**Grimhaven Orphanage, Illinois, USA. This is the actual location of that old schoolhouse in the photo posted back in 2009, the image that is the origination point for our modern understanding of the Slenderman mythos, the place where you come face to face with your past, your fears, your future – and the legendary Slenderman! Here, one fateful night on June 17th 1898, a dozen children and the orphanage’s caretaker disappeared… seemingly without a trace.**
Back in the present day here you are visiting the crumbling overgrown ediface of that same orphanage, urged on by your tingling, irrespressible curiousity in a personal quest, that you tell yourself is in answer to the rising swell of cries for hard evidence that The Slenderman exists. Even as you explore the abandoned buildings and investigate the truth behind the tragedy, you risk becoming a victim of the Slenderman yourself – he still stalks the hallways and his trendril embrace is inescapable.
Clamber over the overgrown hedges one moonlit night, drop into the front entry yards – things have changed a little since the photograph was taken, but this is the place all right. Tentatively step inside through the broken front doors, flick on the torch app on your phone so you can see where you’re going. Shine it around the aging brick walls – the orphanage has obviously been deserted for many years. You approach an old school photo hanging crooked on the wall, run the cold light of the phone over the faces of all those children since missing – it’s almost the same image you know from online, but… as you take a closer look, something in the air is changing – a stirring.
Exploring the crumbling rooms, casting your light over the disused pots and pans in the scullery, looking out from the dirty windows over the back yards, the rambling old hedge maze, the old chapel and a children’s cemetery. In the murky back corner of what must have been the music room rests an old German piano, dusty, crooked, neglected for so long. Listen – can you hear those distant yet clear notes of music – it’s altogether complex, plaintive, haunting – an eerie expression of the grief and misery of a young orphan lost in time?
Climb the rickety stairs to the rows of cots lining the low-ceiling dormitories, a pair of iron scissors dangling above each little bed to guard the infants from the changling-maker fairies… a child’s toy rolls across the floor to your feet and as you go to pick it up, your phone crackles to life – an image is trying to form on the screen… someone is trying to communicate… faintly through the white noise – is that a child’s face… from another time, but perhaps, the very same place?
Could there be a deeper set of motivations, personal discoveries, twists and turns to this journey through the dank, cramped brick-walled rooms of the abandoned Grimhaven Orphanage? Will your discoveries reveal more than you bargained for, as the layers of time and space are peeled back one by one? Are there unknown links between you and the faint sounds of those lost children’s voices, their half-seen faces straining and struggling to communicate to you through the electronically-sensitive medium of your own phone?
It seems that parallel to your search for the truth, you must also save the soul of your own ancestor, the missing orphan Charley – or you may cease to exist yourself. Twists in time and tears in the fabric of space provide glimpses of the terrifying events of that night, and as you piece together the stories behind the disappearances you learn of shocking connections to the haunted young Charley.
**Follow the clues, do ask Charley asks you, find him, bring him back, or cease to exist yourself!**
The Slenderman Stories: The Orphanage was developed by shadowshifters
The Slenderman Stories: The Orphanage was Released on Windows,Mac
The Slenderman Stories: The Orphanage is a Single Player game
The Slenderman Stories: The Orphanage