Bittersweet Infamy - #28 - Slenderman

Episode Date: October 3, 2021

Halloween special! Josie tells Taylor about the creepypasta that inspired an attempted murder. Plus: the killer clown outbreak of 2016.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, you tell the stories that live on in infamy, shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, the stories are always sweet. Trick or treat. Josie, where were you? Trick or treat. I was like in wrap shirt. I'm so sorry. You're excited? Okay. Okay. Trick or treat. Yes, that is right. It is I, the pumpkin king, Taylor Basso, here with my most ghastly ghoul friend, the corpse bride, Josie Mitchell. We are here to welcome you to trick or treat infamy.

Exactly. You nailed it. Our celebration of everything, creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky. Josie, how are you feeling? Spooky. I'm feeling spooky. Are you excited? I am excited. You know, Taylor, that I am a horror film scary movie screamer. We have experiences together. You are. You are. You scream at everything. I scream whenever, whenever it moves me. Yes, which is typically when things are scary. Well, I'm looking, this is good because I'm looking forward to some screams. I want to, I want the story that you tell me today. I want to scream so loudly that all of the smarties and coffee crisps, coffin crisps, fly out of my mouth and land on the sidewalk for some stranger to put razor blades in. You want to vomit Halloween candy? Is that what you're saying? You want to be so scared? You're just going to vomit everywhere?

Yeah, 100. Josie, what's your, do you have any childhood trick or treating memories, let's say? Yeah, my neighborhood was kind of like the trick or treat zone out of, you know, the neighboring neighborhoods, Bird Rock, and there was like a lot of haunted houses. And yeah, and I remember one time I was trick or treating with my brother and a friend and we went down. I forget what street it was, but there's this big hedge and we walked by the hedge and then, and it's big, like that's like two stories high, like it was a big hedge. Okay. And it didn't cover the house, but it separated the house from the one neighboring. So. As hedges will. Well, it could, it could separate to the sidewalk, right? You know what? You're right. I'm being an asshole for no reason. You're right. There's different kinds of hedges.

This is an American egg. I think maybe that's it. And I, so I want, we all walked past this and I looked over my shoulder and saw this like tall figure in a long black robe, like just a very like plain old Jane Halloween spooky, you know, ghost scream face, whatever. Uh-oh, that's the scariest kind. And it started walking slowly towards me. And I was probably like, I don't know, 10, 11, and I just like fucking booked it. It was like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Did you hold onto the candy? Did you hold onto the pillowcase? Oh, big time. Yeah. Yeah. Good, good woman.

I was collection at close. And I don't think my brother nor his friend saw it. And so I was just the, the psycho one. But also in my head, I was like, what fucking adult does that? That's terrifying. Where is the costume on Halloween? And like is creepy in a darkened hedge corner. It was, it was lurking on it. It was lurking. It was purposely lurking. It wasn't just like sitting there like chatting, having a beer. Right, right, right.

No, like it didn't. Pumpkins, yeah. Didn't break at all. Just Spooktown USA. Are you ready for some scary shit? Yeah. I'm scared. Oh my God, that was Josie's teeth chattering. Yeah, I did.

Falling out of my head. I'm so scared. Let's go back to a terrifying year, 2016. Oh, fuck yeah. That was spooky. Before we knew about COVID-19, we were dealing with an even more life-threatening pandemic, Killer Clowns. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Balloons. Do you remember? Out of grades.

Yeah, I remember. Okay. So were you scared of the Killer Clowns? Or do you, are you scared of clowns? Yes. I don't, I don't know that I'm scared of clowns. I just like them, I think. Yeah, there's, there's, I have a mix. I have a mix. There's a bit of pity there. There's a bit of like, why this path? Why? Yeah. That's the thing. Clowns are so widely disliked now, I feel, that they're like dolphins. They need a PR change.

That you don't get into clowning unless you're like full tilt into it, right? That's true. That's true. And there's all different types of clowns too. I mean, rodeo clown, creepy clown, children's kid party clown. Like there's a lot of layers. You're like. Crusty the clown. You know that scene in Best in Show where Christopher Guest is just like listing types of nut in his car? We're just listing clowns now. That's what I got off you. Yeah.

So 2016, people just as clowns were popping up all over America and even beyond wielding knives, chains, baseball bats, and chasing after innocent passers by to who knows what nefarious ends. Just to spook the fuck out of people. Rude. So it seems likely that the inspiration for not not the direct cause of but a likely inspiration for this wave of clownery was a very popular YouTube channel called DM Pranks in which pranksters would dress up as clowns to scare people racking up millions of views. Okay, okay. So they had cornered the market on this genre of clown videos, but they're not the ones who did this. It just seems likely that, you know, teach a man to fish. Okay. So the first piece of clown chaos in 2016 took place at an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina, where residents reported clowns luring kids into the woods with candy and cash and banging on apartment doors with chains. Yeah, not very fun.

What would they do with the kids once they had been lured or did they just attempt to? There was no, the kids didn't go in because of a fucking creepy clown shows up in the woods with candy. You bolt. You fuck off. Yeah. You say, Smart. Fuck you, Krusty.

And then you bolt. Smart kids. Greenville was the inflection point for the clown demic with copycat cases, copyclown cases. I'm sad that I didn't think of that in time. Clown cases subsequently popping up nationwide. You can find a map on Atlas Obscura documenting just some of the thousands of clown sightings that emerged. And it's, it's a freckled map of America, truly, like Pippi Longstocking. Oh shit. Whoa, dude. In Mesa County, Colorado, someone named clowny head smasher called it.

That was my rap name. You boy clowny. It's your boy clowny. That's right. Yeah. So clowny head smasher called into schools with threats resulting in them being closed. In Rankin County, Mississippi, a driver reported that a clown's sudden appearance had caused a car pileup and then the clown vanished. Oh. In Concord, California, a woman said that someone dressed as a clown tried to kidnap her one-year-old outside of Denny's. Oh no.

In Sterling Heights, Michigan, a clown ran a knife against a boy's arm causing a scar. Oh. In Detroit, a man robbed a Walgreens wearing a clown mask. I think that's just a bank robber with a clown mask. Or not a bank robber, but like a Walgreens. Yeah, I happened in a clown pandemic. Yeah, I hear it. I hear it. They'll blame the clowns. Give me all the fucking money. Eventually, these stories were picked up by two of the greatest megaphones for hysteria. Local news and social media.

Aw. Working in tandem. I have no doubt. Wonder Twin Powers activate. Form of hysteria. And this resulted in a moral panic around clowns. The World Clown Association had to release a statement disavowing the killer clowns. McDonald's polled mascot Ronald McDonald from advertisements and events citing heightened clown sensitivity in the current climate. Current clown mint? Nope. Bang on. That's what they call it in circus school. Retailers stopped selling clown costumes. They were banned from schools and vigilante clown hunting groups sprung up at local universities.

One Michigan State University clown hunter said, quote, We went out there to exchange some words and possibly write hooks with this little clown makeup wearing sissy face square. When we got there, a bunch of courageous MSU gentlemen had come to join us. Sissy's a gentleman. Goodness. Sissy's V. Gentleman the Agile. The Betty versus Joan, man. Like Godzilla versus Mothra. It's all happening. Oh, yeah. Big time. Meanwhile at Penn State, a 500 deep mob was captured on video attempting to track down a recently spotted clown. Said one person caught on video, we're the actual clowns now.

I love some self awareness. That's nice. That's real good. Tragically, this circus of calamity appears to have claimed a victim. A 16 year old boy in Reading, Pennsylvania was stabbed to death while wearing a clown mask. Specifics of the incident are unclear, but is speculated and this is just speculation as far as I'm aware that this young man may have joined in the clown craze and encountered somebody who didn't find it funny. Oh, so he was just trying to like, I don't know, spook on some people. Yeah, that's the theory. The theory is that this was a teenager doing teenager shit and when you jump out at someone dressed as a scary clown.

So while there were serious cases of threats and violence, the overwhelming majority of the cases seem to have been hoaxes. Police largely found no evidence of clowns when they showed up to collect information. It seems likely that the verifiable cases were the work of independent actors and teenage coffee cats and not some ruthless underground clown cabal hell-bent on world domination. Wasn't this connected to the film release of it? Let's find out. The adaptation of Stephen King's book? That's what I always... It came out in 2017, so this happened before it.

It was before, okay, okay. Yeah. Ooh, I bet the producers of it were like, yeah! Killer clowns! We went viral, bitches! God damn. Nonetheless, as we move into spooky season, we encourage our listeners to exercise an abundance of caution. If you're walking in the woods and see a pair of size 24-foot prints in the dirt behind you, run. And don't stab.

And don't stop. And my source on that was there's a delightful... Oh, I said don't stab people. Don't stop, bud. And don't stop. And don't stab people. Don't stop, don't stab, you know. Listen, it can be two things. We're capable of holding multiple ideas at once, folks. You're complicated people. I trust you. Yes, everyone contains multitudes.

Exactly. Don't stop, don't stab. My source for this video was a delightful YouTuber named IzzyZ. It's... IzzyZ, why is it IzzyZ? IzzyZ. And she's... IzzyZ.

She's like an Aussie chick in, I guess, her early 20s who always has like nuts makeup on. And she has all these like long furbies and Garfield toys. And she reports on these kind of... She does a lot of fandom stuff. She does a lot of like internet archaeology kind of stuff. And she does like weird stories like this one. So that's where I got all of this information. Oh, thank you IzzyZ.

Thank you IzzyZ. I'm ready to tell you my story, Taylor. Are you ready? I am ready. Let's go. Okay. You're 12 years old. Are you there? Yeah, I'm 12. Cool.

And your friend invites you to their house to celebrate their birthday. It's a sleepover. Okay. This friend is not super close, but y'all are going to Skateland that night. I love Skateland. You're gonna eat your face off with pizza. Love pizza. Skateland has the best pizza.

Exactly, right? And you're... Taylor, you're a pro skater. I know you're out there. You're just like... Oh, fucking, fucking, busting, fucking rails. That makes me sound like a co-op head. You're 12. It's different, right?

It means something different when you're 12. Exactly. And you go home to your buddy's house. There's three other friends there, three other buddies. Okay. The birthday buddy, you don't know them. Well, you've known them for about two years, so you're relatively close, but you also know that they don't really have a lot of friends.

So you're kind of... You're their buddy because you want them to make sure that they have friends, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. They all have friends like that. Yeah, you're kind of... Or are somebody's friend like that? You know?

Right, exactly. Yeah, if you don't have any friends like that, then... And these two other kids who are there, they're like relatively new friends of the birthday bud, and you can kind of tell they're maybe in a similar boat. Okay. Probably not a lot of other friends. Okay. You all go back to the birthday bud's house, and you think, because in past times with

sleepovers, that you're going to stay up all fucking night, and you're just going to look at the internet for hours upon hours upon hours. The sleep and sleepover is a suggestion. It's like an appendix of the word, nobody sleeps at a sleepover. It's not a hard and fast rule, right? You just jump over the sleep. Yeah. There you go.

I'm over it. Yeah. But these friends are not really into that. They're like, now we're kind of tired, we're going to go to bed. Okay. You're like, cool, cool. You go to bed. Okay.

You sleep well. The mom has donuts and strawberries for everyone to eat. That's good of her. Yeah. You're like, thank you. Thank you, Mrs. So-and-So. Your home is lovely, because I know you're a play kid. I fucking would.

100%. You've done a great job raising your son. Yeah. I know you'd sit there and be like, Mrs. So-and-So, did you always want to be a mom? That's deadly, but that's correct. The other kids would play in Legos. You're like, tell me more. Yeah.

Tell me more about your first love. Yeah. What were the Reagan years like? You know, getting to the bottom of it. Exactly. So you eat your donuts, you eat your strawberries. Then the birthday bud is like, we should go to the park. You're like, okay, let's go to the park.

And all of you are at the park and you all walk into the bathroom together. There's like a public washroom there. A little weird. A little weird, but you know. And we're holding each other's dicks, like what's going on? Sorry. No, it's just like, it's just a suggestion. I'm sorry, I've just never rolled into a public washroom with like five of my homies

and been like, do you want to set up camp here? That happens. It does, yes, yes. So there's the birthday bud and then two other weirdo friends. None of us really know each other that well, apparently. No, not super well. I mean, well enough that like you've known each other for over a year, which is like a lifetime when you're 12, right?

No, chew on, chew on. Yeah. So the birthday bud and another friend tell the third person, you should go to sleep. Try and put yourself to sleep. And this other friend is like, what? No. And then one of those friends hits that friend. And you're like, this is fucking weird.

Yeah, this sounds like a fucking Harmony Korean movie I'd like to leave. So you all leave the bathroom. And then it's suggested, let's play hide and seek. So you're like, okay, there's like a forest nearby. All right. Cool, cool, cool. You go and hide. A half hour goes by.

You're like, no one's found me. That's the worst. This is fucking weird. I don't like this. Your neighbor friend kind of vibe. So you live close by. So you just go home. You're like, I don't know what happened.

Yeah, yeah. Later, you hear that your birthday bud and another of those buds stabbed the third friend and left them there in the woods. That's ugly. Claiming that they would go and get help for this injured friend. I don't like that. No, I will tell you now, the injured friend does survive, sustains multiple stab wounds, but is found and is able to get out of the hospital in a week and they survive.

This is the true life story of the slender man stabbing. Yeah, I knew it. I knew this bitch. You knew it. I know you knew it. I figured it out. When we were all dicking around in the woods, I figured it out. But oh, that's.

Yeah. Okay. Take me there. I played with trying to make you the stabby and then I was like, no, I don't want that for Taylor. I'm like, I don't want that either. So you're just a fictional fourth. Yeah.

All right. I'm going to tell you the blow by blow of the actual incident and then we'll kind of unpack a little bit of slender man. Let's do it. It's the evening of May 30th, 2014. Morgan Geiser is holding her 12th birthday party and she has her two best friends in the whole wide world over and they go to skate land and have a sleepover. Morgan, the birthday girl.

She's a little bit of a weirdo in school. Okay. She doesn't have a whole bunch of friends, which means that these two buddies who she invites are like her buddies. Yeah. They're it. There's a reason that she's not having a big birthday party with the whole class and they're going to skate land.

There's a reason that it's a small group. We love an intimate birthday party. It's fine. It's way better anyway. Oh yeah. You get to be more attentive to the people around you. You're not doing your rounds like a bride on your wedding day. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Also bigger slices of cake. Way bigger. Less presents, more cake. Yeah. It's straight off. So her two buddies are Peyton Lutner, who is actually called Bella because there's another

Peyton in their class. I can't have two. She goes by Bella. Happily I never had to be Taylor B. I was surprised that you never were Taylor B. I was never Taylor B. Or Taylor's. No.

I was always the only Taylor in my grades. Always. I was always the only Josie. I tell a lie. There was a girl Taylor in like eighth grade. There was a girl Taylor for like a second. But yeah, we were just boy Taylor and girl Taylor. Like there was no confusing us.

So Peyton, they called Bella. She's been friends with Morgan since fourth grade. That's like two lifetimes, right? They're in sixth grade. They talk every day. They're super besties. They chill at school. And it's the same situation that I described.

Peyton knows that Morgan doesn't have a lot of friends that she's kind of bullied. And she feels like, you know what? I just want to make sure that Morgan has some friends. And I like hanging with her. So I'm going to, I'm going to chill with her. Yes. That's nice. That's empathy and kindness.

I respect that. Yeah. She, like you, is also a pretty good skater. She's kind of like ripping it up on her own. And Morgan and the other friend, Anissa, Anissa Weir, they're kind of like hanging back at Skateland. They're not super athletic. So they're like, what's going on?

She is also a bit of a loner at school and she's brand new to school. She's just transferred. This is Anissa. Anissa. Yeah. Okay. She transferred into the sixth grade and she kind of likes the same weird stuff that Morgan likes.

They have the same bus route. So that's how they initially met. And they hang out on the bus a lot. They talk about the books they read. They talk extensively about Harry Potter. And they're really into creepy pastas. They think they're like really, really dope. Right.

And so they just have a lot of like intersecting, you know, interests. Well, they're little edge lords. They're little like... Totally edge lords. Yeah. They're too young to be Goths, but they're Goths. You know what I mean? Exactly.

And Tim Burton is the perfect little space for that. Then and now. Oh, yeah. Like in my childhood and 2014 and now. I feel like Tim Burton is like... And now. Oh, yeah. You can buy the same shirt at Hot Topic that you could have when we were in high school.

Like straight up. Toots, my goats. Maybe some stripey fingerless gloves like arm warmers. Like fishnets under your jeans. Yeah. Like you have torn up jeans, but they're fishnets in there. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeans with the fishnets under. It's hot. Yeah. No, that's all good looks. And Anissa's parents are super stoked that she has a friend in Morgan and Morgan has these other friends because Anissa has a history of being bullied. A lot of trouble making friends. So her parents are like, yes, go have a sleepover.

Yes. Yes. So that night when they get home from skate land, they do go to bed early, which surprises Peyton because usually they kind of stay up all night. Right. Right. But before they do go to bed early, they do watch some of their weird internet stuff. Right.

Put on some salad fingers or whatever the fuck. And Peyton's like, okay, like I get it. I get the aesthetic. Okay. Moving around along. Yeah. I get it. You're brooding.

Okay. Maybe I should go to sleep. Fuck. I don't know. Morgan's mom, who is there the whole time, her name is Angie Geyser. She says they were chilling in Morgan's room most of the evening. They had eaten a lot of pizza. They were running up and down the stairs.

They were just kind of doing like kid stuff. Right. We are 12 and 11 here, remind me. They're all 12. They're all 12. Okay. They're all 12. Yeah.

Thank you. Morgan is, it's her birthday, but she's turned 12. So she's 12. There you go. Okay. So I was just a day behind. It's not my fault. So a little backstory on Morgan and Anissa.

They've known each other for like a school year or so and they're deep into creepy pasta. It's an internet site that has scary stories. And one of the scary stories is about this character named Slenderman and they've read some other creepy pastas and that they knew were true stories because they have the internet at their fingertips. So they looked up some of these stories and found news articles and they knew that it was real, but they didn't find anything on Slenderman and they were really interested in him and they wanted to prove that he was real.

Oh, this is terrifying. And Slenderman is this fictionalized character. He's extremely tall and he has these long, long limbs. He's always wearing like a black suit and he has no face, very like white, white skin with no, you know, facial features and he has these tentacles that come out from his back and that's what he uses to terrorize mainly children. But he usually appears in the woods. So he's this very tall, almost tree-shaped figure and in the woods he kind of like is

in the background almost unseen kind of lurking. He's often depicted in kind of in the background so you can't really see him very much. You can't see it, but there's an apartment complex right across the way from mine called the Edinburgh and there is a particular combination of a tall lamp post and some building part that if you happen to stand exactly where I stand to smoke in the back alley, it configures itself to look like Slenderman and it scares the shit out of me every time I go from Slenderman. Fuck. Okay, it's fine guys.

It's fine everyone. Okay, I thought of Slenderman. So Anissa and Morgan had learned a lot about Slenderman and one of the elements that they had learned about was this idea of his proxies, which are considered like servants or apprentices, even maybe puppets of his that. I watched Marble Hornets. I know the lore. Okay.

I don't know all of it. Okay. I don't know anything. What are you talking about? You know everything. I do know everything. I do know everything. So they've learned about this proxy situation and they had gotten interested in it and

they had learned through their research that in order to become a proxy, they needed to kill someone. Classic sacrifice situation. Classic. Classic. You know, making a bargain with a demonic entity, there's going to be blood at some point, right? Exactly.

You can't deny it. That's the whole point. Peyton was the only person that they could really think of as this sacrifice because it was the only person that they really hung out with on like this small intimate scenario. So that had been their plan for the last few months was that they were going to kill Peyton. Walked into an ambush this poor girl. They didn't want to do it that night. They originally had planned to do it in the evening, but Morgan reportedly has said she

wanted to give her one more morning. Big of her? Anissa reportedly said that they were pretty tired from skate land. They wanted to go to sleep. That feels more plausible to me. We wanted to kill her, but we were tuckered out, frankly, your honor. Real tuckered. We were pooped.

It was, whew. So the next morning, Angie Geiser serves the girls donuts and strawberries. What a woman, yep. And the girls are playing dress up at a certain point and Peyton is in the bathroom trying on a dress and Anissa and Morgan decide that it's going to be that morning. They're going to do it that morning. Oh, this is terrifying. And they want to take her to the park bathroom because they keep thinking about the drain

in the bathroom and how that'll be good for the blood. Oh, that's, ooh, that gave me chills. When Morgan asks her mom if they can go to the park and you guys are kind of hesitate, she doesn't let her, she doesn't let Morgan go to the park alone. She's too young, but she's with two other friends and it's Morgan's birthday. She's a little bit older, a little more responsible. So she lets them go and the park is like down the street. This is, I didn't say, this is in suburban Milwaukee in Wisconsin in Waukesha County.

So a relatively safe suburb, lots of parks around lots of forested area, you know, not a lot happening. So Angie Geiser lets them go. Morgan brings a five inch knife that she takes from the kitchen. It's just a kitchen knife, wrangled kitchen knife. Don't use a kitchen knife for a murder. Don't use a kitchen knife for a murder. Don't murder.

Don't stab. Don't stab. Don't. Stop. And don't stab. In the public bathroom at David's Park, which is close to Morgan's house, Anissa and Morgan ask Peyton to put herself to sleep because they had read online. I fucking hate that.

They had read online. That's when I realized, that's when I realized I was like, oh, I hate that. They had read online that it's easy to kill somebody when they're asleep or when they're out cold. There's something like really horrifying about this very sinister murder plot mixed with the childlike naivety of asking someone to put themselves to sleep. Exactly. Fucked up combination.

Yeah. Very weird. Yeah. And so when Peyton's like, well, I'm not tired and we're in a fucking bathroom, the park, no. Thank you. I do like Peyton. Yeah.

Right? Anissa strikes Peyton's head like right in the forehead. And so that her head hits the concrete wall. And it hurts, but there's no real damage. I think Peyton is probably in a little bit of shock right now. Yeah. Of course. So when Anissa and Morgan say, let's play hide and seek, she's like, okay.

What the fuck? What the fuck? Sure. Yeah. What? Yeah. In reports, she feels that she has absolutely no recourse. Right?

Like she's forced to go. Yeah. Obviously she's scared. Right. So they go outside to play hide and seek in this forested area that's near the park and near Morgan's house. Anissa and Peyton, they go hide together. Right.

And when they're hiding, Anissa sits on Peyton thinking that Morgan can more easily stab her this way. Peyton can't breathe because somebody's sitting on her. Morgan finds them and there's this back and forth between Anissa and Morgan about who's going to do it, who's going to take the knife and actually kill her. I think the knife actually physically passes hands a few times. I'm so stressed out right now. Finally, Morgan takes the knife and says, Anissa, just tell me when to do it.

Anissa hates screaming more than anything, as she says later. So she walks about five feet away from them. She turns around and says to Morgan, go ballistic. Fuck. Go crazy. Oh, fuck. Make sure she's down. Oh, fuck.

Morgan, who has the knife, whispers in Peyton's ear, don't be afraid. I'm a little kitty cat. What the fuck? Yeah. What the fuck? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So Morgan Geiser takes this five-inch-long blade and stabs her best friend of two years repeatedly.

There are 19 stab wounds. Two wounds were to major organs. One missed a major artery in her heart by less than a millimeter. Another went through her diaphragm, cutting into her liver and stomach. That's fucked. That's nuts that she survives this. It's wild. That's crazy.

Yeah. Morgan and Anissa, they tell her, stay still. Don't move. You'll bleed less if you just don't move. And they say, we're going to go get help. And they leave. They never had intention of getting help. So Peyton drags herself through the forest to a nearby trail where she's found by a cyclist,

which is kind of amazing because the trail has been blocked off. Like a cyclist, he had to kind of like move around this chained area to get onto this track anyway. Right, right. And he finds her. Thank God. And he immediately calls 911. And he asks her, who did this to you?

And she says, my best friend. That's so fucked. So fucked. Morgan and Anissa, when they left, they started on their planned journey to go to the Slender Mansion, which through their research, they knew was Slender Man lives Slender Mansion. You can't spell Slender Mansion without Slender Man. And they head out to to walk there. It's a Nicolay State Park.

It's like a four to five hour drive there, which means I think it's like a 65 hour walk. Yeah, that's that's crazy. There's no way two fucking 12 year olds are walking that. No, they stop along the way at a Walmart and refill their water bottles. They stop again at Stein Huffle's furniture store. This is such a tragedy because they really mean it. They really believe it. They really believe it.

They really believe it. Yeah. Oh, my heart breaks for them in whatever way. Not that it's OK to stab your friend so hard that you're hit and liver, but I mean stab your friend at all. But yeah. Yeah, don't stab. Don't stop.

Don't stab. Yeah. Moral of the story. I don't know. I have a hard time with these stories of murder where the murderer has clearly had some sort of like psychotic break or some sort of delusion that has taken over their life or something like that. Yeah.

I think ultimately we're all still responsible for what we do, but that's sad, right? Especially when you're 12. Especially when you're 12. There's like a double layer of that, I think. So Morgan and Anissa, they stop first at the Walmart and refill their water bottles and then they stop again at Stein Huffle's Furniture Store. And that's after walking 4.9 miles from where they were in the forest. Damn.

Yeah. That's not nothing. And they still have the knife that they used in their bag. They're carrying it with them. Oh, my God. Amateur hour. Sorry. I mean, it is, though.

They're 12. Yeah. It's amateur hour. This is why 12-year-olds shouldn't murder. Exactly. They are too tired to go on. Both of them have experienced some type of nervous breakdown at this point on their walk. Morgan has called out and to Slenderman and said, Slenderman, if you're here, help us.

We need you. Right. No response. Right. So they're sitting on the side of Interstate 94 when the police pull up and apprehend them. It's additionally tragic because Slenderman is not a benevolent figure, like, you know what I mean? Yeah.

It's their version of calling out to God, but if you've never watched a YouTube video or read a creepypasta or whatever about Slenderman, he's not inclined towards help. He's a bad guy. Yeah. So it's sad. They've brainwashed themselves or something. Both girls are apprehended and they're taken into the Waukesha County Police Department. And I think you're right.

Your instinct to kind of talk a little bit about Slenderman, let me describe what creepypasta is. So... Yeah. Creepypasta chronicles these scary stories that are shared on the internet, but there's a specific element to creepypasta and even the name. There's nothing to do with pasta, actually. It derives from this copy-paste culture of sharing a story where you highlight it, copy

it, paste it, and share it somewhere else. A proto-version of memes. Before we had memes, we were copying and pasting passages of text. And I think Slenderman would fall into kind of meme territory because it's a replicatable image and identity, but because meme is kind of even larger than just like the image with text on the top. For sure. The category of meme, we've had memes for centuries.

Yeah. Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears is a meme. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It comes from this copy-paste culture of storytelling, digital storytelling online. And then so the copy-paste became copy-pasta because all you do is add an A to the end

of... It's cute. ...paste, copy-pasta. And then there's scary stories, so this became creepypasta. Yeah. So that gives you a sense of kind of like what this is. And they were kind of shared loosely across the internet. Tumblr was a big thing.

There were a lot of like creepypasta stories on Tumblr. And then in like 2008, 2009, the creepypasta wiki was created. So that is more or less an archive of all these stories that can be shared and like coalesced into one space. That is what Morgan and Anissa had poured over, had read thoroughly, had researched entirely, was through the creepypasta wiki. Sometimes you will have like Slenderman, for example. We know when and how he was created.

He was created by a specific person at a specific place. But people have taken this idea of Slenderman and propagated it through a variety of means. There's YouTube videos. There's creepypastas. There's digitally manipulated images, whatever. Hand drawn images. A lot of fan art. Hand drawn images.

Like traditional art. Yeah. And so it's not like there's one creepypasta wiki is sort of a repository for these things. But for something like Slenderman, for them to be sitting there and researching all this lore, all this lore has been contributed in bits and bobs by various other internet creators and their takes on Slenderman, right? So it's not like a sole authorship that they're really immersing themselves in. The Slenderman lore, like they are part of the Slenderman lore now.

Oh, totally. You know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, big time. Yeah. It's the same principle as like the scary campfire story that you hear at camp and then you go to school and you hear somebody talk about it. But it's like they heard it through their cousin's girlfriend and it didn't like take

place in Northern Wisconsin. This took place in New Mexico and instead of the guy being, you know, a cop, he was a fireman. You know, all these like little changes that happen in a story. When it's orally passed down in a traditional oral sense, those things kind of accumulate and you're more aware maybe of like, oh, well, Sally from summer camp is from New Mexico. So that's why she told me the New Mexico story. But Josh, who I go to school with, no wonder it takes place in Wisconsin because that's

where we are. So I think the cues might be a little louder when it's just the oral. Also the proliferation of the digital, I think creates, it's just a huge global community that is, you know, it's not just the kids around the camp. It's exponential. It's exponential. You don't got to wait for them to carry it back to someone in the next town because, yeah.

Yeah. And so it's just like super, super fast. It's also, it's also written down. And so there's a little, like we're taught too that things written down in a Western tradition, information that's written down is more trustworthy too. Yeah. Which it isn't always. No.

Obviously. I mean, welcome to the internet. Right? Look at the world. Yeah. Yeah. So there are various characters that repeatedly show up in creepypasta. One is Jeff the killer, who is this young teenage kid from a suburb who defends his little

brother from bullies by beating them up and he realizes that he likes to hurt people. And he ends up burning his own eyelids off so he can't sleep. And he scars his face with this huge, like Joker-esque smile and wears his whole family. As you do. There's Ben Drowned, which is a story of a college kid named Matt, who bought a used version of the N64 game, Legend of Zelda, Majora's Mask. Right. The game had previously been owned by this little boy named Ben who had drowned.

And so the game is haunted by Ben and like there's images of drowning that runs throughout and Matt is subjected to this haunting through the video game. So Anissa and Morgan had actually, they came to creepypasta and read these like scary things. And the first thing that they kind of glommed onto was Jeff the killer, the young teenage boy who killed his family. And they did some research on him, quote unquote research, and they found news articles that said it was true. His name was Jeffrey Woods and this really happened and he's a serial killer.

And so they knew that this was true. So then had to be true. And so they deduced from that that most of the creepypasta stories most likely were true. So when they came to Slenderman, they were like, Okay, this guy is true. This has to be true. Right. Real talk. So an interesting thing too about creepypasta and just like internet proliferation of stories

is that unlike an oral tradition, they're time stamped and they are attributed to original creators. Right. So it's traceable. There is an original creator. It's traceable. Totally traceable. The original creator of Slenderman was this guy named Eric Knudson.

He used the name Victor Surge as his like online persona and he entered two images into a photoshop contest for this website called Something Awful. Right. Which was, I remember I would read Something Awful sometimes at the time. Yeah. So I was, I was kind of there on the ground floor Slenderman. Yeah. Maybe a slipster, but, you know, cute, I was there before it was big, I was there before

he was tall, man. Exactly. So this was in 2009. So Victor Surge or Eric Knudson devised these two images and one is of this like group of kids that are like playing on a playground. It's any old suburban playground in a park and in the far background is this tall figure that has like these tentacles that extend from its back and it's wearing a suit. It's like, it's like a gangly, like not normal proportioned human.

Yeah. No face. And no face. And no face. And no face. And the other image is it's like these group of kids that are coming out of the woods area. They're just kind of like all moving together and then the figure is kind of in the back as well.

They're both black and white. And unlike the other entries in the contest, Victor Surge or Eric Knudson included captions to the photos, which essentially kind of sent them into a short story situation rather than just an image to itself. So one of the captions that he shared was we didn't want to go. We didn't want to kill them, but it's persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time. Which is very much the kind of response that these two girls had to Slenderman, eh?

Totally. Yeah. Comfort and horror all at the same time. And so that's where Slenderman kind of starts. Not kind of like definitively starts. And Nisa would describe him to a detective. She said he's anywhere from six to 14 feet tall, which is a huge range because like a six foot person, that's not unusual.

No, I'm 5'9". A 16 foot person is very unusual. Yes. So. Super natural even, yes. Super natural. Yeah. And Nisa said he consistently wears a suit with a red tie.

His skin is white and he doesn't have a face. Yeah. At his own will, he can explode these tendrils from his back and like strangle his victims. And from what Creepypasta Wiki said, he targets children the most. So I was really scared knowing that Slender could easily kill my whole family in 30 seconds. That's an interrogation on the day that Peyton was stabbed. That's on the day of the incident. I've seen these interrogation tapes.

They are wild. Because they 100% bought in. Yeah. Totally. Like convinced. Convinced that this is true. All this is true. Totally.

And Nisa even says in throughout her interview, I wanted to prove I wasn't crazy that I wasn't seeing things because she reportedly had seen Slender Man twice before the stabbing and once after. And like two of them, she was on the bus and she like turned and like saw this creepy scary thing and she turned again and then it wasn't there anymore. The same thing happens to me when I'm out having a smoke and I look over at the Edinburgh. You know what I mean? And it's the lamppost.

It could just be something like that. Yeah. And like imagine to this tall, ungainly figure with all these tendrils. That's a tree. That's a tree in winter, you know? Or lamppost. Or... Equally likely, this clearly profoundly mentally ill person is having a hallucination.

And that could definitely be it too. Yeah. So Slender Man, he doesn't have this face and he's wearing this suit. He's a pretty like unambiguous figure, which I think makes him even scarier because you can kind of see him in all these different situations, but he could also... You can put all these types of fears and uncertainties onto him too because his motivations, even within the creepy pasta stories, is never super clear. It's always changeable.

There's a point where he's commonly seen as cruel and sadistic, manipulative, predatory, misanthropic demon who only comes to capture humans just because he despises them. That's from the creepy pasta wiki. Mmm. Yeah. But then in the same creepy pasta wiki, they talk about him in this way, due to Slender Man being such an enigmatic figure, it is entirely unknown if he is indeed a man of lint or if what he does is true, leading others to portray him in an anti-heroic and benevolent way.

And he's only taking children in and brainwashing people, simply to show them his way in trying to be better than the current state of humanity. Oh, he's the fucking Joker now. Okay. Yeah, and he kind of has some of these benevolent vibes. In fact, I think after the murders, this benevolent character becomes even stronger and he's seen with a daughter that's called Skinny Sally. And they like, they hold hands and, you know, little cutie booties.

He develops this backstory where he was bullied as a child and that is the reasoning for his behavior now. No. Okay. It's a little weak. Yeah, I know. He can kind of take on any form, right? I know.

I think people were obviously horrified that this came through and that somebody was physically hurt from the stories. So I think there was like a community response of like, wait, no, that's not what Slender Man is. You know, if we created this story, we can change it, too. They had a live streaming telephone to raise money for the victim's family, I think. Exactly, yeah. The creepypasta community did, yeah.

The mayor of Waukesha County led a similar thing, like a fundraiser called Purple Hearts and it was for Peyton and her family. Yeah, no for sure. And there's all this really, really interesting kind of narrative and oral storytelling and almost linguistic aspect of a story like this that gets repeated and repeated because there's plenty of studies on folklore and stuff like that, but there's a new, a new like subcategory that's digital storytelling and digital folklore that I think is really fascinating because it tracks all of this, these tendencies of oral storytelling where things get repurposed

and rehashed and repurposed and changed and they have many, many authors. But because it's in a digital space, it is tied to literacy. It's no longer just oral, it's written down. But because of the ease of copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, it takes on more attributes of oral storytelling where it changes and changes and changes and changes. Yeah, no for sure. Does that make sense? No, I absolutely agree.

I've been thinking about this lately. I think you raised a good point. The sheer amount of words online and the sheer amount of people online constantly communicating, constant, constant, constant, more than we're in more and more constant communication than we've ever been in our lives, right? So it makes sense that the ritual of oral storytelling would find itself adapted for this medium. Totally.

The speed of which we can tell stories is so much faster and the audience with global that we can reach is global. Global. It's totally, yeah, it's wild. There was someone, when I looked at the thing, there was someone listening to this podcast in Sweden, in England, in Australia, in Kenya. You know what I mean? Yeah.

You can reach anybody. Well, I know. And I was thinking about this a lot in terms of our podcast too because I was also thinking about how I write this all down. I make notes. It's a literacy project, but then I tell it orally and the switch between that and what that does to the storytelling. I write very differently on the page than I do for this podcast.

Yeah. And it ties back to those fictionalized intros too. The fictionalized intro that I do for this podcast doesn't really resemble the way that my literary fiction sounds on the page. I write it differently. I'm much more conversational. I'm much more staccato. I'm much more short, simple sentences.

Yeah. I'm repeating myself again and again. If you're saying it out loud, you're taking time, so you're also not adding in any kind of fluff. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you even said that you watched the interviews with the girls after they had been apprehended. So I watched a lot of them too.

You can find them at Law News, L-A-W-N-E-W-Z-Z. Ooh, cool. Cool news from the law. You can watch their trials actually, and then they play bits of the interviews on the trial. Right. So the girls were apprehended at the furniture store off of I-94, and they were taken to... That's hard. It's so hard.

They were taken to the Waukesha County police station where they were separated and interviewed by two different detectives. Morgan was interviewed by a man named Detective Casey, last name Casey, and Nisa was interviewed by Detective Trusoni, who was a woman. Interestingly enough, in the state of Wisconsin, children can be interviewed without a parent or counsel present. Whoa. That's...

Okay. Didn't making a murder happen in Wisconsin? Like, come on. Right. That means that these 12-year-old girls sat down in a small windowless room, and these detectives read them their Miranda rights and said, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to seek counsel.

If you can't afford counsel, it will be made available for you, all of this stuff. They don't even know what that means. They think that they're going to the Slender Mansion. They have absolutely no idea. One, these girls are very deep into a delusion. There's that. Two, they're fucking 12. There is absolutely no way that they can understand.

And there's been studies upon studies upon studies that anybody under the age of 15 predominantly cannot comprehend what is being said in the Miranda rights. Right. Many grown adults don't understand the Miranda rights. 14% of adults don't, and it's something like 70% of under 15 don't. And it's just, it's fucking wild. So they're questioned for three plus hours, both of these girls, by these detectives. The interviews, interrogations are completely recorded, and they become the bulk of what

the trials are based off of, of what all any type of media that documents the interaction. I mean, you've seen the interrogations. It's yeah, it's all there. It all becomes kind of the basis of what becomes their case and their subsequent lives after that. And one of the most shocking things, and you kind of text on this, is that they're pretty unremorseful. They don't, they truly, really, truly believe in Slender Man.

Yep. They're in the exact same mindset that they were when they stabbed her. Exactly. It has not changed. The amount of blood has not like triggered something for them or anything like that. They also have just been walking fucking five miles down 994 or two for how long? Exactly. Right?

Yeah. They're out of it, man. They are 12 and out of it. Like there's just, on top of that, under Wisconsin law, it suggests and encourage that prosecutors try homicide defendants older than 10 years old in adult court. So that means these 12-year-olds who are initially interrogated without a parent or counsel present are then taken to court and determined that it won't be a juvenile court but an adult court, which is wild to me.

It's like, they're kids still. Like obviously, I just, I don't know, I have a lot of, a lot of like questions with that and how that that's even at all supported by the law, but it is. And everything that went down in those interrogations was completely lawful. There's no, nothing that got kind of like thrown out the window because it was deemed not to be. Right. The girls and lawyers do try to get them tried in juvenile court again and again.

They appeal and appeal and it doesn't happen. The detectives, it's interesting because it just, it reveals so much to me some of the stuff that they said about the interrogations. Detective Casey, who was interviewing Morgan said that he had a daughter of the same age at the time and he was talking with Morgan and he was like, yeah, she seems very, you know, very much like my daughter, regular 12-year-old. And then she started saying creepy things. And then I was like, oh, she's not like my daughter at all.

And it's like, okay, cool. So you completely dehumanized her. Awesome. Good work. He also was quoted as saying, people tend to tell the truth more when their parents aren't present, which is a wild sentence to me because what he means is children tell the truth more when their parents aren't present. Like that's not, he's obfuscating what's actually being said there in a very frustrating way,

I find. Yeah. No, that's, that's a good point. That's a good, an interesting point. Yeah. Trisoni was interviewing Anissa and those tapes are interesting because both Casey and Trisoni have no idea what creepypasta is. I think they probably have some trouble finding the police station printer.

You know what I mean? Like, I just, they're not, they don't know the language or the culture whatsoever. There's a generational gap. There's a generational gap, yeah. And so Anissa spends a lot of time kind of explaining here and that and this and that and Trisoni's trying to follow. At one point there's a break or something like that and Anissa says, I just have a question. How far did we walk?

Because I'm not a very athletic person. So I just want to know, like, was it a long way? Was it far? Yeah. And they ended up walking 4.9 miles. But Trisoni is said to, she reflects on that moment and she's like, that's when I remembered I was interrogating a 12 year old. Yeah.

And it's like, well, one, you probably should have been fucking remembering that the whole time. Okay. But moving on. We don't have vocabulary for children who murder other children, do we? Like I can understand being rattled by that. I still think, as you say, it's incumbent upon the cops to want to have a representative in the room.

But you know, Wisconsin, apparently. Yeah. Right. Our other Wisconsin story, too, is Lori Bimbenek. That's right. Yes. So Jeffrey Dahmer, that's a Wisconsin case. So Wisconsin law, you know, I don't know about that old Wisconsin law.

Yeah. There's something, something going on there for sure. Yeah. And I get it. Another layer of this is like, they're 12 year old girls, they look like women. They can sometimes talk like adults. When I read Morgan's description of Slenderman and she describes his back as like, he can explode these tendrils from his back and strangle, like that is, that's a beautiful description.

That verb is really strong. Like, it's, no, it's very evocative. Yeah. And the way that they kind of pull some like internet language into their own speaking language is like, they sound very knowledgeable and adult, but they're not, which I think is kind of an interesting place for 12 year old girls, too, because they're total kids, but they don't look like kids. Like I think that, that happens a lot to young, young women at that age.

Do you know what I mean? Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At one point, Morgan is dancing around and one of the breaks that she has, it's caught on video, not very remorseful about what's happened, but obviously not very clear about what's happened, I think, too. No, no sense of the gravity of the situation. Yeah.

I think one of the classic, this is like a lay person's understanding of the law, so I'm sure someone will tell me, you know, where to shove it. But my understanding of like an insanity plea, let's say, has been that the thing that determines whether or not you're liable to be held criminally is whether you understood that what you were doing was wrong. Exactly. And it's hard, it's really hard to get a sense of that with these girls. Totally, totally hard.

At one point, Morgan asks Detective Casey about her friend about Peyton and whether or not she's dead, and the detective tells her that she was taken to the hospital. And Morgan does this weird, like, you can see it on the video, it's like this weird head shake where she, like, she was leaning against the chair, and then she kind of like looks up and like does a double take kind of thing. I don't know, it feels like a very kid thing to do, a very natural double take, but not at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then she kind of excuses it and says, oh, okay, well, I was just wondering. And it's, it feels remorseful. It feels kind of cold-hearted, but at the same time, it's very clear that it's the actions of a 12-year-old, too, and perhaps a delusional 12-year-old. Yeah, well, she's also, it's fucked up, but what probably went through her head is like, fuck, I failed my slender man mission. Exactly. Maybe my family's gonna get God, or you're like, who knows?

Yeah. So when it comes to the girls in trial, they have two separate cases. They're tried separately. And their defense is largely, I think I mentioned this earlier, that these girls should be tried in a juvenile court, not in the adult court. They're 12. Right. It's just that shouldn't be the case.

It never goes through. It gets appealed and peeled and never goes through. So they are tried as adults. The prosecution, at different stages, they point out how the girls are seemingly remorseless, how they don't seem to really care at all about what they've done. At one point in the trial, they bring up, this was in Anissa's trial, Detective Trisone had to do a write-up on the interview, and she does like a succinct document. And part of the process is they have to give it to the interviewee, the interrogatee, and

let them sign off on it. And so Detective Trisone gives it to Anissa, and was like, is everything in here correct? And Anissa's like, well, when we stopped at the furniture store, we didn't just get water, we also got some fruit snacks. And I just wanted to add to this thing about the proxies that I learned about. And it's like, there's also this guy named Zarogh, and it's just like, she kind of goes on and on. It's totally, just totally 12-year-old explaining something that she knows, you know?

And the prosecution hones in on that, and she's not clarifying that she was scared for her life, and da-da-da-da-da, and that's why she's, I don't know, it's just like, it's so strange to me. So after years and years of trials, the trials start probably around six months after the stabbing incident, let's see, Morgan, who was the girl who did the stabbing. She physically was there. Yes. The birthday girl.

The birthday girl. She accepted a plea offer, under which she would not go to trial, and would be evaluated by psychiatrists to determine how long she'd be placed in mental hospital. Okay, that's fine with me. She pled guilty, but was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Through that process, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Yeah, that sounds right. In her case, that went a little faster because her father also has schizophrenia, and it

is hereditary. Her father has really high functioning schizophrenia. That's tough. Super tough. Super tough, too, because it usually doesn't manifest as young as 12. You have to be, like, sometimes in your 20s, before it shows up. So her parents were aware that things could be a little different for her, but they had absolutely no idea that the hallucinations were this, that the delusion was so, so deep.

Yeah, and so intense, yeah. Yeah. She was given a maximum mental health sentence, which was 40 years, and she had involuntary treatment at a state psychiatric institute until the complete resolution of her symptoms or until age 53, which is a long fucking time. Right. Initially, when she was in trials, she was at a juvenile penitentiary, and she was isolated in her own cell with no windows.

She had absolutely no outside time. She was unmedicated. She wasn't medicated before, right? But they were doing tests and determining that things weren't super great, and she was still being unmedicated. And she reportedly told her parents again and again, I don't care, it doesn't matter where I am, because my delusions will stay with me, and they'll always keep me company. When she does get medicated, and when she's at a proper facility that will help her understand

what's happening, she starts to understand what's happening. She starts to realize what she did and what the consequences are for her. Yeah. And she kind of like comes online and realizes the severity of the situation. Ha. Yeah. Which is really, really sad. Yeah.

In 2017, and Nisa, she pled guilty to being a party in the attempted second degree homicide. She was also found by a jury not guilty by mental disease or defect. Right. So she was given 25 years treatment in a state psychiatric institute, followed by communal supervision until age 37. So her stuff is very similar, it's just a little shorter. She was not the one with the knife, more or less. Yeah.

She had a court hearing in March of 2021, so just this last March. She was 19. Yep. And she submitted a letter to the court stating that she was, and I quote, sorry and deeply regretful for the agony, pain, and fear I have caused. Not just to Lutner, but to my community as well. I hate my actions on May 31st, 2014, but through countless hours of therapy, I no longer hate myself for them.

Wow. Yeah. So, she also claimed in this letter that she had exhausted all of the facilities. Resources. Resources and treatments for her, and that in order to be a productive member of society, she had to be in society. Wow. She was part of her 2021 hearing, and Judge Bovren, who had been presiding over the entire

history of cases, ordered that Anissa be released from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, and that there's certain stipulations on her release, which include 24-hour GPS monitoring, so that she can't leave Waukesha County without permission, and she has to have her internet monitored, and she's not allowed to use any social media. She's required to take medications, and she has to be personally escorted to counseling sessions by caseworker. Right. But, as of last Monday, a week ago now, she's out with these stipulations.

Interesting. Yeah. Wow. Peyton Lodder and her family aren't super stoked to hear about that. Understandable. They're a little fearful. You did stab me a lot of times. A lot of times.

Yes. And you did leave me for dead. And you did leave me for dead, and that didn't scare you or spook you. You just kept going. Okay. Yep. You were pretty into it, as I recall. As I recall.

In 2019, Peyton went on 2020 with David Muir, and she has some interviews with him where she states that she felt that the girls did need to be tried as adults. She said, if they had stolen a candy bar, sure, that's a child, but you tried to kill somebody. That's an adult crime. Interesting. Yeah. I think that's interesting, too.

Put it to you this way. I have my own bleeding heart tendencies toward cases like this, but having a bleeding heart tendency is different than having a bleeding liver. And so, I totally get why the person who was actually on, not just the hypothetical conversation about this gruesome crime, but this gruesome crime, why she would be more like, yeah, I really think you should do to whatever you need to do to those people, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Especially knowing kind of her backstory, too, where she was like, well, these girls need a friend, and I'm here. Yeah, she was just like a chill, nice chick who loved to skate. Yeah. She was a great skater. Probably still is. So she was not surprised to hear about their motive, the Slender Man thing. Yeah, because they probably wouldn't shut up about Slender Man.

No, exactly. Yeah. She says of Morgan, she believed so hard in this thing that she would do anything for it. It was a little shocking to me to see that they had this big, huge plan that they had been working on for months, but I wasn't really that surprised. Yeah. Yeah.

Makes sense. Yeah. She is 17 at the time of this interview. Now I think she's about 20. Right. And she started college in 2020, poor thing. So sorry about that. Poor one out.

Yeah. She was asked what she would say to Morgan, and she's quoted from this interview as saying, I would probably initially think her. I would say just because of what she did, I have the life I have now. I really, really like it, and I have a plan. I didn't have a plan when I was 12, and now I do because of everything that I went through. Wow, that's the high road. Totally.

I didn't have a plan at 12 either. I don't have a fucking plan at 32. No, uh-uh. I still don't want to get stabbed. Yeah. No, don't stab. Don't stop. Don't stab.

Don't stop. Don't stab. And she's going to go, based on all of this experience, she's interested in going into the medical field. Cool. Good for her. Yeah. Take those lemons and make lemonade.

Yeah, dude. Slenderman has received all these different types of iterations. There was a feature-length movie that came out. That's supposed to be bad. It's supposed to be real bad. You mentioned marble. Marble Hornets. So all of Marbled Hornets?

I watched much of Marble. I never for a second followed what was going on. Oh, it's real hard. But I watched... It's very labyrinthine mythology, Marble Hornets. Yeah. So Marbled Hornets, it came out in 2009. It's a web series created by Troy Wagner, but it is a really interesting take on kind

of a Blair Witch-esque, but it's a YouTube series. So the filter is very loose and very strange and scary. The footage as a medium suits YouTube just kind of by its nature. Totally, totally. And it is scary. There's a few jump scares in there that are... Oh, yeah. Marble Hornets is scary.

Yeah. A lot of scary people in masks. Yeah. Yeah. And the story is still out there. It has definitely lost some popularity. We talked about how quickly the stories can proliferate over the internet. Yeah.

Now it's just a vintage creepypasta as opposed to the new hot creepypasta. Exactly. Yeah. It's stately. I think it just also speaks to the faster story spreads. The faster it can kind of fizzle out. But another factor is Morgan and Anissa. They have, as you said, entered the Slenderman lore and it's entered a space in reality where

people are like... Because now it's true crime. Yeah. And now it's true crime. Now it's a true crime story. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah, dude. Did you, as, I just want to know, like, did you as a child ever have like imaginary friends or like... Yeah. Yeah. A bunch. Yeah. Yeah.

A bunch. Yeah. Me too. A bunch. A whole cast of characters. Yeah. Yeah. Total.

Not to this degree. Not to age 12 either. No. It wasn't that late. Oh, I still have imaginary... Well, not imaginary friends. But like, I've got a very vivid imagination to this day. Yeah.

I was thinking about that as I was like thinking about the story as like both you and I, like, we write fiction. We deal in fiction. Yeah. Part of our lives are spent in fiction. Thank you for that trip to the Slender Mansion. Don't stop, don't stab. Don't stop, don't stab.

Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find podcasts. We usually release new episodes every other Sunday. You can also follow us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. If you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review, or just telling a friend. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this episode were the 2016 HBO documentary by Irene Taylor Brodsky called Beware the Slender Man.

I watched a 2020 episode with David Muir. It was an interview with Peyton Vella Lutner. I watched the web series Marble Hornets created by Troy Wagner and posted in 2009. I watched the trials of both Anissa Weir and Morgan Geyser on Law News, a YouTube channel, and that's News with a Z at the end. I read the article from The Guardian, The Wisconsin Girls, Miranda Rights, and Miners, a Blind Spot in U.S. Law written by Jessica Glinza. I also read the Wikipedia pages for Slender Man and the Slender Man stabbings.

And lastly, I read Creepypasta Wiki, the page devoted to Slender Man himself. The infamous jingle that you heard in the middle of the episode was written by Mitchell Collins. And the song you are now listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele.