Ain't Slender Man Scary? with Sean and Carrie

What makes a monster? In this spine-tingling episode, Josh and Sarah welcome back fellow podcasters Sean and Carrie from the hit show Ain't it Scary with Sean and Carrie to explore one of the internet's most notorious creations: Slender Man.

From creepypasta legend to real-world tragedy, discover how this faceless, tentacled entity became modern folklore and what it reveals about our relationship with monsters. Four podcasters who love things that go bump in the night dive deep into digital horror, viral legends, and—because it's The Thing About Witch Hunts—somehow end up discussing the Salem witch trials.

Whether you run toward mysterious figures in the woods or away from them, this episode will make you question why we create monsters and what happens when fictional nightmares bleed into reality.

Episode Highlights🎃 What is Slender Man? - The origins of the internet's most infamous boogeyman

👻 Creepypasta to Crisis - How digital folklore goes viral in the modern age

🕯️ Monster Theory - Why do we need monsters? Why do we treat humans as monsters?

🔮 Salem Connections - The unexpected link between witch hunts and modern monster-making

🎙️ Skeptic Meets Spooky - Sean and Carrie return with their signature perspectives on the paranormal

About Our Returning GuestsSean & Carrie host Ain't it Scary with Sean and Carrie, where a skeptic and a believer explore the unknown, unsolved, unbelievable, and just plain weird. With their passion for history and uncovering truth, they bring complementary perspectives to every mystery they tackle.

KeywordsSlender Man, creepypasta, digital folklore, internet legends, monsters, witch hunts, Salem witch trials, paranormal podcast, horror podcast, Ain't it Scary, folklore, urban legends, monster theory, viral horror, true crime

Listen & SubscribeDon't wander off the path—subscribe to The Thing About Witch Hunts and join us every episode as we explore the monsters, myths, and witch hunts throughout history.

Also check out: Ain't it Scary with Sean and Carrie wherever you listen to podcasts!

Keep the porch light on. 🎃

Links

Ain't It Scary With Sean and Carrie Podcast

Sign the Petition: MA Witch Hunt Justice Project

Join One of Our Projects

The Thing About Salem Podcast

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. I'm Sarah Jack Skellington.
So, Sarah, quick question, if you saw a very tall man with no
face watching you from the edge of the woods, would you run
toward him or away from? Him.

(00:22):
I've got a bunch of questions for him so I am going to run
towards him. Of course you are.
Does he have tentacles? Oh, he's got tentacles all
right. I have questions, I got to go
find him. It looks like you have company.

(00:42):
I hope so. So we're looking at monsters
this month because witches are monsters and we want to find
answers to questions about monsters.
What is a monster? Why do we need monsters, and why
do we treat humans as monsters? What does that do for?
Us I have questions for all those monsters too.

(01:07):
Today we're joined by returning guests, fellow podcasters Sean
and Carrie of the amazing podcast Ain't It Scary with Sean
and Carrie to talk about the internet's most infamous
creation. We're talking Slender Man, the
faceless boogeyman born in the digital age.

(01:27):
From creepypasta legend to real world nightmare, we're exploring
how folklore goes viral. And we end up talking about
Salem because of course we do. We always find our way back to
the witch Charles. For podcasters who love things
that go bump in the night. So grab your Jack O Lantern and

(01:51):
keep it close. Don't wander off the path, keep
the porch light on and get cozy for the spooky one.
Let's get started. He's skeptical.
She's spooky together. They explore the unknown,
unsolved, unbelievable, and justplain weird on their podcast

(02:12):
Ain't It Scary with Sean and Carrie.
With their passion for history and the truth, they bring their
different perspectives to today's episode.
Team up. It's about to get scary with
Sean and Carrie and Josh and Sarah.
Welcome back to the podcast Ain't It Scary with Sean and
Carrie. Thank you so much.

(02:32):
Thank you so much for having us.We are getting back in the
podcast saddle after a long absence, so thank you so much
for helping us do that. Absolutely.
We're really looking forward to talking to you guys again.
And of course, as always, lowering the usually very high
level of discourse on this show.Just a touch.

(02:52):
Just a touch. Keeping it lighter.
And thank you for having us during the most Ain't It scary
time of year during spooky season, just as we roll into
October here. Yeah, I was so excited when we
connected and it was a go. So thanks for helping us roll
out some fun Halloween talk. Absolutely, yeah.

(03:16):
And, and with that, I mean, for Halloween, we always, I mean,
just traditionally it just sort of happened.
We always end up talking about urban legends.
It's such a like a spooky campfire time of year.
And more and more over the years, I particularly have been
really fascinated with like how folklore evolves over time and

(03:42):
how folklore exists in our worldnowadays.
And usually that's wrapped up inlike scary stories.
And I think with both of our podcasts, we have kind of this
mutual interests in the idea of monsters, not necessarily like
crazy creatures from the abyss, but you know, for us sometimes,

(04:03):
sometimes, sometimes, you know, but or you know, Jeff the
talking Mongoose. But really society's like
definition of a monster. What makes a monster if those
defined by society at large really are monstrous, if it's
their actions that define that. And often times urban legends

(04:23):
really explore these, you know, where like fictional and real
monsters sort of coexist. And that's pretty appropriate
for the time of year, I think. I'm so fascinated with how the
stories are told. And how they evolve too.
We thought it would be interesting today to talk about

(04:45):
Slender Man in particular. I think your audience will be
familiar with the concept of Slender Man.
They might even see a few Eastereggs in one of these screens.
I don't know. Slender Man may be may be
lurking, but that is a story that has evolved from basically
a post on an image board to this, to something that you

(05:06):
know, eventually jumped in a very scary way into into real
life and into into the news. Yeah, it's, it's sort of a case
study on Internet folklore, which is kind of one of the most
popular kinds of, of new age folklore nowadays is because
like, how, how is everyone connected?
You know, usually back in the day it was word of mouth or, you

(05:30):
know, books and things like that.
But now with the Internet, things move so quickly and you
can connect to so many people across such a vast space that
these stories really spread and evolve and take on minds of
their own, even more than you know, the urban legends we grew
up whispering at summer camp. Yeah, I was thinking about, you

(05:53):
know, hoping to see Bloody Mary in the mirror but not really
wanting to. But you hope will that image
appear? Will the image appear?
And then of course, there were not computers for me to go look
at scary images yet at that age when I was that age 100.
Years ago and I think what's interesting about those like

(06:15):
urban legends that we grew up with and those that maybe you
know younger people are growing up with now that are really
Internet based is that they still kind of function the same
way. A lot of them, you know, the,
the ones that really stick, the ones that are really, that
really are evocative and really grab people, they, they're often
cautionary tales. They're sort of these like

(06:36):
heightened warnings of horrific possibilities lying around every
corner. So, you know, we grew up hearing
stuff like the man with the hookfor a hand, you know, the, the
kids are, the teenagers are on lover's lane and they're necking
in the car and then blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, murderer has escaped an asylum and kills one

(06:59):
of them and leaves a hook in thecar.
And it's oh, it's the guy with the hook for a hand.
Now the the warning here is obviously like don't, don't be
kissing, don't be kissing. And but you know, it is kind of
influenced by real life too. There was a real life crime that
still hasn't been solved, the Texarkana moonlight murders and

(07:22):
those happened two teenagers on lovers lanes.
They were killed or victimized and no one ever found who did
it. So, you know, that's not
something that happened in everytown.
You know, like, every town had the urban legend of, like, did
you hear about the escaped convict that killed those kids?
But it, you know, this cautionary tale sort of melded

(07:44):
with a real life crime and sort of, again, took on a life of its
own. But it took a lot longer, you
know, to snowball back in the day.
The Texarkana Moonlight murders were in the 40s, and we were
hearing those iterations of the legends in like the 70s,
eighties, 90s. And so, you know, it kind of
took a long time to spread and sort of define its classic story

(08:09):
structure. But with the Internet, things
are created and they spread immediately.
You know, if they really hit, they become viral.
Everyone knows about it eventually.
I also feel like for parents theInternet is a fear or a danger
or the and so 1 angle of SlenderMan to me is a folklore, a

(08:35):
modern folklore story to parentsof the dangers of your child.
What are they looking at on the Internet?
And I mean in a way with the crime that happens, it kind of
makes sense. Obviously this this like the the
lovers lane murders is a very heightened example.
This is very specific example. These these are the Slender Man

(08:57):
stabbings. Like there's just these, this
one stabbing. But you know, parents can look
at that and think like, I knew the Internet was a bad place.
They they create these monsters and and the kids are enraptured
by them. For Do You Remember Momo?
The. Yes, image that was supposedly
make kids like I'm alive themselves.

(09:18):
Yes, yeah, there are. There are things like that all
over the place. And I mean, I, you know, Sean
worked in the news and I feel like you guys covered, you know,
this is the new Internet thing. Like Momo, we we did cover Momo.
Yeah, like on the local news, because parents were probably
calling in being like, hey, what's going on?

(09:40):
I heard that this is happening to everyone.
And just like an urban legend, just like with the lovers Lane
murders or Slender Man, like this is a very centralized
situation of, of influence in real life, but people kind of
take it and run with it. So these Internet based urban
legends, they're called creepypasta.

(10:02):
And that's kind of from the the term copy pasta, which was like
those emails that you'd get backin the day that was like copy
this and then send it to 10 friends or you'll have bad luck
or whatever. So Creepypasta was sort of the
Internet Horror Story version ofthat.

(10:22):
The word creepypasta. I, I was reviewing the notes on
the Slender Man crime that we'llget to in a minute.
No spoilers. And it struck me that the word
creepypasta was, it was a big part of these girls vocabulary
like you, like they, they're talking.
We'll, we'll get into it, but they're talking about going to
a, a mansion in the woods where all of the creepypastas live.

(10:45):
Yeah, like the creepypastas. As in, like they're the
universal monsters. Or yeah, the shared universe.
The shared cinematic universe ofthe Creepypastas.
So yeah, you know, it's, it's pretty fascinating how those
things take on the life of theirown.
And I'm curious how much you guys knew about Slender Man,
like when it first started becoming popular and then did

(11:07):
the crime really register with you guys as well?
I don't think I knew about it until the crime.
I wasn't in the creepypasta world so it was a new exposure
for me to see that. And since then I've I like the
creepypastas but I don't like taking them and turning them

(11:29):
into real life. Yeah.
For sure agree on that one. I was aware of creepypasta, but
I wasn't aware of Slender Man and my niece was 12 when things
happened. And I remember, I think I
probably the first thing yet Sarah said was, you know, what's

(11:52):
fantasy, what's not fantasy, right, 'cause it, it was.
So I think that was one of the real shocking things is like
that, you know, what is in our actually in our world, what is
real in our world. But I was so fascinated because
of how his image, just that the history of him, and I know you
might talk about that a little bit, but how he just wasn't

(12:17):
thought of. And then he was presented and
then the stories, you know, theyjust ran with the stories.
Yeah, the visual hasn't even evolved that much in those first
two. Something awful, folks.
It's there. It's a really good creature
design, you know. Well, it's very Men in Black.
We we did one of one of our lastruns of episodes before we
departed for our hiatus was a Hot Moth Summer.

(12:40):
And we talked about the, you know, we were talking about the
Mothman and we talked about the Men in Black a lot.
There is a slender Man. Sing it, sing it.
I've heard you sing it. Sing it.
Smith. It's been so long, I forgot what

(13:01):
I forgot which I was going to bust into Will Smith's Miami.
I was like, I don't know why we're doing this, but it's a
jam. Yeah, I mean, there's something
really evocative about the imagery and.
And we'll get to that in a second.
And yeah, for me, like 2009 is when this first sort of hit the
scene. And I was in early college, I

(13:21):
was probably the perfect age to like really appreciate
creepypasta culture. And I was on Tumblr.
I was on all that fun stuff, butI didn't take it seriously.
Like I was old enough to not take it seriously.
I was old enough to be like, this is cool.
I like reading horror and it's cool that everyone's kind of
contribute. It's almost like fan fiction,
you know, It's like this really,like anyone could do it.

(13:42):
Anyone could share their work. And I think that's really cool
and and special. On the creepypasta subreddit
which I was on from time to time, it was always like nobody
would say that it was fake but you could tell no.
Sleep was the subreddit. Oh our no.
Sleep is. Great.
That was the conceit was like, yeah, everyone kind of was

(14:06):
role-playing that these stories are.
Real. If you said you were posting a
fake story it would get taken down.
They're like the rules of the sub where you had to pretend it
was real because you want peoplewanted the experience of like,
like, yeah, this. It's almost a role play, right?
Like like clicking through thesecreepy stories and go, oh, who
posted this? But they even though, but
everybody's participating in a shared like agreed delusion in

(14:30):
that in that space where they all know it's fake.
But but you know, it may be a preteen stumbling on the
creepypasta. Wiki doesn't know that.
Yeah. So, you know, they had the the
girls part of the crime, which again, we'll get to, you know,
they were experiencing this story after it had evolved and
spread for years. So they didn't have that route

(14:52):
of knowing where it came from and knowing it was fictional.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Should we start with something awful?
Well, yeah, so something awful, which is what happened, but also
this forum that was like a message board forum, a really
popular thing in the mid 2000s. And what's interesting about
this is that not, you know, unlike what we were just talking

(15:13):
about with like the role play aspect, this forum started a
spooky image contest. So it was enter your spooky
pictures that you create with like a little spooky story.
And everyone knows this is fake because it's like a Photoshop
contest. So no one was going into this
thinking, oh, this is like a ghost photo that someone really

(15:37):
took or this is someone's real experience.
It was like, how legit can they make it seem Like, how
interesting can they make the story?
So people started to submit to this back in 2009.
It was just, you know, one message thread until I said
pretty early on, one user named Victor Surge, which is not his

(15:57):
real name, submitted what would probably become the most
memorable because that's what we're talking about today.
So he posted two photos that he created and then it was part of
the thing that he created them. And one of them was a black and
white photo. So the real picture, he had
obviously found it somewhere and, you know, stock imagery.

(16:21):
And it's like a group of young teens, they're walking toward
the camera, and then there's this strange faceless figure
just barely visible behind them,which was, you know,
photoshopped in. But like, really well done.
It's sort of. It's a pretty good edit.
Very tall, long arms. Yeah, tall, long arms, big
strong guy, bald, like faceless.And then below the photo in the

(16:45):
post was this quote. 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.
And then there was a date, 1983,photographer unknown, presumed
dead. So it's I love.
I love photographer presumed dead.

(17:05):
That's that's a chef's guess. Like you don't even know they're
dead. And then there was a second
photo. So again, like a real life,
probably a stock image, black and white picture of a little
girl on these like ladder steps up to a small slide and she's
smiling at the camera. You know, like, almost like her
mom's taking the picture. There's a few other kids playing
around her in like a park or a playground.

(17:29):
And then in the shadows in the far background, there's again
this same strange tall faceless figure.
And he's got these like odd tentacle looking limbs and he's
standing with a few children around him.
And the photo bears a seal on the top right saying City of

(17:49):
Sterling Library's local studiescollection.
He's he's reaching down to them,right?
He might be holding the kids hands or something with his
weird. It's kind of like he's beckoning
and bringing them in, like, you know, like attracting them to
him. Any listeners or viewers who
aren't think they're not familiar with these pictures?
If you are familiar with what the Slender Man looks like, you

(18:09):
probably have seen one of these 'cause they're like the most.
But if you just Google or use search engine of your choice.
Original Slender Man pictures. Yeah, original Slender Man
pictures. These are the two pictures that
you'll find. Yeah.
And then on the second, there was this back story, one of the
two recovered photographs from the Sterling City Library blaze.
So that sounds like something from a Stephen King novel

(18:30):
already. Specifically, it is.
It is basically ripped off from it actually.
Notable for being taken the day which 14 children vanished and
for what is referred to as the Slender Man.
So this is the first time that the name is used.
Deformities cited as film defects by officials.
So this seems to be a reference to the weird creepy guy in the

(18:51):
background. Fire at library occurred one
week later. Actual photograph confiscated as
evidence. 1986 photographer MaryThomas missing since June 13th,
1986. So he just posted these
pictures. He just posted like a sentence,
a little paragraph, and then everyone freaked out.

(19:13):
People still were submitting their own things, but everyone
was kind of like this Slender Man, like this story is cool.
Like I love this guy. People were were starting to, I
love this. I love this, the idea of this
monster. People were submitting their own
images based on Slender Man froma few days before.

(19:34):
So it's became its own thing within the message board that
like the first people to see this sort of latched on
immediately. Like, this is a really effective
creepy story and a really effective monster, which is
which says a lot about how greatof an idea it was.

(19:56):
It has to be. You have to be a really good
creature, design a really good creepy idea to start in a post
that literally acknowledges thatit's fake, and then get to a
place where there's widespread belief in the in in the thing.
And in the post, you know, everyone was still very much
aware that it was fake. They were making their own

(20:18):
versions of the story, and that's kind of how it would
spread. It came out of the post.
People were sharing the post with other people.
People started contributing their own versions of the story
and their own imagery and their own lore.
And it started out slow because,again, this was just, you know,
a popular but random message board.

(20:40):
It wasn't like a, you know, it'snot like how social media is
today. But once it really picked up
speed, speed, it just kept on going and going and spreading.
So Serge, who his real name is Eric Knudsen, told Vanity Fair
that he wanted to formulate something whose motivations can

(21:00):
barely be comprehended, which caused unease and terror in a
general population and. It is it, right?
It's Pennywise. Well, that's always going to be
the thing for kids. It goes back to that cautionary
tale idea that in this case, Slender Man was targeting and

(21:24):
victimizing children. And with Stranger Danger being
such a thing and such a influence on urban legends and
modern day folklore since, I mean, I guess the 80s was like
when it really sort of like became hysteria.
It could kind of be that SlenderMan became this modern day

(21:45):
boogeyman for kids who, you know, like, hey, don't stray too
far from the crowd. Don't be too much of an outsider
that monsters could lie and waitand get you.
I was. Just going to say it's kind of,
you know, goes back to the whiteHansel and Gretel.
So successful. It's the children in danger.
They're being lured by somebody,they're being taken by somebody.

(22:10):
And we see that with the witch trials.
Anytime a child was put in danger, then they go after the
danger like intensely. You know, we had the whole
satanic panic going on in the 80s too.
The parents were just freaking out about this stuff.
And they never stopped they theymight latch onto a new fear.

(22:32):
So one of the most prevalent ones, as Sean said, is the
Internet is what could be connecting to kids, what your
kids could be looking at when you don't know and.
There is that's a not an unfounded fear, right?
There's a lot of, I mean. It's it's very.
Legitimate dangers out. There, yeah.
So, you know, it, it all develops.

(22:54):
And what's interesting is that Ithink the adult perspective is
just as involved in the spreading of the story and the
formulation of the story as the kids who are consuming it too
'cause you know, like I was a college kid, like I guess I was
an adult, but like young adults,like they, they read, you know,
spooky stories online because people like reading horror

(23:15):
stories, but you know, they havedifferent perspectives of it.
But the adult fears of of what could happen to your child or a
child's fear of what could happen to them, this kind of
both combined in this story. It's also unclear to me in that
first flurry of Slender Man posting, and you get into this

(23:36):
as the lore, the weird Slender Man lore builds up with the
Slender Man proxies, and we'll get into that.
It's unclear in those first two images whether he's threatening
those children or whether he's, I mean, the photographers are
presumably adults, right? And they go missing.
So is it that Slender Man's weaponizing these children?
Is it fear of the children? Yeah, 'cause they followed

(23:58):
Slender Man. But the lady who took the
picture, she did. Yeah, yeah.
I mean it. It could be he.
He's just, he's just going aftereveryone.
Yeah. He's just having fun.
He's just, he's just having a good time.
Why do you think it seems to have stayed as the Slender Man
and not Slender Man? What a good question.

(24:19):
I think it kind of. I mean, there are versions of
the legend that have multiple ofthese creatures.
Or like there's the Slender Woman.
Of course people are going to spin it off, you know, like the
bride of Slender Man. But I think it's just so much
creepier, like a Pennywise the clown to have like 1 monster.

(24:42):
It's the Michael Myers. You can't get away from him.
Like even he's just one guy, butEven so, he's still going to get
you. And this guy, particularly this
guy, I mean, whatever it is, it can't be reasoned with.
He's got no face. Like you can't talk to him.
You know, he is, he is just lying in wait lurking, like

(25:08):
coming to get you. And these original posts,
they're they're not saying how like they're just saying these
kids vanished. They're not saying, oh, he
murders them like this or he does this.
His motivations are unclear and you can't talk to him about his
motivations and you can't. There's no understand, there's

(25:29):
no humanity because you can't look him in the eye or you can't
connect on that level. So I think the monstrosity of
just this, like this unknowable creature again, so many things
go back to the fear of the unknown.
And what's more unknown than a faceless face?
Just something that looks human but isn't.

(25:52):
I'm trying to figure out what how the timeline on this works,
but now I'm also thinking of theThe Silence from Doctor Who, the
Doctor Who villain which are a whole alien race of Slender
Man's. But I don't know if that those
episodes came out after the Slender Man legend.
Probably, but they also could just be Men in Black.
Yeah, again. And the men in black really

(26:13):
quick overview, but they're thisthese beings and they're,
they're more than one. So it's unlike the slender man,
but it's they're attached to stories of alien abductions and
encounters. And these weird guys in suits
show up to your house and they're they threaten you not to
talk. And they look human at first,
but then it turns out like theirfaces are weird and they start

(26:35):
acting funny. And again, it's that thing of
they seem like us, but they're not quite right.
And that's always going to make like we are.
That's why the uncanny valley isso frightening is because we can
look at something and go, but the eyes are not quite human.
It's not real. And that makes people

(27:00):
instinctually very afraid, whichis why this was so effective.
He has the somewhat of a guise of a guy in a suit, but he's
like too lanky and he's got these tentacles sometimes and
he's got no face. There's things that are off and
that are wrong, and that's what makes it frightening.
It's like how movie robots have to look like Johnny 5 or they

(27:22):
have to be human actors because something in between is too
freaky. I see 3 pios in between.
So, Indiana University folklorist Jeff Tolbert noted,
the Slender Man indexes at leasttwo separate intellectual
strands, 2 distinct but related conceptual frameworks.
First, Slender Man is a sign of abject fear, the ultimate other,

(27:46):
the final evolution of radical alterity.
Second, Slender Man subtly references the self-conscious
commutative processes that give rise to the tradition itself and
are in fact the reason for its continued existence as an
Internet icon. Slender Man offers critical
commentary on the legend genre by enabling individuals to

(28:06):
participate in the creation of alegend through reverse
ascension. So basically, there are two
really important factors to thisprofessional folklorist as to
why this was such an evocative story.
And it's because he represents this, this fear of the other,
which is something that you guystalk about all the time is that,

(28:29):
you know, why, why do people ostracize other people and why
do they turn them into boogeyman?
It's because they're afraid of them for some reason.
They are other, they are different.
And that combines with how the nature of urban legends and
especially Internet urban legends, which are easy to

(28:51):
access, like quick to update, you know, you can, you don't
have to wait years for things tolike get told through word of
mouth. It's the participatory nature.
And that sort of combined into like this really powerful story
that kind of just snowballed andsnowballed and snowballed.
And it is the participatory nature that can also be the

(29:16):
scary thing, right when impressionable minds come across
this this stuff. Yeah, absolutely.
And that just like anything on the Internet and people are
experiencing that now. And and this is, you know, even
this is like dated in a way likehow they this story spread
initially. Now it's like TikTok.

(29:37):
It's conspiracy theories, but it's at the end of the day, it's
fear of the unknown. I don't understand why this
thing happened. I need an explanation.
We're making up stories at the end of the day, but they spread
because people need to understand what they don't
understand. And people do.

(29:58):
There are, since we've been researching the Slender Man,
there have been people who believe that there might be
Slender Man out there. And I think a lot of them fall
into one of two camps. 1 is children who don't know any
better necessarily and think they see adults talking semi

(30:19):
seriously about something on theInternet and think that it must
be semi serious or greater. And then you've also got a very
interestingly the school of thought around tulpas, around
thought form energy ghosts. If enough people believe in
something, then they will the secret style manifest it into

(30:39):
being somewhere in the world. Yeah, it's a very old folkloric.
I mean, that's from like old religious and even certain Pagan
folklore is creating something out of pure belief.
If you believe something hard enough, you can create
something. And sometimes that is used for
good to to manifest to your vision board.

(31:01):
But sometimes according to folklore of all different
traditions, that can be used to create like your own little
monsters to do your bidding. And it's at the intersection of
like creation and fantasy and real life fear that the Slender
Man story eventually led to whatwas eventually called the

(31:23):
Slender Man stabbing. That is a.
Spoiler. Once an attempted murder case,
we're going to spoil that up topbecause there are children
involved here and it's good to know that it's not.
Full murder, yeah. It turns out, but yeah, there
was an attempted murder. So this was in May 2014.
So this is only five years afterthis the, the first images were

(31:47):
posted. So, you know, we, we were
telling the same urban legends for decades, you know, Bloody
Mary, the hook hand, you know, aren't you glad you didn't turn
on the light like the the college roommate one like those
had decades and decades to percolate.
This had spread so far and wide.There were YouTube web series.

(32:11):
There were indie video games by this point, I think, I don't
know if there had been a film yet, but there have been since
then. So in in only five years, this
kind of influenced this major crime.
So it's it just goes to show howthe Internet has affected how

(32:34):
folklore transmits nowadays. But in May 2014, the basic story
is that 212 year old Wisconsin girls stabbed their friend in
the woods. She was also their age.
They had fully intended to kill her, and it was meant to appease
what they believed to be the real Slender Man, to prove

(32:56):
themselves to him. And I think it's hard to believe
that 12 year olds, that childrencould be capable of such horror.
At the same time, it's also hardto believe that children as old
as 12 it 12 feels a little too when you're on the face of it.
It feels a little too old for this level of falling into a

(33:20):
fantasy. Right.
So it's surprising in both. Ways, yeah.
And now this is it was combined with obvious other issues at
play, probably mental illness, which we'll we'll talk about.
But it made it so it seemed likethis to them.
This was a reasonable course of action.
So the victim, Peyton Leitner, she was originally friends with

(33:43):
the perpetrators. These were Morgan Geyser and
Anissa Wire. And Morgan and Peyton had been
friends since 4th grade, and Anissa had been a recent
addition to the two at the beginning of 6th grade.
So you have this situation where, like, there's these two
best friends forever, and then one girl kind of comes in and

(34:04):
she's kind of close with Morgan,but Peyton's not really, like,
into it. But now they're a trio.
That's kind of OK. That's our friends.
Now. Morgan was always a little odd.
Her mother recalled that she wasn't sad about Bambi's mother
dying in Bambi as an example, but rather she just said run,

(34:25):
Bambi, run. Get out of there.
Save yourself. And this was like very, very
young. This is obviously years and
years before this stabbing happened.
So you know, she had some thingsgoing on and she was the first
of them to really become obsessed with Slender Man.
She got really into reading creepypasta online.

(34:47):
She found the Slender Man story and she just became obsessed
with it. She would draw Slender Man, she
would look up art, she would engage with the stories, and she
sort of influenced Anissa with this this obsession.
So they fed off of each other. And again, Peyton, who is
originally Morgan's best friend,is getting left behind a little

(35:08):
bit and they're becoming like really, really insular and
really interested in this thing together.
And Peyton's not really interested in it.
So she is naturally becoming more and more ostracized the
more they become almost addictedto this story and like
experiencing more versions of the story and art and videos and

(35:29):
all these things. Well, Carrie, they're working to
become proxies to the Slender Man, right?
Yeah, because what these girls believed is that Slender Man
lives in a mansion somewhere in the woods.
An abandoned mansion, except he lives there with all of the
other creepypastas. That was an idea, yes.
And it was specifically in Nicolette National Park, which

(35:49):
was in Wisconsin. Where they are.
Yes, yes. We believe it that he has a
mansion. It's right back here in the
woods. Exactly it it which.
Is like a like a child like way to well, you know, if, if he has
a secret mansion in the woods, it's got to be those woods cause
those are the only woods I know.It it, you know, there is this

(36:11):
childlike fantasy to it all thatis interjected with this just
horror, which is really interesting to meld together.
So in 2014, after a slumber party, the three of the girls
headed over to a local park. Morgan and Anissa baited Peyton
with a game of hide and seek. So again, they're kids like this

(36:34):
is like the nap. You know, they're walking to the
park after a slumber party. They're playing hide and seek.
They pull her deeper and deeper into the woods.
And eventually, Morgan got on top of Peyton, told her I'm so
sorry, and pulled out a knife and began stabbing her.
Anissa told Peyton to lay down away from the road and be quiet
so she'd lose blood slower. And the girls said that they

(36:55):
were going to go get help for her but just fled.
So this poor girl, Peyton, her friends have just attacked her,
tried to kill her. She is really badly wounded.
And she's hoping that they're going to send help, too.
Because again, there's this childlike aspect of I can't
believe my friends did this. This can't be real.

(37:17):
Yeah, why? I don't know why they did this,
but I don't know why they would say they're going to send help
if they're not so hopefully. Yeah.
Why do you think they wanted to kill her with such a violent
act? Or why not just lead her to the
mansion with them and then tradeher for admittance?
Why do you think it's? It is really hard for me to

(37:40):
comprehend that violent need to stop that thing.
There's a sacrificial aspect, especially for Morgan 'cause she
was always so close to Peyton. I don't know if Anissa was
feeling the same sort of intensesacrifice of it all, but there
was a development in the SlenderMan lore which came years later

(38:01):
where you could. And again, there's a zillion
different ways this plays out because.
He's a really dark Bloody Mary. Yes you could.
Do. Do terrible acts and act as his
proxy and he would then take youunder his wing and trust you.
So I think there is a sacrificial aspect of this is my
best friend. What could be better to

(38:23):
sacrifice to Slender Man than mybest friend?
Oh, it's. Like Thanos?
It's a bit like. That so Slender Man wants to be
out in the world and or he wantsto have impact on the world.
He wants to be doing bad stuff and killing people and being a
naughty little boy. But sometimes you don't want to
go out. Sometimes you want to eat
DoorDash and that's when he has the proxies step in, I think is

(38:46):
what's going. On and then my other question
about the proxies is because I thinking always thinking about
witchcraft accusations and just our humanities idea around
witches. So these proxies, were they
ever, could somebody be accused of being a proxy or did people

(39:08):
just want to identify as proxiesor were they being identified by
other fans? That's fascinating.
I don't think I've ever heard ofit going that way.
I think most of the time, and I think probably where the lore
came from was people wanting to be part of the story.
And in this case, what's interesting is, you know, it

(39:30):
seems to me that the the two perpetrators, Morgan and Anissa,
they were feeding off of each other.
They were playing into each other's mental illness and
obsession with the story and also they were creating this
very intense bond that ostracized this other friend.

(39:53):
And also she didn't struggle with mental illness.
She was known as being more welladjusted.
So she what is interesting is that it's the reverse of a lot
of witch hunts and witch trial cases where the other is like a.
Socially awkward or doesn't fit in an outsider.

(40:16):
But in this sort of little yeah microcosm, this three person
group, it's the two that are struggling with their mental
health, obsessing over this horror monster, and they're
ostracizing the girl that is a little bit more well adjusted,
less of an outsider. But to them, she has become the

(40:37):
outsider. She is the one that needs to be
scapegoated and sacrificed. And they probably are dealing
with some social ostracization outside the.
Group. Oh, absolutely.
Especially Morgan. Yeah.
They both really struggled with friendships in school, Peyton
and Morgan. It seemed like Peyton was making
other friends and able to be social and things like that.

(40:58):
And maybe Morgan saw that and was very jealous of that as
well, because these were her only friends.
Now, didn't Anissa tell Morgan or the other way around, maybe
that Slender Man would kill their parents.
So there's also like a, there's a carrot in a stick angle.
Like, you can come live in the mansion with me and Michael
Myers or whatever, or I'll kill your parents.

(41:19):
Yeah, so to get that to that in a second, the girls do flee.
They go to try and find Slender Man in the woods in his slender
mansion. Is that what they called it?
In my mind is that, but I don't know if that's what they called
it. But colloquially I think people
are like the Slender Man. So they run.

(41:42):
Now Peyton was miraculously found alive by like a biker,
just like a passing person. She was rushed to the hospital,
and Morgan and Anissa were discovered walking by the
highway and detained for questioning.
So again, there's this really childlike aspect of like,
there's not really a plan here. How are you going to get into
the deep woods of the this National Park, which I'm sure is

(42:06):
massive to two kids who don't know where they're going.
They're just wandering by the highway.
They just figured Slender Man would swoop and be like, this
way, you know? But they were able to do such a
horrific act that is world altering that almost ended a
person's life, but that there's no real plan and that that is

(42:27):
real, really childlike. But then wrapped up in all of
this horror and so questioning, Morgan said that they had to do
what they did because Anissa hadtold her that Slender Man would
kill their families. So.
That was from the stand. You know what struck me,
watching the HBO documentary, they talked about Morgan and

(42:50):
Anissa planning this for like 6 months to like work out the
details of this plan. But then they kind of changed
some of the elements towards theend.
Like they want to kill her at night while she's sleeping at
first, but then they go with this other plan and.
This was like the third option. I think they, they tried to do

(43:12):
something in the bathroom at thepark and I don't know if Nisa
couldn't go through with it. So it, they kept on putting it
off again, it's the child. Like, we'll figure it out.
We'll figure it out. It's fun to, as a kid to like
fixate on something and make a little plan or whatever.
And I used to do that with like murder mystery parties.

(43:34):
Like that was my thing when I was in high school or whatever.
Like we would plan and we would create the characters and
everything and that was so fun. But it was fake, and I knew it
was fake and it was just for fun.
But they were using this as their entertainment as well
because it was their entertainment.
Reading creepypasta was their entertainment and fixating on it
and obsessing on these stories and then they just brought it

(43:56):
into their lives. I was just thinking about
attacking her. Was power.
Like how do children look at that?
Like look for power? Did they feel like they were
taking some power? Like having power to hurt their
friend, to serve Slender Man. So then are they like even

(44:18):
they're adjusting his power because they're not going to be
victims of his? I think that was part of it.
Is that Morgan especially who was the one who did the
stabbing? She had a flat affect too.
I don't think it. It seemed like it affected her a
ton, at least initially. And I think part of it was she

(44:42):
was wrapped up in this fantasy that she's just doing this for
this monster. She's just in a way part of this
monster. She's his right hand doing this
action for him. And I think it's a way to remove
yourself as well. It's like, well, I'm only doing
this for such and such, and for a child, it might be a little

(45:04):
easier to pull those things apart and be like, this isn't
me. Because if you're already
wrapped up in this fantasy, it'snot so hard to remove the blame
from yourself. So I think she probably did feel
power, but she didn't feel like she was doing it just for
herself or doing it to get one over on Peyton.
She was doing it to to go be with Slender Man, but that's

(45:30):
what they wanted at the end of the day.
Maybe a power dynamic was at play, but they weren't
consciously thinking about it. Super.
Hard yeah, I think with what we talked about how they had been
othering her and their three person friendship, I think that
was really the expression of it was this is going to be the
victim because she is the most unlike the two of us.

(45:53):
Like the two of us get it. We're a little we're a little
more weird. We're we're obsessed with this
story and she's not like us. And the power there is
victimizing her. It's like they they felt
powerful to make the decision tomake her the victim to choose
her as the sacrifice. But I don't know if they thought
of it as necessarily even against her, you know.

(46:20):
Yeah, it's, it's interesting because it seems like it was
just very much like this is whatwe have to do to meet Slender
Man. Yeah, if one of them fully got
cold feet and the other one saidI'm so sorry, they weren't like
excite. They weren't up in an angry
bloodlust or excited to to get to the stabbing.
They. And they seemed both interested

(46:43):
in Slender Man and also fearful.And Morgan said that Anissa said
that he would kill their families, and she also said that
she had been seeing him in her dreams, which I'm sure was
frightening for a child. And Anissa said from what the
creepypasta wiki said, he targets children most.
So I was really scared knowing Slender Man could easily kill my

(47:03):
whole family in three seconds. But.
Here's where I get stuck on thatword creepypasta again.
Because to me, but maybe this isthe difference of being an adult
but to me or maybe this is a difference of mental illness for
that matter. But for me the word creepypasta
means that the stuff's fake. That's an attending like mental

(47:24):
tag on the word creepypasta. Is so that meant it might have
just been a genre true crime like horror.
It was just the genre that they were looking at.
But I think they really played into each other's fears so much
so that you know, they started believing it through the power
of just influencing each other back and forth, back and forth,

(47:45):
obsessing about this thing, fixating on it and then fixating
on this plan. It became more and more real
because you had someone else telling you that they believed
it and they thought the same things as you.
So it's how the conspiracy theory spreads.
It's well, if someone else believes the same thing, I can't
be crazy because there's something here.

(48:05):
It's really interesting because again, they're kids.
So it's seeing it through that lens is very different than
seeing it through an adult lens.And we talked about the Satanic
panic, we talked about Pizzagateand all that stuff.
And those are very adult hysterias based in fears just
like this. Fears about children.

(48:26):
And some of them resulted in crimes or accusations levelled
at people. Mcmartin Preschool.
Yeah, Mcmartin Preschool, like very baseless sort of
situations. At the end of the day that was
legally found and that those were the adult cases.
So it's interesting that this islike a, again, a microcosm of
that. And Morgan was the one that

(48:48):
really went with the proxy thing.
She was the one that told Anissalike this is what we do, to be
proxies for him and go meet him.It was her that said that they
should kill Peyton because they have to prove themselves to him.
So it makes sense that she's theone.
First of all, she's the one doing the stabbing, but she's

(49:09):
the one making this choice because she was the one who was
the closest to Peyton. So maybe she also felt the most
jealous of her being more integrated in their young
society. She might have felt left behind
by her in some senses and betrayed by her.
And she figured I have this new friend, I need to prove myself

(49:32):
to this new friend as well. We both believe the same thing.
So let's cut out this other person that is not part of our
group anymore. It just would have been better
if they just got into like Ed Sheeran or something.
Ed Sheeran will never demand stab your friend in the woods

(49:52):
and. If he does, that's not good.
If you plan backwards, yeah. Exactly.
Bags masked. Ed Sheeran still going to have
some tea. That's a very pleasant bath,
absolutely. So after the interrogation, the
girls were arrested for first degree attempted homicide.
The trial began September 2017, so this is a few years later.

(50:16):
Morgan was charged with attempted first degree homicide
because she was the one who perpetrated the stabbing and
Anissa with attempted second degree.
Now because of a get tough on crime initiative in Wisconsin,
they were required to be tried as adults.
They were not even teenagers during the stabbing and they
still were like 14 or 15, but they were being tried as adults

(50:42):
for attempted murder and they were both facing life in prison
if found guilty. So this kind of it wasn't a
whim, right? There was planning that went
into it, but they didn't grasp the seriousness of it for a
variety of reasons. But again, they were 12.
Like you're going through puberty.

(51:03):
Hormones are crazy, like you're kind of crazy when you're 12 in
a way. Like it just taking out any
question of underlying mental illness or anything like that.
Like you're on, you're not your most reasonable as a 1213 year
old person. That's also a bad that's a bad
position to put the jury in because these girls definitely

(51:24):
are guilty of attempted murder. Yes, but the you know, the
question is how much your stand they were doing something wrong.
Or how much do you want to? Yeah, how much?
Who does it serve to put them inprison for?
And the mass punishment, you know, So Morgan was eventually
diagnosed by court psychiatrist Kenneth Casimir with

(51:44):
schizophrenia, an oppositional defiant disorder for
schizophrenia. Casimir said the patients could
lose track of reality in a number of ways.
Hallucinations, hearing voices and delusional thought like
believing Slender Man is real. During the trial, another
psychologist stated that he feltENISA was susceptible to
delusional disorder, schizotypalpersonality disorder, and this

(52:09):
particularly is a diminished ability to determine what is
real and what is not real. He also felt that she had no
characteristics of psychopathy or sociopathy, but she was
diagnosed with a shared psychotic disorder with Morgan.
We talked about this in our show.
It's like a Foliado madness of two where you kind of share

(52:31):
delusions so deeply, you egg each other on so much that you
enter into a psychosis with another person and that the fact
that it's with another person makes it stronger because you're
going back and forth. It's an endless feedback loop of
this really damaging thought. It's what's probably going on

(52:52):
with Betty and Barney Hill or those two ladies who say they
went back in time at Versailles.Yes, you say, oh, isn't this
weird? Isn't this weird?
Isn't this weird? And then just goes back and
forth. You know what?
You're right. That was Marie Antoinette.
Yeah. Exactly.
Oh, wow. And so this idea of this
hysteria and shared madness is really prevalent in a lot of
stories that both of our podcasts cover.

(53:14):
Hysteria is often a factor in what leads to witch trials and
the scapegoating of those perceived as others.
And this event really was evocative to me of the Salem
witch trials. Now, of course, it's the one
that I know the best, but the fact of the young girls being
the catalyst here, they're influenced by a variety of

(53:38):
factors that are still debated even to today.
Wasn't their God, but they're they include societal pressures,
paranoia in their cases, the real difficulties of colonial
living and being a young girl inthe pre revolutionary era.
And that's just the dreadful boredom.
You don't have much to do from childhood to getting married.

(54:04):
You're just getting ready to getmarried a lot of the time.
You're helping your mom, you're helping around the house.
And then you're you're getting, you're waiting to be a wife and
a mother. And that was a really lonely and
difficult place to be, I'm sure,as a young woman in the colonial
era. So that's sort of in the Salem

(54:26):
witchcraft trials case. They had these shared stories
that they would go back and forth and participate in.
There was a role play element ofmaking their their little
puppets and doing a little spells and things.
Yeah. And they whipped each other into
a frenzy, building on each other's stories until it did
leak out into the real world andhad really large implications

(54:49):
for their society with adults aswell.
So it wasn't just limited to thechildren.
And that's how the shared storytelling of the Slender Man
in this little group led to those real life consequences.
It's this shared hysteria that leads to tragedy.
I. Think those girls probably were

(55:10):
feeling their power? Yes, I think so.
And like the Salem witch trial afflictions that was full of
emotion, the shared delusion of Anissa and Morgan, I wonder how
it it seems like there was like this void of emotion.
Yeah. And some of that could be their

(55:33):
particular individual mental States and mental health
struggles. Morgan might just have a very
flat affect generally. I think part of it is also what
they were doing was so involved in this other being, you know,
doing things for this other being or through this other
being. They could kind of lay blame for

(55:55):
this other being. And I think that they probably
knew they were doing something wrong, depending on the mental
illness factor, but they knew that killing was wrong.
She said I'm sorry. Yes.
But the girls in the witch trials, I think initially they
probably didn't understand what they were doing was wrong.

(56:18):
Eventually things escalated to such an extent that it was like,
oh, people are dying. This is getting serious.
But I think they were. They had the fantasy.
They thought they were in the right.
They thought they were doing what was right in a way, I
think. They put a baby in prison pretty
early. They did.

(56:38):
I think by that point they were probably figuring it out.
But initially, and again, they have childlike motivations too.
They don't want to get in trouble, so they have to start
blaming other people. And then eventually they're
whipping each other into a frenzy of this is really
happening. And then they have to keep the
ruse going because, again, they could get in trouble.

(57:00):
Like, it's a very childlike thing, but has these really
drastic implications in the lives of so many people.
And that's what happened in the Slender Man stabbing as well.
You can see how the girls in theSalem witch trials and it seems
like these two girls, the Slender Man case, like they're

(57:21):
really influenced by what adultsare saying.
Also, because adults invented Slender Man and adults in Salem,
we're saying, hey, the devil's all around you.
He's walking around these woods right now trying to get people.
So, you know, they're on heightened alert, believing what
the adults say. And then the adults are

(57:42):
reinforcing them and saying, OK,good job accusing that person.
Why don't you accuse another? We're going to have that person
arrested. We're validating your accusation
so it. Exactly.
If your mom's telling you the devil's real and you don't have
a lot of outside experience in the world to tell you that it's

(58:02):
not real, you're going to believe that it's real.
And if your mom is telling you Idon't want you looking at that
Slender Man stuff anymore, it's not right.
Then part of you as a child might think maybe there is some
like, why is my mom afraid of him if he's not real?
Why doesn't she want me looking at this?
You know it. And yeah, it is eventually like

(58:25):
they are two stories told by adults, two children.
And the children take it and really run with it for different
reasons. But it's interesting that
they're young women and feeling,I think probably both of them
did feel powerless. I think any 12 year old girl
kind of feels powerless in a wayof the changes going on around

(58:49):
her, with her friend groups, with her microcosm of society,
with her body, things that we were.
You're not understanding how you're feeling from moment to
moment. Sometimes you feel powerless.
So you can either take action inthe Salem witch trials case, or
you could be a proxy to another being and not have to make these

(59:11):
decisions for yourself. I was just thinking, one of my
favorite, one of my favorite. It's more than a character,
'cause she's a real person. But Abigail Hobbs, she had the
most wild confession about her contract with the devil.
And I was just thinking, man, how would have Abigail Hobbs,

(59:34):
what would have her, what would have she had to say about
Slender Man? What actions would she have
taken the Slender Man? Yeah.
Yeah. Do you think any of those,
obviously those are all coerced confessions to 1° or another, In
which trials do you think peopleget into?
And do you think any of those people got into a place where

(59:55):
they were just like, ended up inthe delusion with everybody
else? Or is it always a case of please
stop hitting me? I would.
I saw I put, I wrote in the book.
Well, I don't. I mean, Josh, what do you think
about Abigail and Slender Man? I think Abigail Hobbs, she
confessed. I think because she wanted to,

(01:00:17):
she's like an outlier. She's a 15 year old girl who's
like the wild child of Topsfield, Massachusetts.
She like has a lot of squabbles with her step mom and she's like
tells. She's has the habit of telling
people before the witch trials like, oh, I know the devil,
he'll come with, like Olive, things like that, that you

(01:00:40):
shouldn't be saying that anytimein 17th century Massachusetts.
But I think that she was like, yeah, I know the double what of
it? And she felt she had some
certain cache because of it. By the way, I know you have the
trial of George Jacobs up on your wall there.
We do. Yeah, we have.

(01:01:01):
So my parents had my dad's an English teacher and growing up
we had the famous portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne over our
fireplace from he we got at the House of Seven Gables.
He was, you know, my dad was a big fan.
And so when we moved in here, hegave it to us and we were like,
it was kind of, I really like these paintings.
And we, I think it's just, I don't know, I like we.

(01:01:24):
We've themed this dining room around Salem, MA.
We have the witch house on one wall.
We have Hawthorne there. And I just I.
Always think the companion pieceactually the two those two big
witch trials paintings. They're such.
And again, it's the witch hunt, the witch trials that I'm most
familiar with and most people are, but it is one of my
particular interests. And I think something about the

(01:01:47):
the reminder of what we can do to each other when we're not
civil, when we don't talk, when we don't try to understand each
other. And these are things that I
really value is like civil discourse, empathy, trying to
understand each other. That's really important to me.
So that's why I like the reminders of in a weird way,

(01:02:07):
reminds me of my own like moral hierarchy.
I guess and the importance of critical thinking.
Yes, critical thinking, very important now maybe more than
ever, but certainly then too. Yeah, definitely.
When you're confronted with someof these ideas, like that your
neighbor is a witch, you should stop and think for a minute on

(01:02:30):
that. Like could there be another
explanation to why my butter soured or by my pudding split
down the middle you. Say that, Josh, you say that,
but she looked through the window right when the right when
I took the sip of the sour milk.So I if you were here, I think

(01:02:51):
you would agree with. They were in such a reduced
experience of the world, like children.
All they had was their religion.All they knew.
Most of them was the local area,their neighbors, their hometown.
Some of them had been in in nearby States and had gone
through traumas with Indian warsand things like that.

(01:03:13):
But all they knew was their verycomparatively to nowadays, they
didn't have the Internet right. But they're smaller realities.
They're very insulated communities and in the Slender
Man stabbing, it is like a very insulated situation.
There is this connectivity to the Internet and stuff, but the
access ends up just making them more and more obsessed with this

(01:03:36):
one thing and feeding it into iton each other.
And they don't have the life experience of an adult, but they
haven't travelled, they haven't met a lot of people.
So it's easier to believe certain things when you don't
have the experience not to. Also, when you're forming a
personality, when you're a adolescent, a teenager even, I

(01:03:58):
would say this flies through collagen for some people through
their 20s, you are looking for things to build that personality
around. And sometimes you can become
obsessive about something just because there's not you haven't
figured out what else you're really about yet.
You're trying to find the thing.And I think it's harder for some
people than for others. But they must have been talking

(01:04:19):
a lot about Slender Man, becausewhen Peyton heard the reasoning
behind the stabbing, she was just like, that Makes sense.
Yeah, they would do that, basically.
I know they were obsessed. I wasn't really into it, but
yeah, that that makes sense to me why they would think that's a
good thing to do. So, yeah.
So at the end of the day, Nisa pled guilty and the jury found

(01:04:42):
her guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
So not insanity, but she's not fully in charge of her
faculties. Morgan accepted a plea deal
wherein she would not go to trial and would leave it up to
psychiatrists how long that she would be held in a mental
hospital. And then later she pled guilty
but was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or

(01:05:04):
defect. Anissa received 25 years to
life. She had a few years of locked
confinement and involuntary treatment at the state
psychiatric institute. Morgan received the maximum
sentence of 40 years to life. She was in three years of locked
confinement and involuntary treatment at the psychiatric
institute. And then eventually, Anissa was

(01:05:26):
released in 2021, and Morgan continues to live in a state
mental facility. I think it's good that they
weren't sent to prison forever. I don't think that would serve
anybody. But I think they just, I don't
usually the standards for the insanity defense as it's called.
Is whether you know right from. Wrong is whether you know right

(01:05:47):
from wrong. And if you apologize to your
victim before you stab them, I think you are blowing that
defense out of the water. But I also think they probably
just shouldn't have been tried as adults 'cause they were
children. Both before and after.
It makes me feel frustrated withthe adults.
It's like, are we too lazy to learn how to try children for
horrific crimes? Let's just follow this template

(01:06:10):
over here because it's so bad. Well, they got help, the help
that was available. I can't even, like you mentioned
what it would have been like forthe jury when you're thinking
about the judge, but even the medical staff who wanted to see
these girls heal and be OK, I can't imagine what that journey
was like for everybody. But I'm, I don't know, adult

(01:06:34):
trials for children. It just seems like can we do
better than that? But also it is, it was a very,
she almost died. She could have been dead and she
survived that. Survival is incredible, yeah.
And yeah. So it seems apparent that Morgan

(01:06:54):
and Anissa latched on to this outsider monster because they
themselves felt like outsiders, and then fed into each other's
delusions until they enacted this crime in his name.
The real question here, and I think we're probably like minded
of this, but like, does that make them monsters?

(01:07:17):
Is it this monstrous act? This the planning, this
monstrous act? Can 12 year olds be monsters?
Are they capable of that? Are children capable of that?
Their brain isn't fully developed.
Maybe they're not totally understanding everything they're
doing, but can you still be a monster as a child?
What about the mental health factor?
And then this applies to many people.

(01:07:39):
We've talked about many criminals and stuff and not to
say anything about mental illness there.
There are factors in a lot of crimes where that is a
contribution. Can you be fully a monster if
you're not fully in charge of your mind?
Many of us would probably, I hope, say that only a monster

(01:08:00):
could coldly stab their best friend and leave them for dead.
But can these girls really be defined as that?
They are getting they've had years of of help.
One of them's free out in the world.
Now, now. But were they monsters when they
did this crime? It was a monstrous action, but

(01:08:20):
can you define them as monsters?Yeah, I don't think so.
I think it reminds me going backagain to Salem because I love it
so much even though it was awful.
Yeah. Exactly.
People like to blame the girls for, you know, for the
accusations that they made, but they're Anne Putnam Junior's 12

(01:08:42):
years old, Abigail Williams, 11 years old.
How much responsibility could they possibly bear if you were
going to try them for, say, false accusations or something?
How much responsibility can theyactually bear because of where
they are in their mental development?

(01:09:05):
Exactly. And adults are the ones giving
them the power of the adults weren't listening to them, the
adults weren't making the arrests, it wasn't the girls who
were doing the hangings or whatever.
It was the adults that gave themthe power, so at the end of the
day, they were the ones that kind of helped.
It happen. Yeah.

(01:09:26):
I was just, do you know, with the three friends in Wisconsin,
was it common for them to be outon their own wandering?
Because I know that that's an age right where I was at that
age out in the neighborhood. But you just, I don't know, it's

(01:09:49):
you hate to think that they leftthe house with a weapon.
It just is wild to me that they left the house with a weapon.
I think the initial thing was that they were going to the park
and I, that's something I, we would have a slumber party and
then we'd walk over to the park and sit on the swings or
whatever and whatever. Just hang out for like 2 hours

(01:10:10):
for doing nothing. I think that was probably what
they assumed and what they usually did.
And then it like when Peyton's being brought further and
further into the woods, like even she's understanding this is
strange. So I don't think that was
something that was expected of like, oh, they're going to go to

(01:10:30):
the National Park. They're going to go into like
deep into the woods. And I think the girls didn't
really know what they were doingeither because they thought that
there was like a mansion in there.
Yeah. I think they probably were just
going to the park and they took advantage of that trust that
their parents put in them. They're like, oh, they've gone

(01:10:51):
to the park 1000 times and this will be like any other time.
You're not going to expect that someone's going to get stabbed
by one of the girls, you know? Yeah, I.
The question on monsters and were they monsters at that
point? And just at what point is a
human a monster? And there is so much that plays

(01:11:12):
into bad choices. As we've learned about these
attackers. There was there were things that
weren't OK within their own minds.
But do we need to admit that humanity is capable, that people
are just very capable of monstrous acts?

(01:11:35):
Is that important? Or do we just is there just like
you've hit this limit and now you're not a human, you're a
monster. Are you a human acting like a
monster? Yeah, it's interesting because
even in in certain other cases like John Wayne Gacy, right, a
famous serial killer, probably widely considered a monster,

(01:11:57):
very famously had real very abused and had traumatic brain
injury, head trauma, which is another a common thing.
And I say that as someone who got a really severe concussion
playing hockey. So I'm not saying every person
with head injuries is. A murder.
She has no victims that we know.Of but that is a common factor

(01:12:21):
and there is a nature versus nurture aspect a lot of these
people. Obviously John Wayne Gacy was
dealing with a lot of mental trauma from his upbringing and
brain trauma, but I think most of us would say that guy was a
monster. You know, is that because he was
an adult when he made those decisions?
Is that the factor? Are we do we assign more

(01:12:41):
innocence logically to a 12 yearold?
I think when it comes to serial murderers and when it comes to
Gacy's and Bundy's, I think. Repetition of it.
No, I think we want to. I think we want to define them
as monsters, as a way to other them and put up a wall between,

(01:13:02):
well, there's but not me. It could never be.
I would never do anything like that, obviously, because I'm a
totally different species than that.
That's exactly what I was just thinking, yeah, like, why do we
call people monsters? It's because we don't want to
think about are we capable of doing the things that they're
doing? We want to be so different from

(01:13:24):
them, and we want an easy explanation too.
We don't want to think about, well, he had some head trauma
and some other trauma in his life and you know, that
contributed and then you know this and that.
There was the, there have been acouple of like scary sniper
guys, but one of them had a justa brain tumor and a note on his

(01:13:46):
body that said, I think there's something going on in my head,
please cut it open. And there was a big old tumor
pressing on his brain. It's really scary to think that
just a physical, something physically going on could turn
you into a monster. And at the end of the day, the
girls that perpetrated this crime, they thought they were

(01:14:07):
doing this for this faceless inhuman creature.
But Peyton only saw her very human friends at the end of the
knife. And she didn't see a faceless
non human monster. She saw 2 girls that she grew up
with that she trusted. What would she define as

(01:14:29):
monstrous? Would she blame Slender Man or
would she blame the very human girls that that chose to do this
to her? Probably the girls.
So yeah, it's a very interestingquestion of what defines a
monster, what defines other ring.
And I think we both found in ourshows and the different cases

(01:14:51):
we've investigated that there's a lot of factors and it changes
from story to story and even sometimes within the story.
Maybe these girls did a monstrous action, but then there
was later context found to thoseactions and that sort of informs
on what happened previously and the definitions change so.

(01:15:12):
Yeah, that holding these perpetrators at arm's length or
othering them or breaking down those barriers a little bit to
explore what's going on under the hood is all very of a piece
of that true crime world that wesometimes swim into.
I think that is the fascination of serial killer stories for
true crime people. They're all people, but how

(01:15:33):
could they be like me? Him like me, him like me.
How you know? That's the that's the dread of
serial killers, I think, for a lot of people.
So that's the Slender Man stabbing, and that's the story
of Slender Man and how Internet folklore kind of turned into
this real life Horror Story. And I think we've seen that

(01:15:56):
conspiracies and things like that in, in their own way, kind
of Internet folklore nowadays have also continued doing a lot
of the same things. So yeah, it's really about that
critical thinking, but can be hard if you have other factors
at play sort of messing with howyou are thinking.

(01:16:18):
Has his suit gotten more sooty over the years?
I feel like the tie is more defined now.
He definitely has a tie. Sometimes there's like sexy
Slender Man too. I got that one's built you we
just found a pretty built slender.
Like I, he's not that slender. I mean, he shouldn't look like
he's ripping out bench press. For sure.

(01:16:41):
Yeah. So thank you so much.
Oh, thank you guys. This has been a.
That's great. Yeah, that's supposed to be
like. A and the cobwebs just in time
for October. Yeah, I'm in other parts of the
house. Thanks for having us and have an
amazing spooky season. And yeah, don't let Slender Man

(01:17:05):
get you. And we'll look forward to our
next collab. Guys, please, please invite us
back and we can maybe we can getyou into the Ain't It Scary
Studio sooner rather than later.That would be really fun.
And I have to tell you, I was like, you could tell Josh this
week. I was like, I hope they bring up
men in black. I hope they bring up men in
black. I hope I can get him to sing.
What if I can get him to sing it?

(01:17:27):
I'm sorry, it's so embarrassed. I was running down Will Smith in
my head. Oh.
Yeah, Prince, you didn't get jiggy with it.
Yeah, I know. I really have just enjoyed your
episodes so much. Thank you so much.
Thank you, we have loved watching your show grow.
And develop and the scope develop and also how you guys

(01:17:48):
have helped influence the sort of real world out outside of
podcast stuff. I think that's really important.
And again, influencing more critical thought and interest in
history and knowing how history informs what we're doing now, I
think that's more important now than ever.

(01:18:09):
And and sometimes how some of the stuff isn't fully left in
the past. No, it's just a lot of the times
it just recycles and repeats andhopefully we can approach it in
a more critical and tempered way.
That's not always the name of the game nowadays,
unfortunately. Yeah, we can probably start by

(01:18:30):
not calling people monsters. That's true.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.