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It's so cute the way you believe closing your blinds will keep me from seeing in...

— Slender Man (@Slenderman__) March 4, 2014

The meme was almost a movie and a videogame, but both didn’t happen because Slender Man is actually copyrighted by Eric Knudsen, who goes by the pseudonym Victor Surge, according to copyright records.

Still, Kenneth Lanning, a former FBI agent who worked in its behavioral science unit for violent crime, said the meme alone is not to blame any more than superman was to blame in the 1950s for children jumping off their roofs.

“If these girls get so enmeshed in the fantasy of Slender Man, there’s some kind of a problem,\" he said. \"It may have lowered their inhibition, but that's not what caused this ... Hundreds or thousands of children talk about, tweet, text message about Slender Man, but ... they've never killed anybody.\"

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