
Being a veteran of summer camps I'm accustomed to the "bonfire villain run a muck." In the case of the old Camp Don Bosco in Newton, NJ it was Farmer O'Leary; a mutant, inbred tiller of the soil who stalked the fields around the camp looking for wayward campers to drag back to his farmhouse to slice up. Total bunk of course, I'm sure invented way back when to scare kids so they wouldn't sneak out of their cabins at night. Lets just say it worked too well sometimes. I had young kids in my cabin too frightened to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, at times with rather unsavory results. Here in Chicago its Nurse Norah, who supposedly haunts the old wing of the youth center. She was invented in the "new" CDB at Putnam Valley, NY; transplanted here by a former Salesian who will remain nameless. The story was officially banned (as were tales of Farmer O'Leary) because the younger kids were taking it too seriously. Nonetheless, in the case of the mythical Nurse Norah, the effects of this little yarn are felt almost a decade later, with kids still scared to go to the second floor unaccompanied. And this modern myth making isn't consigned to summer camp. When I worked in a Newark parochial school it was the Candy Man, a vaguely demonic figure conjured up by saying his name three times into a mirror, that the pre-teens feared. So, while I was as shocked as anybody last week that two 12 year olds in Wisconsin tried to kill their "friend" to get in good with a fictional bogey man known as Slender Man, who they thought was real, my mind was not completely blown. Even in this Internet savvy age, where the children know what's what in the virtual world more than the adults do, human nature doesn't change.
The fact is that many children of a
certain age, let's say between 9 and 13, don't have the ready ability to know
when their leg is being pulled. Even teens and adults can confuse fiction with
truth at times: how many otherwise rational adults believe in Big Foot or the Moth Man? For that matter, go back to 1938 and Orson Welles' radio
play adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Presented as a real time news report,
without any disclaimer, thousands listening in the North East, and possibly the
country, thought the Earth really was being invaded by Martians, causing a
general panic. If adults can be convinced that legend is literal, how much more are children susceptible to this type of confusion?
I went to a few sites, and although the Slender Man character has a definitive origin with a particular author (who holds the copyright, no less), every page I saw presents the myth as fact, with "found" photos or videos, whose takers have been "missing" for decades; a strategy utilized by the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project. If any of these sites does post some sort of disclaimer, I missed it. The site these girls regularly visited did put up a post expressing their concern for the victim, proclaiming the content of their site fictional, while defending said content. I'm not sure if pre-teens were the original target audience for the type of horror contained on the site, but the young ones found it, and while most probably know that the content is fictitious, there will always be those impressionable minds who won't get the conceit. Thus the responsibility on the authors and web masters to make things plain.
I'm not saying that children shouldn't hear spooky ghost stories around a camp fire. I remember when I was in the fourth or fifth grade a classmate bringing in an LP of dramatized ghost stories into school and playing it for us. (If you don't know what an LP is, ask your parents). I knew it was bunk, but I still didn't sleep for a couple of nights afterward. And I don't think that I was any worse for the wear. I'm no psychologist, but there is something in us that likes getting scared, under controlled conditions, once in a while. I will admit, I never understood slasher movies, because they strike me as being disgusting as opposed to suspenseful or frightening, and these are two different realities. So without getting overly analytical about it all, there is a natural attraction to mystery and myth, and even a touch or horror, in our psyche, especially during the "tween" years (this is the age, remember, when girls are supposedly haunted by poltergeists). Handled properly the vast majority of young people navigate this phase unharmed and with a more vividly creative imagination.
The difference I see in the old campfire stories or the old Hammer horror films I watched on local TV as a kid and these contemporary horror stories, is the level of darkness. In the midst of the ghosts and vampires of old was a degree of campiness that kept things from getting too heavy. On the modern horror sites I perused, and I admit I only visited a couple, there wasn't a hint of humor to leaven the proceeding. Realism seems to be the key, whether its the doctored photos or "found" videos. The line between myth and reality is always a fuzzy one, and you could argue that that's part of the fun. But in these contemporary presentations the line seems to be nonexistent, thus making it even more difficult for young minds to tell the difference.
There is another aspect, which is the demonic. The site that these girls visited the most put up a disclaimer, as I mentioned, in which they said, among other things, that they were a "literary" site, not a satanic cult. I'll take that at face value, but one doesn't have to willfully be at the service of the the devil, or even believe in him, to help his cause. Under the proper supervision, and with a proper dose of camp, the mysterious and the spooky can help cultivate the young imagination. But unsupervised and presented in a self serious way it can lead to an attraction with darkness, with tragic results. I do believe that these sites are doorways for true evil to enter, so it is for any parents reading this out there to be aware of what your children are reading and watching, and if something strikes you as being too dark, don't be afraid to restrict it. I'm not saying that these girls were possessed, or even that the demonic was directly involved in the incident (though I personally lean in the direction of demonic influence). The responsible adults did Satan's work for him by fashioning the material in a particular way and then leaving the girls on their own to consume it and interpret it as their 12 year old minds were capable. All the Evil One had to do was sit back and reap the rewards.
I went to a few sites, and although the Slender Man character has a definitive origin with a particular author (who holds the copyright, no less), every page I saw presents the myth as fact, with "found" photos or videos, whose takers have been "missing" for decades; a strategy utilized by the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project. If any of these sites does post some sort of disclaimer, I missed it. The site these girls regularly visited did put up a post expressing their concern for the victim, proclaiming the content of their site fictional, while defending said content. I'm not sure if pre-teens were the original target audience for the type of horror contained on the site, but the young ones found it, and while most probably know that the content is fictitious, there will always be those impressionable minds who won't get the conceit. Thus the responsibility on the authors and web masters to make things plain.
I'm not saying that children shouldn't hear spooky ghost stories around a camp fire. I remember when I was in the fourth or fifth grade a classmate bringing in an LP of dramatized ghost stories into school and playing it for us. (If you don't know what an LP is, ask your parents). I knew it was bunk, but I still didn't sleep for a couple of nights afterward. And I don't think that I was any worse for the wear. I'm no psychologist, but there is something in us that likes getting scared, under controlled conditions, once in a while. I will admit, I never understood slasher movies, because they strike me as being disgusting as opposed to suspenseful or frightening, and these are two different realities. So without getting overly analytical about it all, there is a natural attraction to mystery and myth, and even a touch or horror, in our psyche, especially during the "tween" years (this is the age, remember, when girls are supposedly haunted by poltergeists). Handled properly the vast majority of young people navigate this phase unharmed and with a more vividly creative imagination.
The difference I see in the old campfire stories or the old Hammer horror films I watched on local TV as a kid and these contemporary horror stories, is the level of darkness. In the midst of the ghosts and vampires of old was a degree of campiness that kept things from getting too heavy. On the modern horror sites I perused, and I admit I only visited a couple, there wasn't a hint of humor to leaven the proceeding. Realism seems to be the key, whether its the doctored photos or "found" videos. The line between myth and reality is always a fuzzy one, and you could argue that that's part of the fun. But in these contemporary presentations the line seems to be nonexistent, thus making it even more difficult for young minds to tell the difference.
There is another aspect, which is the demonic. The site that these girls visited the most put up a disclaimer, as I mentioned, in which they said, among other things, that they were a "literary" site, not a satanic cult. I'll take that at face value, but one doesn't have to willfully be at the service of the the devil, or even believe in him, to help his cause. Under the proper supervision, and with a proper dose of camp, the mysterious and the spooky can help cultivate the young imagination. But unsupervised and presented in a self serious way it can lead to an attraction with darkness, with tragic results. I do believe that these sites are doorways for true evil to enter, so it is for any parents reading this out there to be aware of what your children are reading and watching, and if something strikes you as being too dark, don't be afraid to restrict it. I'm not saying that these girls were possessed, or even that the demonic was directly involved in the incident (though I personally lean in the direction of demonic influence). The responsible adults did Satan's work for him by fashioning the material in a particular way and then leaving the girls on their own to consume it and interpret it as their 12 year old minds were capable. All the Evil One had to do was sit back and reap the rewards.
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