Bespectacled, blond Morgan Geyser in an interrogation room says casually of Payton “Bella” Leutner, “She’s the one who was stabbed. Is she dead? I was just wondering.” Her words were caught on camera in Beware the Slenderman, an HBO documentary about the mythos of “the Slender Man” and its role in two twelve-year-olds’ stabbing of a third girl. The Slender Man, according to lore, kidnaps and preys on children, and is purported to have been in existence for centuries. “Go ballistic” is the instruction that Anissa Weier is said to have given to Morgan, her partner-in-crime, who stabbed Payton nineteen times in the woods. When asked by the man who found Payton crawling out of the woods, “Who did this to you?” Payton Leutner responds, “My best friend.”
I began to be truly afraid when the camera moves to Morgan’s father, Matt, a man with schizophrenia who has, at that moment, only recently learned of his daughter’s diagnosis with the same disorder. He is stricken and tearful as he says, “I wish I could talk to her about … I always wanted to know, like, if she sees that stuff too.” He says, “I know the devil’s not in the backseat, but the devil is in the backseat.”
In the case of the Slender Man, the “devil in the backseat” originated on the Creepypasta Wiki, an online series of documents and forums full of grim, fantastical tales told with utter conviction. Wikis are designed to grow; essentially anyone may contribute to a wiki, something crucial to remember when considering the attributions of urban legends under the guise of horror stories. According to the wiki, the faceless Slender Man wears a suit and has long, slender arms and legs. Tentacles protrude from his back. He wears a hat, although the type of hat varies depending on the source. He kidnaps children in particular, and preys on them upon capture. The wiki includes historical references ranging from Brazilian cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphics to German woodcuts. The Slender Man, according to the wiki, is tied to legends from around the world (Scottish, Dutch, and German myths are cited). In one well-known Slender Man document, a sullen girl stands in the foreground of a black-and-white photograph amid a group of children who look like campers. The image is low-res, like a photo from an 1980s yearbook. A tall, skinny white figure stands in the background—it could be a sculpture, but is, of course, the Slender Man. The caption reads: “1986, photographer Mary Thomas, went missing in 1986.”
Says one user in the forums, “This is probably one of the most classic creppypasta [sic]. Unfournely [sic] its [sic] been so chlichaed [sic] that its [sic] getting old, just like Jeff the killer. However its [sic] still a classic.” In response, another user says, “anyone remember that news article where a young girl killed her friend(s) to ‘appease’ slenderman?? yeeah.” A third user chimes in, “I remember that. I miss the good ol’ days.” Folklorist Trevor J. Blank says in Beware the Slenderman, “Often in the adult world we forget how much it sucks to be a kid.”
In scrambling to find an explanation for Payton’s attempted murder, investigators looked to other cases of youth violence: were Anissa and Morgan bullied, as in the case of the Columbine shooters? Bullying did not seem to be a major issue. The girls had each other, and they had Payton—in fact, the stabbing occurred on the day after a sleepover birthday party for Morgan. I posit that being a kid “sucks” even without the specters of bullying or abuse. You have no control over your life; it is frequently impossible to decode the actions of adults. The internet is one way to access a type of freedom. Because of my father’s job as a computer engineer, I was using the internet before the World Wide Web was made available to the public, and learned to “make friends” on Prodigy bulletin boards when none of my peers were aware of such things—the drama, the flirting, the expensive long-distance calls with “internet people”—and I am fascinated by the role of the internet in Anissa’s life in particular. The browser history on Anissa’s iPad revealed a whirlwind of searches, including “The Sanity Test,” “The Psychopath Test,” and “The Sociopath Test.” She was accessing ways of exploring the world and her place in it. Another video she watched included a snake eating a mouse. Says her mother, “She liked to spend a lot of private time up in her room … I totally regret the iPad.” And, of course, the internet is where Anissa learned of the Slender Man.
Many online documents testify to the Slender Man’s existence. One is a so-called police report from 1993, with “blood” spattered on the document. Childish handwriting says atop the typing, “SLENDER MAN KILL US ALREADY KILL US KILL KILL KILL.” Another is a poorly Photoshopped newspaper clipping with the headline “Local Boy Disappears.” “School officials state that in the weeks leading up to his disappearance, that he had been irritable at school and home, after complaining of a tall, very thin man in all black. Police declined to comment at this time.” At the bottom are the words: “**Alert**Alert**Deployment request**Anti-S Walker Unit to deploy to —— Wichita —— Kansas.” These “primary documents,” however badly cobbled together, are presented as genuine and accurate artifacts; they are PDFs and images created by people excited to coax the Slender Man story into life, and the more realistic, the better.
“I told [Morgan] about [the Slender Man],” Anissa testified.
“Anissa told me we had to,” Morgan said. “[Anissa] said that he’d kill our families.”
Anissa might have been the one to discover Slender Man, but there exist pages and pages of Morgan’s disturbing drawings of him. She claims that she saw the Slender Man when she was five years old, long before she saw any internet artifacts about the monster. But the audience for such artifacts is made up of people—or children—like Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, whose dual obsession with the Slender Man led to a conspiracy to kill their mutual friend Payton Leutner. The three girls would go to Skateland to celebrate Morgan’s birthday, after which there would be a sleepover in Morgan’s basement. Originally, the plan was to kill Payton and hide her under the covers. The murder would turn Anissa and Morgan into Slender Man’s “proxies,” and they would live with Slender Man in his mansion forever.
Payton Leutner did not die after the stabbing, though people seem to think she was killed—when I mentioned working on this essay, friends and acquaintances recounted a murder, though what actually happened was this: On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, twelve-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser conspired to kill Payton “Bella” Leutner, who was then considered to be Morgan’s best friend. On the morning after a birthday sleepover, the girls went to a playground and then a public restroom, where the stabbing did not happen. In the nearby woods, Anissa ultimately told Morgan to kill Payton with a knife they’d brought with them, saying, “Go ballistic.” Morgan stabbed Payton nineteen times. (“I don’t like screaming,” Anissa later said.) A passerby discovered Payton crawling out of the woods and called 911. Police ultimately found Anissa and Morgan walking along the interstate.
For me, a popular 1984 film called The NeverEnding Story stood in place of the Slender Man’s well-wrought wiki. I was in second grade when the film was released. An expensive West German production full of fantastic creatures, the film follows Bastian, a bookish and bullied boy, and his absorption into an alternate universe called Fantasia, which happens via a mysterious book snatched from a dusty bookstore. In Fantasia, the mystical Childlike Empress has fallen ill, and a young hero, Atreyu, is sent on a quest to find a cure. Meanwhile, a terrible force called the Nothing is destroying their world. If the Childlike Empress survives, it is thought, so will Fantasia. By the end of the film, Bastian’s and Atreyu’s worlds intersect. It is up to Bastian to save Fantasia by giving the Childlike Empress a new name, which he does by screaming out of a window during a violent storm.
I was the leader when it came to bringing Fantasia and the Nothing into our lives, tempted by the idea that we might be part of a larger story without fully knowing how. I told my best friend, Jessica, that we were part of a book, and that the book was being written as we acted. Jessica had frizzy hair that was difficult to tame, and she was prone to tears, a trait that I found exhausting.
We coaxed a third friend, Katie, into the game, which grew increasingly elaborate—if we said the word “Nothing,” or if we stepped into the sunlight from shadow, we would become hypnotized and walk around like zombies. We referred constantly to the bigger world in which someone was reading a book about us and what we were doing, gesturing skyward to indicate that we were merely fictions in someone else’s story. This went on until Katie finally insisted that we were only playing. No, Jessica and I insisted, we were not playing. It was real, all of it. We stuck to our story until Katie cried and ran from us; at this point, Jessica and I had an unspoken understanding that the Nothing was an important part of our lives, and we would not toss it aside for anything. The next day, Katie returned to say that she’d spoken to her parents about us and our game. Her parents, she said, had reassured her that Jessica and I were indeed only playing.
But this did not stop us. Jessica and I kept zoning out when we stepped into the light. We were careful not to say the Nothing’s name.
The game continued until a critical conflict occurred between Jessica and me, not long after Katie’s insistence that we were lying and her subsequent departure from our group of friends. Cautiously, secretively, Jessica approached me.
“We’re just playing, aren’t we?” she asked, hushed.
“We’re not playing,” I replied. “This is real.”
“No, really,” she said.
I repeated, “We’re not playing.”
Jessica insisted that I tell her the truth. With my every denial, she became increasingly hysterical while I remained calm. I watched her leave in sobs; I remained grounded in the world of my imagination.
Imagination has a power in childhood that it lacks in older years. How much more rooted in my childhood delusions would I have been had I—like Anissa and Morgan—had access to scores of documents that testified to the reality of my daydreams? What if I’d been able to open YouTube and watch other children being swept away by the power of the Nothing? Would I have become increasingly absorbed by the narrative, and stuck to the story to dangerous ends, if I had spent hours reading hundreds of forum posts about its veracity?
Though I wasn’t diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder till much later, I am intrigued by my second-grade willingness to forgo even friendship for the sake of my version of unreality. Was there already something vulnerable to fragility lurking deep in my mind, or was I simply more stubborn than most? In hindsight, I ask myself how much I truly believed in my own fiction. Where the puzzle gets tricky is in children’s natural proclivity for the line between fake and real. Even now, C. and I treat our childhood stuffed animals with a tenderness that indicates that we believe, to some degree, that they are sentient. Yet if a fellow adult asked us whether we actually think they are thinking creatures, as Real as the Velveteen Rabbit, we would have to say no. (And then feel guilty, deep down, about betraying our stuffed pals.)
I eventually became friends with Jessica again, sacrificing my adherence to our version of Fantasia in order to repair our relationship. To do so sounds simple, but I don’t think it was so simple for me to detach from the world we’d created, as though I could simply toss it aside after a period of intense commitment. When I try to remember how I gave up the fiction, my mind blots out the transition; I have no recollection of telling Jessica that there was no Nothing and no Fantasia, as though the trauma of letting it all go had shattered my memories.
I postponed watching Beware the Slenderman for weeks after I knew I’d be writing this essay. I insisted on watching the documentary with C., who would serve as an anchor to reality, and I insisted that we watch it during the day, for fear that my adult self would become seduced and haunted by the idea of the Slender Man. I ended up viewing the film while visiting my friend Miriam. We watched it on my laptop, reclining on her sofa bed, while Brooklyn and Manhattan loomed outside her apartment windows. I tried to hold myself at a distance by taking notes in a small green notebook as we watched the terrible story unravel.
According to a testifying psychiatrist in the film, Dr. Kenneth Casimir, “Schizophrenia is one of the most serious and one of the most studied mental illnesses of human beings.” He also says, “It bears saying that schizophrenia, in and of itself, is not a dangerous illness. There are many thirty-five-year-olds who have schizophrenia who don’t have to be incarcerated, who can be managed in a community. However, there’s a second part to that. When your delusion—when your fixed delusion tells you to kill people, and when your insight doesn’t allow you to seek treatment, then schizophrenia becomes dangerous.” I was thirty-four when Miriam and I watched this. It can be said that I am “managed in a community.” I do not consider myself to be dangerous.
The final trials concerning Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser occurred in September and October 2017, in their hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Both were charged as adults, with attempted first-degree murder in Morgan’s case and attempted second-degree murder in Anissa’s case; both used the insanity defense. A mental disorder defense indicates that a person falls in one of two categories: that they were acting from “the irresistible impulse,” in which they could not stop themselves; or that their mental disorder prevented them from realizing that what they were doing was wrong.
DA Kevin Osborne said of the girls, “They knew this was wrong. They understood what they were doing was wrong.”
Osborne said that Anissa may have believed that the Slender Man was real, but that she had the mental capacity to know that she was committing a crime. Anissa Weier was diagnosed with a “shared delusional disorder,” or schizotypy, a milder form of schizophrenia. One characteristic of schizotypy is magical ideation, which would seem to provide a fertile ground for fully believing in the Slender Man.
Though it has been posited that Anissa was the ringleader of the attack on Payton, it was Morgan who was diagnosed with schizophrenia—her father’s diagnosis—a few months after the assault. “[The stabbing] was necessary,” she says in one video-recorded interrogation. Unlike Anissa, who cries and wraps her arms around herself in the interrogation room, Morgan’s affect is flat. She doesn’t cry at all.
On Friday, September 22, ten of twelve jurors voted that Anissa, now fifteen, was not criminally responsible. She is in a state mental hospital and could be released in three years or up to twenty-five years. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on October 5 that Morgan, also fifteen, had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a deal acknowledging her lack of criminal responsibility due to mental disease. She, too, was ordered to be committed by the Department of Health Services—in her case, for as long as forty years.
One could say of my younger self that she was simply highly imaginative. Spirited. Already prone to storytelling, which would make sense for her future self—the novelist, the writer. Children are prone to believing in the things that they pretend are real; how many, for example, genuinely fear the boogeyman under the bed, or the monster in the closet? How many really do see ghosts in their rooms that they swear are real?
If Anissa and Morgan had never attacked Payton Leutner, they might not have been diagnosed with any form of the schizophrenias as preteens. They might have been called cheerful, spirited, and highly imaginative until some future year, in which they wandered into a fracturing of their realities that could not be denied. In the absence of their friendship and its shared delusion, or in the absence of the Creepypasta Wiki and its scores of pictures, videos, and other documents about the Slender Man, their mutual tendencies toward instability might have pulled them in less-dark directions. As I was, they might have been diagnosed in adulthood. They could have learned to deal with the schizophrenias. Hopefully, they still might.