The Slender Man was created during a contest on the Something Awful forums in June 2009. The goal was to change photographs using digital manipulation so that the pictures showed something supernatural. On 10 June, a forum poster with the user name "Victor Surge" uploaded two images in black and white. They were photographs of groups of children, to which had been added an obscured figure in the background: a tall, thin man with a blank face. Surge included short stories to go with the images, describing the disappearance of the children in the images. It gave the character the name, "The Slender Man":