Der Großmann.

Anyone who is remotely familiar with the internets is familiar with two things.  4chan and Something Awful.  Considered by some to be the offal-pits of the interblag.  What I find as the redeeming feature of 4chan is its anonymity and the paranormal chat board, /x/.  It should come as no surprise that your humble author is a visitor of such a thing.

A recent "mascot" of the /x/ boards has been a figure called "slenderman."

One of the more "famous" images.

Slenderman is a tall suited humanoid with a blank face and (in most cases) long tentacle arms.  Most of the legends I've come across concern his stealing of children and the occasional adult.

Of course I was curious, so I dug.  Turns out most of the contemporary stories about the slenderman come from the Something Awful forums in a "let's make a new myth!" thread.  Despite my obvious grammatical objections with the use of the word "myth"...it struck me as odd how many of the posters seemed disturbed by the slenderman.  And since I regularly have to deal with things beyond the veil, as it were, I was only made more curious.

So I kept digging.

Living in New York has a few benefits, one of these being access to the New York public library, and since I do some of my work there (the ESS offices are in the basement), I find plenty of times to crawl the stacks and find the unusual stuff, which does contain some very obscure stuff...

As I dug, I focused on demonology and the realms of the faerie (as these things generally go in that direction) and found that the tall-man, der großmann, is actually mentioned a few times in some mid-16th and late-17th century (predating the brothers Grimm by about fifty years) tales collections of faerie stories.  They spin tales of der großmann sneaking about and snatching children like the krampus, but without any sort of focus.

I did find an interesting woodcut though.
I had to capture it with my phone's camera, I'll have to get Dr. Jones' help on getting a photocopy.

The woodcut was one of an example of apprentice prints.  With this print was written: "Steigen sie nie in seinen wald ein."

"Never enter into its forest."

The more I looked, the more vague things were.  I've determined the more useful thing to do would be to find original German texts and translate them to the best of my ability.

Curiously, as I've been researching this one (which is on the side-burner with the hands' parchment), I've started to notice things going less than smooth.  I've begun to ward my door at night ever since I saw someone tall and skinny staring up at my window.
It just goes to prove my adage: "Anyplace that has a Gutenberg Bible is not to be trusted."