Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  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.

  DETECTIVE: So did you think that you actually had to kill someone to do it?

  ANISSA: Yeah.

  DETECTIVE: Like, for real?

  ANISSA: Mm-hmm.

  About an hour into the interrogation, the detective asks Anissa, “When Morgan said to you, ‘If we don’t do this for Slender, our families and loved ones will be killed,’ do you honestly believe that?” Anissa, crying, answers in an astonished-kid voice: “Well, yeah.” More specifically, she believes that Slender Man “can easily kill my whole family in three seconds.” Just hours earlier, during their long trek to the Nicolet National Forest, the girls had announced each time they’d caught a glimpse of him along the way—in the suburban woods, among the trees by the highway. They could hear the rustling of him following close by.

  MORGAN GEYSER’S DRAWINGS OF SLENDER MAN VEER from stark, repetitive images evoking a phantom—a page covered in his symbol (“X”), a blank face with “Xs” for eyes—to the increasingly particular. In one pencil sketch, a girl with kitty-cat ears and tail lies on the ground, eyes closed, a skull floating above her head; looming over her is another humanoid kitty girl, who looks straight at the viewer, a scythe in one hand. The speech bubble above her head reads: I LOVE KILLING PEOPLE! And in the most elaborate image, a slim, bald, and faceless figure towers over a row of children; enormous, octopoid tentacles emerge from his back, like long black fingers. Above this Slender creature’s head is written a message, as if to the artist herself: YOU ARE STRANGE CHILD . . . IT WILL BE OF MY USE.

  In that inscription, an adolescent girl, channeling the voice of a monster, exiles herself—she is “strange” and warped—only to accept herself again. The monster tells her, Here in the Slenderverse, your strangeness is unique; your loneliness has a purpose; I am calling you to your destiny. Just as in the 4th World, Pauline and Juliet’s weirdness, their “madness,” gives them psychic powers and untouchable brilliance. By some Brothers Grimm logic, a dark trial, a call to murder, becomes the girls’ only prospect. On ten separate occasions in her interrogation, Morgan calls the stabbing “necessary.”

  In another sketch, a long-haired kid in a bloody sweatshirt looks as if she has thrown her arms around the neck of Slender Man, who embraces her in return. She is crying; his reddened cheeks are either bloodied or blushing. The two appear to be close, intimate; they are, perhaps, comforting each other. Here the meaning of that earlier inscription—HE STILL SEES YOU—seems to change. As if following the plotline of a teen romance, perhaps Slender’s message has become, instead, I SEE WHO YOU REALLY ARE. Slender Man has inspired reams of online fan fiction, some of it romantic or even erotic, about teenage girls involved with the monster. Titles include “My Dear Slenderman,” “Into the Darkness,” “Love Is All I Want,” “To Love a Monster,” “I Slept with Slender Man,” and “Slenderman’s Loving Arms.” A few of these stories have some 150,000 reads.

  The occult is orphic, a word meant to evoke Orpheus and his dark romance. An ancient Greek myth tells of how, after the death of the musician’s wife, he followed her into the underworld—only to fail at his one chance to bring her back to life. To build a private, occult world with someone is to travel with them into the dark—and the danger inherent in that is, inevitably, erotic.

  Months before her mother’s murder, Pauline Parker was sent to see a doctor at the suggestion of Juliet Hulme’s father: he was concerned that his daughter’s friend might be a lesbian. At their trial, there was much speculation about a possible sexual relationship between the two—a romance perhaps born out of their shared writings and nighttime escapades in the garden. Even putting aside the possibility of a lesbian romance, any sexuality for
an unmarried woman, never mind a girl, was liability enough in the 1950s. When the case went to trial, the Crown prosecutor asked his witnesses leading questions about “orgies” and “sexual passion.”

  And what of the girls of Salem, and what they claimed to have seen of the dark? Abigail Williams was made notorious by Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible (which premiered, incidentally, the same year Pauline and Juliet met); she became the lead harpy, the great finger pointer, a 17-year-old girl capable of sending men and women to their deaths, embittered by her affair with local farmer John Proctor. But, in reality, Abigail was only 11 in 1692, and Proctor was 60. Miller made large assumptions about what shaped her; he spun her story into one of young female sexuality as a corrupting force. In Miller’s play, she has suddenly come into the sexuality of an adult, but with an adolescent’s inability to control her impulses. A new darkness—a dark eroticism and sexual envy—infuses his character’s thoughts, has lured her out into the woods, out past the borders of good society, in search of a hex. And when she levels her accusations, her conviction is as compelling, as unassailable, as that of a child.

  At the same time, in both Christchurch and Waukesha, the attacks were striking in their childishness. In spite of the girls’ months of secret talks and journaling and to-do lists, when carried out, the attacks were stupid and clumsy; they had no idea what they were doing. Some of the details they had thought through were fairy-tale-specific: Juliet’s idea to distract Honorah Parker with a pink gemstone she placed on the park path; Anissa’s idea to lead Bella into the woods through the offer of a game of hide-and-seek. Think of the fact that Morgan and Anissa could still lure their friend into the woods through such a simple game; the bursts of energy with which that game is played; and Bella “hiding” from people she should truly have hidden from. Picture her attackers out there in the suburban woods, playing in high spirits—and then turning to another game, a dare, passing the knife back and forth between themselves until Anissa gives an order clear enough to bring their play to an end. That morning, Morgan brought the knife with her in the way that she might have brought a wand to a Harry Potter movie screening. And perhaps she believed that she could perform magic with a toy—but that idea brought with it no real-world consequences. Playing with a knife, of course, did.

  Their childish incomprehension of the gravity of violence, and the callousness that comes with that, is painfully evident in the girls’ interviews while in custody. When Anissa describes her nervousness as they approached the playground that morning, the detective asks what she was most nervous about. She answers, “Seeing a dead person. ’Cause the last time I saw a dead person it was at a funeral and it was my uncle.” When asked what Morgan was upset about in the park, Anissa says, “Killing. She had never done that before. She’d stabbed apples before—with, like, chopsticks—but she’d never actually cut a flesh wound into somebody.”

  Pauline and Juliet continued to behave like immature girls, unaware of what was at stake, even after their arrest. When Pauline was taken into custody alone—at first, police believed Juliet was not directly involved—she didn’t want to break her habit of journaling, and so she wrote a new entry, stating that she’d managed to pull off the “moider” and was “taking the blame for everything.” (A detective on the case quickly seized it as evidence.) Once both girls were at the station, sharing a cell, they were placed on suicide watch—but they spent their first night (a police officer would later report) gossiping in their bunk beds, unconcerned about their new environment. During the trial, about a dozen foreign publications were represented in the courtroom, with most British newspapers printing a half column daily, often on their front page—rare attention for a New Zealand case. In a courtroom packed with spectators, Pauline and Juliet were out of sync with the tone of the proceedings. Seated together in the dock, they appeared relaxed and indifferent, often whispering excitedly to each other and smiling. One journalist described their attitude throughout as one of “contemptuous amusement.”

  Then there is the physical fact of just how young all four of these girls were at the time of their crimes, Morgan and Anissa in particular—something driven home by their regular images in the press. Morgan’s and Anissa’s faces are recognizable. Their booking photos, published as a single split-screen image, are iconic: these suspects have the round cheeks and unfashionable eyeglasses of children. Photos from their first hearings three and a half years ago show the two in dark blue jail uniforms, their handcuffed wrists locked to shackles around their waists; at the same time, they are petite (the size of 12-year-olds) and flat-chested. By their 2016 hearings, both girls, photographed in an array of cotton day dresses, have clearly entered puberty, with developed breasts; their bodies are transforming into those of young women right in front of us, their adolescence taking place in captivity. Anissa’s hair, once cut just below her chin, now falls a few inches below her shoulders. Here it is made visible: the uneasy border between “child” and “adult,” between the softness of girlhood, still visible in their baby fat, and the latent sexual threat of early womanhood. Did the changes in their bodies increase the chance of them paying a greater price for their crime?

  WISCONSIN LAW ALLOWS FOR ANYONE AGE TEN OR ABOVE to be tried as an adult for a violent crime. This ratchets the stakes up much, much higher: Both Morgan and Anissa were initially charged with first-degree intentional homicide, facing up to 45 years in prison (they each pled not guilty for reason of mental illness or defect). If the judge had allowed both their cases to be moved to juvenile court, they would have remained in a juvenile facility, set for release at 18.

  In the earliest days of this country, American jurisprudence followed the doctrine of malitia supplet aetatem—or, as translated, “malice supplies the age.” Following the example of English common law, a child of seven or older who understood the difference between right and wrong—as if these were simple, stable concepts—could be held fully accountable. He could even be eligible for the death penalty. As Blackstone’s Commentaries summed it up in the 1760s, “one lad of eleven years old may have as much cunning as another of fourteen.” It was not until more than a century after the founding of the United States, in 1899, that a juvenile court system was established. Industrialization had made clearer the need to protect children as a separate class—or, in Jane Addams’s words, to create a court that would ideally play the role of the “kind and just parent.”

  But the biggest shift in juvenile justice has been our evolving understanding of the adolescent brain. Neuroscience research has shown that the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until 25 years old, impairing a person’s impulse control. There is also the lack of emotional development: the Supreme Court has described adolescence as “a time of immaturity, irresponsibility, impetuousness, and recklessness.” As recently as 2005, the court outlawed the execution of minors as “cruel and unusual punishment,” in a case in which the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association filed briefs on new research into adolescent brain development. The same ruling leaned heavily on a 2002 case that prohibited the execution of individuals with intellectual disabilities: Because juveniles are immature, “their irresponsible conduct is not as morally reprehensible as that of an adult.” The Supreme Court was not arguing that adolescence is a kind of mental disability, but perhaps that both share symptoms in common—vulnerability, instability, a skewed or heightened worldview—that render their actions harder to judge.

  One of the earliest entries into the Grimms’ original collection—one that would never make it into the later, popular edition—is a story called “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering.” Like all the Grimms’ folktales, it is short and terse, and it goes something like this: In a small city in the Netherlands, a group of children are playing, and they decide that one should be the “butcher,” one the “assistant,” two the “cooks,” and another, finally, the “pig.” Armed with a knife, the little butcher pushes the pig to the ground and slits his
throat, while the assistant kneels down with a bowl to catch the blood, to use in “making sausages.”

  The kids are discovered by an adult, and the butcher boy is taken before the city council. But the council doesn’t know what to do, “for they realized it had all been part of a children’s game.” And so the chief judge decides to perform a test: he takes an apple in one hand and a gold coin in the other and holds them out to the boy; he tells him to pick one.

  The boy chooses the apple—laughing as he does, because in his mind, he’s gotten the better deal. Still operating by a child’s logic, he cannot be convicted of the crime. The judge sets him free.

  IN THE MONTHS BEFORE BELLA’S STABBING IN 2014, MORGAN Geyser, nearly 12, was both entering into adolescence (she had just gotten her period) and descending into mental illness.

  After her initial five-hour interview came to an end, Morgan, still without her parents, in clothes and slippers provided by the Waukesha Police, was placed in the Washington County Jail for juveniles. Anissa was there, too, but they were not allowed to interact. Morgan could have no visitors other than her parents, who were required to sit on the other side of a glass divider; only after a few months into her stay was she permitted to touch or hold them, and even then only twice a month. Over the summer, she became, as her mother, Angie, described her, “floridly psychotic.” She continued to have conversations with Slender Man, as well as characters from the Harry Potter series (at one point, she claimed that Severus Snape kept her up until three a.m.); she saw unicorns; she treated the ants in her cell like pets.

  In the fall of that year, Morgan was moved to the Winnebago Mental Health Institute for a few months of 24-hour observation, to determine if she had a chance of being competent enough to stand trial. There, she was given a psychological evaluation that concluded that she suffers from early-onset schizophrenia—very rare for someone so young. Her state-appointed doctor learned that Morgan, since the age of three, had been experiencing “vivid dreams which she wished she could change”; and in the third grade, she began “seeing images pop up on the wall in different colors.” She believed she could see ghosts and feel their embrace. At a hearing in December 2014, the judge found Morgan capable of standing trial and ordered her back to Winnebago for treatment—but the facility could no longer take her, now that she had been deemed “competent.” Her parents asked for her $500,000 bail to be reduced to a signature bond so that she could be moved to a group home for girls with mental and emotional issues, but the request was denied because the home was not considered secure enough.