“ALL RISE.”
I stood up in the court of Judge Michael Bohren, who entered the courtroom wearing a red bow tie and with a neatly trimmed white mustache. He sat down solemnly.
Then-twelve-year-old Morgan Geyser was led through the courtroom doors, handcuffs connecting her wrists and ankles, attached to a chain belt. She shuffled into the courtroom wearing the smallest prison jumpsuit possible. Two security guards twice her size led her to her defense lawyers. Her father, sitting a couple seats away from me, burst into tears and put his face in the palm of his hands.
Geyser was part of a terrifying incident that happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin—a midsize city outside of Milwaukee, where my parents currently live—while I was working on this book. This incident took place just a couple miles down the road from their house. There, in an area of forest near a city park, two young girls’ belief in a monster resulted in tragedy. Geyser and her friend Anissa Weier had come to believe that a mythical entity, Slender Man (sometimes written as Slenderman), was a real being and that if they gave him the blood sacrifice of one of their classmates, a twelve-year-old girl later identified as Payton Leutner, they would be granted access to Slender Man’s kingdom in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, about two hundred miles away. There they would become Slender Man’s “proxies” and live with the mythical entity, who is depicted as being tall and slim, having a gray head with no face, wearing a sharp black suit, and sometimes having tentacles protruding from his back. Slender Man was said to kidnap and kill children.
Geyser and Weier had had a sleepover party the night before, with their victim. They went roller-skating. The next morning, they went to play at David’s Park. The girls originally planned to stab their friend in the park bathroom, letting her blood flow through a floor drain. They entered the bathroom. Geyser had a five-inch knife tucked in her waistband. But she had a “nervous breakdown,” according to a report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the girls abandoned the plan for the moment.
Next, the girls went to a thick forest bordering a quiet suburban backstreet on Rivera Drive, where Geyser and Weier created the ruse of playing hide-and-seek. Weier and Geyser jumped on their victim and stabbed her with a knife nineteen times. The victim cried out, “I hate you. I trusted you.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:
Weier told the victim to lie down and be quiet—she would lose blood more slowly. Weier told police she gave the victim those instructions so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself, and so she would die. Weier told the victim they were going to get her help; but they never actually planned on doing so. They hoped she would die, and they would see [Slender Man] and know he existed.
A couple days after the incident, I retraced the crime scene. Walking along Rivera Drive, I ran into three young girls, quietly carrying messages they had written on signboard. I approached them, and they told me they were classmates of the victim and were showing their support. YOU AND YOUR FAMILY ARE IN OUR HEARTS! STAY STRONG, BELLA! read one. The girls explained that Bella was the victim’s nickname. OUR HEARTS GO OUT TO THE VICTIM, read another sign, shaped like a Valentine heart. A pink teddy bear was placed next to it.
Geyser and Weier had left Bella behind to die and began to walk to Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, where they thought Slender Man would greet them. They packed granola bars, bottled water, and a change of clothes for the two-hundred-mile trek. Geyser packed a picture of her family.
Bella did not die. She managed to channel enough strength to crawl out of the forest to Big Bend Road, right by the spot where the girls I encountered were placing their signs. A horrified bicyclist found her, collapsed near the road. One of the girl’s messages read, A MILLIMETER AWAY, AND YOU’RE STILL HERE TODAY, referring to the doctor’s discovery that one of the nineteen knife wounds had penetrated just millimeters from Bella’s heart.
Police quickly picked up Geyser and Weier. Because of the severity of the crimes, the case was brought to adult court instead of juvenile court, and the two girls were held on $500,000 bail.
The court appearance was a short one. Judge Bohren ordered Geyser be tested for “competency” to determine how the case would proceed. Weier’s defense asked for more time to evaluate the case. Afterward, the lawyers were surrounded by a throng of media in the courtroom hallway.
Slender Man is not an old myth. He can be traced back to an online photo contest from 2009 that quickly became a viral hit. Soon people were featuring him in their own online fiction stories, short homemade movies, and video games.
But, then again, Slender Man is older than 2009. He is just a new version of an old, powerful archetype: the Bogeyman, that faceless, frightening creeper who has lived on in children’s imaginations and nightmares for generations. With the gullibility and viral nature of the Internet, this Bogeyman soon took on a life of his own. The lines between fact and fiction, as they often do with paranormal subjects, began to blur. Some people began to believe Slender Man was real.
In The Mothman Prophecies, John Keel talks of the theory that creatures such as Mothman or ghosts might be an actual manifestation of the human mind. He writes about an alleged haunted house in Greenwich Village. The home is the former residence of pulp writer Walter Gibson, and after he vacated the house, people began to report seeing an apparition “dressed in a long, black cape and a wide brimmed slouch hat, pulled down over its eyes as it slinks room to room,” Keel reports. That description matches Gibson’s most wellknown creation, the mysterious pulp detective known as the Shadow.
“The Tibetans believed that advanced human minds can manipulate invisible energies into visible forms called Tulpas, or thought projections,” Keel writes. “Did Walter Gibson’s intense concentration on his Shadow novels inadvertently bring a Tulpa into existence?”
Aaron Sagers, of ParanormalPopCulture.com, speculates on this as well, specifically in relation to the Slender Man incidents. He says that in the paranormal community, there is an increasing amount of people who believe Slender Man is real in some form. Some think he has always been around and is just starting to get notice now, Sagers outlines in an article for the Huffington Post: “The other theory is that we created Slender Man by thinking about him. Not entirely unlike Tibetan Tulpas, Slender Man may be a so-called ‘thoughtform.’ Through people directing energy to him, crafting stories, fleshing out characteristics, and talking about him at length, the theory is we may have collectively given life to the monster and allowed him to enter our realm.”
Sagers goes on to point to a case in the 1970s where members of a group called the Toronto Society for Psychical Research claimed to have materialized a spirit they created entirely with their minds—a seventeenth-century nobleman named Philip Aylesford. The group of eight created a fake bio on the ghost and communicated with him, they claimed, during a séance in which he communicated by knocking on the table.
After a court-ordered evaluation, psychologists determined that Morgan Geyser was incompetent to stand trial. They determined, “[Geyser] exhibited disturbing behavior and beliefs during their interview with her,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “squatting on her chair, laughing hysterically, constantly looking in corners. She had conversations with Voldemort, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and repeated her belief in Slender Man, unicorns, and her own ‘Vulcan mind control.’”
Evaluation of Geyser’s and Weier’s condition continued, and they returned to court in December 2014, with Judge Bohren hearing assessments from mental health experts. Geyser was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but despite this, the judge determined that both girls were competent to stand trial.
“The Slender Man kids who wish to be allowed into the castle in the woods metaphorically equals the Christians going on the Crusades because someone imagines they will be able to enter the gates of heaven if they kill certain people,” Loren Coleman told me when I asked him about the Slender Man case.
He said, “The existence of a fringe element in Fortean and unexplained studies, as well as vulnerable people ‘believing’ in the reality of some items that are not proven or outright creations and fiction is not common. But historically it does occur.”
In June 2014 the International Cryptozoology Museum received 501(c)(3) status, and Coleman’s visions for the museum continue to grow. That same month, the museum unveiled a new exhibit of artifacts donated by Tom Page, who bankrolled Bigfoot expeditions in California in the late 1960s and early ’70s. On display are footprint casts and documents relating to the expeditions. The centerpiece of the display is Page’s tranquilizer dart gun, which he hoped would take down Bigfoot.
When I asked Coleman what keeps him involved in the field, despite drama and struggles keeping his museum doors open, he had a simple answer: “The field of cryptozoology fills my life with passion, mysteries, and animals—three of my favorite things. Also, I absolutely learn something new every day, and feel more alive because of it.”
After I returned from my trip to Isabella, Jim Sherman had the recordings of the sounds we heard by our camp analyzed. The odd laughlike chattering, he said, is still an unknown. But he determined that the terrifying howls we had heard so close to camp were most likely from an unusually aggressive coyote. That is what had trapped a Bigfoot tracker and an investigative reporter in a Jeep overnight: a coyote.
As for the UFO, I had a unique and somewhat humbling experience after seeing it—I got to experience the flip side. I had been scrutinizing with a skeptical eye, and now it was turned on me, to my surprise, by friends and family. They gave me that special look that implied I was lying or that I had been out in the field too long and had gone crazy. Jim’s short video footage, not doing justice to the actual sight, did little to help. People told me what they thought I had seen: airplane lights trapped in fog, a star shining at a funny angle, or a drone out for a late-night cruise. I do not maintain that what I saw was an extraterrestrial craft, but none of those other explanations satisfy me.
“Welcome to the club, haha,” Jason McClellan of Open Minds Productions responded when I contacted him about the incident.
Dave Shealy’s next move with the Skunk Apes was to announce an expedition limited to five people with a price tag of $500 a head. The “exciting 2 day adventure,” scheduled for late 2014, was to include “his home cook meal of frog legs, fish, etc.” and a chance for “possible Skunk Ape sightings.”
Rev. Bob Larson continues to tour around the country, from airport hotel to airport hotel. He had more than twenty stops planned for the first half of 2015, including eight days in the Ukraine.
“Hello, my name is Noah, and these are my friends,” Leigh’s voice echoed across the stage of the Modjeska Theater, a historic venue on Milwaukee’s south side that had been abandoned for seven years and was starting to decay. A development group had recently purchased the theater and was beginning the huge task of removing moldy carpet and flaking paint to restore the Modjeska to its glory days. PIM had been invited in to investigate the claims the Modjeska had accumulated over the years—an apparition of a man wearing a top hat who appeared before concertgoers in one of the balconies, items levitating, unexplained noises.
After setting up equipment in the main theater at the Modjeska, as well as audio and video recorders spread throughout a smaller side theater on the second floor, the hallway, and the theater’s massive basement, PIM began its investigation. Nothing definitive was captured in that investigation or a second one the team conducted a month later. After my night with the team at the Modjeska, I parted ways with PIM.
“My reason for staying in this field that is filled with drama and way more questions than answers is twofold,” Leigh told me about his motivation to keep investigating. “Are all these claims made-up, hallucinated, misperceived, etc., or is there legitimacy to a small percent of them? As a scientist that searches for that truth of whether or not the paranormal exists, it is too strong for me to resist, at least right now.” PIM continues to book investigations around Milwaukee and beyond and made plans for a 2014 return road trip to investigate Sedamsville Rectory and Bobby Mackey’s Music World.
“I also want to help people who think they are experiencing the paranormal. There are very few groups that take the stance PIM does, and being a strong voice of reason in a sea of disinformation is something I take great pride in,” Leigh said.
Meanwhile, Jann had continued her interest in paranormal investigation without the team. She described herself as an “orphan,” tagging along with other investigators she had befriended. She joined TnT Paranormal Investigators, an Illinois team led by married couple Melissa and Tracey Tanner for an investigation at a business. For her birthday, she assembled a group of friends to investigate the Bird Cage Theatre, a haunted hot spot in Tombstone, Arizona.
She even returned to the site of her most intense investigating moment, Bobby Mackey’s Music World, in June 2014. She teamed up with NightShade Paranormal, a group based out of Ohio, to bring in paranormal expert David Rountree, author of Paranormal Technology: Understanding the Science of Ghost Hunting. Rountree gave a seminar at Wanda Kay’s Ghost Shop before joining the group for an investigation of the honky-tonk. This time, Jann told me, things were quiet.
“It was fun this time. That weird thing only happened with my stomach once,” she told me. But why would she return again and again to a place where she had such frightening experiences? That was an easy question to answer, she told me.
“To find some fucking answers.”