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Sunday, December 5, 2021

Cannock Chase Slenderman

 Cannock Chase Slenderman

By Cole Herrold

Sometimes there are moments in Fortean history that are completely confounding. Perhaps the most perplexing is cases where individuals encounter characters that are seemingly fictional. One of the most famous cases of this variety is when comic book writer Alan Moore saw his occult antihero John Constantine walking down the street in broad daylight. The encounter was relatively uneventful and more mundane than some of the other cases, which seemingly have been growing more and more frequent in the reoccurring years. The most alarming and horrifying of these seemingly real representations of fictional characters is a malevolent, extremely tall shadowy figure dressed in dark-colored clothing. This figure, however, has one haunting feature, or should I say lack thereof, that leads an eternal impression in all those who see it the entity has no facial features or hair.

This entity which is known as The Slender Man or Slenderman, was originally created in June of 2009 by Eric Knudson, aka Victor Surge, on the Something Awful forum later being collected and elaborated on in various Creepypasta websites. The figure has since been embraced by a generation and has appeared in films and video games. Yet while there has been a general spooky nature to this internet meme, it does have a dark side as the character's stories were taken as authentic by several children around the country. One child attempted to burn down his home, and in Waukesha, there was an unfortunate incident when two schoolgirls proceeded to stab their friend to appease the dark entity. While there is no doubting that Victor Surge created the Slender Man, there are interestingly enough reports of a creature similar in appearance much earlier than 2009. One of the most interesting of these accounts came out two years earlier, in 2007 from Cannock Chase, England.

In June 2001, Mike Johnson, an ecologist from Wolverhampton who worked for the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and the University of Wolverhampton, was in Cannock Chase to work on a project revolving around the Midland Hawthorn, a plant that can grow to 25ft in height. Mike had entered the Cannock Chase area near the old German Military Cemetery and parked his car around there. It was 2:00 pm, and it was a warm, bright day with barely a cloud in the sky, and he was headed towards an area that was at one point a plantation forest that was cleared sometime earlier. He noticed that the woods were extra quiet today, and there was a strong looming silence over the forest that Mike thought was rather odd. There were no sounds of bird songs or insects, and even the sound of vehicles passing the area was practically nonexistent. Mike, however, did not think too much of this at this current moment and simply proceeded to head further on down the path. As he was heading down the path towards where the plantation used to be, he noticed a herd of 50 or so deer suddenly appearing on top of a nearby ridge. He smiled, seeing this as he had only ever a few deer occasionally, and watched as the herd seemingly ran towards a large plantation that was positioned on Mike's right. It was almost as if they were running away from someone.

As Mike headed further down the path, an eerie thought arose in his head. This area seemed wrong. Sure enough, as he looked around, he could not tell where he was the path that he took from the cemetery was seemingly now on the west of him when it was currently on the east, and as he looked up into the sky, even the sun was seemingly in the wrong direction as while it should have been high in the west it was now currently directly north. Even some of the landmarks were off while the ridge was in its original position, the entire area to the south was now in the west. It was almost as if someone had taken a chunk of the area away and moved the sun. The fact that he was seemingly lost was bizarre to him as he had traversed these paths many times before. So taking the position of the sun, he proceeded to get his map out to try to figure out his position.

As he looked at the map that he brought to try to determine if he could find the path he was on, he soon realized that the path that he should have been on that was only 700 meters from his car was not the path that he was on. The landmarks were gone, and the path's overall shape did not match that of his map. He then reached down and attempted to find his way back by use of his compass, but as he waited for the needle to spin towards magnetic north, he watched only in confusion as his compass needle stayed dead still. As he looked in the area, he also had a growing sense that something more was wrong as the area had grown to be uncomfortably silent, and an oppressive feeling seemed to permeate through the air.

He noticed that while his environment had seemingly changed around him, he was not alone as he could see three elderly hikers coming his way in the distance. Seeing this potential aid, he decided that he would wait for the group to approach him so he could get directions from them. He waited ten minutes for the couple to approach, and when they got within about 500 meters away, he was able to get a good look at them and could hear everything they were saying. The trio of nature enthusiasts were about in their 50s or 60s and comprised of a man who was tall and wore cream-colored trousers and a shirt with a rucksack; the other two were women who wore waterproof coats tied around their waists. He watched them as they approached when something peculiar happened; they seemed to disappear. Mike could not believe what he had just witnessed; he stared at the spot and could only think that they had popped out of existence. However, as he did this, he attempted to rationalize what he just saw and felt that perhaps they had descended into the gully and disappeared from sight naturally. So, Mike began watching the area for several minutes, waiting to see their heads rise out of some grassy decline, but they did not appear from the direction he had thought. Instead, the group proceeded to reappear approximately 200 meters from his left, but as he looked, he noticed that there was something different about the party.

Further back from them, there appeared to be a fourth figure; it was a relatively short distance away but still undefined compared to the three figures seen in front. The figure as he watched seemed to move when the group moved and stopped when they stopped, and each time it did this, the figure came closer and closer until Mike could tell that the person behind them was not normal. As he looked, he could tell that the figure was wearing gray-colored trousers and a tight long-sleeved shirt of the same color and that the figure was incredibly tall with long thin arms. As he watched the group, he noticed that the figure was now incredibly close to the trio and that it towered over top of them. He realized that this was not a normal person as he estimated the height of the figure to be well over 9ft tall. As he craned his neck upward, staring at the colossal man, he realized that the man was deathly pale and that on top of its shoulders was an incredibly long thin neck which led to a top slightly elongated head. As he looked at the head, he noticed that there was no hair and just a glistening slick skin that covered the dome, and as he focused in on the head, he came to the shocking realization that the figure bore no facial features; no eyes, mouth, nose, or even ears just absolute blankness. As he looked at the body, he realized that while he initially thought the arms were long, he now realized that the arms actually hung down almost beyond the knees.

Seeing this well-dressed entity was bizarre enough as well as the trio of vanishing hikers, but Mike soon felt that this entity and the hikers were, interestingly enough, unaware of each other's existence. Mike firmly felt this after one of these moments when the hikers stopped. The figure was now a short distance behind them, and as one of the women reached down to grab her bottle of water and proceeded to take a drink that the creature stretched its long arms over the expanse of grass and proceeded to grab the woman's shoulder. The woman simply continued to drink and talk with her friends and was seemingly oblivious to the figure behind her. Mike felt that the entity, however, was aware of him as the figure turned its head to look at him and that this grab to the shoulder was the entity protecting the woman and possibly the rest of the group from him.

It was around this time Mike felt an extreme sense of disorientation and started to bend down to the rucksack that was on the ground. He had full intention to go over and approach the group, but when he looked up with his bag in hand, the environment was back to how it used to be. The sun had returned to its position in the west, and all the landmarks that he was familiar with in the past were back to their designated spots. The overwhelming confusion and disorientation were gone, and so too was the oppressive feeling. As the location seemed to shift to normal, so too did the sounds of nature seemingly return birds were chirping, and the sound of zooming cars too could be heard. In front of him was the path to the German Cemetery, and he could see a large German shepherd running down it, followed by a group of children and adults. As he could now find the way out, he began to run down the path, hop in his car and drive away, never to return to the area again.

While Mike would never encounter the sinister Slenderman type figure again, he would continue to have similar bizarre emotions in the woods. A year later, in 2002, while up near Loch Garten in Scotland, Johnson once more had an overwhelming bizarre sense that something was wrong in the woodlands around the Loch. He felt a bizarre tingle that went up to his back and a similar sense of disorientation and was unable to find a clear direction, but this happened rather quickly, and he was able to get out of the area with little issue. Johnson would tell of his experience in 2001 and follow-up sensation in 2002 to British Fortean researcher Nick Redfern in 2007, and his account would appear in Redfern's book There’s Something in the Woods. Several years later, the Slenderman would pop up, and Redfern couldn't help but notice that there is an uncanny similarity to the fictional internet being and the entity Johnson saw. Redfern would later collect other reports from all over the United States and England, which along with Mike's encounter, would appear in one of the only books on the subject of the Slenderman phenomenon, the Slenderman Mysteries.

Following Redfern, other paranormal researchers would go to write about the entities, such as Pastor Robin Swope, who is considered one of the primary paranormal investigators of Erie County, Pennsylvania, and also wrote a book on the subject called Slender Man: From Fiction to Fact. Another researcher who has put their hat into the Slender Man ring is British paranormal investigator Lee Brickley. Lee Brickley, interestingly enough, had spent a great deal of time investigating the Cannock Chase area and had written several books on the subject, and it was during late 2014 to early 2015 that he came forward with several accounts that he felt were Slender Man accounts. These sightings, however, were much different from what Johnson experienced, as you shall see, and also that two did not occur in the grassy ridges and tree-surrounded woodlands but inside the homes of those who live in the forest.

The first sighting Lee mentioned occurred on January 2, 2015, and occurred at the Castle Ring in the Cannock Chase. The Castle Ring is an old Iron Age fort that has since been a frequent British Bigfoot and ghost hotspot. It was late at night when the witness who was there saw a strange figure on the fringes of the ring. He was unsure if it was another visitor to the location but watched in abject terror as the figure proceeded to rise up off the ground and begin to hover in the air. The sky was perfectly clear and filled with stars, so he was able to make out the figure more clearly; the figure wore an old black homburg style hat and bore a dark coat. The figure's eyes glowed a vibrant red and had a mouth filled with sharp fangs. As the witness watched this airborne anomaly, he saw that it turned looked at him and proceeded at superhuman speed to fly towards him. Afraid that the entity would hit him, the witness dropped down to the ground as the figure flew by overhead. The figure then seemingly descended back down into the nearby trees, and the witness high-tailed it out of there. In an interview with Lee, the witness did mention one thing about the entity that brings it to a whole new level of weirdness. The witness claimed that the figure to him best resembled the infamous paranormal entity that belched blue flame and terrorized England in the mid to late 1800s, namely Spring-Heeled Jack.

The next sighting Lee connects to the Slenderman occurred at 2:00 am also in 2015. The witness to this sighting was lying in bed asleep when she was suddenly awoken by strange scratching sounds that seemingly were coming from her open closet. As she looked into the dark abyss, she noticed a spherical shadow that was hovering off the ground. The dark orb, seemingly aware that she noticed it began to change its form as it began to shape into an eight-foot-tall pale humanoid. The witness would describe this figure as being very similar to a vampire. In a complete state of shock at the anomalous apparition in front of her, she fell back onto her bed, her head hitting the pillow. Yet her eyes continued to watch the freaky fiend she watched as the figure's arms continued to morph. They seemed to extend, stretching out to twice the length of a traditional human's, and proceeded to close in upon her. The creature's claws were running down her face, at which point she screamed, and the entity, upon hearing the sound, seemingly retreated back into the shadows from whence it came and disappeared.

The final case, which occurred at similarly 2:30 am around the timespan of these sightings and also near the Cannock Chase, involved a similar bedroom invader. The witness woke up that night to a loud sound in his bedroom and, as he scanned the room, saw a floating humanoid figure over his bed staring malevolently down at him with fiery red eyes. The entity was dressed completely in black, and the witness claimed that the entity spoke to him in a telepathic way (but what was said went unreported). This haunting apparition, however, left the man shortly thereafter floating upwards towards the ceiling and vanished. The witness then did not sleep the rest of the night.

Now while I'm sure everyone else can agree, none of these sightings are by any means a Slenderman sighting. They have elements of that kind of phenomenon, from the ever-growing arms to even the shadowy body type; however, these accounts are more akin to encounters with entities like shadow people, Hatman, and Sleep paralysis demons than what we would consider a Slenderman encounter. I chose to include them simply out of completeness due to the fact that they are now interconnected with both the location and the phenomenon.

Cannock Chase is just one of several areas on our planet that seems to be either what John Keel would call a Window Area or what would be classified as a haunted forest. The area is littered with countless types of paranormal phenomena. Cryptids like the British Bigfoot to giant snakes and black panthers to even Mothman, Pigman, and Dogman type creatures are constantly reported in the area; there are also reports of ghosts, anomalous lights and sounds, UFOs, and the nefarious Black-Eyed Children. There are countless reasons as to why this could be from lay lines and magnetic reasons or simply because of the isolation this location represents. I've always been a proponent that these areas hold no true supernatural significance and that they are just prime locations for such a phenomenon to occur. Cryptids, seemingly if they are biological animals, have mandatory needs like shelter, food, and water sources, and this is twofold since the species need a larger area to remain elusive. UFOs might go to the area to conduct research outside of our intrusive eyes, and the history of the area can explain why ghosts occur there. All of these reasons for each separate phenomenon can explain the reasons they are so frequently seen there. However, with the nature of all the bizarre phenomena, there is the chance that a more supernatural reason could occur.

While there are tons of reasons as to why phenomena are drawn to the Cannock Chase region, it still does not explain what this particular entity is. One of the big theories with the Slender Man sightings is that the Slenderman is a tulpa, a kind of thoughtform that is featured heavily in Tibetan Mysticism. Now the simplest explanation for this phenomenon is that a person's belief and controlled thoughts can create a life form. The idea behind this with Slenderman is that enough people who have read his story online now believe in him, and so this collective belief resulted in making the entity real. Now, this theory does not exactly work in the way most paranormal researchers point to with these kinds of sightings as the Mike Johnson case predates the appearance of the 2009 Slenderman creation, so that seems to go against the direct connection therein. Now perhaps there's some archetypal figure such as a child's stick figure drawing or something like that, that over time, because of its rudimentary form became something similar to a tulpa, and that could explain why there are sightings today, but this is just speculation.

Interestingly enough, featureless or faceless creatures are somewhat common; there is a phenomenon known as Stick Men, which appear as black, white, or gray living stick figures that have similar anomalous abilities like Slender Man. There was also a creature reported in Georgia of a pale-skinned faceless entity known as the Faceless Thing of Dahlonega. I also covered a bizarre extraterrestrial case involving a faceless apparition that appeared with several jogging suit-wearing Hawkmen aliens that occurred in Montvale, New Jersey (See The Jogging Suited Hawkmen and the Faceless Woman of Montvale for more info). So, the existence of a seemingly faceless creature is nothing new.

Now with all that being said, I have to say I do not think the Cannock Chase Slenderman is a cryptid, tulpa, or ghost; it just does not seem to fit those categories. If there was a light in the sky, I would argue that the creature could be an extraterrestrial as there have been cases of seemingly faceless ETs, but there's not, so it's not as likely. This seems to leave three big categories: Demonic, Faerie, or Interdimensional. Now the clearest and most likely of these categories is that this entity is from another dimension. The fact that the whole area seems different seems to be very reminiscent of countless other cases where people have stumbled into other worlds or other times. Another interesting thing that sort of points to this is that the three hikers seemed to be oblivious to the entity even after it touched one of the women. There's almost like a mergence of several worlds at once as though one was to put three different colors of tissue paper together, and it makes a totally different color, yet all three are their own separate planes. Perhaps the entity is much like something from Stan Gordon's masterpiece From Beyond, a being that is around all the time and could interact with us without us being aware only occasionally when some event happens, we have the ability to see it. Again, all this mere speculation, however.

One thing that really sticks in my head is the Faerie possibility; many researchers have compared the Slenderman to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, an elf or faerie type being, and this whole encounter with the elderly and the assumed protectiveness of them from the creature seems to match that kind of lore. In Faerie lore in general, there are stories of the Fae taking humans away to fairyland, which could be interpreted as another dimension or a subterranean or spiritual world. The fact that this encounter took place in the wilderness and there was a bizarre feeling is also major similarities to faerie encounters in general. Perhaps Slenderman is a particularly rare variety of faerie that we currently have very little information on aside from folktales and, for some reason, are just now seeing a resurgence of encounters. Now with all that said, I will say there are, at least to my knowledge, no faceless faeries, so linking Slenderman to a specific kind like troll, dwarf, gnome, giant, etc., is currently difficult.  Interestingly enough, while there are no faceless fae, there is a faceless entity from Japan known as Noppera-bō. These entities are described as spectral apparitions who have the uncanny ability to impersonate friends, family members, or acquaintances for the sole purpose of scaring people by dissolving its features to reveal a pale white slate of a face. I have often wondered if there might be a connection between Yokai and classical Faeries, as many of the entities reported in Japan do have striking similarities to entities reported in Europe. If the Japanese Yokai are indeed the Eastern equivalent of the Fae, then perhaps the Slenderman is a variation of this kind of species.

The final possibility for this entity is that it could be a demonic entity. Now typically, when people have encounters with this entity, it is not a pleasant experience. People typically do not want a reoccurring encounter like some bigfoot or lake monster witnesses do. The creature's genuine surreal quality to some of the more religious-centered researchers tend to imply a more diabolical origin to the beast. The fact that the creature appears along bedsides and seems to cause oppressive feelings is very indicative of what most would consider demonic behavior. Another reason that this entity could potentially be an agent of the infernal one is that the featureless guise, if intentional, could be a way to terrify any who encounter it. Much like Ultraterrestrials, demonic entities are believed to feed on fear and other negative emotions, so a haunting figure such as this could be the perfect way to illicit such a response.

While one can argue that the whole current wave of Slenderman sightings are a form of mass hysteria or a kind of cyber folklore, its accounts like this that make me think there might be something potentially real going on as faceless entities have seemingly been reported for generations. Just what exactly they are, I can only speculate, and most encounters, while downright terrifying and disorienting, these entities do not seem to be particularly aggressive or violent, so what their motive is, we can only guess. All I do know is that the next time you're out in the woods and things seem off, keep an eye out for you just might encounter a creature straight out of your worst nightmares.

Quick Facts:

Species/Potential Species: Paranormal Entity/ Interdimensional Entity

Location: Cannock Chase, England

Sighted: June of 2001

Works Cited:

There’s Something in the Woods By Nick Redfern

The Monster Book By Nick Redfern

The Slenderman Mysteries By Nick Redfern

Sara C Nelson “Slender Man Now Said To Be 'Haunting British Beauty Spot Cannock Chase'” Huffington Post. January 30, 2015. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/26/slender-man-haunting-british-beauty-spot-cannock-chase_n_6545294.html. Accessed November 28, 2021. 

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