SLENDERMAN - LIVING THE LEGEND

Trevor J Blank and Lynne S McNeill (Editors). Slender Man is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet. University Press of Colorado, 2018.

Who by now who follows Fortean themes, especially the contemporary ones, has not heard of the Slender Man? For the handful of you who may have emerged from your survivalist compound in the woods in order to top up your hoard of jerky, he/it is an abnormally tall, thin humanoid, dressed in a black suit and tie. Faceless, he loiters in the shade in children's playgrounds in exactly the manner that one should not.
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SIZING UP SLENDERMAN

Nick Redfern. The Slenderman Mysteries: An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life. New Page Books, 2018.

By now, most followers of forteana will have heard of the Slenderman. This creation, if that is what it is, started out ‘life’ on the website Something Awful, which is a comedy site. The creature itself loosely resembles a man in a black suit and wearing a black tie. All likeness to a human being stops there, as the face is blank, it is far too tall and thin and, on occasion, it has tentacles.

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FROM THIN AIR

Shire Chess and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man. The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave, 2016.

Something happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on 31st May 2014. That something was the attempted sacrifice of a human being. The incident involved three 12 year-old girls. According to reports in the media, two of the girls enticed the third into local woodland. The two then stabbed the third nineteen times and left her for dead.
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THE KIDS NEXT DOOR

David Weatherly. Strange Intruders. Leprechaun Publishing, 2016.

Most of us have heard of neighbours from Hell who make life quite intolerable for those around them, but few would take the idea literally. However, as this book shows, there are those in the United States who claim that they have had neighbours who if not exactly from Hell are to put it mildly, pretty damn weird and who seem to lack most human social conventions.

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DON'T PANIC!

Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall. A Colorful History of Popular Delusions. Prometheus Books, 2015.

Robert Bartholomew, in association with several collaborators, has written a series of books on a number of popular panics, rumours and dubious beliefs, most recently a comprehensive discussion of schoolyard panics. In this present title he and Peter Hassall offer a generalised round-up of irrational mass actions, arranging them in a typology ranging from vague rumour and gossip, to full scale riot.
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SCARESHIPS AND SCAREOPLANES

Nigel Watson. UFOs of the First World War: Phantom Airships, Balloons, Aircraft and Other Mysterious Aerial Phenomena. History Press, 2015.

As any UFO historian knows, phantom airships were haunting our skies well before the First World War. The Great 1897 Airship Wave in the US is well documented and speculated upon, less familiar is the smaller wave of 1908.

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KENTISH TALES

Neil Arnold. Kent Urban Legends: The Phantom Hitch-Hiker and Other Stories. The History Press, 2013.

Blue Bell Hill, that sounds a nice place, doesn’t it? Redolent of Enid Blyton and sunny picnics with lashings of ginger beer. Don’t go there. Literally. Don’t go there. According to Neil Arnold, you’re likely to bump into any number of phantom hitchhikers, whether they’re a bride killed on the way to her wedding, a cyclist mown down by a car or the gruesome end products of various other road-traffic accidents.
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MODERN MONSTERS

Gregory L. Reece. Creatures of the Night: In Search of Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves and Demons. I. B. Tauris, 2012.

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Alasdair Wickham (i.e. James Buxton). The Black Book of Modern Myths: True Stories of the Unexplained. Arrow Books, 2012.

Gregory Reece having already examined the worlds of ufology and cryptozoology, now turns his attention to the world of the horror story both in reality (or anyway purported reality) and fiction. Starting with his childhood encounter with Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Reece enters the realm of the supernatural, the realm of ghosts and domain of devils, exploring ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demons and Satanists.

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DON'T PANIC!

Robert E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford. The Martians Have Landed; A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes. McFarland, 2012.

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Guy P. Harrison. 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Bartholomew and Radford’s book carries on from a number of other titles by Bartholomew, looking at social delusions, as well as another book on panics and hoaxes co-edited with Hilary Evans. This seems to be a rather slighter volume with over thirty topics dealt with mostly in fairly short chapters.
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KEEP OUT!

Nick Redfern, Keep Out! Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About, New Page Books, N.J., 2012

In this romp through stories mainly about alleged strange goings-on at secret bases, Nick Redfern lets the reader decide whether they are true, partly true, or just misinformation, lies and fantasies. 
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SUPERSTITIONS OLD AND NEW

        

Euan Cameron. Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason and Religion 1250-1750. Oxford University Press, 2011.

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William J. Birnes and Joel Martin. The Haunting of Twentieth Century America: Tom Doherty Associates, 2011.

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Claude Lecouteux. Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and Ghostly Processions of the Undead. Inner Traditions, 2011.

Euan Cameron notes in his introduction that superstition is a tricky concept, but as the definitions in the online Oxford Dictionary ("unreasoning awe or fear of something unknown, mysterious or imaginary especially in connection with religion; religious belief or practice founded on ignorance; more particularly an irrational religious belief or practice, a tenet, scruple or practice founded on fear and ignorance") show it revolves around the ideas of false religious belief and practice.
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NASTY LEGENDS, URBAN RUMOURS

Gillian Bennett. Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease and Death in Contemporary Legend. University Press of Mississipi, 2005

Though some time has elapsed since this book was published, it has only just come to my attention and is sufficiently important to note. In many respects this book marks a sharp contrast to Gillian Bennett's first book Traditions of Belief. which looked at the ghostlore of middle aged women in Greater Manchester, rather gentle and comforting traditions and experiences. This volume, to the contrary, deals with the dark side of contemporary legend.
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