A wave of suicides -- 103 attempts as of December 2014 -- on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota is being attributed to the presence of the Walking Sam figure. Teenagers claim a slender, shadow-like spirit dubbed Walking Sam appears before them and commands them to kill themselves (sound familiar?). The first wave occurred in 2013 when five members of the Oglala Sioux tribe killed themselves, and continued to spiral until Oglala Sioux tribe Vice President Thomas Poor Bear discovered photos on Facebook in 2015 depicting nooses hanging from trees, revealing plans behind a teenage group suicide. The specter archetype that Walking Sam is based on has roots starting with the good old-fashioned boogeyman and working all the way down to the 'Slender Man told me to do it' folklore of 2008. The idea of shadow people is also a pretty old-school urban legend going back further than history can care to track. However, the character of Walking Sam himself has existed among the Lakota and Dakota Native American tribes for some time now, with a record of him being described in Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse back in 1980. Sometimes known as "Stovepipe Hat Bigfoot" or "Taku-he", the character's been spotted by South Dakota Sioux and Little Eagle tribes as far back as 1974.
