All that users knew at first was that Slender has the appearance of a lean man in a black suit, and there his humanoid features end. He is unnaturally tall—sometimes as tall as twelve feet—and where his face would be is only blanched, featureless skin, stretched taut as a sausage casing, with shallow indentations in place of eyes and mouth. Occasionally, when he shows himself, a ring of long, grasping black tentacles, like supple branches, emerges from his back. Slender Man’s motives are unclear, but he is associated with sudden disappearance and death. And he has a pronounced appetite for children. Like a gothic Pied Piper, he calls the children out and leads them away from their world, never to be seen again. And when he allows them to stay in their suburban homes, he infects them with the desire to kill, and the longing to be initiated into his darkest, innermost circle.
Slender Man, his fans have decided, has a peculiar attachment to the woods. Any woods, anywhere. Elaborate Photoshopped images populate the internet—of Slender lurking in the trees at the edges of suburban backyards, or appearing in the background of snapshots taken by unsuspecting hikers. Scores of YouTube clips show twentysomethings running through the woods, chased by Slender Man (who sometimes even makes an appearance, in a bad suit, on stilts, with a white stocking over his head). And then there are the “archival” photos, of historical Slender Man sightings around the world. One of the most arresting images shows Slender standing among the massive pines of a half-felled forest behind children in what might be 19th-century dress: it could be an early photo of Appalachia, or perhaps the Black Forest (some believe the monster first emerged long ago in Germany, the birthplace of some of our darkest folktales).
For Slender’s hundreds of thousands of online devotees, he was a trip, a monster they were crowdsourcing in real time. His many, many fans and cocreators were mostly college-age guys, or guys in their early 20s—people with a lot of time to devote to the unreal. But because the internet is so wide open, and because there were so many avenues leading to Slender—from video games like Minecraft (where Anissa Weier first discovered him) to alternate-reality games, entire YouTube channels, and fan-fiction forums—there was no way to control who was exposed to this new monster and what they made of him. Morgan and Anissa, among the youngest members of the Slenderverse, were quickly consumed by the swirling, open-ended storyline. They latched onto him as a source of private ritual, the linchpin in the occult universe they were building together.
From the beginning, their friendship was forged by a kind of urgency. Anissa, in particular, suffered from bullying after recently transferring to their school (a fact she kept from her parents) and needed this months-old bond with Morgan to last. (Morgan would later claim that she’d gone ahead with the stabbing to keep Anissa “happy”: “It’s, um, hard enough to make friends, I don’t want to lose them over something like this.”) Their bond was only heightened by the alternate reality they inhabited together.
The Slender Man phenomenon actually feeds on the divide between young people’s reality and that of adults: he exists, he grows, in the gap between adolescents’ intuitive sense of the truth—their willingness to embrace the mysteries—and the cool logic of their parents and teachers. “It should also be noted that children have been able to see [Slender] when no other adults in the vicinity could,” reads one fan site. “Confiding these stories to their parents [is] met with the usual parental admonition: overactive imaginations.”
The girls told each other they could see and hear Slender, and in her notebooks Morgan drew the image of the faceless man again and again.
IN SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 1692, A DARK STORY SPUN BY a cadre of teenage girls had radical real-world consequences. Their false accusations were as fantastic as any folktale—a form that had become popular in Europe earlier that century—and as starkly good-versus-evil as the biblical drama that their harsh Puritan community thrived upon.
The “afflicted girls” of Salem—Abigail Williams and ten others—charged their neighbors with consorting with the devil, and of tempting them to do the same. Abigail, then fourteen, openly rebelled against her stepmother and claimed to wander the woods at night. She told everyone who would listen that she had no fear and nothing could harm her—she’d made a pact with Satan! Most outrageous of all, she said that she’d taken part in a gathering of nine witches during which they’d consumed an unholy sacrament. “I will speak the truth,” she told the crowd when called into court. “I have been very wicked.”
As the Slender Man legend evolved, the shadowy figure operated more like the Satan of Puritan times. Posters claimed that anyone who learned about Slender was in danger of becoming obsessed with him through a kind of mind control; increasingly, he killed through others—humans known as his “proxies,” his “husks,” his “agents.” He took possession of them, and they did his bidding.
The fairy-tale concept of evil lurking in the woods may be as old as the idea of Satan himself. And all of them—children’s monsters, Slender Man, the Devil—are kept alive by the stories we tell one another. Abigail Williams claimed to have had a vision of elderly Rebecca Nurse offering her “the Devil’s book”; in church, she cried out that she saw another of the village women perched high in the rafters, suckling a canary; she spotted malicious little men walking the streets of town recruiting new witches. Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme’s visions were more mystical and ethereal. Two months before the murder, over Easter vacation, Pauline stayed with Juliet and her family at the beach, and the pair had their first shared revelation. On Good Friday, out for a walk before sunrise, they saw what Pauline described as a “queer formation of clouds,” “a gateway” into the 4th World. They suddenly realized that they had “an extra part of our brain which can appreciate the 4th World . . . [W]e may use the key and look into that beautiful world which we have been lucky enough to be allowed to know of.”
As for Morgan and Anissa, in Waukesha, they, too, shared visions they claimed were tangible, hyperrealistic. Like the adults posting on Slender Man forums, the girls told each other that they were able to see “Slendy”—but with a vivid reality that set them apart from any healthy adult fan. According to Anissa, after she first told Morgan about the monster, Morgan claimed she’d spotted him when she was five, in a wooded area near her family’s house. Anissa told Morgan that she’d seen him twice, in trees outside the window of the bus they shared to school.
When a detective questions Anissa shortly after her arrest, she asks, “So back in December or January, Morgan told you, ‘Hey, we should be proxies,’ basically?”
ANISSA: Yeah.
DETECTIVE: And you said what?
ANISSA: I said, “Okay, how do we do that?” And she said, “We have to kill Bella.”
DETECTIVE: Okay. [Pause.] And do you know why she said that?
ANISSA: Because we had to supposedly prove ourselves worthy to Slender.
DETECTIVE: And what did you think of this?
ANISSA: I was surprised—but also kind of excited, ’cause I wanted proof that he existed. Because there are a bunch of skeptics out there saying that he didn’t exist, and then there are a bunch of photos online and sources online saying that they did see him . . . So I decided to go along, to tag along, to prove skeptics wrong.