Anissa Weier had a kind, open face and hazel eyes. She liked roller coasters and horror stories. Her mom called her “four eyes” because she needed glasses.
When Anissa (pronounced Uh-NEE-sa) was ten years old, her parents, Bill and Kristi, announced that they were separating. Afterward, they continued living with Anissa in the same condo for almost twelve months, a year that Anissa later described as “the worst period of her life.” During that period, Kristi vented to Anissa that her new boyfriend had multiple DUIs and didn’t appreciate his family, which seemed insensitive, Kristi explained, because her own parents were dead and all three of her sisters hated her.
“I don’t have a family,” she complained, which left Anissa thinking, “What about me?”
Anissa felt like she could talk to her dad about “anything and everything.” Deep down she knew that he would never judge her. But she held off confiding in him about her mom and the depression. She didn’t want to stress him out. Bill was tired. His attention was torn between his job as a quality supervisor at a manufacturing plant for machine parts and his two teenage children from a previous marriage. His first wife had been diagnosed with myelofibrosis when she and Bill were still in high school. The blood disorder capped her life expectancy at forty years. Now, at the age of thirty-nine, she was dying, and Bill’s eldest children were entering an emotional crisis.
To Anissa, the impending tragedy made her own problems pale in comparison. While she navigated her parents’ divorce, her older half siblings, Sarah and Bubba, were becoming hospice nurses. They were basically saints. Sarah often called the house crying. Anissa made herself small and quiet, hoping Bill would love her more if she didn’t make as much noise. She tried to stand out by getting good grades.
“I got whatever attention my parents could spare,” Anissa would recall. “I was always pushed off to the side because I was the good kid who didn’t need to be watched.”
After Kristi moved out, visitors to Bill’s condo were struck by the lack of décor. A large flat-screen television adorned one of the walls, which were otherwise bare, emphasizing the home’s colorlessness. After school, Anissa shuffled across gray laminate floors, past gray cabinets and gray walls, up thick, gray shag-carpeted stairs to her bedroom, where Tiger, the family’s black-and-gray cat, purred in his gray cat tree.
Bill noticed that Anissa seemed to “walk on eggshells” around him. But he didn’t think much of it because she got As on her report card. When Anissa said she was sad about the divorce, Bill brushed it aside. Lots of parents got divorced, he thought, and by Anissa’s fifth grade graduation, the event was months behind them.
Instead of talking to her about it, he played video games with Anissa, “fantasy, medieval games,” she later said, “where people have to save the world.”
Anissa loved playing the hero, policing various dream worlds with her dad and fighting off bad guys together. Righteous violence—violence enacted in self-defense or the defense of others, or to uphold some moral code—was an obsession of hers. At school, she lashed out at other kids for not following directions, even going so far as to hit them. Her teachers would later describe her as a “rule-stickler” but claimed they never saw anything to suspect she might be a bully. At worst, they seemed to worry about her. She had a lisp and dressed young for her age. Sometimes she cried when she thought no one was looking.
Anissa knew her parents loved her, but she thought their love was conditional, and she worried that at any moment she might do something wrong to make them leave her.
Years later, a bevy of mental health professionals would speak with Anissa in an attempt to determine what had led her to participate in such a violent crime. Their reports would go into various levels of detail about Anissa’s academic abilities, IQ, family relationships, and worldview. But in the end, each one reached some variation of the same frighteningly simple conclusion: Anissa had a desperate need for other people to accept her, a need driven partly by her own unshakable belief that no one ever had. To belong, she would do almost anything, even “compromise her beliefs and values,” one doctor noted, “because she wants that connection.”
As Anissa’s home life became more stressful, she quit Girl Scouts and stopped participating in extracurricular activities. When her world felt out of control, she played the video game Minecraft, where she was in charge and could bust apart rocks and trees to build tools, houses, and bridges.
One day, Anissa was watching a YouTube video of someone playing Minecraft when an ad popped up for Creepypasta.com.
“Hey,” Anissa wondered, “what’s a ‘Creepypasta’?”
It turned out that “creepypasta” was wordplay on “copy and paste.” It was a creative writing website for short stories, about five hundred words long, uploaded by users. Visitors read and rated one another’s creepypastas and submitted original creepypastas of their own. Creepypastas were free to circulate; they could be copied and pasted and shared across the internet. Many of them featured the same characters, born on horror story forums and in paranormal Photoshop contests. There was Laughing Jack (a killer clown), Eyeless Jack (a cannibal killer with empty eye sockets that oozed black liquid), Jeff the Killer (who whispered “go to sleep” before killing children like Anissa for sport), and a fringe character, filed away under “Beings and Entities,” named Slenderman.
Later, a court-appointed psychiatrist tasked with explaining creepypastas’ role in Anissa’s crime would define Slenderman as “an internet fantasy character” with “special powers and capabilities to communicate and travel for the purpose of torture and murder … A centuries-old, vaguely proportioned, dangerous stalker, tormentor and murderer of young and vulnerable people.”
The psychiatrist’s report continued in dramatic fashion and included a long description of the Slenderman character, copied and pasted from Creepypasta.com:
The Slenderman is a being (male in appearance) who looks like a man with extremely long, slender arms and legs. He also appears to have 4 to 8 long, black tentacles that protrude from his back, though different photographs and enthusiasts disagree on this fact, and therefore it is theorized he can “contract” these tentacles at will. He is described as wearing a black suit strikingly similar to the visage of the notorious Men In Black, and as the name suggests, appears very thin and able to stretch his limbs and torso to inhuman lengths in order to induce fear and ensnare his prey. Once his arms are outstretched, his victims are put into something of a hypnotized state, where they are utterly helpless to stop themselves from walking into them.…
It is often thought as well that he enjoys stalking people who become overly paranoid about his existence, purposely giving them glimpses of himself in order to further frighten them.
“It was really creepy but it was also … alluring,” the doctor said, reflecting on his introduction to Creepypasta.com. “I started to feel, imagining that I’m twelve and a half, ‘Ooh, there’s something about this.’”
In the years to come, Anissa would need to explain the concept of Creepypasta again and again to police officers, defense lawyers, and court-appointed doctors. Her dad, Bill, would lament that Anissa had been able to access Creepypasta.com from her school-issued iPad despite parental controls downloaded on to the device that were supposed to screen “inappropriate” content. At least five of the grown-ups tasked with documenting Anissa’s obsession with Creepypasta would mistakenly refer to her beloved game Minecraft as “Mindcraft,” hinting at the mind-altering effects ascribed by many to screens.
But despite what many adults would later profess, Creepypasta was not a demonic cult or an X-rated site capable of tricking children into violence. It was an ever-growing collection of amateur horror stories written in the PG vein of R. L. Stine. Anissa liked it, she said, because “it was something different you couldn’t find at a library, and there was no censor for it.” Many of the creepypastas had clearly been written by other children. (“There it is again! What is that thing?!” began one. “Oh no. No no no no no no, I can see the outline of a man form.”) But Anissa was just a child, too, and stories like these, published in dramatic red and white font against a spooky black background, kept her awake at night.
Creepypasta.com specialized in what it called “chills and thrills,” and its editors took their jobs as purveyors of young adult content seriously, warning aspiring authors that any story submissions containing racism, bigotry, “excessive sexual content, profanity, gore or offensive slurs” would be automatically rejected.
But while the posted horror stories were tame by adult standards, many of them had been fashioned after newspaper clippings, medical records, Secret Service memos, police records, psychiatrist reports, and video interviews with people who claimed to have encountered Slenderman—all tagged with some version of the claim “true story,” a common trope in popular horror, ranging from The Blair Witch Project to the novel Carrie. While any adult would have seen this for what it was—a creative style choice—young Anissa read the “true stories” as if they were entries on Wikipedia, filing away every detail of Creepypasta mythology as real.
After Anissa’s parents’ divorce was finalized in 2013, Anissa spent the first three days of each week at her dad’s, then two days midweek at Kristi’s new place, and then back again, shuffling between the two homes several times during an eight-day period while also trying to manage her schoolwork and keep her overnight bags organized with everything she needed for school. The stress accumulated later that fall, when Anissa switched school districts and became the new kid at Horning Middle School, where Morgan and Bella were enrolled. But while Morgan and Bella had each other, and began the year knowing most of their peers from elementary school, Anissa, who had attended a different elementary school, knew almost no one. She missed the kids from her old school.
“There’s always telephones,” her dad reassured her, sounding very old.
At Horning Middle School, Anissa’s sixth grade teachers considered her a bright student and later observed to police that they’d felt she had a core group of friends. But Anissa received no birthday invitations.
At night, she sat hunched in her covers, her face lit by the glow of her iPad screen, despondently scrolling through creepypastas, their relatable characters plagued, as she was, by a sense of creeping evil. She memorized the scariest stories, hoping that if she got invited to a sleepover, she could recite the creepypastas by heart and impress everyone.
On weekends, she sat alone reading horror stories. She listened to techno music. She tried to teach herself to dance using YouTube videos. She felt lonely.