Recently, while browsing YouTube for LARP battle videos, I happened across this amazing demonstration of a couple of hand-made Halloween costumes:
(This video is full of amazingness. You’ll see why I love the idea when you watch it.)
(I DID NOT make this. All credit goes to GeneralTampon.)
I really wanna make a costume like this. Probably not *this* year, but definitely before next year’s Anime Weekend Atlanta. I’ve already sat down and tallied up the cost, and it comes out to +/- $150. Crutches for the front legs, drywall stilts for the hind legs, a cheap plastic mask, foam upholstery padding for the shape of the legs and body, and cloth fabric and whatever other kinds of accessories you want to cover it all and make it look awesome. If I could find a substitute for the drywall stilts, I could cut the price almost in half! When I get around to it, you can definitely expect a series of videos detailing it’s creation and testing.
This costume appealed to me in several different way, one being that it looks like something straight out of Princess Mononoke. (Just gonna throw this out there: I’m a HUGE Studio Ghibli fan.) One reason in particular that resonated with me was it’s resemblance to a being I hadn’t encountered or thought much about in a long time…
Convenient Backstory:
All those years ago, back when I was on the GameFAQs’ Paranormal / Conspiracy Message Board, A creature (who was not Slenderman) had captured my attention. It was known as The Stiltwalker. At the time, it had earned more of my attention than Ol’ Slendy for the simple fact that I lived in a wooded area, complete with steep hills; this creature’s ideal habitat (Or so reported sightings have led me to believe). The pasta is as follows:
I live in the Texas hill country by a river in a small town, and I had some coworkers over tonight. One of them hadn’t seen my river yet, and I’d been telling her how awesome it was, but it was raining when they got here. It just stopped raining a little while ago, so we all walked down to the river in the moonlight to check it out. You have to walk down this tree-lined path off the road, which takes a turn and goes downhill to the river. There’s a bank on the other side covered with trees, it goes back maybe 15 yards from the edge of the water until it reaches a cliff wall that goes up maybe 10 yards, and is pretty steep. It’s dark but the moon is giving us some light, because Texas weather can never make up its mind if it’s raining or clear, and our eyes have adjusted at this point.
We brought a couple beers with us, and we’re sitting on the rocks talking, my buddy, Jarrett, is sitting across from me with his girlfriend, and this new girl is sitting next to me. He’s in the middle of a sentence, looking between me and the girl next to me, when he looks back over both of our shoulders, widens his eyes and cuts off what he was saying with “holy crap” in this really quiet voice.
We turn around and I barely have time to register what I’m seeing because it was dark. There was something black about half as tall as the cliff, 15 feet tall-ish, on these extremely spindly legs noiselessly sprinting through the trees on the opposite bank. I couldn’t make out the shape too well, but my impression was that it was covered in long hair, and its body and head were kind of like a dog looking down, but stretched longer. Most of its height was in its legs, which were really thin. Jarrett turned on the flashlight,t and shone it across the water at the thing, and it stopped moving and turned to look at us. It had humongous eyes that reflected the light from the flashlight. After a split second of this, it turned away from us and just scaled the cliff as easily as it was striding across the ground and disappeared from sight.
We stared for a second and then we just ran back to my house. We s**t bricks over what we saw, and then they all just went home.
All four of us saw the thing, and we all seemed to be in agreement on what it looked like. I think my heart rate finally went back to normal just before I started writing this, and now it’s back up. What happens now? Do I call animal control or something? I don’t know what this thing is, if it’s dangerous, or what. I don’t want to go outside or even look out my window at the trees. Also I didn’t score with the new girl and we left like 5 unopened beers on the bank of the river. What the f**k.
This was fascinating to me, for one reason in particular: I had seen something very much like it late one afternoon on the opposite hillside in the woods behind my house. In hindsight, it was most likely the product of a young, overactive imagination, being home alone at the time. While it scared me to a certain extent, it also interested me, and left a lasting impression.
The impression remained dormant for some time, only resurfacing recently in the wake of the Slender game, and the video at the beginning of this post.
PS – I would have included The Stiltwalker as one of the monsters mentioned in my previous post instead of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I couldn’t find anything about him at the time. I have only recently discovered him again, and I was inspired by this new influx of lost information.
EDIT: I fixed the link to the Stiltwalker wiki article. It was removed from the Slenderman wiki for unknown reasons (Although I heard someone vandalized the entire page first). The new link is to an earlier version of the article on the Internet Archive.
