S1E1: The Internet is The New Woods (Monsters, Ostension, & Moral Panics)

Jan 16

Perry Carpenter:
On June 8th, 2009, a new kind of internet monster was born. This monster's name was Slenderman.
Mason Amadeus:
And to this day, academics and internet culture experts mention Slenderman as one of the most important figures of modern folklore. There are a lot of good reasons for that, and we'll touch on some of them today.
Perry Carpenter:
From the concepts of ostension and monster theory, to why we - as a society - love scary stories and how Slenderman and another digital monster by the name of Momo found themselves at the center of moral panics.
Mason Amadeus:
Today's episode touches on the topics of violence, self harm and mental health. Listener discretion is advised.
Perry Carpenter:
Hi, I'm Perry Carpenter.
Mason Amadeus:
And I'm Mason Amadeus.
Perry Carpenter:
And this is the Digital Folklore Podcast.

[Creaking, scurrying, knocking sounds, accompanied by a low, evolving drone]

Perry Carpenter:
The fairy-tale flies; the legend walks, knocks at your door. The one can draw freely out of the fullness of poetry. The other has almost the authority of history. Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, 1844.
[Sounds of dial-up modem connecting]
AOL "You've got mail" voice:
Welcome, you've got... Manifestation.
[Audio-cascade of various internet influencers talking about ‘manifesting’]
Internet Influencer 1:
I just wanna talk about manifestations really quickly.
Internet Influencer 2:
Manifestation?
Internet Influencer 3:
I just manifested a million likes.
Internet Influencer 4:
Find out what you wanna manifest into your life.
Internet Influencer 5:
How to manifest a car.
Internet Influencer 6:
This is how I instantly manifest certain outcomes.
Internet Influencer 7:
I manifested practically my whole life.
Internet Influencer 8:
Three words not to use when you're manifesting.
Internet Influencer 9:
Manifest the right way.
Internet Influencer 10:
How to manifest anything in 24 hours.

Internet Influencer 11:
I literally manifested something over night.

Internet Influencer 12:
Manifest anything in four minutes.
Internet Influencer 13:
This might sound crazy but you need to gaslight yourself into getting what you want.
[End of Audio Cascade]

[Dark / Dramatic music… Perry in ‘true crime’ voiceover mode…]
Perry Carpenter:
Manifestation. Making something real. Causing something to come into being, purely through the power of thinking about it repeatedly and often. Influencers from Oprah to ‘some guy that you just saw in a backwards talking about it on TikTok’ evangelize the power of manifesting the things that you want. Focus enough of your thoughts on something and it becomes real.
There's a concept in Folklore. It's called 'ostension' and it describes something very much like this. How the stories we tell push into the real world. It's like the idea of manifestation. It is a building of a bridge between our imaginations and the physical world. But what about when manifestation actually happens? What about when we bring things into existence that we never really wanted to exist? When something horrible manages to cross the bridge.

[Scene change – Perry and Mason walking through the woods]
Mason Amadeus:
And we- we had to go to the woods to do this.
Perry Carpenter:
Well, yeah. The woods, the forest. They're central to so many folkloric tales and concepts. So I figured it would be good to go straight to the source. In a way, what we're doing right now is a kind of ostension because what ostension really is, is just taking action in the physical world because of something that started out as folklore or legend. And here we are, walking through the woods because the woods represent folklore. You are the one who kept insisting we put ‘immersive’ in the show description.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh. Oh, cool. Yeah. It's my fault.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, it's your fault. But hey, you know, at least as we look around, it's not a bad night.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. It was an even better day, Perry. We could've been here before it got dark, man.
Perry Carpenter:
[super dramatic voice] Immersion.
Mason Amadeus:
[mockingly] Mosquitoes.
Perry Carpenter:
I'm- I'm serious though. The woods represent in so many ways the unknown. It's, uh, the- they're scary places where predators could be lurking, unseen in the shadows. I mean, I don't think I need to give a lot of examples. Off the top of your head, you could probably name a dozen fairy tales or scary stories that involve the woods.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. But that's like, a very literal interpretation of the fear. That's like-
[Mosquito buzzing followed by a slapping sound]
Got it. Sorry. Uh, that description feels very surface level. Most of the time when we tell stories, whether or not we consciously realize it, we use places like this in metaphorical ways to represent other things. Like Chelsey from American Hysteria said when we talked to them about this.

[Sound of Mason pressing ‘play’ on a portable tape recorder]
Chelsey Weber-Smith:
It's a metaphor for like, the chaos, I think, that we want to repress and repress and repress and repress, which includes our societal others. So I think the woods just is like, the Jungian shadow in a way where you don't know what's gonna happen in there. You shouldn't go in there. The internet is the new woods, and Slenderman is that bogeyman in the woods.
[Scene change / Quirky Music / Sounds of typing and microfiche whirring]
[Perry in ultra-dramatic voiceover mode]
Perry Carpenter:
June 8th, 2009. A single post on Something Awful, a comedy website with a thriving forum community, would directly plant the seed.
Gerogerigegege:
Creating paranormal images has been a hobby of mine for quite some time. Occasionally, I'll stumble upon odd websites that showcase strange photos and I've always wondered if I can get one of my shots on a book, a documentary or a website just by casually leaking it out onto the internet.
Perry Carpenter:
User Gerogerigegege put out a call, a very direct request for people on the forums to invent new paranormal photographs.
Gerogerigegege:
Before I export the file, I like to open my levels and slide my black and white inward to lose the true white or the true black. I think it makes it look a little bit more legit. You know what I mean?
Perry Carpenter:
Two days pass. Many people contribute their grainy photo shops and spooky captions to the thread. Then on June 10th-
Victor Surge:
We didn't want to go. We didn't want to kill them. But his persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time. 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.
Perry Carpenter:
A user by the name of Victor Surge uploaded a blurry photograph. A group of teenagers walking outdoors. Behind them barely visible in the contrast, an unnaturally tall, distorted white faced figure and another.
Victor Surge:
One of two recovered photographs from the Sterling City Library blaze, notable for being taken the day which 14 children vanished and for what is referred to as the Slenderman. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.
Perry Carpenter:
This second photo bore an official looking seal reading, "City of Sterling Libraries, local studies collection." In the foreground of the photo, children playing on a slide and lurking in the background, the same distorted, lanky blank-faced figure behind another group of children.
Victor Surge:
1986, photographer, Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.
Perry Carpenter:
Victor Surge's posts almost immediately took over the entire thread. Other users began contributing to the lore of the Slenderman, posting images, firsthand encounters and speculating on the origin and the powers of the Slenderman. While the original intent of the post was indeed to create fake paranormal images with the hope of spreading them online, nobody present that day could've predicted just how far this one would go.
[Symphonic music bed]
Stories, YouTube series, movies, YouTube series turned into a movie, video games, artwork. Slenderman transcended all forms of media and continues to this day. Just this year in 2022, a remake of the original Slenderman video game was released. Why Slenderman? What about this specific character so thoroughly enraptured our collective minds, and what is the tipping point at which something like the Slenderman evolves from a momentary fascination to being embedded in the fabric of modern folklore?

[Glitch sound transition to AD break]
Vivian Asimos:
There was something about 2009. Even if you had every single element the same except for the timing and you tried to do it now, I don't know if it would really work.
Perry Carpenter:
That is Dr. Vivian Asimos. She has a PhD in anthropology of religion with a focus on digital storytelling and internet mythology.
Vivian Asimos:
The original post by- I'm gonna use his username, which is Victor Surge - allowed for a lot of fill in the blanks, which is always what the best kind of those paranormal-y photos do. But the posts that followed it were also so good. There was somebody that edited a German woodcut to look like the Slenderman. It's not just Victor Surge, but everyone's creativity that really fed into it. What makes the mythos is the alterations in the agency of the storytellers.
Perry Carpenter:
It would turn out that those gaps in the story are a large part of what made Slenderman spread so widely.
Amory Sivertson:
There's room for you to kind of fill in some gaps. Right? It starts as this image and then there's the opportunity to really build the world of Slenderman and decide what you think it should be.
Perry Carpenter:
That's Amory Sivertson. She's one of the hosts of the Endless Thread Podcast from WBUR.
Amory Sivertson:
Victor Surge just created the image. Then you have the Marble Hornets internet series that imposes all of these other Slenderman characteristics. Then you have these girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin who say that this Slenderman figure is summoning them to do his bidding. So it really is the memetic nature of it, to me, that was the most interesting.
Ben Brock Johnson:
I felt similar to Amory but maybe in a less, uh, articulate way.
Perry Carpenter:
And that's Ben Brock Johnson, the other host of Endless Thread.
Ben Brock Johnson:
What's weird about that story to me is that like, in some ways, it's not as compelling to me as a scary story because it's so… confused. It's not one story. It's like, a story with six different heads on it and it just really took off and could never really die. Something about that was both interesting to me but also made it less scary in a way 'cause it almost- it got so silly.

[Transition back to Perry & Mason talking in the woods]
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. I mean, he's right though. Like, I remember when Slenderman was catching on. I did play the video game ‘Slender the Eight Pages’ when that came out in 2012. And I remember seeing all this art and posts and memes about him. But it was so all over the place and obviously not real that it never felt compellingly scary.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. I mean, at the time, it was coming out, I remember thinking it was just this lame thing my kids were talking about. I never heard anything about Marble Hornets or anything like that.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, I know. I would've thought Marble Hornets was something you'd buy on Etsy.
Perry Carpenter:
Right? But I think it's worth talking about Marble Hornets for just a minute though because it was easily one of the biggest Slenderman lore building machines of its time.
Mason Amadeus:
There's absolutely no way that we could cover it all though. It was like, a hundred and thirty-something episodes long.
Perry Carpenter:
In a nutshell, it was this YouTube series that ran from June of 2009 to June of 2014 and there's all this lore that sprung up around it. That's where we get this idea of static encompassing any kind of audio when he's around, people starting to cough from Slender sickness, and those other little bits that have really solidified themselves in the way that people think about what is considered established lore for Slenderman.
Mason Amadeus:
But the whole Marble Hornets thing still leaned more into the spookiness of Slenderman. Uh, to Ben's point from earlier, there were also things like the Trender Man, which was basically like, a hipster Slenderman with a scarf.
Perry Carpenter:
There was also the Splender Man, who was this sparkly, grinning, top hat wearing, rainbow emitting parody of Slenderman.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, he was also in My Little Pony. There was a Slenderman in My Little Pony.
Perry Carpenter:
Oh, right.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah.
Mason Amadeus:
Anyway, some of the more absurd evolutions of the Slenderman do make him less scary. But it's that very nature of having those holes in the plot, those spaces in which anyone can freely invent new facets of the lore that has kind of given Slenderman immortality.
Perry Carpenter:
One of the hallmarks of folklore is that there is no authoritative version, no centralized defined canon.
Mason Amadeus:
You know, I think my favorite piece of the Slenderman lore is a bit that directly addresses that changing nature. It's called the t- ooh. Hold on. [sounds of Mason digging through his backpack] I brought a flashlight for this exact-
Perry Carpenter:
Oh my god.
Mason Amadeus:
... reason. Okay. It's called …
[sounds of Mason turning on the flashlight and illuminating his face]
…the Tulpa Theory.
Vivian Asimos:
How do you keep the fear of a monster that you're actively creating? They threw out this idea of a Tulpa, which is from theosophy, which is a kinda new religious movement. The way that theosophy took Tulpas was that it was a thought-form that you could physically bring into being through the power of your thought. Somebody with extreme intellectual religious knowledge knew about this thing in 2009 on these forums and said, "Well, have you ever heard of a Tulpa?" And throws out this idea and everyone latches onto it. Oh, this is great because basically, the idea is now I can keep feeding the story - and the fear now is that I'm feeding the Tulpa.
Perry Carpenter:
The introduction of the Tulpa idea was brilliant. The Tulpa Theory is essentially giving this metaphorical body - not to the Slenderman himself - but to all of the attention and creative energy surrounding him. If the Slenderman is really a Tulpa that subsists and grows off of the attention that it is given, then the mere act of discussion is a contribution to the monster. It's like a metaphor for folkloric process at large. It's like the concept of ostension given a body to inhabit. The energy that we spend discussing it even right now goes straight into making it more powerful.
Mason Amadeus:
Why do we gather around and tell each other scary stories? Why would an internet community put so much effort into trying to keep something scary? And why would we, as human beings trying to survive, want to maintain the horror? Why do we engage with these kinds of stories at all?

[Quirky Music Starts]
Quincy Walters:
I guess I kinda like to be scared in a way that I know I'm not in danger.
Mason Amadeus:
That new voice on the podcast is Quincy Walters. Quincy is a podcast producer at WBUR and he produced the Endless Thread episode about Slenderman and oh, yeah. Quincy is an avid fan of horror and scary stories.
Quincy Walters:
By listening to a horror podcast, it's, you know, really easy to sort of get into that where… Ben will make fun of me for saying that I listen to these while I'm in bed, hoping that, you know, they feed enough material for a nightmare, which they usually don't.
Amory Sivertson:
(laughs)
Quincy Walters:
Um.
Ben Brock Johnson:
I feel like I don't- I'm- I'm impressed. I'm not- I don't wanna make fun of you. It's incredible that you have the guts to do this.
Amory Sivertson:
Meanwhile, I'm over here taking CBD gummies trying to like-
Ben Brock Johnson:
Chill out.
Amory Sivertson:
... keep the nightmares at bay.
Ben Brock Johnson:
Yeah.
Quincy Walters:
But I mean, it is- it is kind of like, you know, thrilling to wake up in the middle of the night and you hear somebody say, you know, "And he creeps through the house and nobody-
Amory Sivertson:
(laughs)
Quincy Walters:
... is aware.
Ben Brock Johnson:
Oh my god.
Quincy Walters:
…and soon, your blood runs cold." You know? I feel like, you know, that's kind of cool.
Amory Sivertson:
This is why Quincy is so much fun to work with. (laughs)
Quincy Walters:
Oh, dear.
Ben Brock Johnson:
I know. So true.
Quincy Walters:
You know - Even as a kid, like, I'm realizing that I enjoyed watching ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark’? And even graduated to ‘Tales from the Crypt’ before maybe I should have.
Amory Sivertson:
This is making me realize like, I don't like scary movies but I love scary stories. I'm a real like, worst case scenario thinker. I like to at least acknowledge that bad things do happen and can happen in the world. To me, a good scary story is kind of a way to tip your hat at all of the actual evil and bad stuff that happens without allowing yourself to get lost in it or- or become so obsessed with it that it starts to take a toll on you.
Perry Carpenter:
Neil Gaiman put it well saying that scary stories and nightmares let us confront our deepest fears and problems in safe ways. With the purpose and goal of overcoming them.
Mason Amadeus:
At the risk of fueling the Tulpa further, I think it's worth taking a deeper look at what Slenderman specifically is.
Perry Carpenter:
One of the other interesting things we learned from Dr. Vivian Asimos was the concept of monster theory.
Vivian Asimos:
Jeffrey Cohen was one of the very first people to, I think, coin the idea of monster theory, which is the kind of main, primary ways that you can understand analytically what a monster is. And a lot of them can kind of fade between each other as far as the different definitions or theses go, but the one in particular that I'm always drawn to is “the monster that is a harbinger of categorical crisis”.
Basically, monsters as hybrids. There's a thought in anthropology that we categorize our world as we start to interact with it. And these categories are very social or culturally based. And what the monster does is it says, "Actually, your cultural categories are broken." And that's really fascinating for me, because that really gets into the heart of what a society or a culture sees as important or sees as necessary for protection.
A good examples of this is just the vampire. Breaking the categories between living and dead. The storytelling mechanic of the Slenderman, pretending it ‘as if real’, you're playing with that break of basically the category between reality and fiction.
Perry Carpenter:
So we have Slenderman transgressing our categories of reality and fiction. And to play in that particular space invites questions around belief. Not necessarily “does anyone actually believe in Slenderman?”, but questions around how we perform belief and how we interact with fiction that is presented ‘as if real’.
Mason Amadeus:
In our discussion with Vivian, I posed a question about suspension of disbelief and her response fundamentally changed the way I think.
Vivian Asimos:
I honestly don't like the idea of suspension of disbelief because I don't think that's how we work. I think we start with a willingness to believe. We start full in.
Mason Amadeus:
And she's absolutely right. We're all, on some level, willing to engage, wanting to be pulled in.
Vivian Asimos:
We can kind of talk about belief as being this ultimate end-all-be-all of “well, this person believes, or this person doesn't believe”. That's not really important. What's important is the story and the way that people find import in a story.
Perry Carpenter:
It does not matter how much we believe in the truth of a monster or a scary story. The point isn't to become a true believer or a servant of that fictional thing - because when that happens, it rarely leads to good outcomes.
Mason Amadeus:
If you're familiar with the story of Slenderman, you're probably thinking that we've skipped a pretty big facet of this story.
[Archival News Broadcast]
12-year-old Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier are accused of attempted murder of their 12-year-old friend. When police say they lured her into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. According to court documents, the two plotted to kill their friend to please Slenderman, a demon-like fictional character on the horror site Creepy Pasta.
Mason Amadeus:
The unfortunate and tragic aspects of ostension from Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2014. And honestly, we struggled a lot with how to discuss this part of the story because it's complicated. It's tragic and those events have caused immense pain that is still felt today.
Kathleen Hale:
In 2014, two little girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin stabbed their friend 19 times ostensibly to honor Slenderman.
Mason Amadeus:
This is Kathleen Hale. She's the author of a new book about the Slenderman stabbings in Waukesha, Wisconsin. ‘Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Health and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls’. The book provides a more empathic look into everything that led up to that horrific event and places it into a context that provides some nuance that often gets lost in the way we've heard the story through the media.
Kathleen Hale:
It's the first full account of the crime and it dispels a lot of myths surrounding the case. Because I spent so much time talking to Morgan, the book is really through the lens of her experience with early onset childhood schizophrenia, which is the rarest form of schizophrenia.
Mason Amadeus:
If we take a step back and learn about Morgan before the stabbings, we can see a much clearer picture of how the involvement of Slenderman was nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence.
Kathleen Hale:
Morgan had been having hallucinations of some kind or another, auditory or visual, since the age of three. A lot of times when you hear people talk about schizophrenia, they're talking about command hallucinations. You know, the stereotype is like, Satan is screaming in your head to go do something bad. And that is not the kind of form that her schizophrenia took.
All of her hallucinations were very friendly. They were supportive of positive behavior. But when she was about five, she had this hallucination that sort of anecdotally is common, which is that she would look in the mirror and she would see standing behind her this very tall, gangly figure. This was seven years before she found Slenderman.
The hallucination only appeared to her in the mirror for a short amount of time and then it was gone. But she remembered it forever and it was very scary. Years later, when she was 11, Anissa Weier, Morgan's neighbor, introduced her to creepypasta.com. Morgan quickly found Slenderman and she said, "Oh my god. That's the thing that was standing behind me when I was five." And it wasn't as if she went online suddenly at the age of 11, 12 and was hypnotized by, you know, the internet into doing this. It just so happened that this figure reminded her of something that she had seen earlier in her life because of the mental illness that she did have.
Mason Amadeus:
And aside from there being obvious warning signs that were either dismissed or went unnoticed, it's not as though Morgan would have had many places to turn for help.
Kathleen Hale:
Unfortunately, our largest mental health care system has become our prison system. So a lot of people don't receive the mental health care that they needed from the beginning until they commit a crime out of fear, confusion, paranoia, delusion. You know, Morgan Geyser, she was diagnosed post-arrest and she did not receive medication for 19 months because of a number of things. Because of how the adult judicial system is set up and they were charged as adults. They were not charged as children even though Morgan had just turned 12.
And so during that entire time, she was in a state of psychosis. The conditions of the jail where she was awaiting trial, those exacerbated her psychosis and she lost the ability to read and do basic math. And I was just shocked by the fact that no one cared and it was not being talked about when the case was being talked about.
Mason Amadeus:
It is so desperately hard for us to face and address these massive systemic issues that we have. It's a lot easier for us to create a bogeyman that provides an easy solution.
Kathleen Hale:
Slenderman is the least scary thing about this case. We have a really, really long history of blaming child-on-child violence on whatever the new media is at the time. So with Columbine, the new media was violent video games but it goes back and back and back. I mean, even Leopold and Loeb, which was 1924, that was called ‘the crime of the century’ at the time. It was these two teenage boys who killed a 12-year-old boy. That was blamed on detective novels, which weren't new. So it's like, we'll do whatever we can. We will bend over backwards to avoid talking about mental illness.
Perry Carpenter:
As we're about to learn, moral panics are almost always a way to hide our true problems behind a scapegoat. Just in case you're not familiar with the specifics of the term moral panic, it's defined as a widespread feeling of fear. Often an irrational one - that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests or wellbeing of a community. It's when media, or mass opinion, forms a bogeyman.
[Glitch sound to AD Break]

[Unidentified audio fragment… unidentified person speaking…]
…a. That's bit.ly/mpx2a.
[Episode resumes – mysterious music]
Chelsey Weber-Smith:
It's a slight of hand and it's convenient for, uh, a lot of different types of people.
Perry Carpenter:
That's the voice of Chelsey Weber-Smith, the host of the American Hysteria Podcast, which dives deep into conspiracy theories, urban legends and moral panics.
Chelsey Weber-Smith:
Moral panics, I have learned, are often symbolic representations of fears that we have – and they also act as a sleight of hand so that we can be distracted by a more interesting problem, and not have to address structural issues. There's always been an issue with things that harm children and yet, that harm in the '80s and '90s was presented as a roving stranger in a van, offering candy and kidnapping children, which almost never happened. But what there was a lot of, are issues of children being harmed in their own homes and communities. Which is very hard to address. It's very hard to talk about. It's very hard to have any idea how to solve, and so if we have this sensational villain and sensational issue, we can externalize the problem and then we'll use that rare story as proof that this is some kind of widespread issue and then ignore what I consider to be ‘boring’ issues. Boring and difficult. Simple is: arrest that man in the van. And what's not simple is: we have generational trauma.
Perry Carpenter:
Moral panics as misdirection, sleight of hand, a way to boil down a deep societal issue into a reduced form that is mostly devoice of substance - yet captures all of our attention.
Mason Amadeus:
In a way, there are some dark parallels to how we engage in scary storytelling. If we're inclined to explore scary topics through fiction, if we're engaging with these larger-than-life monsters as a way to acknowledge the evils of the world that doesn't involve actual danger, then a moral panic is something like the shadow version of that. A way that we try and feel like we're coping with larger societal issues without addressing them. It's the dark quasi-ostension of a monster into the real world.
Perry Carpenter:
And it's at this point that we should introduce you to Momo. You probably remember her. If not by name, you'd recognize the picture. An image of a scarily distorted woman's face. Large, bulging, black pupiled eyes fixed forward over a shallow upturned nose, and an impossibly long V-shaped smile cutting almost literally ear to ear. Most commonly, the photo was cropped in to focus on the face, but larger images reveal that Momo's body is propped up on two creepy scaly bird legs.
Mason Amadeus:
This was the avatar of Momo. A being said to exist on the popular text chat platform, WhatsApp. The legend goes that if you were to message specific numbers tied to Momo, she would reply back and attempt to coerce you into performing acts of violence, self-harm, and the interaction would ultimately culminate in being instructed to take your own life.
Chelsey Weber-Smith:
Something like Momo, you have this creature that is drawing children into this mental health crisis. Right? Where it's like, “oh, this monster is convincing our children that they need to commit suicide,” Right? When we have a very real issue with suicide in young people. It's a really great sensational bogeyman to say, "Oh, the problem is that there are these bizarre individuals out there - whether they be supernatural or just some creepy like, Saw villain - encouraging children to go down this path." When it very well could be parents themselves who are not addressing mental health issues, or who may even be causing them.
Perry Carpenter:
It's important to note that no law enforcement agency has confirmed that anyone was harmed as a direct result of the Momo hoax. In our research for this episode, we tried to investigate that claim and we were unable to find any news stories or reports of actual harm directly linked to Momo as well.
Mason Amadeus:
The story surfaced in July 2018 but hit a peak and gained worldwide attention in February 2019 after it was reported that images of Momo were being spliced into children's programming on YouTube.
[Archival News Audio]
Voices of Reporters:
This terrifying face is circulating the web, interrupting kids' videos on YouTube.
Warnings about the so-called Momo Challenge.
She's called Momo. She's got bug eyes, long, stringy hair and spooky chicken legs.
YouTube videos marketed to children that feature instructions on how to commit suicide. For more, I'm joined by Dr. Dina Kulik. Nice to see you, doctor.
Dr. Dina Kulik:
Nice to see you too.
Reporter:
Doctor, what more do we know about these videos out there?
Dr. Dina Kulik:
Yeah. So there's not so much known yet. What we know is that there are videos that are circulating.
[End of Archival Audio]
Mason Amadeus:
Something interesting here that relates back to a lack of substance in moral panics is that despite many hours of our best efforts to dig up conclusive evidence of this actually happening, we were unable to find any evidence of videos where that occurred.
Perry Carpenter:
We were, however, able to find archived posts and discussions of people doing the same thing. They were searching for evidence during the time that all of this was going on. But with the exception of the single video referenced in the article that started the panic, it doesn't seem that anyone could locate instances of Momo being spliced into children's videos.
Mason Amadeus:
There's a term that Chelsey brought to our attention, which (laughs) came from Winnie the Pooh, actually. Do you remember the Woozles? I've never seen one personally, but Chelsey might have - when they were researching their episode on snuff films.

[Whimsical Music Begins]
Chelsey Weber-Smith:
The Woozle Effect is something that comes from Winnie the Pooh, and that's the story in which Pooh and Piglet are walking through a snowy forest and they're looking for this magical creature called a Woozle. They see footprints in the snow so they start following those footprints. And soon, they start seeing more footprints in the snow and they're like, "Oh, there's even more Woozles that we're looking for." And they just keep going and going and trying to catch up with these creatures.
Eventually, they, uh, have Christopher Robin come in. The omnipresent God that he is, lets them know that they have actually been following their own footprints. So they've been going in circles thinking that they're following something real, when it's actually fictional and they're adding their own evidence to it, quote, unquote, as they go. That story is used to explain how one piece of evidence - something that's, you know, untrue or misinterpreted or, uh, a story that's told incorrectly or misunderstood in some way - serves as like, a piece of foundational evidence.
And, you know, even in academia an academic is going to say something like, "It's widely understood that X, Y, and Z." And we use snuff films as an example. “It's widely understood that there's underground industry producing murder films,” but that's all based on a single line written in a book about Charles Manson way back in the early '70s. So it just takes on a life of its own from there.
Perry Carpenter:
The Woozle Effect. We definitely see some form of it happening here. That single video with Momo spliced into it was enough for journalists to spin up a panic.
Mason Amadeus:
And, of course, after the reports brought Momo to worldwide attention, people began to splice the picture into videos - and YouTube began pulling any Momo content from their site in March of 2019.
Perry Carpenter:
For something so allegedly widespread, there was surprisingly little evidence that can be traced to any actual Momo activity. But that doesn't exactly matter if you're the kind of person whose every move is closely watched by the media.

[Archival News Audio]
Newscaster 1:
Even Kim Kardashian, a mom of three little ones, is posting a warning on Instagram.

Newscaster 2:
Kim Kardashian, because she took to Instagram to beg YouTube to stop the Momo challenge.

Newscaster 3:
Mother of three, Kim Kardashian West, took to Instagram tagging YouTube for help.
[End of Archival News Audio]
Perry Carpenter:
Kim Kardashian posted an Instagram story tagging YouTube and saying, "Please help."
Chelsey Weber-Smith:
I don't know if- if it would've happened without Kim Kardashian because she, in an instant, showed millions of people this creepy chicken suicide enchantress.
Perry Carpenter:
Not only are we doing an episode on Slenderman and Momo in 2022 but now, we're also talking about the Kardashians.
Mason Amadeus:
If I can, uh, take a step back, there is a very interesting tangential facet to Momo that I don't think is often discussed. And that is what the image of Momo actually is.
So the thing that started Momo, what the picture is actually of, is a sculpture created by Japanese artist, Keisuke Aso. I did consult with my friend, Ben, who speaks Japanese to try and help me with these pronunciations. I apologize if I don't get them exactly right. But the sculpture of Momo was made in 2016 and shown at an art show in Tokyo.
What she is a sculpture of, is a piece of Japanese folklore. The actual sculpture is ‘Mother Bird’ and she is an ubume, which is a type of yōkai. Yōkai are spirits or entities whose behavior can range from malevolent, to mischievous, to friendly. Sort of analogous to fae or fairies in a more Western mythology in some ways. And the ubume is said specifically to represent the reincarnated soul of a woman who died during childbirth.
She's most commonly depicted as the spirit of a woman who looks completely normal, carrying a baby - but she will try and give any passerby her child and then disappear. And if you take the baby, it then transforms into either a bundle of leaves in some stories, or an impossibly heavy boulder and gets heavier and heavier and heavier until you can't hold it anymore or - it pins you down to the ground.
It was a Japanese folklore concept or figure and then it makes its way into internet culture and then takes on another folkloric mechanism with that which is this idea of moral panic and different forms of ostension. And so it's almost full circle in a lot of ways.
Perry Carpenter:
Unlike Slenderman, Momo had this reverse build effect in terms of her lore. It was mostly after the moral panic elevated her to the public eye that people online began inventing and creating new facets of who she might be.
Vivian Asimos:
It could've took on a life of its own just because of the misunderstanding of the people seeing the story. I think Momo is a much more interesting facet of that, actually.
Perry Carpenter:
There was also a fairly significant pushback against the darkness. And what I mean by that is: that people started to make these positive and lighthearted and friendly Momo memes. It was all about trying to take the scary image and reclaim it for wholesome and healthy themes.
Mason Amadeus:
Memes would be made with Momo's face reading, "Make sure you drink enough water today." And things like that. People developed different character traits and background stories for the figure. Again, with no central canon.
Perry Carpenter:
And again, like the moral panic spawned around Slenderman, the real discussion being avoided in the moral panic around Momo is one of mental health issues and access to mental health care.
Mason Amadeus:
But both of the panics in themselves focus on the unknowns of the internet as being the monster that we should fear.
Vivian Asimos:
Momo was a kind of different one in the sense that it was a fear of parents losing control of children, and that idea of the internet is a monster.
Mason Amadeus:
Again, that's Dr. Vivian Asimos.
Vivian Asimos:
And it's this amorphous scary - and Momo is a figure that we can point to. But it's an example and really, the internet is a monster. Where Slenderman was a monster of the internet, he was kind of the harbinger of what's to come. He's lurking in the forests and then eventually someone went, "You know what? The whole forest is terrible." (laughs)
Perry Carpenter:
But are these online, digitally spawned and spread stories really any different than the kinds of tales we've always told throughout human history? What makes digital folklore unique?
Vivian Asimos:
The form that it takes is quite different, and I think that's something that's going to be shifting - but it's gonna be shifting based on the form. So like, the way that you would tell a story on Instagram, for example, is gonna be really different than the way you tell a story on Reddit.
Each one of those things is going to have its own, more narrative-level form that, on its surface, is gonna look really different but you could probably tell the same structure of the same story in each of those places.
Mason Amadeus:
And Chelsey Weber-Smith had similar thoughts.
Chelsey Weber-Smith:
Back when we had, you know, the original way to tell urban legends was you heard it from ‘a friend of a friend’. My theory is the ways that urban legends spread is you call your cousin. 'Cause, you know, it's like, “oh, why do they pop up everywhere at once? Is it, you know, some psychological thing manifesting all-“ it's like, yeah. And it's also probably Timmy calling his cousin. And then in the '90s, you had fax lore - which I love so much - which is all the chain letters. But now it's like, the biggest difference is how quickly it spreads and how many people it spreads to.
Mason Amadeus:
The rapidity with which we can spread and develop stories has increased tremendously. The platforms we use to create them are new, and can shape them in unique ways. And the culture of whatever part of the internet they're born on can vary. But really, they're nothing more than accelerated urban legends.
[Scene Change – Perry & Mason in the woods]
Perry Carpenter:
When you study horror and scary stories as a genre, it becomes clear that the reason society creates and consumes these tales is to hold up a mirror to our deepest fears and biggest problems, but to do so in safe ways so that we can overcome those fears and to begin solving those problems.
Mason Amadeus:
But sometimes we miss that step of overcoming, and we focus on the monstrous distraction we've created. And sometimes that looks like ostension, when the face of the monster appears on a real unfortunate act.
Perry Carpenter:
There's an article written by Andrew Peck from the Journal of American Folklore, and the main body of that article was written in 2014, back before the events of Waukesha, Wisconsin. And the journal article was published in 2015, after the stabbings. The article is titled, Tall, Dark and Loathsome: The Emergence of a Legends Cycle in the Digital Age. In this article, Peck describes how he predicted ostension. How early on in the development of Slenderman, he had been published as saying, "I think Slenderman is going to spill over into the real world." Just a few months after he submitted his draft article, he found out that indeed, Slenderman did spill over into the real world in tragic ways.
After the stabbings, he had been contacted over and over by journalists. At the same time, he was also hearing a lot of the moral panic spinning up around Slenderman. So he concludes this 2015 article by saying, "I spent most of June explaining to reporters and media personalities that concerns over the Slenderman were largely overblown, akin to scrutinizing children's mirror use for fear of Bloody Mary - and distracting from many more real dangers young people may face online."

[End Credits – Theme Music Plays]

Perry Carpenter:
Thank you to Amory, Ben and Quincy of the Endless Thread Podcast for joining us and helping us figure out how to cover today's topics. You can look forward to a companion episode coming out soon featuring more of our discussion with them.
Mason Amadeus:
Thank you as well to Chelsey Weber-Smith of the American Hysteria Podcast for lending us their time, expertise and insight into what the stories we tell really mean and how they change or don't change over time. I will forever think of Momo as a ‘creepy chicken suicide enchantress’ so thank you as well for that.
Perry Carpenter:
And a huge thank you to Dr. Vivian Asimos for lending your deep knowledge and insight to us. Vivian also hosts a podcast called the Religion in Popular Culture Podcast, publishes a blog called Incidental Mythology, and is the author of several books on digital monsters as well as a forthcoming book on cosplay.
Mason Amadeus:
Also a big thanks to Kathleen Hale. Her new book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness and a Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls is available now. There's a link in the show notes. And we'll have a companion episode coming out featuring more of our discussion with her.
Perry Carpenter:
Check out the show notes for links and more information about all our guests. Digital Folklore is a production of 8th Layer Media.
Mason Amadeus:
If you haven't yet, please consider following the show, telling a friend and leaving a review.
Perry Carpenter:
And one more thing, right now, text whatever friend is at the top of your contacts list and tell them to immediately subscribe to the Digital Folklore Podcast.
Mason Amadeus:
If you've got a lead on a piece of digital lore that you'd like us to stick under a microscope, let us know.
Perry Carpenter:
Send us an email. hello@8thlayermedia.com. Thanks for listening.
Click to download a fully formatted PDF version of this episode’s transcript.

The Internet is The New Woods (Monsters, Ostension, & Moral Panics)

This episode introduces us to two "monsters" who were birthed on the internet, but couldn't be contained there. Their names are Slenderman and Momo, and they are great examples of a few key folkloric concepts. So join us as we take a look at Slenderman and Momo and learn about ostension, monster theory, moral panics, and the defining traits that make something folklore as opposed to just a simple online expression of creativity.

Guests: