When Morgan Geyser was a toddler, ghosts would hug her and bite her. As she got older, colors melted down the walls of her bedroom like paint, and rainbows orbited her body. She heard voices that reverberated inside and outside of her skull, as if she were standing in front of a loud intercom system. One of the voices, named Maggie, became a dear friend.
As Morgan learned to read, sentences floated around the pages of her storybooks like animated cartoons. Characters stepped from the screens of her favorite anime films, fully formed. She became friends with a boy named Sev who resembled an anime character, with dark bangs swooping across huge, opalescent gray eyes. When Morgan pressed her hand against Sev’s chest, she felt his heartbeat. Sometimes he slept in her bed, and Morgan woke up with his drool in her hair.
At school, the visions and voices competed for Morgan’s attention. She stared into a rainbow mist, struggling to focus as a teacher droned somewhere in the fog. In private, Morgan preferred to talk to Maggie, Sev, and the others out loud—it felt more intimate. But in public, she spoke to them with her mouth closed. Other children found this strange and shrank from her.
Morgan’s unpopularity wasn’t lost on her parents, Matt and Angie Geyser. While other girls wore rainbow T-shirts emblazoned with words like LOVE and listened to boy bands, their daughter decorated her bedroom with a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Star Trek character Spock, a human-alien hybrid whose actions “are ruled by logic” rather than emotion. She named her guinea pigs Thor and Loki, after the gods of thunder and mischief from Norse mythology—allegedly enemies, though in Morgan’s case they peacefully shared a cage under her loft bed.
She spent a lot of time alone, but if anything, that impressed her parents. To them it signified strength and independence, not something to be pitied. They weren’t worried, because Morgan never seemed lonely.
And it was true that Morgan wasn’t lonely, because she was never really alone; she had Sev and Maggie. Rainbows followed her wherever she went.
But her parents didn’t know that. Only in hindsight would they see the warning signs and blame themselves—Matt, for his genetics, and Angie, for all the time she’d spent away, working and providing for the family. In the meantime, Morgan wasn’t hurt by her outsider status, and not caring what other people thought of her struck her parents as a rare and special quality, particularly in a girl—especially in Wisconsin, where midwestern conformity reigned.
Morgan’s mom, Angie, had grown up on a dairy farm. As a child, she named all the cows and dragged her doll into the barn to milk them with her dad. He was a strong man. But when Angie turned ten, his body became frail and rigid, gripped by cancer. For weeks, he lay unconscious on a hospital bed in the living room.
After he died, a crowd of strangers assembled on Angie’s front lawn, and she and her siblings hid inside while an auctioneer sold off their farm equipment and pieces of the property. Their mom, Dianna, closed the blinds, but Angie could still hear the auctioneer, rapidly selling her cows, one by one, without once mentioning their names.
Years later, Angie lay on her back in their new house, reading Stephen King novels. Her mother had remarried a nice man named Bob, a retired police chief from New Holstein, Wisconsin, where cows out-numbered people.
After Angie learned to drive at age sixteen, she was in a terrible car accident. To staple her scalp back together, doctors shaved part of her head. At home, Angie shaved the rest. But New Holstein was not the sort of place where women wore buzz cuts, and Angie’s neighbors were the sort of people to wonder why she had done that. They lived on an eerily perfect, quiet road where it seemed like no one ever went outdoors, and yet the yards were always immaculate, and when you stepped outside to walk the dog, you felt everybody’s eyes on you.
Angie wanted to live someplace where nobody knew her or cared about her hair. So she moved to the nearest big city and became a waitress like her mom.
Milwaukee was a nondescript city with a skyline dominated by church steeples. The heavy yeast smell of breweries wafted onto the highways, causing drivers’ eyes to water.
Angie got a job downtown, waitressing at the SafeHouse, a spythemed restaurant that had been in business since the 1960s. Diners entered through a “secret” entrance off the alleyway and stepped into what appeared to be a tiny, windowless room with a fireplace, where a secretary dressed like Moneypenny from the early James Bond movies subjected them to an “interrogation,” which included dancing, karate moves, and Hula-Hoops.
Finally, the fake fireplace opened, leading to the restaurant, where display cases contained spy emblems and real pieces of the Berlin Wall. At the Magic Bar, bartenders pulled dollar bills from oranges and doled out sugary drinks, such as the SafeHouse’s signature Great Spytini.
Like other waitresses at the SafeHouse, Angie wore a uniform of harem pants and was expected to memorize a spy-themed script.
“Hello, spies,” she said upon arriving at a new table. “I’m going to be helping you with your food mission today, spies.” Other parts of the act included:
“Here’s your weapons of mass consumption.” (Silverware.)
“Can I clear the evidence for you?” (Clear your plates?)
“Here’s the damage report.” (Your bill.)
Yet even when forced to address her customers as secret agents, Angie emanated a kind of regal sophistication. She had a Mona Lisa smile, huge eyes, and shiny light brown hair that had grown long since the car accident, falling nearly to her waist. For dessert, she served people goblets of ice cream that were bigger than their heads, speared with lit sparklers that crackled and popped.
When the SafeHouse bouncer, Matt Geyser, looked at Angie, his heart lit up, too.
Matt stood six feet four inches tall and weighed almost four hundred pounds. Most nights, his physical presence was enough to stave off fighting at the SafeHouse. But when customers drank too many Spytinis and got “lippy,” as Matt put it, he gave them a choice: they could hug each other or fight him.
People were impressed by Matt’s confidence. They didn’t know that he spent much of his life gripped by fear. When Matt stepped outside the restaurant, he saw patterns that floated through the air. Rainbow halos orbited the glow of city streetlights. When he caught his reflection in windows, he saw Satan standing behind him.
Unlike other girls Matt had dated, Angie was not put off by his schizophrenia diagnosis. She didn’t mind that he was a homebody, either, easily overcome in large social settings, and in return, Matt worshipped her. He pored over the photographs taken of her after the car accident, looking as beautiful in a buzz cut as Sinéad O’Connor. He was the first boyfriend to state the obvious: that Angie was pretty, and he won her heart by making her feel seen and accepted, by showing her that she was both normal and special and rare. On weekends, they stayed in to listen to Smashing Pumpkins albums and watch Tombstone, a movie about a couple of gunslingers who aren’t out looking to find any trouble, but trouble soon finds them.
Matt’s Mormon parents considered his schizophrenia a test from God, and instilled in him the belief that stoicism was the best medicine.
Grit and avoidance had served Midwesterners for centuries. In Wisconsin, winters lasted up to nine months. Night fell early and lasted well into the next day. Living in darkness could trigger mental illnesses; in the 1800s, newspapers printed stories about settlers walking naked into the snow or massacring their families in the middle of a hailstorm. Giant wolves prowled the prairie land. Those who survived with minds intact developed a high emotional threshold for isolation and bone-chilling cold. They learned to cope with the elements by repressing their feelings.
“The horrid howl of the prairie wolf disturbed my sleep,” Ole Knudsen Nattestad, one of the state’s earliest settlers, wrote in his diary in 1838, “until habit armed my ears against annoyances of this sort.”
When Matt was seven years old, he woke to see the ghost of his unborn sister hovering above him. She wore white and radiated love. “Goodbye,” she said, and disappeared. Matt ran to his parents, sobbing. He told them what he’d seen. He warned his pregnant mother that the baby inside of her was dead. She and his father told him not to worry. “Go back to bed,” they said.
But a few days later, a visit to the doctor confirmed Matt’s premonition. His mom apologized for not believing him.
“God wants you here for some higher purpose,” she said. “Satan sends the demons after you because he hates seeing the light of God.”
Years later, Matt sat on Angie’s couch, smoking a cigarette, when a familiar psychic sense hit him, and all at once he knew: they had just made a baby. Two weeks later, a pregnancy test proved him right. He was thirty and Angie was twenty-three. They were young and, although excited, felt somewhat unprepared. Matt worked only part-time as a bouncer, while Angie’s waitressing job yielded little income for all the time it took. They needed more money, a bigger apartment, and health insurance. Full-time employment put too much pressure on Matt’s mental health. So Angie hurried back to school to provide a better life for her family, and Matt prepared to be a stay-at-home dad. His schizophrenia became a distant concern compared with all the more pressing ones. Even if Morgan did develop symptoms, odds were they wouldn’t manifest until adulthood—and if her symptoms were anything like her father’s, they would be minor and treatable.
Even that possibility seemed so remote. According to the US National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), schizophrenia and related “psychotic disorders” affect somewhere between 0.25 percent and 0.64 percent of people. NAMI has found that childhood schizophrenia is even more rare, affecting only 0.0025 percent of kids. Still, Matt and Angie’s optimism would turn out to be misplaced; studies vary, but research has shown that children who have one parent with schizophrenia are forty times more likely than the average population to present with the disease. There was a one-in-ten chance that Morgan would inherit Matt’s condition.
But for now, Matt and Angie’s excitement to meet their daughter overshadowed any anxiety. They needed to believe that her future would be bright. After she was born, they hung on to hope even more fervently. When children are involved, engaging with the worst-case scenario—kidnapping, child molestation, genetic abnormalities—fights against biology.
When Morgan was three years old and ran into their bedroom to say that hers was haunted—that ghosts were pulling her hair, biting her, hugging her—Matt and Angie reassured her that everything was fine.
They told her to go back to bed.
Morgan didn’t dream, at least not like other people did. Her nights were black, a respite from the voices and visions, while dreams, if you could call them that, consumed her waking hours, dripping through the ceiling of her classroom, where the walls seemed to fold in on themselves, and from their crevices climbed strange characters, some of them frightening. In the bathroom mirror, she saw the silhouette of a man standing behind her—a towering, shadowy thing, shifting in and out of corners, his body the color of smoke and ink. She named him “It”—Morgan hadn’t read the Stephen King novel at the time, she just didn’t know what else to call it. At night she woke to see bone-white faces flashing at her in the dark. They had black holes for eyes. Their features twisted in agony. But when she shined a light on them, they disappeared.
In 2010, when she was eight years old, Morgan woke in the night to see a demon girl crouched on her dresser. Morgan reached for her trusty flashlight, but when she switched it on, it only illuminated the girl’s distorted features. She peered down at Morgan and smiled.
The encounter marked a turning point in Morgan’s childhood. From then on, Morgan could no longer control her imaginary world or erase from it what scared her—and she began to experience an unfamiliar yearning for human company. In her bedside drawer, investigators would later find a clear plastic bag containing typed instructions on how to join a club, indicating that at some point Morgan had resolved to recruit someone new into her strange and increasingly lonely little world. She still loved Sev and Maggie. But she longed for a real friend—one that other people could see.