Samuel Mender

My name is Philip Mender, or just Phil for short. For quite a while now there have been a lot of Creepypastas and indie games about the "Slenderman" and every time a new story or game comes out, i keep hearing people talk about it and it just makes me angrier and angrier. For the few who don't know, Slenderman is depicted as an incredibly tall man wearing a tuxedo with long arms and legs with an empty white face who stalks people and eventually kills them. Probably the most well known are the original Slendeman story that appeared on the something awful forums as part of a contest and the indie game, Slender: the 8 Pages, where you must collect 8 paper scraps scattered throughout a forest while Slenderman stalks you and kills you if you look at him too long or if he gets too close.

All of the stories about Slenderman are bullshit. Slenderman is a joke about my younger brother, Samuel Mender. Sam was born 3 years after I was born but with a deformed face and very strong metabolism but he had no mental illnesses. My mother, my father, and myself all feared people would ridicule, judge, and pick on poor Sam so whenever we went out anywhere, and i'm not joking, we would hide poor Sam's head under a paper bag, a cloth, and eventually, a mask that was essentially what Slenderman's head resembled, but that wasn't for quite a few years.

As we grew up, whenever Sam and I went to family gatherings such as birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. Sam would always play with our younger cousins. Every time I went to their houses, they would always ask, "Is Sam here too?!" I never saw Sam not wanting to play with them. He seemed to just enjoy making them happy. By this time, he had his white Slender mask that he would wear whenever we went somewhere public. He never complained about having to wear it even if I asked him how he felt about having to hide his face, but I still felt bad that he couldn't show his face to anyone but his family. We were both home-schooled so we didn't really get to interact with other kids and make friends anyway. I was given the option to go to school, but I refused because I didn't want Sam to feel alone. When we were bored, we would go outside and play in the woods; climb trees, make forts, and play pretend.

Once Sam was 17, he started working at a daycare center, because he never stopped enjoying making young children happy, while I was working odd jobs at the time to make some extra cash. He was offered the job by our grandmother who worked there as a teacher and he would play and joke with the kids every second he was able to. The parents of the children came to start calling him "Slender Sam" because of how skinny he was and his last name rhymed with slender, and even though their children loved playing with Sam, some parents stopped taking their children to the daycare all because Sam couldn't show his face due to his deformity. It makes me sick just thinking about those fearful glares they must have given poor Sam.

After a few weeks, i had started hearing rumors about a "pale faced man who kidnaps children" from the people I would do odd jobs for and I knew they were referring to Sam. The only reason I didn't beat the shit out of them was because I needed money. after a few months and the rumors died, the Slenderman creepypasta on the something awful forums was posted and everybody read and knew about it and Sam was officially known as "Slenderman" by everyone he met. He was infamous now and people either joked on him or talked in hushed voices around us and gave fearful glances toward him. After a few weeks of this, Sam ran away in the middle of the night and I haven't seen him since then.

I love my brother and i don't blame him for running away. I just hope he's alright wherever he is.