On May 31, 2014, two Wisconsin sixth-graders stabbed their friend 19 times in order to please Slender Man. Discover who he is and why they did it.
On June 10, 2009, a series of photos were posted to the online forum Something Awful. At first glance, they were innocent enough: black-and-white photographs of children playing in a park and walking down the street. Closer inspection, however, would reveal something far more sinister.
In the backgrounds of these photos stood a figure that looked eerily close to an adult human man. But the man had no face. And he seemed to have tentacle-like appendages where he should have had arms. He was called the Slender Man.
The photographs weren’t real, of course. They had been digitally altered for a competition on Something Awful. They were meant to be scary, but no one could have predicted just how much attention the photos would receive – or how real the horror of Slender Man would eventually prove to be.
Slender Man soon became a genuine internet phenomenon.
Eric Knudsen/Something AwfulOne of the original Slender Man photos posted to Something Awful.
The photos spread well beyond the Something Awful forum, and as they continued to be reposted across the internet, the story attached to them grew as well. Slender Man as a character was greatly expanded upon, with thousands of people working him into stories and contributing their own bits of lore. Web series like Marble Hornets, Everyman Hybrid, and Tribe Twelve became massive hits on YouTube, well before Slender Man would ever be given the Hollywood treatment.
In the burgeoning digital age, these stories blurred the lines between reality and fiction. Blog posts wrote about Slender Man as if he was real. The web series looked like any other YouTube video. It all lacked the polish of traditional storytelling media, just like The Blair Witch Project had done a decade earlier. The horror of it all came from the idea that it could be real, even if most people knew it was fiction.
But what if it wasn’t fiction?
This was the idea that eventually struck two young girls living in Wisconsin. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier had bonded over their shared love of internet horror, best known as creepypastas. They were particularly obsessed with Slender Man. They believed he was real. And they believed that if he wasn’t appeased, he would come for them and their families.
So, they devised a plan. They would offer Slender Man a sacrifice – Morgan Geyser’s best friend, Payton Leutner – by luring her into the woods and stabbing her.
And on May 31, 2014, the carried out this plan. Geyser and Weier stabbed Leutner 19 times and left her for dead. But by some miracle, Leutner survived, though both she – and the town of Waukesha – would never be the same.
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