Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  “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.

  From this closeness the two built a wholly immersive imaginative life. They bonded through regular sleepovers at Juliet’s house, and the swapping of chapters of the baroque novels they were writing, packed with tales of doomed romance and adventure. Pauline was stocky and boyish, with short black hair and a scar running down one leg; Juliet’s hair had blond highlights, and she was taller and slimmer and wore well-tailored clothes. Pauline shuffled when she walked and was often ready to lash out; Juliet carried herself with the elegance and easy confidence of an aristocrat. They called each other by secret p
et names based on their fiction (Pauline was “Gina” and Juliet “Deborah”). They dreamed of running away together to America, where their work would be published to great acclaim and adapted for film. They rode their bikes far into the countryside, took off their jackets and shoes and socks, and danced until they were exhausted. Some late nights, Pauline would sneak away and ride her bike to Juliet’s house, where Juliet would slip out through a balcony. They would steal a bottle of her parents’ wine and drink it somewhere out on the grounds, or ride Juliet’s horse through the dark woods.

  On a bright June afternoon in 1954, Pauline and Juliet took a walk through a local park with Pauline’s mother—the place was vast, with a few hiking paths cleared between the young pines and outcroppings of volcanic rock. When they’d gotten far enough away from any other visitors, Juliet provided a distraction—a pretty pink stone she planted on the ground—and as Honorah Parker bent down to take a look, Pauline removed a piece of brick she’d hidden in her bag, wrapped in a school stocking, and brought it down on her mother’s head. The woman collapsed to the ground, and the girls took turns bludgeoning her—about forty-five blows to the head, her glasses knocked from her face, her dentures expelled from her mouth—until she was dead.

  According to Pauline’s journals, in the year leading up to the murder Pauline and Juliet had created their own religion, unimpressed by Christianity and inspired by elements in their lives both secular and sacred. They’d drawn on the Hollywood movies at their local theater for their coterie of “saints” (Mario Lanza, Orson Welles, Mel Ferrer), erected a “temple” (dedicated to the Archangel Raphael and to Pan) in a secluded corner of Juliet’s backyard, and marked their personal holidays with elaborate, choreographed rituals. They believed they could have visions at will—visions of a “4th World” (also called “Paradise” or “Paradisa”), a holier realm inhabited by only the most transcendent of artists, a plane of existence far above that of Pauline’s father, with his fish-and-chip shop, or her undereducated mother. With enough practice, each would soon be able to read the other’s mind. Each made the other singular and perfect.

  What eventually drove Pauline and Juliet to kill Pauline’s mother was the fear of being torn apart: Juliet’s parents, who were separating, wanted Juliet to stay with her father’s sister in Johannesburg while they prepared to return to England; Honorah had refused to allow Pauline to go along. If this were to happen, the world they’d built together—over so many daydreamy afternoons and secret nights out among the trees—would collapse. The girls could not permit that.

  In April of 1954, Pauline wrote: “Anger against mother boiled up inside me. It is she who is one of the main obstacles in my path. Suddenly a means of ridding myself of the obstacle occurred to me.” And then in June, a series of entries:

  We practically finished our books today and our main like for the day was to moider mother. This notion is not a new one, but this time it is a definite plan which we intend to carry out. We have worked it all out and are both thrilled with the idea. Naturally we feel a trifle nervous but the anticipation is great.

  We discussed our plans for moidering mother and made them a little clearer. Peculiarly enough I have no qualms of conscience (or is it peculiar we are so mad?).

  I feel very keyed up as though I were planning a surprise party. So next time I write in this diary Mother will be dead. How odd yet how pleasing.

  And early on the morning of June 22, on a page of her journal labeled, in curling letters, “The Day of the Happy Event”: “I am writing a little of this up on the morning before the death. I felt very excited and ‘The night before Christmas-ish’ last night . . . I am about to rise!”

  FOR FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE STABBING, MORGAN AND Anissa discussed how they would kill their friend. They learned to speak in their own private code: “cracker” meant “knife”; “the itch” was the need to kill Bella; their final destination, the Nicolet National Forest, was “up north” or “the camping trip.”

  Like those girls in Christchurch, they were drawn to each other out of loneliness. Each saw the other as an affirmation of her uniqueness; they shared a hidden, ritualized world. Morgan and Anissa’s private universe was spun not from the matinee idols and historical novels of the early 20th century but from the online fictions of our own time. They had devoted themselves to an internet bogeyman.

  Like a fairy-tale monster, Slender Man emerged through a series of obscure clues, never fully visible. He first appeared online, in the summer of 2009, in two vague images that were quickly passed around horror and fantasy fan forums. In the first, dated 1983, a horde of young teenagers streams out of a wooded area toward the camera, while behind them looms a tall and pale spectral figure with its hand outstretched. The image is coupled with a message: “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time . . .” In the second photo, dated 1986, we see a playground full of little girls, all about six or seven years old. In the foreground, one pauses to face the camera, smiling, as she climbs a slide; in the background, in the shade of a cluster of trees, others gather around a tall figure in a dark suit. If you look closely, you can make out wavy arms or tentacles emanating from its back. A label states that the photo is notable for being taken on the day on which “fourteen children vanished,” and as a record of “what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man.’” Making this all the more meta-real, these photos were presented as “documents”: the 1986 image bears a watermark from “City of Stirling Libraries”; the photographers, respectively, are listed as “presumed dead” and “missing.”

  These images were created by a 30-year-old elementary school teacher (Eric Knudsen, who goes by the name “Victor Surge”) in one of the collections of forums on the website Something Awful. Surge decided to take part in a new thread called “Create Paranormal Images.” The game was to alter existing photographs using Photoshop and then post them on other paranormal forums in an attempt to pass them off as the real thing. The monster was deliberately vague, his story almost completely open-ended—and so the internet rushed in to make of him what it wanted. Bloggers and vloggers and forum members wrote intricate false confessionals of encounters with Slender Man and posted altered photographs and elaborate video series, all predicated on the assumption that “Slender” was a real entity and a real threat.

  Over the next several years, the monster spread at an exponential rate, mainly through alternative-reality games—online texts and videos created by fans feeding off the narratives of other users in real time, creating a “networked narrative” that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. And as the story spread, it quickly lost its point of origin, becoming instead the creative nexus, for hundreds of thousands of users, of a dark, sprawling, real-time fairy tale. A sort of 4th World.

  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 b
y 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.