About five hours later and a few miles away, while resting in the grass alongside Interstate 94, Morgan and Anissa are picked up by a pair of sheriff’s deputies. The deputies approach them carefully, aware that they are possible suspects in a stabbing but confused by their age. One of the men notices blood on Morgan’s clothes as he handcuffs her. When he asks if she’s been injured, she says no.
“Then where did the blood come from?”
“I was forced to stab my best friend.”
Morgan and Anissa do not yet know that Bella, against all odds, has survived. After their arrests, over the course of nearly nine combined hours of interviews, they claim that they were compelled to kill her by a monster they had encountered online. When discovered, the girls were making their way to him, heading to Wisconsin’s Nicolet National Forest on foot, nearly 200 miles north. They were convinced that, once there, if they pushed farther and farther into the nearly 700,000-acre forest, they would find the mansion in which their monster dwells and he would welcome them.
Morgan and Anissa packed for the trip—granola bars, water bottles, photos by which to remember their families. (As Anissa tells a detective, “We were probably going to be spending the rest of our lives there.”) Though they were both a very young, Midwestern 12, they had been chosen for a dark and unique destiny that none of their junior high classmates could possibly understand, drawn into the forest in the service of a force much greater and more mysterious than anything in their suburban American lives. What drew them out there has a name: Slender Man, faceless and pale and impossibly tall. His symbol is the letter “X.”
GIRLS LURED OUT INTO THE DARK WOODS—THIS IS THE stuff of folktales from so many countries, a New World fear of the Puritans, an image at the heart of witchcraft and the occult, timeless. Some of our best-known folktales were passed down by teenagers—specifically teenage girls.
When Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm published their first collection in 1812, they’d collected many of the stories from young women—from a handful of lower-class villages, but also from the far more sophisticated German cities of Kassel and Münster. At least one of the girls—Dortchen, a pharmacist’s daughter Wilhelm would later marry—was as young as 12. In their earliest published form, 125 years before the first Disney adaptation, these stories are closer to the voices of the original storytellers, less polished, blunt.
The common belief is that many of these tales, when told to children, serve as warnings for bad behavior, harsh lessons, morality plays. But on the flip side, they’re remarkable for their easy violence and malleable moral logic, like that of a child. Even mothers are potential villains (converted to stepmothers in later editions); even the youngest protagonists may kill or maim—as in Dortchen’s story of Hansel and Gretel, who burn that evil old woman alive in her own oven. Punishments are meted out, but unevenly; one offending parent meets her death, while the other is forgiven for his sadistic deed—the smoothest path to a happy ending.
The sense that these stories, however peculiar or perverse, rose up from the heart of the culture, seemingly authorless, gives them a unique authority. It is part of why they endure. The same can be said of religious allegories and rituals, or, today, of the new legends that emerge from the internet with the barest of contexts and the illusion of timelessness; timeless elements, those that seem to transcend our moment, are essential to the spinning of myths. The characters are archetypes, blank, faceless—“the girl,” “the boy,” “the old woman”; the settings are those of epics—a faraway castle, a mountain few can summit, a dark forest.
Nearly a third of the original 86 tales of the Grimms’ collection feature young people, many of them girls, making their way into the woods—lured out by a trickster, or the need to pass a life-or-death test. In these stories, to enter the forest is to exit everyday life, leaving its rules behind; to encounter magic, and sometimes evil; and finally, deep within the tangle of trees, to be initiated, transformed—maybe even to conquer death—in order to cross into the next phase of life. To enter the forest is to cross over into adolescence.
The woods are also (according to common knowledge) the natural domain of witchcraft, the site at which wayward women gather in the dead of night, naked, to conspire against their neighbors, to blight the crops, to make blood pacts with the devil. They travel out to the edge of town—out into the darkness, between the tops of trees, carried through the night air by demons. At least, this was the Puritan nightmare. In the first American settlements, simple houses stood close together, without streetlights to guide the way at night, and a dark wilderness stretched out just beyond the town limits. The settlers clung for comfort and stability to their vision of a harsh and unforgiving god—but the woods beyond were free from authority.
There are also the woods as they belong to the Pagans of today—those we usually mean when talking about present-day witchcraft in this country. For the Pagan movement, nature is the seat of the sacred, and the black trees the architecture of a natural temple. There the witches—Pagan priests, many of them women, some of them naked—gather for ritual. In that renegade space, they circle out under the moon, chanting, invoking their gods and goddesses.
Then there are the generations of adolescent girls who have experimented with witchcraft—whether some form of Paganism, or folk spells, or totally improvised rites and incantations. For them, the woods have been an occult “room of one’s own,” a site at which to assert that they are separate and unique, a place to be unseen and unselfconscious. This is an impulse, untrained: as Emily Dickinson writes, “Witchcraft has not a pedigree, / ’Tis early as our breath.” Girls are drawn out from their homes, even in the cleanest of suburbs with their bright glass malls, drawn to seek out some kind of magic; to be surrounded by trees, wrapped in the dark, hidden; to become perfect, if only for an hour.
To be an adolescent girl is, for many, to view yourself as desperately set apart, powerfully misunderstood. A special alien, terrible and extraordinary. The flood of new hormones, shot from the glands into the bloodstream; the first charged touches, with a boy or a girl; the first years of bleeding in secret; the startling feeling that your body is suddenly hard to contain and, by extension, so are you. It’s an age defined by a raw desire for experience; by the chaotic beginning of a girl’s sexual self; by obsessive friendships, fast emotions, the birth and rebirth of hard grudges, an inner life that stands outside of logic. You have an undiluted desire for private knowledge, for a genius shared with a select few. You bend reality on the regular.
Add to this heightened state a singular intimacy with another girl who feels the same isolation—you’ve encountered the only other resident of your private planet—and the charge is exponentially increased.
THERE MAY ONLY BE ONE OTHER CRIME, COMMITTED BY girls, that closely evokes that of Morgan and Anissa. It took place 60 years earlier, in 1954, in New Zealand.
Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme met at their conservative all-girls’ school in the Victorian city of Christchurch and became the closest of friends. Pauline was sixteen and Juliet only a few months younger. It was an unexpected friendship, as their families had little in common: Pauline’s parents were working-class (her father ran a fish-and-chip shop), while Juliet’s were wealthier and well traveled, from England, her father the rector of the local university. But the girls had something that drew them together: They’d both been sickly children—Pauline with osteomyelitis (which left her with a limp) and Juliet with pneumonia (which would lead to tuberculosis)—and that brought with it a peculiar kind of isolation. Excused from gym class, the pair spent that period walking through the yard holding hands; they spoke almost exclusively to each other. The headmistress took Juliet’s mother aside to express her concern that the girls might be growing too close—but Hilda Hulme did not want to interfere.