When Anissa told Morgan about Creepypasta, it came out as “Creamypasta.” She had a slight speech impediment that made her G’s sound like D’s and her P’s like M’s. (Zalgo, a seven-mouthed demon described on Creepypasta as “a creature of utmost terror,” ended up sounding like “Zaldo.”)
On her school-issued iPad, Anissa showed Morgan how, when you typed in a search term like “Legend of Zelda,” multiple pages of creepypastas popped up. Morgan started visiting Creepypasta.com at home. When she came across Slenderman, she was captivated. She had seen his face before. Not on the internet, but in her home. He was the spitting image of It, the tall, faceless man who had plagued her since she was young. Suddenly, Creepypasta went from an interesting hobby to a vault of knowledge.
Pictures and “true stories” about him proliferated online, making him seem even more real to her. According to Slenderman expert Dr. Shira Chess, between the years 2013 and 2014, when Morgan first discovered Slenderman, the mythology around him was rapidly evolving and spreading online faster than ever. “The idea became very crowd-sourced, and everybody loved it, and they all started jumping in—people were making new images, new photos. The first Slender video game came out—the facelessness of the character makes him infinitely interpretable. There were a lot of different variations out there and the girls found a version that complemented the things that they wanted to believe.”
Morgan was open with Anissa about her fixation on Slenderman. But she kept the monster It to herself, unsure whether she wanted to tell Anissa about the visions and voices. Bella knew about those things. But Morgan and Bella had been best friends for two years. It was different.
Prior to introducing Morgan to Creepypasta in the fall of 2013, Anissa had happily clicked the “Random Story” button on the site’s home page, reading whatever popped up. But once Morgan zeroed in on Slenderman, Anissa became fixated on him, too, clicking through creepypastas and amateur, kid-produced “found footage” of Slenderman on YouTube. Anissa spent a lot of time worrying that she might be “crazy.” She would later explain that she had wanted him to be real—for all creepypastas to be real—because if they were real, it meant she wasn’t “crazy” or weird for feeling so afraid of them.
Eventually, Anissa uncovered what she considered incontrovertible proof that Slenderman existed. The evidence was twofold:
1. According to creepypastas, Jeff the Killer’s full name was “Jeffrey Woods.” Anissa searched the internet and found news articles (from real newspapers) about a mentally disabled felon named Jeffrey Wood. The real Jeff Wood had been convicted in 1998 for armed robbery and murdering a gas station attendant. Unlike Jeff the Killer, Jeff Wood (singular) was not a serial murderer, and had a normal mouth. But those were minor details. All that mattered to Anissa was that both men were killers named Jeffrey—to her, this proved that Jeff the Killer was real, and from that she was able to extrapolate that the rest of the creepypasta characters were real, too.
2. The second piece of evidence was a black-and-white picture; Slenderman first emerged in 2009 as part of an online Photoshop contest for paranormal images. (Anissa brushed aside the “Photoshop” detail, choosing to believe that the black-and-white picture was a found artifact.) In the photo, adolescent kids were hiking down a trail. In the background, an eerily tall, shadowy figure stood half camouflaged by trees, watching them. While scouring the photo, Anissa noticed a strange resemblance between herself and one of the boys pictured in the foreground. Anissa and the boy had the same color hair, the same pageboy haircut, the same dark eyes, and the same chubby, heart-shaped face—and for some reason this, too, strengthened Anissa’s certainty that the monster behind her look-alike was real.
A caption underneath the photo (written from the point of view of a fictional photographer, “presumed dead”) read, “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its [Slenderman’s] persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time …”
According to court records, the girls’ fascination with Creepypasta and Slenderman began innocently, as a shared creative endeavor. They read creepypastas at night and would “book club” them the next morning on the bus, saying, “This story sucked because …,” or “This story was good because …,” and so on, critiquing the various plot-lines and writing styles. At home, Morgan searched the internet for “Slenderman comic” and “Slenderman cute.” She sketched silly “Slender parodies” of Slenderman on loose-leaf paper, drawing spin-off caricatures like “Offender man,” a pervert in an overcoat, and “Splender man,” who wore a flamboyant, polka-dotted suit, clown makeup, and a top hat.
Creepypasta.com accepted submissions, which inspired Morgan to write her own creepypastas. In one of her notebooks, she drafted a moralistic origin story about Jeff the Killer getting bullied as a kid—perhaps in response to her own experiences or what was going on between Anissa and Bella. “Jeffrey Woods was always bullied as a child and it never got to him … but what he didn’t realize is that somewhere in his head it really did hurt him … He was beaten and covered in chemicals. His sanity snapped and he lost his life. No, he didn’t commit suicide, but his mind was lost. People shouldn’t start to bully, because as you get older, you get meaner. An inescapable fact.”
Later, investigators would uncover a drawing of Jeff in Morgan’s bedroom, along with the caption “Don’t ever begin to bully others, because once you start, all you can do is get WORSE.” The letters in the word “WORSE” dripped with what appeared to be blood.
Anissa was elated by Morgan’s love of Creepypasta. She had always wanted a best friend, someone who liked being scared as much as she did, and it seemed that her fantasy of reciting creepypastas at a sleepover might finally come true. In elementary school, she used to talk to some of the boys at recess about UFOs and aliens. But not like this. She didn’t feel lost or crazy anymore. She felt seen.
Unfortunately, Anissa’s one and only sleepover with Morgan did not go well, because Morgan kept trying to keep Anissa awake, until Anissa, who was tired, lost her temper and hit Morgan with both hands, screaming, “Go to bed!” Finally, Morgan relented, but not before putting Silly Putty on Anissa’s pillowcase. Later, Morgan would tell police, “I can be annoying, I guess.”
The bus was their sacred place. Intimate, but not too intimate. Anissa felt hyper during “book club” with Morgan, or scared in a good way, like being on a roller coaster. The best was when they would analyze creepypastas together as if breaking a code. Slenderman lived in a mansion—“Slender Mansion,” according to the websites—located deep in the forest. Wisconsin had forests. Maybe Slenderman lived in Wisconsin. Maybe he lived in the Nicolet National Forest, which was only three hundred miles away from Morgan and Anissa’s condo complex. Were they in danger?
In creepypastas, Slenderman hunted children. He reached through locked doors with his tendrils and took them away. Sometimes others did his bidding. He hypnotized mothers into killing their children. He enlisted Jeff the Killer to stab people. Certain creepypastas said that Slenderman lived with Jeff the Killer, Zalgo, and other creepypasta characters in his mansion. They were his “proxies,” a creepypasta term meaning that Slenderman controlled them. They carried out his will and killed at his command.
At first, Morgan’s drawings of Slenderman were detailed and precise, showcasing the emerging talent of a gifted cartoonist. But over time her portraits of him became crude and frenzied—a circle for a head and a triangle for a body. She covered pieces of paper with ominous phrases about him, written in all capital letters:
“HE STILL SEES YOU.”
“SAFER DEAD.”
“DON’T LOOK OUT THE WINDOW.”
“HE CANNOT BE HARMED.”
“HELP NEVER COMES.”
“YOU ARE STRANGE CHILD … IT WILL BE OF MY USE.”
In science class, Morgan pretended to take notes while secretly writing lists of “defenses” against creepypasta characters in her notebook:
Masky and Hoodie … offer cheesecake
The Observer … need more info
Toby … try and relate to him
Ben Drowned … spray bottle … he attacks; spray him with cat pee
Zalgo … get ready to die
Jeff the Killer … pepper spray
Slenderman … run like hell
Morgan’s science teacher, Mr. Cera, noticed that she looked nervous and seemed afraid when he gave directions, but according to police reports, he wrote off her reaction as a natural response to “his [Cera’s] size, bald head, and physical stature.”
Matt and Angie were aware of Morgan’s fascination with Slenderman but chalked it up to the same adolescent wonder they had experienced paging through Stephen King novels. “Except I didn’t believe that Pennywise was real,” Angie later admitted, “and we didn’t know that Morgan believed that Slenderman was real.”
Unlike Gen-Xers, who had grown up fighting with their parents about whether they were allowed to watch MTV—and who now watched, with mounting discomfort, as their own children disappeared into iPads and other new devices—the Geysers viewed Morgan’s passion for Creepypasta as an extension of her creativity. Morgan loved to read. Throughout history, kids have gravitated toward stories that corroborated their view of the world as magical, unpredictable, and frightening. As Bruno Bettelheim, one of the great child psychologists of the twentieth century, wrote in his critically acclaimed book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, “This is how the young child experiences the world: either as entirely blissful or as an unmitigated hell.”
For other readers of Creepypasta, the site was benign, no more dangerous than ghost stories, video games, or rock albums that contained swear words. But for Morgan, a child gripped by hallucinations, it was something else: proof.
Later, people would have it backward, blaming the site for what was yet to come. But Morgan went online to nurture what was already inside of her. Every hallucination that had ever scared her, thrilled her, or comforted her became projected onto Slenderman, and interwoven with his mythos was Morgan’s desperate hope that Sev and Maggie were real, which meant that she was not insane.
In an effort to include Bella in her newest obsession, Morgan introduced her to creepypastas. She warned Bella not to tell her mom.
For reasons she couldn’t yet articulate, Morgan’s newest obsession felt different to Bella. It seemed like things were getting out of hand. She felt like Morgan was getting “weirder and weirder and scarier and scarier.”
Bella described Creepypasta as “pictures and rumors of people who go around killing people for fun, like Jeff the Killer, Slenderman, and more—they are on websites.” Stacie Leutner “did some research to show Payton [Bella] that this information was not true and that it was only fantasy,” sitting down with her at the computer to show Bella that she “couldn’t find anything real on it.”
Part of Bella wanted to believe Morgan, perhaps because the alternative, in her mind, was that Morgan was lying, which to Bella, who prized honesty, would have signaled the end of their friendship. As a result of her belief in Morgan’s belief, she started having nightmares. This made her mad at Morgan.
Morgan still felt connected to Bella and sensed her pulling away. She tested the waters between them by asking her, “Do you really hear the voices?”
Until then, Bella had pretended to like Star Trek and see Sev and the others because she wanted to be a good friend to Morgan. But maybe being a good friend meant trying to snap Morgan out of it, to try to shake her back into the person she used to be, before Anissa and Creepypasta came along.
“No,” Bella said. She had pretended to see and hear Morgan’s imaginary friends as a way to play with Morgan. She had thought it was a game. But the game wasn’t fun anymore.
Morgan felt betrayed. As Bella gained momentum, saying that she didn’t like Anissa or Slenderman and that she didn’t want Morgan to email her Creepypasta stuff anymore—especially not the ones with scary pictures of Slenderman, because those were mean, and one was so mean she had to delete it even from her trash because she never wanted to see it again—Morgan replied that she would keep sending the emails because Bella didn’t like it. According to police reports, Morgan went home and started emailing Bella “way too many pictures” of fictional horror characters from Creepypasta, like Masky (according to the Slenderman Wiki: a dangerous mental patient with schizophrenia who became “aggressive and animalistic” when he put on his mask), Hoodie (a hooded figure whose main claim to fame on Creepypasta was that he got pushed out a window and died but was maybe still alive), and Ben Drowned (a sadistic entity, said to haunt the Legend of Zelda gaming cartridge).
Morgan warned that if Bella stared at the pictures “for more than two seconds,” she would go insane.
She told her that Jeff the Killer was going to crawl through her window and kill her.
Bella doubted it, but she started sleeping in her bed facing away from her window, which she kept locked with the blinds closed, just in case. She and Morgan stayed friends, but things were tense between them.
So Morgan turned to Anissa. She feared rejection but told Anissa about the voices anyway.
Anissa believed her, so Morgan confided in her about the tall shadow-creature It, who looked a lot like Slenderman. She worried that Anissa would betray her, too, like Bella had, by not believing her or getting scared.
But Anissa wasn’t scared.
She wondered if they should run away together to Slender Mansion and offer to be Slenderman’s proxies, instead of just waiting for him to kill them. Together she and Morgan stared out the bus window, searching the passing trees for signs that he was following them. Between his height, his narrow frame, and the killer tendrils that unfurled from his back like live roots, he could easily be mistaken for a tangle of branches.
At first, Morgan was better at spotting him.
But over time, Anissa saw him, too.