#34: The Slenderman Case - A Dark Side of Creepypasta

The Slenderman Stabbing: 5 Disturbing Realities the Media Never Told You

In May 2014, the Slenderman stabbing in Waukesha, Wisconsin, became international news overnight. The story seemed straightforward enough: two 12-year-old girls, obsessed with a fictional internet monster, lured their best friend into the woods and stabbed her nineteen times. It was a modern horror story that confirmed every parent's worst fears about what their children might find online.

But that version of events—the one repeated in countless news articles and true crime documentaries—is almost entirely wrong.

The real story is far more disturbing, and far more tragic. It's not about the internet corrupting innocent minds. It's about severe mental illness that went unrecognized for years. It's about adults who saw warning signs and looked away. It's about a justice system built on junk science from the 1990s, still punishing children based on a theory its own creator now calls catastrophic.

Drawing from Kathleen Hale's meticulously researched book Slenderman, here are five truths about the Waukesha stabbing that the headlines got wrong.

1. This Was Never About the Internet—It Was About Untreated Schizophrenia

Morgan Geyser didn't discover Slenderman and suddenly become dangerous. She had been living with severe psychosis since early childhood, years before she ever went online.

Her symptoms started when she was barely old enough to speak. As a toddler, she told her parents that ghosts were hugging and biting her. By elementary school, she saw colors melting down walls and rainbows circling her body. She heard a voice she called Maggie that spoke to her constantly, a dear friend who existed only in her mind.

Then there was Sev, a boy who stepped out of anime shows and felt real to the touch. Morgan could feel his heartbeat when she pressed her hand against his chest. He slept in her bed. She woke up with his drool in her hair.

And there was the tall, faceless, shadowy figure she called "It" who appeared behind her in mirrors—a figure that looked exactly like the Slenderman she would encounter years later on Creepypasta.com.

Morgan's father, Matt Geyser, also had schizophrenia. He'd been diagnosed as a teenager but stopped taking medication at nineteen, believing that making the devil disappear meant sacrificing joy. This genetic connection meant Morgan had a one-in-ten chance of developing the condition—forty times higher than the average child.

When Morgan tried to tell her parents what she was experiencing, they dismissed her. Matt's own parents had done the same thing to him. At age seven, after telling them he'd seen a vision of his unborn sister's ghost, they sent him back to bed. Now Matt and his wife Angie told Morgan she was making things up to get attention.

Later, after everything that happened, Morgan would reflect on this with a kind of sad bewilderment: "I don't know what kid pretends to hear voices to get out of trouble. They could have gotten me help. But instead they said I was trying to get attention."

This wasn't a story about a killer kid. It was a preventable tragedy about a sick child whose own family refused to see how desperately she needed help.

2. Every Adult Who Could Have Helped Her Looked the Other Way

Morgan's parents weren't the only ones who failed to act. At Horning Middle School, teachers and counselors witnessed behavior that should have triggered immediate concern—and did nothing.

Students reported that Morgan brought a rubber mallet to school, claiming she needed it for protection. She was caught writing the word "die" over and over in her notebook. She barked at other children on the playground. She picked a scab on her knee and used the blood to paint pictures in her notebook.

Each time something was reported, the response from school staff was the same: Morgan just needed to fit in better. After the mallet incident, a guidance counselor told police she saw no red flags and didn't think a referral was necessary.

Horning Middle School had only two guidance counselors for 680 students, an institution stretched too thin to properly monitor vulnerable children. But even within those constraints, multiple adults had the opportunity to recognize a child in crisis. Instead, they prioritized social conformity over mental health.

Anissa's attorney would later summarize this failure in court: "The children all came and said to the teachers 'this is happening, something's wrong'—and the adults all said, 'quirky, wants attention.' There were warnings, there were signs—and as adults, we whistle past the graveyard because we don't want to see that a child is sick."

3. The Attack Resulted From a Rare Psychological Phenomenon Called Folie à Deux

The stabbing wasn't simply a case of one disturbed girl manipulating another. Multiple psychologists who examined Anissa Weier diagnosed her with folie à deux—shared psychotic disorder—a rare condition where delusions spread from one person to another.

Anissa entered the friendship in a desperate state. Her parents' separation had left her profoundly lonely. She was the good kid, the one who got straight A's and never caused trouble, which meant she was constantly pushed aside while her parents dealt with more urgent problems. She needed acceptance so badly that when she met Morgan on the school bus, she clung to her for dear life.

This desperation made Anissa vulnerable to Morgan's delusions. Morgan's psychosis gave her a strange kind of authority—she saw things others couldn't, knew things others didn't. As Morgan's grip on reality loosened, she relied on Anissa to tell her what to do. Anissa, terrified of losing her only friend, went along with everything.

Their pathologies clicked together with vicious intensity, each feeding the other's worst impulses. Neither girl could have committed this act alone. It required both of them, their individual vulnerabilities combining to create something uniquely destructive.

Defense attorney Clarence Darrow described this dynamic nearly a century ago in his closing argument for the Leopold and Loeb trial: "These boys, neither one of them, could possibly have committed this act excepting by coming together. It was not the act for one; it was the act of two... some sort of chemical alchemy operated so that they cared for each other, and poor Bobby Franks's dead body was found in the culvert as a result."

4. They Were Tried as Adults Because of a Discredited 1990s Theory About "Superpredators"

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this case is that two 12-year-old girls—one with severe schizophrenia—were automatically charged as adults. This wasn't a prosecutor's decision. It was mandated by Wisconsin law, which requires children as young as ten to be tried as adults for attempted homicide.

This harsh legal framework exists because of the "superpredator" theory that sparked a nationwide moral panic in the mid-1990s. Political scientist John DiIulio Jr. warned that America was about to be overrun by a generation of amoral, sociopathic "kiddie criminals" with no conscience and no capacity for rehabilitation.

States responded by passing laws to prosecute more children in adult courts, assuming this would deter juvenile crime and protect communities.

There's just one problem: the superpredator theory was completely wrong.

It's been thoroughly debunked by researchers, described as a distortion of statistics based on fundamentally unscientific guesswork. DiIulio himself has since expressed profound regret for the catastrophic consequences his theory had for children across the country.

Even worse, a 2008 Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau report found that prosecuting children as adults actually increases their likelihood of reoffending, making communities less safe. The very law designed to protect people from dangerous juvenile offenders was creating more of them.

So two mentally ill middle schoolers were processed through the adult criminal justice system not because of evidence or sound policy, but because of a discredited theory from decades earlier that even its creator now calls utter madness.

5. The Justice System Prioritized Punishment Over Treatment—And Made Everything Worse

Once Morgan and Anissa entered the adult system, they were denied access to mental health treatment that would have been automatic in juvenile court. They spent years in county jail without adequate psychiatric care while their cases dragged through the courts.

Morgan wasn't medicated for her schizophrenia for nineteen months after her arrest. During that time, her condition deteriorated. She adopted the jail's ant infestation as pets and threw them at other children. She scattered drawings and cat photos across her cell floor like a carpet, trying to make the emptiness feel less oppressive. Her hallucinations intensified. Her grip on reality weakened further.

When she finally received antipsychotic medication in late 2015, the improvement was dramatic. Within two months, she achieved full group participation and won Patient of the Month. But with clarity came something more painful: remorse. As the fog of psychosis lifted, Morgan began to understand what she had actually done.

She wrote in her notebook: "I want to die. I want to kill myself—I want to go to sleep and never wake up. I can't wake up from this nightmare."

Judge Michael Bohren eventually sentenced Morgan to forty years at Winnebago Mental Health Institute—the maximum sentence for not guilty by reason of insanity of attempted murder. His decision was based not on her danger to the community (doctors testified she was ready for conditional release) but on what he called "the community's perception."

Anissa received twenty-five years—one year for each scar on Bella's body.

Both sentences were far longer than what they likely would have received in juvenile court, where the focus would have been on treatment and rehabilitation rather than punishment and public perception.

The Real Horror: A System That Failed at Every Level

The Slenderman stabbing was never really about Slenderman. It was about a sick child whose family refused to acknowledge her illness, a school system that mistook psychosis for quirkiness, and a justice system that treated two mentally unwell twelve-year-olds as hardened criminals because of a discredited moral panic from the 1990s.

Slenderman didn't create this tragedy. He was just a convenient scapegoat, a fictional monster we could blame instead of confronting the uncomfortable truth about how thoroughly we failed these children.

The case forces us to ask difficult questions: What happens when every system designed to protect a child fails simultaneously? When a mentally ill twelve-year-old's cries for help are dismissed as attention-seeking? When politicians build laws on junk science and never bother to repeal them even after the science is proven wrong?

The answer is what happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on May 31, 2014. Three children went into the woods that morning. Only one came out unharmed. The other two are still paying the price for the failures of every adult who should have protected them.

That's the real horror story—and it has nothing to do with the internet.