And That's Why We Drink - E59 The Spirit of AOL and Granola Silly Putto

Episode Date: March 18, 2018

It’s episode 59, and boy have we got some stories for you. After discussing our latest adventures with the Ouija board, Em covers the Joshua Ward House in Salem, MA, where Em and Christine will one day have a summer home among the witches and warlocks. Meanwhile, Christine gets revenge on Em for their story of the Russian Sleep Experiment by discussing the legend of Slenderman and the ensuing Slenderman Stabbings of 2014. Come meet us at CrimeCon 2018 this May in Nashville, TN! Get a surprise gift from us when using promo code “ATWWD”! https://www.crimecon.com/Please consider supporting the companies that support us! CanvasPeople.com takes your favorite photo memories and turns them into beautiful artwork for you to enjoy every day. Use promo code DRINK for a free 11x14 canvas (just pay shipping). Text DRINK to 303030 for a FREE trial membership of Beach Body on Demand! Visit www.mylola.com and use promo code DRINK40 when you subscribe for 40% off your first order!

also are we go we're making sound not recording through the computer by accident we're making sound we're making waves and making moves making the world a better place well we're certainly trying that's debatable uh i'm drinking again oh are we recording yes all right yes you're drinking again christine had a box of wine in her hand and i got here and I was like oh I knew I knew that face she's back yep I'm back baby uh I drank a milkshake today did you yeah we're like back to our roots you know yeah back back to the basics bare bones bare bones basics um my boss actually bought me bare bones boss basics what did she went she went to lunch um with someone else from work and came back and brought me a milkshake very sweet what kind of milkshake chocolate from where it was

called north shore oh that sounds fancy it does sound like a wine actually doesn't it i don't know it came in a normal red coke cup so oh it looked like it was from a pier or something did it taste good oh it tasted so good uh i drank it in like five seconds and she was like what do you mean it's already gone and i was like oh yeah i forgot to tell you i'm a fucking monster whoops i inhaled it it was i was like that was a good shake she's like what do you mean was and i was like i mean it's in the trash i wanted to try it nope uh yeah so my whole 30 is over i uh i did it i'm so happy and proud of myself you guys it changed my life i'm not i know that it sounds cliche never slept so well my skin's never been

drier i mean drier my skin's never been smoother or less dry i lost 11 and a half pounds in 30 holy shit 11.5 i lost four inches around my waist. Wow. Yeah. Did you do all these, like, the measurements before just to see? Mm-hmm. Wow. So anyway, I'm really happy. I'm going to keep the diet, but, like, keep... The wine.

Add the wine back. Right. So... Yeah. Buy four inches. But, um... Or hello, four more. Fresh.

Oh. Inches. Anyway, tell me, what's... Why are you drinking this week? Oh, man. Why am I drinking? Oh, there's a bug in my wine. This is the problem. Oh, well, drink it. We are you drinking this week? Oh, man. Why am I drinking? Oh, there's a bug in my wine. This is the problem.

Oh, well, drink it. We know you love gnats. They don't scare you or anything. I'm sorry. Do gnats scare you? Remember that time I got a fly in my shake and you just told me to suck it up? I didn't tell you to suck it up. I told you not to kill him.

Did you just lick it out of the cup? No. Gross. Whole 30 changed you. Or did it not change me at all um why do i drink uh i good thing we're in the studio room and we have 800 wine glasses around us can you pass me one of those guys if you've ever looked at our website, our store, and that's where we drinked up bigcartel.com. In case you didn't know that hyperlink.

Shameless plug. We sell wine glasses, but we sell them out of our house, which means at all times, Christine has 700 of them literally sitting behind us when we record. So whenever Christine gets a fly in her wine glass, she just grabs another one. Hear them clinking? Oh, yeah. There they are. No, this one has dust in it. Oh, we'll just grabs another one hear them clinking oh yeah there they are no this one is dust in it oh we'll just pull another one of the

we're not kidding anyway i drink oh he's out god damn it guys it's okay i got him he's fine he's gonna live oh no he's dead i'm so i can see it on your finger you know what it is it's like one of those funerals at sea where you throw it over a viking funeral yep it's you have to shoot an arrow of fire onto it then that's step two that's phase two of this process okay guys this is what's happening this is why i'm drinking and it's for a good reason okay what is it i'm drinking because i have a very nice girlfriend who is willing to lose several hours of her life in honor of me oh because we all know i love a good marvel movie you do love a good marvel movie allison has not seen any marvel movie that i have not forced her to watch i think maybe she watched one or two in spurts in her life but didn't really

care about them sure now she's with me who and now she has to know everything about everything she has on her own advised that we as a couple watch every single marvel movie in the correct timeline order before infinity war comes out so we have the whole order. If you guys want, I can post it on Facebook so any other Marvel nuts can watch along with us. But we're about four movies in now. You got to do it because otherwise everyone's going to be like, Christine, when is M going to post it? All right. We've already watched the first Captain America, which is the first one. Like chronologically so.

It was made three years after Iron Man, but it is the first one. It was made three hours after Iron Man? Actually, yeah. The movie industry is really booming and it's getting kind of wild now you help make all the props in three hours can you imagine um but so we're watching all of them and tomorrow we are doing a double feature of iron man 2 and then thor 1 remember we're supposed to watch iron man 2 last night were we why i don't know you came over and you were mad that you was that's why we're watching a double feature i thought you and me i was like we weren't gonna watch it together no i'm just trying to stir drama in your relationship by all means but no we were supposed to watch iron man 2 last night and then someone that is

not me in this relationship of two people got too tired so now we're doing a double feature okay so it's all it's all good now just wanted to stir some things up you know let's stir things up in your relationship are you like still getting married or here's the thing pregnant oh no no no really we're not don't everyone stop getting in car crashes i uh am going wedding dress shopping this weekend for the first time with three of your mothers with all three moms i got the mom i got the stepmom i got the god mom wow there are all the moms are gonna be there and my little sister and i'm terrified i'm terrified why because you just lost 11 pounds and four inches but it's just scary to like walk and it's just scary well i'm never gonna wear a dress so a dress, so I feel bad for you. Thanks.

On your own. Thanks. Hey, I got to get a tux, though, for your wedding and my mother's wedding and my friend Ellen's wedding. You're going to look sharp. I certainly hope so. But I've also never had a tux tailored or like. Oof. So I don't know what to do.

Just Google it. All right. I don't know what to do either. I'm so nervous. Anyway, it's fine. I'll get over it. All right. I don't know what to do either. I'm so nervous. Anyway, it's fine. I'll get over it. We do. Speaking of things that make us nervous, we want to stab me.

We have some potentially exciting news that I don't want to jinx it. So we're not going to say it. But just maybe you can ascertain what we're trying to say in that. Just read between the verbal lines of what just might be on the surface of something people have asked for multiple times since the beginning of this podcast yes there is a horizon and you need to look at it and understand what it is without and i need to go buy anti-anxiety medication yes m needs a prescription i need wine and a new outfit and potentially stage fright might occur. That's the clues you get.

Stage fight will occur. Will occur. Will occur. I mean, if something were to happen that we aren't going to say out loud just yet. Yeah, knock on wood. So we're in the talks with a very reputable, helpful businessman. A man putting all our eggs in one basket god it's not a woman i mean can you imagine they can't work christine they have to push babies out of their

vagina vagina oh man someone tell me where babies come from good one guys a vagina someone put that on a shirt it's fine because it's like english isn't my first language so i don't know why isn't that on a shirt actually what was the thing that you just said downstairs that should have been on shirt i'm so red right now oh christine was trying to explain something to me and she got really dramatic really fast and she was like and i want someone to design this and put it on a shirt, please. She said, quote, I don't know if you can tell, but wine makes me exaggerate. What I said was this pork one makes me want to kill myself. I actually we've gotten a couple.

We've gotten a couple emails saying that people were interested in my phrase from like two episodes ago. Oh, what is it um i said i'm invested and i'm pissed i don't remember that but i love it me either but that should also be on a shirt so artistic people go crazy speaking of artistic people let's do another shout out for that coloring book because holy shit that's on my list oh katie christensen made us a fucking coloring book a good one i mean that made us one she made one for everyone if you're a uh patron and if you wanted to become one you can find us at patreon.com slash atwwd podcast hashtag shameless plug but yes don't type that into the url don't do that

um if you are a patron you can actually see a reaction video of christina and i opening up the book for the first time and freaking the fuck out for five minutes all the pages it's on amazon it's called down the hatch katie christensen she actually created the famous my favorite murder coloring book which was like a huge success success and she we were like so flattered and honored that she made one for us yeah we're shocked to the core shocked shocked and it's beautiful and it's like and i just love people are posting videos of them coloring it while drinking wine oh yeah people are posting their pictures left and right of like us soothing them by them coloring it's like our voices and then like half as hardly is all over the page and i'm like what's happening some people are listening to us while coloring ngo's butt

curtain and it's a very interesting time for 2018 i think very and it's like in my wildest dreams i could not have foreseen this reality never thought people would around the globe be coloring my dogs that i said yeah weird anyway thank you guys for all your coloring and it's great we love it and thank you katie for making that happen it's on amazon guys prime by the way you could have it tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow is tamra home don't do that everyone wants to know what you think about the new movie um well i worked on it that was my hair flip i have not seen it i will never see it so take it oh i will see it i'm actually seeing it with my roommate, Other Christine.

Other Christine is there when I'm not emotionally available for him. That's true. Like horror movies. That's true. Other Christine is there for Marvel movies and horror movies. And I've already told her about Strangers. Pray at night. No, thanks.

I'm not. I'm very excited because I actually trust it will be a good movie because The Strangers, as I've said, and as has become famously known, it's the only scary movie that actually really scared me when I was younger. Which is so interesting to me. So the fact that it, well, it's because it's like just a senseless act of violence. Like a home invasion type thing. Let's not talk about it.

Okay. I can't handle it. So that is, I know it's going to freak me out and I haven't been freaked out like that since I saw the first one when I was like 15. Can we do like a live stream of you watching the video for Patreon? We could, but that's going to require filming in a movie theater. I mean, I know I was just kind of joking, but now I think. I mean, I'm thinking about it and it would be a wonderful idea.

Yeah, I want to see it. Maybe I can sit in the back row of the movie theater and live tweet while it's happening. Oh, that could be good. Christine will probably hate you. Yeah, so I can't do that, actually. Also, before I forget, this episode is dedicated to one of our patrons who has been a dedicated patron for five months at the $25 level. Holy moly. Her name is Liv.

Liv. Liv L. Love it. I live it. I live it a lot. I love it i live live it a lot i love a little bit a lot it sounds like she is like a magazine oh live l yeah actually that's right thanks i just decided she is a magazine and she donates to us yes a magazine donates thank you live i was thinking of live like live ty, who was in the first Strangers Who Died. Wait, Liv Tyler died?

Yeah, she was my character. Oh, but not the actress. Oh, no. Oh, I was really concerned. I'm not just going to like throw that rumor around. I thought she died. Liv, are you there? Are you alive?

Liv, is Tamara home? Is Liv home? Thank you for supporting us people named tamra have tweeted me and said i'm home they're like i'm home stop i don't fucking like it i love it's great thank you live thank you thank you thank you thank you live that's all i gotta say oh well then let's get some fucking mood lighting going. Oh, well... It is bright as the sun in here, Christine. Don't look at me like I'm your PA. And then I get up and do it anyway.

I was like, okay, chop, chop. Also, while Christine's getting the lights, she also built shelves into our studio to hold all of the fan the fan mail that we've gotten over time the gifts and uh today i came up here and the shelf is literally ripped out of the wall that got power drilled in and at first i was like oh that's definitely a ghost and then we saw the screws that christine used and they were like itty bitty so that's what came with it i don't know well then we can blame ikea i guess yeah but it literally got there were four power drilled screws there wasn't anything that heavy on it and it got like ripped out of the wall yes and then m blade walt our ghost here and i was like now he's gonna get fan mail this is

getting confusing you're not supposed to tell them the name of the ghost that lives here we already told them remember we said walt mckeo but then we found out his name's Walt McNeil. And how do we know that? Because we played Ouija board again. I hate myself. I've made such a devout promise to past me that I never would, and now you've gotten me to do it twice. like long excessive conversations and i know it was a real conversation too because christine was intentionally hiding information from me about things that she's experienced in the house alone and then asked questions to see if the right answers that was weird i was like what do you do sometimes what do you say sometimes when i'm home that was weird and it's and we i had no idea and it's spelled geo's name which is what sometimes

i hear when i'm home i hear somebody say geo and i think blaze and alexander are calling him and nobody's home and it spelled that out and i was like oh my god and then he said that he has a dog named gabe who was his best friend and gabe and geo have apparently played with each other before that's the creepy part that was wild he also said he's a vagabond yeah we were like what do you do for a living it was like vagabond and then we we were like, what do you do for a living? It was like vagabond. And then we were like, why do you live in this house? And he literally said, why not?

And that was kind of jolting to me. That was quite a sass, actually. He's like, why not? Oh, a couple of times he did sass us. He just stopped spelling things and would just go to yes or no if we were talking over him. Sometimes he would literally go stop. Yeah. Sorry.

He did talk of all the things, you know, if you were to pass away today and someone offered a Ouija board to talk to you, what would be the one thing you would say or like make sure people knew about you? And he spelt out on his own that he used to eat a lot of beans. And it's like, well, yeah, you were a vagabond. He said beans and gin. Yeah. Oh, this is a funny fucking ghost guys because every time we said what's your favorite food he spelt gin he wrote gin and then we were like what's your other favorite food and i think he spelt like whiskey

or something he said like liquor or something we were like that okay we'll just take that for what it is yep um yeah that was funny anyway so wall emblemed wall and i was like well wouldn't tear our furniture out of the wall yeah he would just be drinking gin i think that's my fault that the furniture fell out of the wall although he did say he knows a lot about christine which was pretty terrifying he yeah he that was weird we said what do you know about christine and he said a lot yeah actually yeah you said is there anything you or i said is there anything you know about me and he said a lot and i was like fuck he also died he drowned somehow

but i think he was implying that he got drunk and ended up in water and couldn't like get out maybe but he definitely said that he um like we asked how he died and it's spelt out lots of water that was creepy that was creepy it's great because we didn't know what it was saying and then you piece the letters together and you're like oh shit yeah it's just wild yeah anyway but he did say he likes everyone in this house so that's that was positive and then he also seemed very happy and he said he doesn't like listen to us record the podcast oh yeah we said do you listen to the podcast and he said no and then we were like and then we said like oh and then without asking he wrote how oh yeah and we were like oh yeah he's like a vagabond from the 1800s

of course he doesn't fucking know what a podcast yeah we said do you listen to podcasts he said no and we said why not and he said how and we were like oh fair good okay fair good point that was rude of us to assume but then i love how we were like so why do why are you did you live here no why are you here why not i why not whoa sorry anyway so that was interesting but he also traveled a lot um because i know there's someone out there that's now like ancestry.coming this right now you got it but so he's not actually from here he was born in alabama yeah and then he spent some time in georgia but he would come out here seasonally to make yolks like is that a thing yeah like for like bulls and oxen cows or something like that?

I mean, guys, this sounds so crazy, but we got all of this information and just sitting there asking random questions. He said the best place he ever went was Georgia. He said he loved Georgia. Oh, he did, didn't he? I think he lived and died in Alabama. Yeah, he said he was born in Alabama. And he said there was a lake there. And I think that's where he died. Yeah, he lived and died in alabama yeah he said he was born in alabama and he said there was a lake there and i think that's where he died yeah he said he died well the first time we ever

talked to him he said lots of water and then the second time we asked him again like how did you die and he just spelt lake and then we said oh yeah which lake and he's basically just wrote lake again like he didn't know yeah and i'm sure it's not the same like today as it was back then because he died in like what 1937 or something a while ago and he doesn't know. Yeah. And I'm sure it's not the same like today as it was back then. Because he died in like what 1937 or something. Yeah it was a while ago. And he doesn't know what. He also doesn't know when he was born. Oh yeah.

We asked like how old are you. And he just kind of gave a guesstimate of like 35 or something. It was like a range sort of. And we were like do you. What year were you born. And he like. It didn't go anywhere. We were like do you not know.

And he said no. Yeah. That was wild. So. So it sounds like Em had a good time, but that's just me. Anyway, Walt seems like a great guy and I'm really happy to have him around because it seems like he likes to be here. Until he rips out our shelves. He didn't do that. He didn't do it. Hopefully he's just drinking gin in the corner, not listening to our podcast. I assume that, I mean, if I were a ghost, that's what I would be doing. Okay, but hopefully Gabe

is like chilling with G right now. Remember that that time you saw a dog yeah but that was in the other apartment oh yeah thank god oh my god can you imagine if I saw now I just got like the chills what if what if he was there too no oh you don't think so don't do this I don't want to think about it okay let's just move on so this is a uh that was quick uh this is a story from the number one place that if we were to ever ever ever visit not to do a live show or anything like that but just like as and that's why we drink team if we could go anywhere oh gosh dream place salem oh salem yeah yep i mean i would yes okay so this is in salem i still haven't been did you know that when we lived in boston i never i went and it was i truly the best day of my life i remember when you went and i was just like i wish em and i were

friends so i could go too i remember telling you about salem and i was like i don't know if i would ever even go with like like i i would never go with this weird fucking girl i was like i didn't know if you were because i was talking about like witch stuff and because my stepmom's wicked so i was buying i went to a bunch of stores i remember asking you 8 000 questions and you were like do you i remember you i thought you were humoring me so i was like i don't know if you would want to go with me you went do you really want to know this and i was like because i was asking about like your ghost hunting and your grandpa and your grandma and i was like asking a million questions and then you were like do you really like care and i was like tell me the world i just well in my head i just remember being like i don't think we would go

together because i think i would like freak you out with how excited i was and now what a what a world has changed now you're i'm like when do we fucking go now we freak the world out with how excited we are okay so anyway this is salem massachusetts fuck yes um and it is the joshua ward house someone out there right now is screaming at excitement and that person is probably in salem oh my god i hear them i think i think i do guys stop yelling deborah can you quit you have a really nasally high-pitched scream. I hope a man was screaming. A man named Debra.

Okay, so Joshua Ward House is a very well-known haunted house in Salem. It's in the Town House Square, which is basically the hub of salem which i've been to look very like old school yes it looks exactly like you want it so it looks exactly like you want it to let's do a live show there guys anyone in salem make that happen anyone in boston area i would kill to just do a whole tour in boston can we just go there for a while actually let's move back okay bye okay but only for a little bit um okay only for a tour and then we'll be back when it gets cold again i'm coming back yeah we'll be there for the summers and come here for the winters i can get into that salem will be our vacation home i would kill to be

a person that could vacay in salem we will be that that will be our new goal okay vision board vision boarding it everyone salem beach house stop it don't you do that to me okay this house joshua ward house is in salem in townhouse square um it was built in the mid 1780s holy cannoli everything in that area is so old i love it love it um it was built for a retired sea captain just like i imagined it would be named joshua ward perfect um it was such a like pretty beautiful elegant house at that time that even george washington stayed there while visiting in 1789 which was like i don't know during his presidency i just love how back then presidents would just kind of like bop around and like vacation can you imagine if barack came into this house and was like i heard you have a great podcast studio let's just waltz up there

michelle and i are gonna spend a couple weeks here he's like get out the fine china i'd be like oh my god i'm there in five minutes staying on your air mattress for a few days. So anyway. God, I thought about it. It was a good time. What? In the world where that happens. That was a good time. Listen, if I could live in that world, I'd be there.

Maybe he'll come to our vacation home in Salem. Yeah. I mean, vision board. That's the only solution. So in the late 19th century, this house also became an upscale hotel. In honor of Washington being there, it became named the Washington Hotel. Go figure. Wow. In the 20th century, a commercial building was built on the yard in front of the house.

So like, it's now a hotel and now there's a building in front of it on the front yard. And in the 1970s, a developer decided that they wanted to tear down the actual mansion and build another building there. OK. And I guess that proposal was turned down because they knew that this house was going to somehow be like a historical landmark or maybe it already was. Or Washington said no. I don't know how it worked back then. Right. And the. Washington said no i don't know how it worked back then right and the washington said no and so that

ended up the original building the joshua ward house stayed but the building in front of it that got built on the front yard ended up getting torn down okay so that was a whole lot of money gone for nothing i think yeah that's kind of weird so i think so so fact, I guess, the building is now a bunch of business offices. The Joshua Ward building? Yes. Oh. And it's really haunted. Oh, yeah.

Wow. Can you imagine working there? Oh, no. I picture it as like a little real estate office or like a travel agency or something. It's like a bunch of offices rent out the space, I think. Because there's like a realty company in there there's like a like a book printing company and like a book publishing company in there um so on this land uh so not the actual house because it was built in the 1780s but a house used to stand there um on the same land before that house

was built before that house okay before the joshua ward house was built there was another house there earlier than the mid-1780s wow which as an american that's like four years i don't even know what you're talking about really old um what's four years the country oh old okay i understand what you're saying. So on the land, this was also where Sheriff George Corwin had his house in the 1680s. So 100 years before that. Whoa, whoa, whoa. So 1680s was just before the witch hunt. Oh, shit. Yeah.

Moment of silence. For real. Okay, so. Wikipedia.org. witch hunt oh shit yeah moment of silence for real okay so wikipedia wikipedia someone emailed and said that that was actually a great reference oh good for beginner wiccans just saying good to know so if you are a beginner wiccan go there how no wikipedia i'm sorry. Wikipedia. The book, Wikipedia. So. I trademarked wikihow.com. Oh. Trademark. Wikihow.

Copyright. Wikihow. So on this land, so Sheriff George Corwin, his house was here. Also a jail. Of course it was. And Sheriff Corwin was nicknamed the strangler oh god because he was involved in interrogating the suspected witches and warlocks during the salem witch trials and uh he was in charge of getting a plea out of them for innocent or guilty and i'm sure in the 1600s there wasn't a lot of

like humane treatment torture rules right yeah so the strangler just happened to be a fun nickname they threw around right he actually just like you know schmoozed and boozed with them but the strangler he had really great verbal abilities yep he um was known to can you believe it strangle oh um you don't say he executed 19 men and women oh wait by strangling no or that was just part of his torture thing i was just like a that's like a it's like a fun thing and then like torture du jour sure sure sure sure um torture du jour so sheriff corwin uh one of his favorite methods was to tie a person's neck to their ankles excuse me until blood came out of their nose what until like their eyes bulged and blood i don't understand so like it would just tighten it or it would just like he was like basically bending them over so their their ass

is in the air ass up neck tied at the ankles which by the way i can't fucking bend that way i can't even touch my own toes so i'm sorry genetics but i 23 me you are so wrong for my intense athleticism i can't even like barely look at my own knees so but they would like chain their neck on one end chain their ankle on the other and like get it tighter and tighter oh they would tighten it like gravity would like since you're upside down gravity would have blood rushing to your head makes me so upset until your eyes were bulging and blood was coming out of engorifice um so i don't know why they called him the strangler when that was like the choice i mean maybe he just left the chain around the neck maybe maybe or maybe he strangled afterwards maybe he was like a cat with a mouse and just like to like torture it first or maybe like strangle them to get them to like admit things you know maybe it's all bad either way

he fucking did something with their necks and it's terrible he it was also um another very common way of getting answers out of these suspected witches or warlocks um was they would be pressed no i don't like that shit i don't like that medieval torture shit so we'll talk about that in a second fabulous um i will say that sheriff george corwin i mean it's 2018 and he was around the 1680s so like he's dead but oh But, oh, shit. He didn't last as long as we thought. No, but no R.I.P. He didn't live Tyler, apparently. But so when he was buried, he actually had to be buried in his own basement because his family was afraid that his body would get dismembered by like a pissed off crowd for the shit that he did.

Whoa. So they were like, we got to hide this body. In his own house. So it doesn't get, you might call it mangled yeah whatever so apparently his grave uh has been moved to broad street cemetery although there's rumors that he's still buried under the ground of the joshua ward house oh so they think they just like like built on top of the house after it got demolished and pretended they moved the grave yeah or it just might be a rumor i mean it's just like one of two things happened and i don't know which one all right so that is the end of the history okay um here are there are three ghosts two of them are um alleged witches and or warlocks that probably perished in this house because this

is where he also did a lot of his torturing because he could like right since it was next to the jail he could bring people into his house and make like a little torture dungeon it was really fucked up like a criminal minds episode so wait so okay so but he lived there before the joshua like really a long time ago yeah in the 1680s and the house was built in the 1780s okay so this is like pre-joshua ward yes okay but now the joshua ward house is what sits on top of this land that's now all tainted with ghosts now it's still haunted okay so um the first ghost is the entity of a woman in black who has quote rather wild hair which is what everyone has i think in the morning um thought to be one of the victims killed during the trials

awful and her apparition apparently roams the hallways and you can hear her shriek in the middle of the night oh no that just gave me like neck chills the worst kind which are the creepiest the quote lady in black she is seen to have a distorted face long unkept hair and a tattered old-fashioned black dress no um former employees so like people who have worked in this house in the last several hundred years there's records of multiple former employees saying that they would be sitting alone in this building after hours and they would definitely feel like someone was with them or breathing over their shoulder or staring very intently into their face at whatever they were doing

staring into their face which i've felt before many times and it's not a good feeling i'd say it makes me think of your story and it gives me a lump in my throat just a thought um people that worked there say that they would look into the hallway like something would catch the corner of their eye and they would see a shadowy figure glide past and then they would shake it off as if it was just late and they were tired and were seeing things and then they would shake it off as if it was just late and they were tired and were seeing things and as they would look back towards their book or their computer she would be right there staring at them so it's basically a horror movie yes oh no many um visitors and employees have said that they feel sick as soon as they walk into the building and they can feel dread and fear wow um which i thought

like maybe oh fear and that they're afraid of the ghost or the ghost wants them to feel afraid of them but uh other people are saying that they didn't feel afraid of the ghost they felt like they could empathically feel the fear of the ghost fear or the the people before they turned into ghosts like fucked up they could they could feel the last emotions that they felt before they died. Right. So like when people feel the sadness of an energy of a place, it's like the fear. Yeah. Oh, how awful.

So part of this building is now a realty company. Hey, I called that earlier. Yeah. Wow. Good for me. Bravo. Do you want to call the rest of this story? Yeah.

No, you don't. So I'm feeling like. So one of the pictures that are. OK, so they were taking pictures for like a marketing campaign for the realty company. And they're taking pictures of all their employees. And they try to take a picture of this one girl. And she didn't even show up on the film. Instead, it was entirely blacked out and there was quote the lady in black standing in one of the hallways what do you mean it's blacked

out like i'll show you what you have the photo oh god google does okay what did you search joshua ward house lady in black photo okay let me see it pretty straightforward shit you're not i'm scared holy crap do you know what that looks like to me uh a woman in the 80s that that hair saved by the bell in a band it actually to me honestly looks like one of those German characters that they tell children is going to chop off your fingers if you don't follow the rules. It looks, she looks. Actually, can I show you? And also this, that was a black and white, but this was a, this is a color.

So that was actually the publicity picture. That's horrible. And I'm going to show you something called strove okay okay you mean the lady in black in the joshua ward house yeah i'm gonna show you strove and you tell me if this does or does not look like this is a character that my like my grandparents had all the children's books too all the way down to the hair and the fingers oh wow and see his nails so he would like he would like murder children fucking germany what is wrong with you guys so much i always used to hear these rumors about germany being like psychos with their kids here's a picture

what he did was this is in a children's book he would cut off your fingers do you see that photo that's like an actual drawing from the book i'm also very excited about that little kid's pose like who can balance on one tippy toe like that someone whose fingers are being chopped off with a garden shear i guess you can look any way you want when you're in a lot of pain but look up schlubel peter s-t-r-u-w-w-e-l and then peter uh my dad had all the books and he's like, they're great children's books. And I was like, four. And Germans are whackadoo.

I'm like, no wonder y'all have so many issues. I used to think that Krampus was a myth that like, I used to hear like, German parents tell this to their kids. And I was like, no one is that Looney Tunes. Oh, man. And then you just show me every, and then like those little elf

things that i told one time oh yeah but i'm like what the fuck is going on with germany germany that was a different that was iceland that's iceland also this one isn't is a good story about a hunter with the rabbit and then the rabbit comes with a gun and shoots the hunter okay but that is a topical story that was actually pita's children's book. It was actually a dentist and an elephant or something like that. Dentist and a lion. Anyway, point being, that ghost literally just brought back horrific child memories. That's how you know it's scary when a German is afraid. When a German is scared from their childhood, that's how you know you're really triggering. Okay, so Google that.

Google the fucking witch photo or whatever that's do a side by side um so that picture was taken yeah it was then in 1981 or this was actually a little before i guess in 1981 richard carlson bought it and turned it into a bunch of offices hence the realty business and a couple other things but so the photo was taken like on film though. So it wasn't even like in the eighties. Wow. Okay. Um,

so, but he does claim that not only like that picture is the most famous thing that's happened in the house in recent decades, but he does say that the burglar alarms would also go off. He said like 200 times in one year, what people had to wake up in the middle of the night to go to the building to turn off the alarms. I would just like let people break in at that point disable the fucking alarm whatever have whatever you want um another odd incident was i guess richard carlson the guy

that owned the building he was looking for um a form that he was being asked for by a customer and he couldn't find it. And then the storage closet opened by itself and the exact document floated out of the storage closet and landed in front of his feet. Walt, if you could do that for me, that would be great. Well, if you could do that with a hundred dollar bill, you just let me know. Well, I'm missing a hundred dollar bill actually. And also please stop tearing down the shelves and just help me find money. Oh, maybe he was helping you find money money maybe you thought it was behind the shelf i mean he's probably just looking for it he's like i've got my gin what more do you want so so back to that picture uh a lot of people do say that they think it's a woman from the

witch trials because anyone that sees it does say that she looks like the archetypal image of a witch which i know is a stereotype everyone but she looks a little stereotypical what do you think they were doing back then they were stereotyping people and then fucking murdering okay valid she looks like someone that they probably went after which is not fair right targeted so another thing about this photo that i keep like delaying to keep talking about how she looked and how scary it was um while the realtor was on the phone before taking this picture um his assistant happened to look down the hall and into another open room and saw that woman sitting in a chair and wearing a long gray dress and then went down to look at her

feet and her feet were not there you could see like her calves like fading away and then she went to double take and the woman was in the middle of fading away no like not not in a normal like oh you saw someone then you look and now it's gone and that was a ghost like saw her in the process of leaving so it's like a dial-up internet connection where it was like we're just actually it's just the spirit of aol america online i'm always crazy shut up rice pudding nine enough so another um entity is of sheriff corwin himself oh shit so uh they think that the more violent things that happen in the house are because of him so trash cans are found overturned books are pulled off the shelves in front of people rooms are found totally cluttered and

messy after they've just been cleaned like you can clean it close the door open the door and it's totally messy like you never cleaned it that would piss me off like an instant kind of thing not that would piss me off to no end that's a glitch in the matrix if i ever saw one for sure close the door open the door it's a totally different state so there are also cold spots go figure and an old man has been seen sitting in a rocking chair by a fireplace and then when you turn around him and the rocking chair are gone oh shit um so back in the 1980s people reported feeling choked by an unseen entity and often during the anniversary of the witch trials people will feel like they're being attacked or someone's trying to scratch them um candles are also taken out like the wax is taken out of the holder and bent into weird shapes what

so there was one situation where an employee had two candlesticks on the fireplace in her office and when she went to go unlock the office um like all the rooms that morning she knows that the candlesticks were turned upside down on the mantle oh god no no and the candles themselves the wax was actually on the floor it's like the the holders the candle holders are upside down on the mantle the wax is separated from the holder on the floor and one was bent into an s shape no for sheriff and the other had been bent into a boomerang shape and she was the one to close and open like close the night before and open so no one should have been in there since then and we all know the fucking burglar alarm works jesus so it's like someone is manipulating the candles what's s and boomerang shape

like it looked like it was in the shape of an s and the other was like in the shape of like a oh but it didn't like stand for anything i don't think i mean i'm just assuming the s did for sheriff or it was just fucking with the wax or it was just fucking with it and looked like a mess how creepy dude but so it was just like the fact it's not even that the wax was manipulated but it was literally clean taken off of the holder and the holders were upside down that's giving me like and then the wax was in another part of the room just the fact fact that they're like, oh, and we're not just going to take the wax. We're also going to flip these over so that you know it was done on purpose. So then the house.

So, OK, in Salem, the first paranormal investigative team is known as Spellbound. Love it. So there's an organization called Spellbound. And the Joshua Ward house was the site of one of their first paranormal investigations. Nice. So they actually started in that house before they grew and were able to look at other places and two of the investigators were checking out one of the um one of the rooms in the house they separated and while one was setting up equipment realized that a lot of time had passed without hearing from the other so she went to go look for robert who was her um co-worker and she couldn't find him anywhere and

went down to the basement and found him in a fetal position and you she could see handprints around his neck and you could tell he was trying to scream but something was holding his windpipe so he was you could tell he had been trying to scream for her but couldn't and she could see actual hand like dents in his, like something was holding him. Tell me he quit. Oh, that was his last investigation. It was? Yeah.

Okay. But she saw his neck. She saw the imprint of a hand on his neck. And then after she shook him and pulled him away from that part of the room, she could see immediate bruising that was... What was it? Massive bruising that was um what was it massive bruising that was consistent to violent strangling um he says that he felt something hit him in the back of the head and all of a sudden before he could like scream for her name for help he started getting

choked and he like was about to black out and then she walked downstairs i mean that's really scary that's like a level of like oh yeah true crime level that's not even ghosty that's like our stories combined yeah so and neither at the time because this was their first investigation and usually what you do as an investigator is you try to go into a house without any information because you don't want to be biased sure and so neither of them actually knew that one of his methods of torture was strangling like they didn't know his nickname was the strangler nothing i mean they couldn't kill him right like no those can't kill him right i don't know he was blacking out though but that's what i mean like it couldn't have like i don't know my thought is always like a ghost can't stab you but if they're able to throw a knife across the room into you you know i mean so do you think that happens like i don't think it goes reported because

how do you explain that right wow okay that really freaks me out maybe in like area 51 okay i don't know it just happens there okay i can live with that so the spellbound organization their founder named molly also had an encounter there where she actually is one of the pioneers in evps um electronic voice phenomenon but back in the day when she started it was all on analog tape not digital so it actually made for better quality and like you could you couldn't edit it because right right so what you were getting was the real deal like no one had played around with it and so one time she was alone in the house setting up a recording device and she played back the tape when she got home and underneath underneath it she could hear a bunch of growling and then like five minutes of silence like not you couldn't even hear like

ambient sounds of her walking around just heard silence so she thought the tape something had gone wrong and immediately as she went to go check the tape which was probably just like a convenience thing like a like interesting how that i don't know there was silence and when she went to go grab the tape she heard clear as day i just want to keep you huh and apparently like the voice was distinct clear no ambient sounds no growling nothing no background distortion it was just one of the clearest and most convincing examples of evp that she's ever found and that has ever been recorded and still exists what have you heard it i haven't you want to look for it uh if i find it i'll put someone else find it i'll put it right here if i find it

if i find it spooky shit right or not if we didn't find it so um okay so the last uh spirit um this is the second because the first one we think was an alleged witch who was a victim on the land right um and this is the other victim from the land his name was i'm gonna fuck it up g-i-l-e-s gilles giles yeah i mean i i know a giles okay we're gonna call him giles then um giles cory okay um he was a man that was falsely accused of being a warlock and he was tortured and killed wow it's interesting you don't really hear much about that like the male yeah side of that well most of them were women right and um i don't think i even realized that there were like men involved too well one of the fun things about salem especially when i went during halloween which is the only time you should really go if you want like a festivus for the rest of us they They, uh, they have reenactments at every single house of what happened to like the

most famous. Crap. Christine, it is a fucking whirlwind. Why am I not there right now? Why? How about this? How about one day instead of like a bar crawl,

we just go to Salem and have everyone do a witch trial crawl with us where we go to every reenactment and then have a moment of silence, of course, because we're doing this respectfully it's not about right but also we can like then go to stone shops and ghost shops and have a good time m i'm literally i could be a tour manager with ideas like that right now i want to go so badly anyone let me know what the best milkshake in salem is and i'll lose my fucking mind help us get there help us get to salem you can donate to our patreon at patreon.com slash atwwd podcast um tax deductible just kidding it's not just kidding um okay so giles cory he was falsely accused for being a warlock and uh he refused to plead guilty

or innocent because uh he was trying to take advantage of a legal tactic slash loophole known as standing mute where if you refuse to enter a plea your case cannot continue whoa so like plead the fifth to the extreme yeah okay and so even during his trial though like this is how ignorant these fucking people were during his trial the judges had to tie his hands behind him to prevent him from practicing witchcraft in the courtroom come on they really thought like they could blame i mean it's such a bullshit thing they can blame everything on witchcraft they really just felt like oh he could blink and we're dead yeah and or somebody like the only reason he wants to kill you is because you're trying to kill him if you were just fucking nice

like someone would testify on their behalf and they'd be like oh it's only because he used witchcraft to make him do it it's like yeah but that doesn't work he refused to plead because he thought he would stall his trial that way and kind of i mean it is smart but his thought was if he stalled the trial long enough he could wait out the witch hysteria oh god he was like if i just hold on a little longer maybe this will end they'll all be logical by the end so of course they didn't care what his opinion was and decided just guilty until proven guilty apparently so fucking awful they he was pressed no which is where they drag the prisoner out into the middle of nowhere and sorry francesca stop listening my little sister i don't want her to hear that okay go on if you're

under the age of like 18 stop listening okay tell your sister just press like the forward 15 button like five times okay go on um so they would walk out into the middle of nowhere they would have you dig your own grave throw you into the grave and then they would throw a board on top you where they began to place very heavy stones on your body until you were slowly crushed is the thought what is wrong with humans what's wrong with bad humans let's start there with sick humans sick in the fucking head so for a period of days heavy stones were slammed on top of his body what in days days because they do it slow enough to torture you oh so it's like you just feel like it's like you're always slightly uncomfortable and then it gets worse and worse can't breathe like more and more and more yes oh my god so for a period of days

they were slamming stones onto the board on top of him and they kept saying like how do you plead how do you plead and he wouldn't do anything but if he started like hurting and gasping for breath his tongue starts to get out of his mouth and they would smack it with a cane to keep it back in his mouth like if you're not going to say anything then keep your mouth closed what with a cane yeah they would like like what's wrong with it they would like whip his tongue what the fuck so then because he was uh gonna die a legend and he knew he was gonna die because he wasn't gonna do anything he wasn't gonna say guilty or innocent he kept all he would say is add more weight whoa and so corwin was getting really pissed and started finding heavier heavier rocks to throw on him harder and harder and right before his ribs eventually gave in and he died giles screamed damn you sheriff corwin i curse you in all of

salem whoa so whether or not he was a warlock he did use his last words to curse him and it kind of worked i don't think you have to be a warlock to maybe you just have to have the energy if a vision board fucking works i think a uh a curse by murder by death torture works too so um unexpectedly very soon after corwin died of a heart attack at age 30 30 which by the way yeah this whole time i thought he was like a fucking 57 year old man he's 30 years old millennial of the yeah 1600s he was like still at the age that people made fun of him for not really growing up and still living in his mom's basement. And like maybe his acne is not fully gone.

And like maybe thinking of starting a podcast. Oh, my God. What a loser. And so he died very unexpectedly. Wow, that's crazy. And he did not exhibit any signs of ill health before he died. I guess that proves my point about if ghosts can kill you, you know. There you go. about if ghosts can kill you you know there you go and so legend has it that giles not only cursed corwin but every salem sheriff since 1692 whoa so in the 70s after salem cahill after salem sheriff

cahill was forced to retire um he was forced to retire because he had a stroke all these it looks if you look through the whole line um i would say i don't i don't want to give an exact number but a very weird amount of sheriffs in salem since then all die or become creepily ill oh god unexpectedly for no reason at young ages that is bizarre like a weird amount that's bizarre um so sheriff cahill had a stroke heart attack and rare blood condition all at the same time what out of nowhere like woke up one day and this was all happening um about 300 years later in 1978 robert cahill will in office suffered a rare blood disease heart attack and stroke doctors 78 so we're like modern day now yeah about 300 years later holy so it's happening up until now up in like this was also happening in between that time wow but 300 years later it's still happening okay um so but his was interesting because it was a trifecta i didn't want to like do too many of these but there's oh there was a lot yeah um so he was forced to retire and they literally said you have to retire before he

kills you like before giles kills you because it's still like a thing in salem that like if you're a sheriff like look out you might die for no reason out of nowhere like you've got to know what you're signing up for yeah and so when all three of those things happen they're like you have to retire and they forced him to retire wow so he that that one uh sheriff cahill he currently lives in florida and notes that the sheriff before him contracted a serious blood ailment while in office he in turn had inherited the post from his father so his father was also a sheriff and he died of a heart attack while serving a sheriff holy and the previous sheriff before that suffered heart problems and so um one of the um one of the like millions of sheriffs it seems that's been interviewed about this

has said as far back as we can trace and the two men who have followed me have all had an awful lot of trouble um so so the sheriff himself said that a sheriff himself said that after having retired and two other sheriffs had taken his place and it also had heart problems so cahill believed that um he believed that when the sheriff's office was moved from salem to the new prison in middleton um it broke the curse in 1991 so ever since 1991 when they moved jails wow okay sheriffs are no longer being diagnosed with heart conditions or blood ailments wow okay since the move in 1991 no sheriffs have been sick or died unexpectedly so all of a sudden it just literally sent from 1691 or 1692 to 1991-92. Literally 300 years.

So what's even weirder is that it just stopped. Yeah. And what's weird is that they had 300 years to like move places and no one did. That's also weird, but I guess people are stubborn. But anyway, in 1711, this is the last thing I have to say, but just in case anyone was wondering. In 1711, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill clearing the names of the accused witches, including Giles and his wife, Martha. Fascinating.

And paid restitution for their imprisonment and deaths. Whoa. So. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm glad they at least eventually. So that's the stuff. Fessed up to something. I mean, God., whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm glad they at least eventually. So that's the stuff. Fessed up to something. I mean, God.

That's the stuff on that. And Jazz's poor wife, Martha. Poor Martha. Poor Martha. Martha, Martha, Martha. That's so sad. Okay. Wow.

That was a doozy. That might've been one of my favorites so far. I got to tell you. Yeah? Yeah. Well, that's because Salem my favorites so far, I gotta tell you. Yeah? Yeah. Well, that's because Salem is the fucking best. I am now. Salem is the ghost Canada of America.

Yep, that's what they call it. That's what they say. That's what the postcards all say. I am now highly invested in going there. Well, yeah. It's amazing. I just mad at myself that i lived in boston for a year and a half and never went i'd be mad too but i don't know who i would have gone

with like we weren't we literally weren't if we were friends we would have gone every weekend it was literally just a train ride most definitely i just like didn't literally just a train well i just remember you going and being like oh i wish i was able to go like imagine if you just said hey do you want to like go to salem again with me i would have been like fuck yeah i know but we just wouldn't have even had that conversation you know i know maybe then you would have been like do you listen to podcasts we could have started this so much longer ago if you just opened your mouth christine hey you were the one who knew about salem you should have told me i thought you i thought you would think i was weird. Things worked

out. It's fine. Let's not get hung up on the details. The past is the past. Que sera, sera. Alright. I'm buckled. Buckle, buckle, buckle. For a real ride. Now, this is a fun one.

Oh man, I love a good fun death. You see the glint in my eye i can't wait tell me so this is my revenge um for the creepypasta you did two episodes ago that really fucked with my head about the russian sleep experiment yeah but now i'm doing a creepypasta that is also a true crime because hell yeah. Because we can both have our own way. Because I can do whatever the fuck I want. This has been suggested over and over again. And I searched in our email for this term and it just came up so many times and on Twitter.

And I was like, okay, people want to hear this. So I don't have a list of everyone. I apologize. But it's a big one. Do you have any guesses yeah but i'm gonna be mad if it's the one that i wanted to do i know you probably will be just say it it's slender man yeah that's okay that's okay i'm very excited but it's fictional there's nothing it is more true crime for sure and there's nothing like actually like it's very verifiably fiction i know but i do love a good slender man story so hit me with

slender man it's fun it's fun times here we go okay slender man the slender man aka slender man one word so a lot of this info i got from an article on the something called the daily oh it was uh the new yorker has like a crime thing, crime segment, I guess, called the Daily Intelligencer. And they went deep, like pages and pages of information. Weird. Okay. They got like some details that I just could not even find anywhere else. Nice. So a lot of information I got from there.

Slenderman. I'm going to start got from there. Slenderman. I'm going to start with the legend of Slenderman. So as I said, Slenderman is a creepypasta and is arguably the most famous, most notorious creepypasta. And if you guys are like, what the fuck are you talking about noodles for? A creepypasta is like, okay, this is what Wikipedia, our good friend, tells us is the definition. Creepypastas are horror-related legends or images that have been copy and pasted around the internet. These internet entries are often brief, user-generated paranormal stories intended to scare readers. So it's like a fictional horror story that's meant to look like folklore

like look like it's real yeah it's supposed to use like old uh old pictures and old references and everything it's supposed to be as authentic as possible for a fake story so you can't really gauge the difference between real and fake and the notion like the idea is that you suspend your belief like it's it's like a really good horror movie where it doesn't look fake and cheesy like you're supposed to you understand rationally that it's not real but you're supposed to suspend your belief and play along sort of yeah and it's just like if you're really tired because i like to torture myself we are always well i like to torture myself and when i'm tired the way i make myself fall asleep as i read really fucked up stories but so i like weaned myself into that in college when i would

read creepypastas to fall asleep because it's like they're logically into your head they're logically not right but if you're tired enough like you can kind of get yourself to believe them and it actually makes you think like are you pretty sure this is a creepypasta or is this like an actual story that got posted on creepypasta to make you think it's not real, but it is? And the Internet's obviously really good for that because they I mean, you can people are very talented and can fake photos and articles and great writers. And it's just really amazing what people can come up with. Slender Man was created as a meme, believe it or not, by Eric Knudsen. And his pen name or whatever you want to call it, screen name, was Rice Pudding 9.

I'm just kidding. Oh, my God. I was wondering. It was Victor Surge. Oh, okay. I mean, not as cool as Rice Pudding, but it's fine. I bet he's always crazy. 4-4-4.

You know what? What were you like Pac-Sun dude or something? No, I was a really stupid one. I will preface it with it was one of those like generated ones online. Oh, come on. You didn't come up with your own? I tried to, but I was also like 11 so we're so was everyone i don't know i it was i'm gonna wait for you to drink lefty sponge because on the tennis team i was like my nickname on the tennis team had was lefty for several years

because i was the only left-handed one right and my coach like didn't care to know our real names and just knew i was the only lefty so just call me and i was obsessed with spongebob so i typed in lefty and spongebob and then at the time it would just like generate options for you sponge brilliant i even knew it was lame then and i was like whatever i don't care i just want to be able to instant message my friends i tried to come up with a cool one and it was pink crayon and then i was like it was because i was looking at a pink crayon guys deirdre's um screen name was literally spelt the right way tell me mountain dew no way and so now like when you think about in hindsight like mountain dew could have like bought that from her real quick or aim could have like just kicked her off wow but it was like literally just the soda mountain

dew spelled the right way pretty legit that means she was an og she was she sniffed out a instant messenger before even soda companies did good times imagine knowing something before coca-cola it's amazing wow wow good job deirdre i can't imagine that deirdre you are a champion so anyway slender man so eric knudsen aka victor surge aka dr pepper whatever the hell i don't know he was actually uh orbit you remember that shitty soda he was no oh that was not a gum well yes but it was also a soda maybe his name was like crystal pepsi or something remember that gum that like i mean not that gum that candy that was like literal liquid high fructose corn syrup what was all of them i know but it was just like gel and you would just like eat it

i used to buy a blockbuster i'm trying to remember god i sound like the most 90s my favorite one it wasn't baby bottle pop but it was basically baby bottle pop but it was paint brushes so you feel like you're graphing your tongue that one got me dip it and paint your tongue and i was only allowed to have it twice in my life and both times my mother was like that is too much sugar i think i think i had it maybe twice too and it was like a birthday or something i also to this day love and cannot find the green apple lollipops covered in caramel wait those are so good i don't have those anymore i could never the only time i ever ever had them was in fifth grade our math teacher would give them to us during quizzes our p.o box

is 1920 hillhurst avenue if you know where to find those i know they come in like a white packaging with like purple on them or something i'm like going off of my 10 year old memory rocks or whatever. I think they sell them in CVS. Whatever. I'll look. But also I remember now they came in a tube like a giant tube like toothpaste and it was just sugar gel like a syringe or something. No, it was like a tube and you would like squeeze out sugar on you.

It's I do remember that. But I also knew back then that was I think in a year and my friend would like bring it on the bus and like squeeze it onto people's feet it was disgusting no it's so gross anyway okay so slenderman anyway well i will say real quick i did love a good shock tart uh my brother swallowed a shock tart on the bus and ended up in the emergency room it's fine okay good uh i did like a good shock tart too actually i still really like a good shock tart i think i do as well as well as a a an apple a sour apple big league chew so good nailed it my brother's gonna use that as an excuse to come back on the show i just realized gross okay great move on move on move on so victor surge created slenderman in 2009 on a comedy

website called something awful so there was a contest being held and it was basically like post a photo that's like the creepiest photoshop or whatever that you can for comedy yeah it was sort of like one of those early like blogs forum websites everything was kind of covered and people would just go on and like find their niche got it um and he basically posted this like it was a thread it was a photoshop contest and users were challenged to edit oh edit like a normal photograph to appear paranormal so it's like a fun like contest right so he uh victor surge added two black and white images of groups of children that were real photos like old-timey black and white photos and then he added this image of this tall slender long-armed man to the images and posted them as part of the contest it was a man wearing um a black suit and he supplemented the submission of his photos with actual text supposedly from witnesses so

this is where the creepypasta like gotcha authenticity comes in and um the text described the abductions of the groups of children in the photos and uh named the character the slender man also did he was his face the situation it's in now what what's the situation like he doesn't have one yeah he's like faceless okay that was not mentioned in your he's wearing i'm getting there oh okay yeah no worries i know if he had a face currently. I have a full description of his full bodily love it. I love bodily things about him. You gotta know about

the bodily things. If you want to get real intimate with the story, you gotta know about the bodily things. Gotta get intimate with the bodily things. Let's get physical! Physical! If you're under the age of 18 please hit 15 over and over until the end of the entire series please just hit delete on your podcast app okay so slender man so he added this photo of this like tall creepy faceless man basically

into and google i mean if you google slender man you'll find thousands of photos but the original slender man photos do you have it uh super creepy i do um let me just read to you like the caption and then i'll show you the picture the quote under the first photograph read quote we didn't want to go we didn't want to kill them but its persistent Ugh. And then the quote under the second photograph read, One of two recovered photographs from the Sterling City Library blaze, notable for being taken the day on which 14 children vanished and for what is referred to as the slender man deformities cited as film defects by officials fire at library

occurred one week later actual photograph confiscated as evidence 1986 photographer photographer mary thomas missing since june 13th 1986 so here are the what did you search i searched original slender man photos okay and uh you're actually gonna find a lot because they've just been added to over time but they are so creepy here okay so here's a photograph. Uh-huh. And then if you look back here. Okay. Oh, I see him now. He's back there behind the playground. That's a creepy bitch. So he made it very subtle.

So it's creepy because it's like, wait. So it's like, look at all the similarities in each of these photos that this weird Slenderman thing is in the background. Yeah, he's in the background with these like creepy tentacle arms. And then it's like, oh, these children disappeared. News clipping, whatever, you know, and then... Weird. I mean, that is for sure.

Especially what year was this? 2009? Yeah. I literally, I don't even see him in this one. Maybe you can find him.

It's like a Where's Waldo. Where's Slenderman? Well, yeah, is that him in the back? Is that? Yeah, because he has no face. Oh, so that's the head? Oh, so creepy. We just saw a child with no face and seven feet tall is normal tree or something oh yeah a white tree

i don't know a birch tree okay that's fair listen i don't know but it's so creepy and so of course now there are just a bajillion like old photographs with creepy slender Man, like, like Photoshop and just so many horrible, horrible images. It's, it's honestly so creepy. Like the notion that he doesn't have a face. And also, well,

I mean, it's such a little thing. I shouldn't even really complain about it, but how did they, that must be like someone acting in the picture, and then they just kind of superimpose him in every picture, right? Because, like, there are definitely pictures way up close of someone kind of, like, with their head slept over to one side.

Like, that has to be a person. You could definitely create that on Photoshop. Gross. If you can draw a person, you can draw a creepy Slender Man figure. I guess so. I'm not very design oriented point being it's so fucking creepy and it they're very subtle the original photos so it looks like old-timey photos and then the captions were like oh these children disappeared and blah blah blah

so when that was posted it went viral um oh i want to like you mentioned the way he looks uh he's depicted as a thin unnaturally tall man with like like 10 feet tall like really tall with a featureless head so like no face and wearing a black suit and he is commonly featured stalkinging, or traumatizing children. Yes. And so this idea went like, this notion of Slenderman went viral. And the story kind of spread across multiple media, including literature, art, a video series that called him the operator. And now a horror film that comes out August 24th, 2018. 24th 2018 um so guess who wrote the screenplay

tell me you good me no good old victor surge himself oh really yeah he wrote good for him he deserves it hell yeah he got the the rights or the the company that bought the rights um bought them from him and he wrote the screenplay which is just great like good for him he clearly can you imagine like just joining some forum contest in 2009 and then yeah literally going like creepily viral and then some true crime shit happening because of it and like probably feeling really guilty but then also getting a screenplay out of it and then my space i don't know why i just said myspace grandma and then myspace shows up and myspace showed up at live journal slash extreme eyeliner stop saying extreme eyeliner that's not a real thing i didn't do that whoever's url was

extreme eyeliner though is like really getting a lot of hits these days okay um so his creepy tentacle arms he's abducting children he's just fucking tall and tilt his head and doesn't have a face like it's just nightmare fuel subsequent posters started expanding upon the character of slenderman they would add their own visual elements and contributions they would add like fake newspaper clippings and so it developed into this whole viral like thing bigger than itself um and he like supported it the whole time too he was like this is a cool storytelling medium like right we need to keep growing this cool horror phenomenon etc um so he has said knutson is that how you say that knutson yeah knutson has said um that his intention was to formulate something whose motivations can barely

be comprehended and which caused unease and terror in a general population so that's what did you just put socks on your hands they's that they've been on here for a while are you serious yeah holy shit my hands are cold do you need a blanket no i'm good now it's too late you always say it's too late like i fucking didn't stop you jumping off a building or something it's it's too late no i i had a lengthy socks on all the way up to my elbows this whole time. Well, I definitely missed that. Okay. So there's a woman, Professor Shira Chess at the University of Georgia, and she has a book called Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man. And she studied this phenomenon, basically.

And she basically related the phenomenon of Slenderman to ancient folklore about fairies. And she said, like fairies, Slenderman is otherworldly with motives that are often difficult to grasp. Like fairies, his appearance is vague and often shifts to reflect what the viewer wants or fears.

And like fairies, Slenderman calls the woods and wild places, his home and kidnaps children so it's just like it basically has this element of like traditional folklore that like draws people in right right right um so since it went originally viral it spawned numerous works of fan art cosplay um more creepypasta uh it basically became bigger than the author in his original story um is obviously now like a hollywood film um as i said he's mostly described as like tall with these creepy tentacle like arms and he kind of like has no face it's really fucking awful

um so a lot of scholars have also argued that even though he's fictional and people can say like this is a guy who invented it and it's clearly spawned from this one source um slenderman represents like a sort of digital folklore oh okay cool which is interesting and then the woman who wrote that book professor Professor Chess, she argues that Slenderman exemplifies the similarities between traditional folklore and then the open source of the internet. And that unlike traditional monsters like vampires and werewolves, the fact that Slenderman's mythos can be tracked to a specific date and time um offers like a really powerful insight into how folklore is formed so they can like literally track how a story becomes like urban legend folklore on the internet so it's just like really cool that it's all been kind of um first of its kind too yeah it really is and there was something they called i don't remember the

word but like it referred to like gutenberg's press like it someone said it slenderman was the ending of the age of the gap between when the printing press was invented and when the internet took over because it was like we're creating our own folklore without the need of print material which is just like so super cool Super cool. Yeah. And when you did the Russian sleep experiment, you mentioned like the things that make a creepypasta go viral. And so Chess identified three aspects of the Slender Man myth that kind of helped the story grow into what it is. kind of helped that help the story grow into what it is um collectivity which means it was created by a collective rather than one person variability built upon itself yeah and it like the best of

everybody's like creepy talents and things was able to be combined into one story variability meaning that the story changes depending on the teller which is like very folklore and then performance meaning that the storyteller's narrative changes to reflect the responses of the audience so it's able to like shift depending on what scares people the most what like affects people the most also this is off topic but i learned that the singular of graffiti is graffito oh because there was a picture on wikipedia and it was like a graffito of slenderman and i was like oh what that makes sense though because one spaghetti noodle is actually called a spaghetto it's just so funny it's not like funny how english doesn't even like it's like no we're not going to use that that rule because like when would you eat

one spaghetto though i mean when you throw it against the wall to see if it's done a spaghettio is a different story a spaghetto is a dangerous italian neighborhood spaghetto yeah it's gonna avoid that but you you went there i did it anyway the pun is there yeah so graffito is an individual graffiti got it anyway so the idea which i mentioned is that nearly all users understand that slenderman is not real but the idea is that you suspend disbelief in order to become more engrossed because you want it to scare you like you want to be a part of the story uh which adds a sense of authenticity and blurs the lines between legend and reality so it's similar to the i feel like the russian sleep experiment because it's like so creepy and like you get so invested emotionally and like

yeah it just feels real even though like logically you think maybe it didn't it's not real but you're able to like suspend disbelief and knutson himself has commented that many people despite understanding that slender man was created on the something awful forums still like to entertain the possibility that he might be real just for fun and that is my segue into the true crime element of the story what i was waiting for this whole time which is called the slender man stabbing the slender stabbing slender stabbing yikes guys but not by men i don't get it not by men why would it be by men slender i don't know slender stabbing and then i want to see by... I don't know. Slender woman stabbing? Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

What? I don't know. Okay. I'm so confused. Most of the time we both are, so... Not by men. Not by men. I don't get it.

I don't either. Maybe I'll get it when I edit and I'll feel stupid. Maybe I still won't. Okay. I think I just said words. I think it just came right out. It's enjoyable, I think, for everyone. I think everyone but us. Just... No, everyone liked it. Actually, no one. I think it just came right out. It's enjoyable, I think, for everyone. I think everyone but us.

Just, no, everyone liked it. Actually, no one. Everyone liked it. Just, I can tell. No. I think everyone's taking Advil altogether right now. Man, this show makes me need painkillers. That's so sad.

Okay. So this, the true crime element of my story takes place in waukesha wisconsin okay 2014 live journal is dead picture it up until last week when people found yours okay i need a sip of wine hold on don't you miss that no i i didn't forget it that's for sure it's ingrained into the darkest folds of my mind it all came rushing back okay so 2014 wisconsin a girl named morgan geyser and her best friend uh what this isn't english oh morgan and her best friend is not english morgan and more a girl named morgan geyser morgan's best friend is not english. Morgan and a girl named Morgan guys are Morgan's best friend. Is not English.

Oh yeah. You were back to your wine when you were doing your notes, huh? Here's what happened. I was born German parents in my first language. Also, uh, I have been sober for 30 days.

So all of a sudden the toxins are just rushing back to be their best selves. Listen, it's not that I missed it. It's just that it's ingrained in the darkest folds of my brain. I can't get rid of it. Okay. That's M.

That's not me, by the way. That's T. That's not Y. Oh, whatever. How many times? I am not even caught up to you. I just want to clarify. So there's a girl named Morgan and she has a best friend named Peyton.

Morgan and Peyton, they'd been best friends since the fourth grade. Both loved cats, Dress Up and Harry Potter. They talked on the phone every night. They're like your 12-year-old dream team. And, oh, by the way, they're 12. Oh, okay. So, it is your 12 year old dream team like lizzie mcguire and lalaine or whatever her name was lalaine that was not her name that was her real name in real life it was the actors her and i share a birthday by the way so her birthday's the day before mine

yes oh i'm gonna assume that morgan and peyton's screen names were i'm always crazy 444 and lefty sponge that's precious it's the dream team the 12 year old dream team 12 year old dream team uh lefty sponge okay i can't deal with that but it's fine we'll get it we'll get to it later i'll address it later with you uh a girl named morgan a girl named peyton bffs harry potter cats all the good stuff all the good stuff the whole shebang morgan's 12th birthday party sleepover was coming up i also had a 12th birthday party sleepover oh you had a 12th birthday lucky i don't know you know what we're doing that that office bit again aren't we we're on michael scott and you're the cameraman and you're just like i'm gonna keep

fucking rolling i just stare at you until you go i don't know what's happening and feel feel weird and but the thing is i never know and i always feel weird i just address it outwardly it's just fun to stare at you until you outwardly admit that you're like, what the fuck is happening? I think at all times, I'm like, what the fuck is going on? It's kind of how we roll through life. Yeah. Morgan's 12th birthday party sleepover is coming up. She invited Peyton as well as her newer friend, Anissa Wire.

So her sleepover rolls around morgan anissa and peyton spend the evening at skateland fun before being picked up by their dad had your typical sleepover they goofed around on their laptops the next morning uh they ate donuts and strawberries for breakfast they played dress up took photos and goofy outfits they invented a game where they crushed this is my favorite part they invented a game where they crushed granola into silly putty and threw it at the ceiling that just sounds like a mess did you know an individual silly putty is called a silly pateau oh you need to throw it up the wall to see if it's six and then you eat it children try eating silly putty and put granola in at first that helps yeah uh but so they but apparently they threw granola this is what i'm saying when i read that new

yorker article and i'm like what a weirdly specific thing to include in your article but okay i love it so they put granola in the silly putty threw it at the ceiling it got stuck they got worried how did we get it down sounds like my childhood uh then morgan asked her mom if they could go outside and play um and they set out for david's park which was a small grassy park nearby that had public restrooms that's bad it was like a small patch of grass nothing special on the way there peyton led the way and anissa and morgan lagged behind and that's when morgan pulled the left side of her jacket up and showed anissa the knife she had stolen from the kitchen. Ah, so she's looney tunes.

There it is. To use Em's phrase. There it is. When they got to the park, Anissa and Morgan lured Peyton into the bathroom. By the way, Peyton, apparently, her name since childhood was Bella. But in the New Yorker article, they called her Bella. In every other article, they called her bella and every other article they called her peyton and that's her given name so i'm not really sure which to use but i just went with peyton

because that's the like her given name anyway okay they lured peyton into the bathroom and attacked her morgan restrained her while anissa pushed bella's head against the brick wall but then Morgan fell apart, started pacing and singing to herself and Anissa sent Peyton outside to play while she comforted Morgan petting her like a cat. After stabbing her.

No, no, no. Peyton went outside to play. Okay. She sent Peyton away. The one they attacked, she sent away. Oh. So Peygan had time to like fucking run for her life if she wanted to yeah so she sent her out and then comforted morgan who had brought the knife and pet her like a cat i see well they did like cats didn't they they love cats they're all about the cats you know uh that comes back to believe it or not. So, it was Anissa's idea after this, once Morgan had calmed down, to go play hide and seek in the woods. Wait, I'm sorry.

Wait, so did they or did they not stab Peyton already? Or they just showed her the knife? They didn't show her the knife. They didn't show her the knife. Sorry, there's a lot happening. So, Morgan showed Anissa the knife while he walked ahead uh-huh they i see they were all three went to the park but payton was ahead of them and morgan showed anissa the knife got it then they lured payton into the bathroom to attack her hit her head

against the wall but then morgan who was with the knife and like freaked out freaked out and started singing to herself and like had a like a little breakdown so anissa the friend sent peyton outside and was like we'll be right out and then pet morgan until she calmed down got it and then was like why don't we go play hide and seek in the woods together and forget all this happened and you have to remember like yeah peyton could have left but again she's like out in the middle of nowhere with her friends and she's 12 like yeah maybe she thought it was just like a weird game or imaginary, you know, maybe it was like an accident that they hit her head or. Yeah.

Like, who knows? Who knows? So Anissa was like, why don't we go play hide and seek in the woods? Which if anyone ever tells you to do that, don't. Yeah. Okay. Not even you. Like, if you tell me to go play hide and seek in the woods

with you i'm still gonna say no i mean that's what i was planning for this weekend but if we if you don't want to it's like fine whatever oh i thought you were you know putting on a dress for three of your moms oh right in the woods actually i think you would rather play hide and seek rather fucking play hide and seek in a public bathroom at david's park than put a dress on in front of all three of my mothers but it's fine it's gonna happen i love it fine it's fine okay so they headed into the woods great start um morgan took the lead she later testified anissa and i took peyton into the forest and said that we were going to play hide and seek anissa said she couldn't do it and that i had to what happened was that morgan counted first anissa and peyton hid then anissa tried to tackle peyton but couldn't hold her down

and then morgan handed anissa the knife while they were struggling, and Anissa handed it back saying she was too squeamish. While they talked, Peyton... Oh, yeah, so she handed her the knife, said... She's like, I'm too squeamish, and handed it back. Then poor Peyton just, like, laid there, and they started discussing it. And Peyton started just, like like playing in the dirt with flowers

because she's like I don't know what the fuck my friends are like talking about they were just wrestling me with a knife yeah I don't know she was just out in the middle of the woods I don't know maybe she didn't see the knife or maybe not yeah who knows and she was 12 I just can't get that out of my head that's insane so she's she's just like, whatever. My friends are being nutsos and just like, and Morgan's her, like her best, best friend. So, uh, so Morgan took the knife back and said, well, I'm not going to do it until you tell me to. Uh, Anissa said, I can't do it. You know, where all the soft spots are. uh anissa said i can't do it you know where all the soft spots are and then and this is started to walk away when she had walked about five feet she turned and said or she stopped and said kitty now go ballistic go. Make sure she's down.

Okay. But also kitty. Are we going to just skip right over that? She's calling someone not named kitty. Kitty? A cat? They really do like the cat thing. No, she thinks she's a cat.

Told you it would come back. So ordering her cat, who's a human, to kill its best friend. Yeah. Okay. Because she said, I won't do it until you tell me to. Okay they're doing some weird role playing yeah yep yep so the friend they have a crush on each other were they dating i mean i don't know i think they were just chilled they were literally 12 i don't know cats got it yeah they were not humans i anissa as she was walking away heard morgan say don't be afraid i'm only a little kitty cat

then she pushed peyton over and stabbed her 19 times in her arms and legs but also punctured her stomach her liver her pancreas and barely missed a major artery near her heart and morgan later recalled it as quote stabby stab stab stab it didn't feel like anything it was like air uh wrong and she said peyton just screamed i hate you i trusted you the whole time oh no uh she tried so peyton tried to get up and walk but she could hardly walk because she had fucking been stabbed 19 times fair so anissa held on to her and helped her walk they took her deeper into the woods and told her to lie down morgan tried to dress peyton's wounds with a leaf okay a leaf and then they told her they were going to go get help for her and that she should stay put.

And then they fled. They went to the nearby Walmart and washed up in the bathroom at the Walmart, filled their water bottles with water, and then wandered around town for several hours, crying and singing with each other until the police found them sitting in the grass near an entrance to the interstate. Meanwhile, Peyton had managed to drag herself with her 19 stab wounds to a nearby road where she was discovered by a passing cyclist and taken to the hospital. And before the anesthesia kicked in, she was able to tell police what had happened and who had done it to her so they you know had found the two girls by the entrance to the highway and when they interrogated them uh they discovered that anissa and morgan had recently discovered the legend of slenderman on the internet and had started to believe in his existence so strongly

that they believed he was calling on them to kill someone to prove their loyalty to him and they thought if they murdered someone they would become his proxies prove his existence to all the doubters and prevent him from harming their families if they did as he said they would then become his servants and live in a mansion in the forest with him oh the dream it's like all you hope i'd kill you to live in a forest with a slender man slender man yep sure gross so that makes you wonder huh makes you do something so when they were pressed by adults, both of them ultimately acknowledged that they knew the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem wasn't that they didn't understand logically that Slenderman wasn't real.

Like Anissa told police that day, he he does not exist he's a work of fiction um but morgan the more troubled one had like a stronger attachment to the fantasy and had a really hard time extricating herself but even she admitted it was probably wrong and said i honestly don't know why we did this but at the same time it seemed like they did truly believe it because anissa when they went and attacked payton had actually so they had brought kind of like a bag of stuff so they brought some granola bars and water bottle water bottles did they put the granola with the silly putty i was just thinking that i I don't know. I think it was all stuck to the ceiling, to be honest. But Anissa had brought along some old family photos in her bag.

And she told police, we were probably going to be spending the rest of our lives with Slender. And I didn't want to forget my family. Then she started to cry and said, you know how distant family members and friends fade away with time wow wise words from a 12 year old who is going to live with slender man in the mansion in the woods uh she had also left two messages on her cell phone that were discovered later and they were goodbye messages written days before the stabbing uh they were sort of like a will and they bequeathed all her possessions to her parents and the other one was a goodbye letter as if it were a suicide it said this is my final wish to those who care do not grieve my absence but remember me for who i was i love and cherish

you all and wouldn't do you harm all right just i just don't know. Me neither. So, as they were wandering around, like, the Walmart and the town and, like, crying and singing and didn't know what to do with themselves, Morgan made a terrible confession to Anissa. She told Anissa that she had, quote, kind of, sorta made a side deal with slender and told her friend that in private telepathic conversations morgan promised slender that if they failed to go through with the murder then slender could have his way with their families oh shit so then anissa fell apart and said i want i want to call my mom i want to go home you this. I don't want to be a part of this. Well, finally, some sense. Yeah.

She's like, I regret that dramatic letter I put in my notes section of my iPhone. Oh, my God. So when police looked into Morgan and Anissa's home home life they found some interesting stuff um when they looked at morgan's household uh it seemed like she had gotten her kind of like gothic lifestyle from her parents one of her father's email usernames was i love evil well apparently so does your daughter and apparently you got that before all the soda companies did which is i'm saying the most impressive i love evil at least according to the daily mail uh his instagram handle was dead boy 420 okay wow there's that there's that

there it is and he also posted on that feed on Instagram, along with family pictures, brass knuckles tipped with skulls, a skull and crossbones birthday card he'd sent his wife. And then two months before the stabbing, he proudly posted a drawing Morgan had made of Slender Man. So a family man. You know, supportive. Doing what he can. He posted with the motto, only Mogoo which is what he called her draws slender man in crayon on a napkin when we are out to dinner i mean but to be fair like her parents really didn't think like oh her obsession with horror movies is gonna be like an issue fucking

murder yeah so i'm not saying you know he liked skulls and so she was right but it's just interesting to see like the connection of like she was so it was so normalized maybe or yeah or just in i mean she clearly had mental health issues of her own but it's just interesting to see like how the background played into her how her parents were like like because they were probably so accepting of like being interested in the dark and the sinister and all that and they just didn't know that there was actually an issue. Yeah. It would never have occurred to me.

It was beyond an interest. She was right. Yeah. And I think the mom even said like, I wasn't thrilled with her interest in this, but like she and her friends seemed like so excited and like passionate about it that we just let it be. I feel like that's me one day with my kids of like, I don't understand it. It's just a bunch of noise, but whatever.

I remember liking things. my parents didn't like. You sound like the Spongebob old lady who doesn't like chocolate. Chocolate? It's just a bunch of noise. Just a bunch of noise. That lady in the wheelchair. Oh god, it's awful. You're such a left sponge old lady.

Shut up. Look at that perfect cup. Holy crap. Perfect. To the brim. And look at that perfect cup. Holy crap. Perfect. To the brim. And that's that on that. And that's the end of everything. That's the beginning and the end.

The beginning and the end. The end of the beginning. The beginning of the end. Alpha Omega. Yes. So, when Morgan was talking to police about Slenderman, she told the police, We got our hopes up. He's everywhere.

He's almost... You mean he's not in the mansion in the forest? No, he's everywhere. He's all consuming. He's omnipotent. He's omniscient, omnipotent. He's Alpha Omega, and he is... The beginning of the end and the end of the beginning.

You know what? Yes yes i'm with this reminds me of second grade religion class we had to come up with metaphors of what god was oh my what did you say i think mine was alpha and omega all right that's what i call my biceps. Get the hell out of my house. Get out. Okay, so she told police we got our hopes up that he was real. He's everywhere. In Morgan's bedroom, they found normal 12-year-old girl things. They found Mad Libs.

They found some some books but they also found granola putty stuck to the ceiling a granola putto a granola silly putto and a graffito of slender man oh god they found 50 drawings referring explicitly to slender man scrawled with slogans in all capital letters like never alone and he still sees you do they have any drawings of slender man with a bunch of fucking cats well a lot no i don't maybe no because she was a cat oh right i forgot who was who in this that would have been a self-portrait i think but she had a cat that she apparently loved but apparently she also loved to watch videos of cats murdering small animals she also loved peyton i'm pretty sure so yeah right yeah and you know whoops who's to say um anyway so so they found these creepy drawings of Slender Man, like sketches and doodles,

and then it would say, like, never alone, and he's still watching or still sees you. Like Santa. Like a really, really fucked up Santa. And then a lot of them had the operator symbol, which is a circle covered by an X, which is supposed to either fend off Slenderman or draw him closer to you. It's just like one of those creepy symbolic things that's part of the folklore. They looked through her online presence and they found some like really disturbing posts.

On February 20th, 2014, she wrote, why did the baby cross the road? Because it was strapped to my bumper oh she just had like some really alarming upsetting content on the internet and in her room um and they found out that she had actually been tormenting payton who was terrified of slenderman uh and would send her links to creepypastas She would warn her that Slenderman was going to get her while she was sleeping. Like, she traumatized her as part of her newfound obsession with Slenderman. So, obviously, they were arrested and charged for this attack. It took... Morgan was in the... not Morgan.

Peyton was in the hospital for a while. Was scarred and, I i mean gouged like all across her body uh in 2017 anissa pleaded guilty to being a party to attempted second degree homicide and a jury found her not guilty by mental disease or defect and then morgan accepted a plea offer under which she would not go to trial and would be evaluated by psychiatrists who would determine how long she would end up in a mental hospital. And she later pleaded guilty and was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. She was actually diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is really rare for a 12-year-old. Wow.

Okay. diagnosed with schizophrenia which is really rare for a 12 year old wow okay um and they said she had could not understand the difference between right or wrong due to her mental health uh and then experts have also testified another really rare thing which is that anissa was suffering from what is known as shared delusional disorder where she was so influenced by morgan and the whole slenderman mythos that she was not able to understand what was real and what was fiction so she herself didn't have schizophrenia yeah well she didn't have schizophrenia but she didn't have the capacity to like understand understand that morgan's influence was like, was not accurate, not real, not good. Right. Um, she later said, I didn't want to do it, but I didn't want to leave Morgan all by herself out here because I thought it would be cool to prove the skeptics wrong. So she basically was like, well, I thought

maybe it was true. And Morgan essentially convinced her that like she had to do it. essentially convinced her that like she had to do it so uh morgan was sentenced to 25 years um in a mental institution which is the maximum sentence for for the crime she committed um and according to testimony from guards and other people uh she's frequently seen in conversation with people who aren't there uh she eats her meals on her knees on the floor with her back to the door and when someone come unexpected comes to see her she'll make claws with her hands like a cat she uh treats the ants in her jail cell as pets and she feeds them off her meal tray and will sometimes take them to the rec room to throw on other kids. She doesn't talk much to anybody else, including the other children. She made a dollhouse with like really specific details, including tiny cd player and cds and a closet

full of clothes um and she obviously can't have scissors so she like ripped them all into really specific little details um she apparently had a falling out with her father while she was in jail and uh she ripped him out of every family picture in her cell. And apparently they later found out the fight was about his disrespect for her imaginary friends. I see. You know how it goes. Oh, I know. So Peyton, she survived. She went back to school about like a year and a half later, I believe.

Can you imagine being 12? I mean, no. Obviously, nobody can imagine it. But her mother, she didn't appear in court to make a victim statement, but she wrote a letter. And she wrote that the trauma of the attack has defined our lives and that her daughter still fears for her life on a daily basis. She said for months Peyton slept with scissors under her pillow for protection,

and she still keeps her bedroom windows closed and locked out of fear. And she basically said, like, she'll never recover from this fully. It's going to, she's a changed girl, and it's going to affect her for the rest of her life. her life yeah i mean you literally can't ever have a best friend you can't trust anyone yeah she said she can't she won't let people close she can't she won't have friends that are close to her anymore which is so sad you're 12 i mean that's so yeah you're 12 and you have a legitimate reason to be afraid to make friends so sad um so morgan is still kind of unwilling to release slenderman and admit that slenderman is not real um she says it was weird i

felt no remorse i still have this idea that it was necessary um and apparently she's still unraveling further uh Uh, she, she was talking to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist said like, what would, would you kill if you were, if you were, I'm sorry. The psychiatrist basically said like,

if we were to release you, would you hurt somebody? Would you kill? And she said, I think I'd have to, if Slenderman asked her to. Okay. So she's like not over it so she's still there um peyton's mother says she'll struggle with the events of the day and the physical and emotional scars for the rest of her life um but is just happy that for now uh she's alive at least alive and that the two girls are you know are facing punishment for what they did but

12 years old man and and how old are they now um what year did that happen so they were 12 in 2014 or so they're 16 now they're about to turn 16 oh yeah that's younger than I thought. Yeah. That's just crazy. I don't know. It's so sad. Yeah, so. Wow. That's the story of the Slender Man stabbing and the Slender Man creepypasta and how fascinating, like, it bleeds into real life like that, you know? Yeah.

I'm sure there was an argument. I'm sure it, like, came up in court at some point of like um like wanting like influencing kids that much totally like a creepypasta like fucking up a kid and like oh yeah like i mean i bet victor surge or whatever his name was he must have felt so goddamn guilty he was like i literally just submitted a picture to a contest and then someone almost fucking died there was a lot of debate like a lot of moral debate like should there be like like parental control or writing or something and there were there were debates about like the morality of creating you know horror fiction and things like that and you know in the end she was diagnosed with schizophrenia it was just something she latched on to and it's not his fault you know

like he was creating fiction and i think hopefully by now kind of the guilt has been assuaged but like it's still fucking awful so that's the story of slenderman stabbing oh good i don't know how to bounce back from that and i when i the other creepy thing is when i searched slender man in our email to see like who had some like suggested it we had a lot of emails from people who had night or um sleep paralysis and things where they're like a tall slender man with no face was standing above me and oh my god listen the number of people who said slender man in like out of context of slender man i was like i don't like the thought of this at all no just creepy it seems to be just like one of those persisting horror themes oh yeah for sure

well that was a good one woof i don't know how to make this pleasant should we do a geoscope sure let me find a geoscope for y'all. Oh, you took your sock gloves off, I see. I did. I balled them up. I was getting sweaty. Okay. Baby G's so sweet. Such a sweet baby. Okay, here we go.

You know that you have a very fertile imagination, Scorpio, and today's aspects highlight this special quality. You might wish to channel your thoughts into an artistic endeavor like writing or painting. BBG. Let's note that an oil painting of Gio sits above your head. Oh, who could forget? You know it's there. Be sure to grab any opportunity to weave a fascinating tale for a child.

What a weird thing to say i have the mind of a child baby g tell me a story weave em a story oh i'll lend you my ears god damn it he's such a good boy be careful about letting your imagination run away with you when making judgments about people oh my he makes a lot of judgments about people i'll tell you what i know but they're all good when he's thinking about me they're most likely on the up and up oh because he's thinking of me because he's thinking of you baby and your childlike imagination i love him so much that was a good one he's such a good boy oh thanks for listening guys that was like whoa that took it out of me oh yeah that was just like i had listen to it. You told a story, too, you dumbass.

I know, I know. Okay. Now what do we do? You gotta tell the thing, because I need to drink my wine. All right. Well, if you haven't heard it before, here we go. You can find us on... Everyone, try saying it with me.

Let's see how well you know it. Okay. Oh, you too? I mean, you said everyone oh okay and bbg um you can find us at facebook twitter okay stop okay facebook twitter instagram at atwwd podcast you can also find our patreon at atwwd podcast please please please donate you don't realize what you're doing where you're bringing us to salem how big of a contribution you are you don't get it i know you don't get it because i didn't get it because you're dumb and you don't understand wow not from my mouth it just sounds like you're saying that no like i remember i

never understood how important donating was until i was on the other end of it it's it's just everyone it's literally how we create it's really you have no idea how much it helps it's like you guys are our boss and you're paying us to do it it's really incredible they're rolling our eyes like oh my god we get it anyway um you can also find us at our website and that's where we drink.com you can find our merch store at and that's why we drink. big cartel dot com. We have new merch. Yeah, we do. You can find us at our email. And that's where we drink at Gmail dot com, where you can send in your personal true crime and or paranormal stories.

We put out a new listeners episode every first of the month coming up. We are also going to Crime Con in May, May 4th to May 6th in Nashville. If you have not yet used our promo code and would like to, it is ATWWD. You better do it. You better do it. And you better see us. And both of our moms have committed to coming. Linda and Renata will be there.

They have their own fan base. A lot of people have said they're coming just for our moms. Alexander will be there too. Even my own mom has said they're coming. She's coming for you, not me. She's been like like i've heard people would fawn over me and that's what i'm here for i talked to my mom earlier and i'm like oh m's here and she's like well i'm meeting them soon and i can't wait and i was like okay uh yeah so my mom

i don't even know if she's 100 here for me i think she's just excited to ride the ego train there will be drinking there will be barring there will be barring, there will be hugging and just probably tears. Show the hell up. So if you can't make it to that, maybe you can make it to something, I don't know, in either April or May. A secret thing that's happening that might

happen. But if you were to be in the Los Angeles area around the April and or May time and you want to watch people sweat in public and you had maybe 20 or something to your name or something like that if you wanted to be around the la area between april and may you just might could do that if you could want maybe to do it though right i mean yeah okay if anyone yep just just maybe do something with that information what are you gonna do you're gonna do that you're gonna think about it you're gonna put it in your brain

um is there anything else i don't think so i think that's about it you can follow our personals uh xd and schieffer and the m schultz yeah you can uh and that's it that's it i think that's it that's the whole shebang that's the shebang and a half. We're going to have a hundred episodes and still don't know how to end these. That's the fun part of this. Guys, drinking wine is so fun. Why did I ever stop?

And we're back. And that's why we drink. Clink.