Out Came the Girls: Adolescent Girlhood, the Occult, and the Slender Man Phenomenon

Here is an image, picked from the notebooks of an eleven-year-old girl in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a head portrait, in pencil, of a man in a dark suit and tie. His long neck is white, and so is his face—bald and whited-out, with hollows where his eyes should be. 

Here is another: an androgynous kid (a girl, like the artist?) in a sweatshirt and flared jeans leaping across the page. She has huge, glassy black eyes and dark, stringy hair; she reaches out with one hand and brandishes a dagger in the other. Filling the page around her, tiny rainbows and clouds and stars and hearts—all the signatures of the little girl the artist recently was—burst in a fireworks display. 

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