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The Slenderman Stabbing · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to Greek Cast. Today. We're doing something a
• 0:18
  little new, a little.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Something that we've been wanting to try for a bit,
• 0:24
  which is talk about something that pertains to Creepypasta, that
• 0:29
  is something very real and very horrifying in real life,
• 0:35
  but it does connect to the thing that we've covered before,
• 0:39
  which we are coming up now on the anniversary of
• 0:42
  the slender Man stabbing, which is a very very real
• 0:46
  thing and it's a fascinating story, and we have formatted
• 0:51
  it in a way to where now it's a digestible
• 0:53
  story to be ingested the same way as a creepy
• 0:57
  as a creep Cast episode, but done in a way
• 1:00
  where we can, you know, shed light on something that's
• 1:04
  very real and horrifying.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Yes, I would agree. So yeah.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: The Slenderman stabbings were on May thirty first of twenty fourteen,
• 1:16
  as I'm sure a lot of you know, a very
• 1:18
  tragic circumstance where a couple young girls became far too
• 1:24
  invested in internet culture around creepypasta, specifically split Slenderman, and
• 1:29
  became obsessed with the idea that slender Man was real
• 1:31
  and they could dedicate themselves as like a proxy to
• 1:34
  him and they took out those fantasies on a friend
• 1:38
  of theirs who will get into but thankfully survived. But
• 1:43
  it's a very it's a very upsetting story. It's a
• 1:46
  very wild one. Especially some of the details of how
• 1:50
  the young girls survived are both terrifying and impressive.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: So I want to say, go ahead.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the survivor is to be one of the biggest
• 2:00
  badasses of all time.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: Her the well, we'll get into it, but the way
• 2:04
  she lived was pretty uh outstanding.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: I would have died once.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Again for people who might not have seen some of
• 2:11
  the previous episodes that we've done. We did a Creep
• 2:14
  TV which was on our show is basically horror adjacent
• 2:20
  video content in like horror storytelling content in.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: Video FORMU that we like to talk about.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: And one that Isaiah showed me that h was a
• 2:29
  three part video series was the Marble Hornets.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: Marble Hornets, Marble Hornets.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: My god, I said, Mandelic Catalog, not Mandela Catalog.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And the three part series that we covered was
• 2:43
  Marble Hornets from years ago. I mean, actually, let me
• 2:46
  ask you, this was Marvel Marble Hornets was before these correct,
• 2:50
  because it was pretty it was pretty Uh, it was
• 2:54
  pretty close to the original posting of the picture or
• 2:58
  you know of the kind of like fan the start
• 3:00
  of the fandom with the first upload of the slender
• 3:03
  Man image.
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: Right, So the original Slenderman image was uploaded, and then
• 3:09
  a week after that, I believe the first Marble Hornets
• 3:12
  video was posted. So Marble Hornets, second to the original image,
• 3:18
  was the first slender Man adaptation, first thing to give
• 3:21
  it a narrative. So yes, these came way after that.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: To think that the thing that we watched, which granted
• 3:27
  Isaiah completely different time, right, but to think that the
• 3:31
  thing that we watched may have helped inspire this act
• 3:36
  or just like the phenomenon that was slender Man.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Which it's not.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: It's obviously, you know, the crimes that were committed were
• 3:43
  in act that they say that it was in fine,
• 3:46
  it was in service to slender Man and stuff, but
• 3:49
  it was really I feel like it could have been
• 3:50
  anything that just struck their fancy.
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, it may have, it may have contributed to
• 3:57
  it in and like the sense that it popularized Slenderman
• 4:03
  and that led to this. But as I'm sure we're
• 4:05
  talking about, their obsession with slender Man had a lot
• 4:08
  to do with like the the fandom side of things,
• 4:12
  with the idea that people can be like servants of
• 4:15
  him and that there's I think they talked a lot
• 4:17
  about the Slenderman Mansion, which was kind of like the
• 4:20
  equivalent of like an O C character thing where like
• 4:25
  slender Man takes his followers to a mansion where they
• 4:27
  all live together and stuff like that. It was very
• 4:30
  like fandom coded, you know, people making their ocs and
• 4:35
  like making them interact with characters they like sort of thing.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: The same kind of community that would do Jane the Killer, Yeah,
• 4:42
  Jeffsey Killer offshoots that they people absorbing media in different
• 4:47
  ways and like basically having like that cult like mentality
• 4:51
  around them is very, very fascinating.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: So today bear with us, we're gonna do something new.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: I'm actually pretty excited just to change the format of
• 4:59
  just a little bit and just see, uh read something
• 5:03
  that is real and extremely horrifying uh and has one
• 5:08
  of the most heroic uh dere dere Darius say, one
• 5:12
  of the most heroic means of escape and survival of
• 5:15
  all time. It's it's pretty it's pretty phenomenal. I just
• 5:19
  wanted to say thank you to our patrons, and for
• 5:22
  people listening on audio platforms right now like Spotify and
• 5:24
  Apple podcasts. Thank you so much. It does help us
• 5:27
  out if you give us a nice rating. Isaiah, are
• 5:29
  you ready to jump in?
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: Yes, I'm ready to jump in.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Uh, thank you?
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: Did you say thank you to the patrons? I did,
• 5:36
  thank you patrons?
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: All right?
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: So for the first I guess what we'll even call
• 5:41
  this is. Was this still a creep cast?
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Or is this like a I guess we're calling a
• 5:44
  creep cast. I don't know. It's like it's just a
• 5:47
  little yeah, creep crime. Let's do that. Creep crime. Creep crime? Sure?
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: What not? Slendermand stab it. In the suburbs of Milwaukee,
• 5:55
  just a few miles inland from the Mighty Lake Michigan,
• 5:58
  lies the quiet and a flu in town of Wakesha, Wisconsin.
• 6:02
  For anyone driving through sprawling parks and home paint the
• 6:05
  picture of a quintessential American town.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Residents knew it as a.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: Safe and cozy place to raise a family, a place
• 6:12
  where you could let your kids play outside until the
• 6:14
  street lights came on. Joe and Stacy Lutner owned a
• 6:18
  traditional single family home in town and raised their two kids,
• 6:21
  Peyton and Cayden. Around Wakesha, the Luteners were well respected,
• 6:28
  Joe had a study job, and Stacy was able to
• 6:30
  stay home and raise the kids. For two children were
• 6:34
  described as compassionate and well rounded individuals, and with only
• 6:38
  a two year age gap, the siblings were very close.
• 6:42
  Twelve year old Peyton, otherwise known as Bella, was just
• 6:45
  your average little girl with dark brown pigtails and blue eyes.
• 6:49
  Her younger brother, Kayden, was a short blonde and tied
• 6:52
  together what many would call a picturesque family. Among all
• 6:56
  her friends was another twelve year old girl with long
• 6:59
  brown hair named Morgan Gayzer or Kayser, I'll say Gayzer,
• 7:04
  who was Peyton's best friend. The two girls met when
• 7:07
  they were nine years old and soon grew close, going
• 7:10
  to each other's house to play with dolls and draw.
• 7:13
  When they were young, they were very similar to one
• 7:16
  another and shared many of the same interests.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: However, as they.
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: Grew older, a clear divide emerged between the two. While
• 7:24
  Peyton was blossoming into a teen taking an interest in
• 7:28
  makeup boys, Morgan was beginning to show more macabre in
• 7:32
  concern and behavior. Since she was little, Morgan had experienced
• 7:36
  weird visual phenomena that only she could see. As a toddler,
• 7:40
  she would approach her parents and tell them that ghosts
• 7:43
  would hug and bite her. Psychologists would later reveal she had.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Vivid dreams when she wished she could change.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: These anomalies grew stronger and recurred more often as time
• 7:54
  went on. In elementary school, she would watch as the
• 7:58
  colors on the wall melted down to the floor and
• 8:00
  pulled around her. Not long after that began woman's voice,
• 8:04
  which she called Maggie, would regularly talk to her inside
• 8:09
  her own head. Morgan herself would grow more concerned about
• 8:12
  the things she was seeing out of the corners of
• 8:14
  her eye. Another figure named Sev soon manifested from the
• 8:18
  anime show she watched, so it was unlike any of
• 8:21
  the previous visions. Because Morgan claimed he felt real to
• 8:24
  the touch, She treated him as though we were a
• 8:27
  real person, even allowing him to sleep in her bed.
• 8:31
  While lying together, Morgan would place her hand on his
• 8:34
  chest and feel his heart beat. In the morning, she
• 8:37
  claimed she would wake up with hair wet with Sev's truel.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Just want to see how fucking horrifying that is? By
• 8:43
  the way. Well, yeah, the idea, I mean, like the idea.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: Of uh, just from the I mean like one I
• 8:51
  guess to conquer your I feel like this would be
• 8:56
  so easily discarded as like oh, you have imaginary friends,
• 8:59
  or like, oh, it's in your head whatever, people like
• 9:02
  brushing this kind of stuff to the side, but going
• 9:04
  to that level of detail and that level of clarity
• 9:07
  of like, I don't like feeling someone's heartbeat, claiming that
• 9:11
  you're waking up from Sev's drool, from sleeping in your
• 9:14
  same bed, I mean, just living with that day in
• 9:17
  and day out.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: My god, that would be fucking rough. Yeah. Yeah, I think.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: It's a hard situation to navigate around because, for one,
• 9:25
  it's hard to understand with the kid how serious something
• 9:30
  like this is. Like when I was eight, I think
• 9:37
  I told my mom that I was in love with
• 9:39
  Raven from Teen Titans, which was fitting and I was
• 9:41
  proud of my younger self, But it's like, at what
• 9:45
  level is it just like a kid who's watching a cartoon.
• 9:47
  At what level are they actually like, have a diagnosable illness.
• 9:53
  I think the fact that she was being seen by
• 9:55
  psychologists when she was so young is kind of a
• 9:57
  indicator of how serious it was, and it passed me
• 10:02
  with that level of I mean, with that level of
• 10:05
  what you're saying every day.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and stuff like that. Yeah.
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: I mean, we'll talk about it more as we ended
• 10:13
  the details of the case. But that's the reason this
• 10:15
  stuff was so damaging to her or her worldview, because
• 10:20
  she was already perceptive to taking outside influence and then
• 10:26
  making it real in her head. So that needs to
• 10:31
  be done.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Which a lot of people.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: Again we'll get into it, but a lot of people
• 10:36
  around this, especially the media, had conversations like, oh, is
• 10:40
  it okay to talk about slender? Is this the kind
• 10:43
  of thing kids should be talking about? And I think
• 10:44
  it's the same as like the video game argument, where
• 10:47
  it's like, it's fine because nine percent of people have
• 10:52
  no issue, but the ninety nine shouldn't be, you know,
• 10:58
  restricted because of things that one percent need kept from them.
• 11:03
  I believe, because I mean, there were plenty of people
• 11:06
  that listened to the slendermand stuff and wrote fan fiction
• 11:09
  all that and didn't stab young girls, So you know,
• 11:13
  also so.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Easy to have these conversations in hindsight, you know, yeah,
• 11:17
  or like it's so easy to talk about these things
• 11:19
  whenever it's like, well, the horrible thing happened, so let's
• 11:23
  discuss why versus just versus. Let's make a blanket statement
• 11:28
  or a blanket idea that covers everybody versus just like
• 11:31
  focusing in and trying to figure out why exactly this
• 11:34
  person had this happen, which we're already starting to hear,
• 11:37
  I mean, associating an imaginary person and like associating with
• 11:42
  them as the sev in the bed and like manifesting
• 11:45
  those things and happen to be something that feels so real.
• 11:47
  I mean, we're already, even at the age of eight,
• 11:50
  already starting to get that idea.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: Her entire life, Morgan knew something was off and would
• 11:56
  regularly talk to her parents about what she was seeing,
• 12:00
  but nothing was ever done. Unbeknownst to anyone, Morgan was schizophrenic,
• 12:05
  just like her father, Matt.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: When her father was seven.
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: Years old, he wandered up to his parents and told
• 12:11
  him about how he had seen his unborn sister's ghost.
• 12:14
  His parents thought their child just had a creative imagination
• 12:17
  and sent him to bed. Years later, when he was
• 12:20
  in his teens, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but stopped
• 12:24
  taking his medication at nineteen.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: His doctors tried to.
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: Reason with him. However, Matt worried taking his medicine would
• 12:31
  make the devil and his visions disappear, eliminating one of
• 12:35
  the only sources of joy he had in life. Fitnyone man,
• 12:38
  that's rough. If anyone was going to catch what was
• 12:40
  going on with Morgan, it would have been her father,
• 12:43
  who shared a similar diagnosis and story. Like his own parents. However,
• 12:48
  Matt ignored the red flags and allowed his daughter's condition
• 12:50
  to worsen. Other people in Morgan's life, like her school
• 12:54
  counselors didn't say anything either. When her odd behavior continued
• 12:58
  at school, she would bark at other students in the playground,
• 13:02
  and early one morning she was caught smuggling a rubber
• 13:06
  mallet into class. She would claim she needed it for protection.
• 13:10
  Like a fog creeping over her brain. Morgan's schizophrenia became
• 13:14
  a changer, making her more paranoid again. It's like the
• 13:18
  parents should have known, and a lot of I feel
• 13:20
  like a lot of this fault would fall on Matt
• 13:26
  because he became so It's from this, it seems he
• 13:30
  became so at peace with his own delusions that he
• 13:35
  figured it'd be fine for his daughter to have, which
• 13:38
  is a very reckless place to leave a child, you know.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Oh sure.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Well also too, the way that you grew up, in
• 13:45
  the way that those things were, how previously those things
• 13:48
  were approached to you, and I think totally dictate how
• 13:53
  you respond to it now. You know, Like he's just
• 13:56
  like they treated me like shit. So therefore I'm gonna, like,
• 13:58
  I'm not gonna put my daughter through that. Hell, I
• 14:00
  will say, though, the counselor's not like a p like
• 14:05
  at a school seeing like this girl bring up these problems,
• 14:09
  bringing in fucking like rubber mallets and stuff, hm like
• 14:13
  like I don't know, like fucking Elmer Fudd into class
• 14:15
  and stuff, trying to like whack Wiley coyote. I mean, like,
• 14:18
  how the fuck do you, like, how do you not
• 14:20
  report this to anybody? Like the councils are just like
• 14:26
  I'm sure it's fine, you know I am. I am
• 14:30
  so afraid in my life that I'm going to be
• 14:33
  like either a parent who just like it, completely ignores
• 14:36
  these red flags, or I'm going to go to like
• 14:39
  a parent teacher conference and then to be like also,
• 14:42
  by the way, so your daughter is pretending to be
• 14:45
  a werewolf, and she keeps removing her teeth in the
• 14:47
  back of the class, and you're like, why am I
• 14:50
  just hearing about this now? You know, Well, we didn't
• 14:53
  want to be We didn't think it was that big
• 14:54
  of a deal.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Little little kids lose their teeth all the time.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, well not by fucking bulling them out
• 15:00
  of your mouth, you goon talking about exactly, Well, that
• 15:04
  was what the rubber mount was for.
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: It's I don't know, because some stuff it's like you
• 15:09
  could see how it would happen, Like the what's I think, Uh,
• 15:15
  it's oh, the barking at other students. It's like, yeah,
• 15:18
  there's weird kids that do that kind of thing.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Oh dude, it's easy.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: I mean the amount of people that even the school
• 15:25
  system you must see in like you must see like
• 15:29
  just strange behaving kids all the time that in a way.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: It literally must come off as normal.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: I mean, dude, I remember, you know me, horse girls
• 15:40
  were in my grade school classes. You would have thought
• 15:44
  that he would have thought it was a goddamn stable
• 15:46
  versus school.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, it was like acted like horses.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, dude, horse girls, especially in elementary which I don't
• 15:52
  know how problem that was. I mean, you got you've
• 15:54
  had Did you have some horse girls in your school?
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: I don't think we did.
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: I mean, keep in mind, my middle school class with
• 15:59
  six people, so it was okay even if it was.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, like I didn't have the biggest class either.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: But I'm just saying that, like horse girls were a thing,
• 16:09
  even just like you know, there's just some strange kids,
• 16:11
  you know. I mean, one of the horse girls she
• 16:13
  would eat fucking pringles and ketch up at lunch, and
• 16:15
  people were more weird up by that than the idea
• 16:18
  that she would like buck and nay and like hop
• 16:20
  around the goddamn auditorium. You know who knows. I mean,
• 16:24
  it's once again, I just want to preference. It's so
• 16:26
  easy to look at these things in hindsight and be like,
• 16:28
  oh God, the signs were there, But I mean, God
• 16:32
  knows the amount of weird shit s.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: So during the day, I'm saying this out of love
• 16:37
  because I care about both of you. But Alison, a
• 16:40
  million percent strikes me as someone who was a horse
• 16:43
  girl itself.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: You have no idea, You have no idea how bad
• 16:46
  I feel duped.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: I when I started to when I started to be
• 16:50
  but I was first. When I was I was just
• 16:52
  Alison's friend. Before we even started dating, there was no
• 16:55
  I don't think I ever heard her say the word horse, right,
• 16:58
  and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden,
• 17:00
  we're like four or five years into our relationship, and she's.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: Like, yeah, I'm just just really just started drawing horses
• 17:05
  a lot.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: I mean I felt like I did feel like a
• 17:07
  guy coming in I thought walking and being like, hey, Morgan,
• 17:11
  what is this? And she's like a slender man. That's
• 17:13
  how it felt to me with Alison drawing these horses,
• 17:16
  and I was like, you ain't even drawn a lot
• 17:18
  of horses lately kind of thing. She came up and
• 17:22
  she was like, yeah, I think I give about getting
• 17:25
  a horse. I'm like, what we're like? And then it
• 17:27
  was just all and then from there she's just dressed
• 17:29
  like Alan Jackson for the past like seven years.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: So what was she a horse girl when she was younger? Dude?
• 17:36
  I acted out. I don't now. I don't know. She's
• 17:39
  always been a big animal person.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: I like she one hundred percent might have been. I've
• 17:43
  seen her videos where she talks about like her furry
• 17:46
  oh see she had when.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: She show me wrong. Don't get me wrong.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: Once again, Isaiah, the hindsight is there, right, I can
• 17:53
  look back now and be like, oh, it makes sense
• 17:55
  because he used to joke around callings and stuff. She's like, yeah,
• 17:57
  I have to pay my bills and like help some
• 18:00
  of my bills. Whenever she was like younger she would
• 18:02
  do furry art and stuff, or or when she was
• 18:06
  younger she was part of the community blah blah, and
• 18:07
  You're like, oh, yeah, yeah, because you're just like.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Huh not anymore.
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say that, you would say that.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: I would have caught on it that immediately.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: But Hunter's like, I mean that's normal, right, Like people,
• 18:21
  you know, you're an artist, you trust stuff, dude, will you? I?
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Once again, Isaiah blinded when you go to a liberal
• 18:27
  arts college and I was getting all horned up for Alison,
• 18:30
  who like was a short haired, crustpunk looking kind of
• 18:33
  like girl listen great punk, I'm like, come on, dude,
• 18:41
  I'm like, she could have told me anything at that point.
• 18:42
  I'm like, hey, living Levita Loka baby, you know I
• 18:45
  was all about it. Also, the amount of other weird
• 18:48
  shit you see, I'm like I would have fun.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: I was like, I will settle for anything.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: I'm like, give me a furry artist over some of
• 18:55
  the crazy shit that I'm saying.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: You know, but no, I didn't know. I don't.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: I think my perception would been totally different if she's like,
• 19:00
  by the way, I'm a horse girl.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: If you if you drilled her on it, I guarantee
• 19:06
  you she like would buck and they when she was
• 19:08
  like nine years old.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Dude, I bet, I bet. I don't know.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: I'm just saying those people exist, and I'm saying that
• 19:14
  once again. We can dog the counselors all day and
• 19:17
  I want to, but it's just it's the amount of.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Stuff you see must be crazy. Uh.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: And I don't know at what point does something unless
• 19:25
  something like it's you know.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: What it is though, too? What's kind of fucked up?
• 19:29
  Is it seems like it's one of those things and
• 19:31
  tell something horrible happens. No one does anything right. Well,
• 19:34
  I mean, I don't know.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: She has a rubber mallet because she says she's whacking
• 19:39
  invisible whack of moles at her desk. And you're like, well,
• 19:42
  I probably shuld probably should have told about that. Well,
• 19:44
  she doesn't hurt anybody, you know, it's that kind of thing.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I just figured, you know, get to let off
• 19:49
  some steam.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: And she said, at her desk playing that.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: Fuck, I remember that Chuck E Cheese game where it
• 19:53
  was like you, uh, you hit the spiders like the
• 19:55
  bugsplat thing the things.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: That yah point, Yeah she's doing she was.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: Doing that at her desk, and we didn't. We just
• 20:03
  we thought it was fun. We like Chuck E Cheese
• 20:05
  games too.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: I don't know that's where a kid can be a kid.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: A kid could be a kid, and I will say,
• 20:11
  just you, yeah, be a kid.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: But I will say, you know, what was the best
• 20:19
  Chuck E Cheese game? What? And I I'm not even joking.
• 20:22
  I've looked for this for my studio. I've looked for it.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: It's that fucking Pirate Ship game. You control the pirate ship.
• 20:28
  It's a two D pirate game and you it's like
• 20:31
  a driving game we have, like the Pirate steering wheel.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Do you you're probably too young. Do you remember this
• 20:34
  or no?
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: The only one I remember being real hyped at Chuck
• 20:38
  E Cheese was the Jurassic Park one with the giant spiders,
• 20:41
  like the shooting game.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: Is that the one where you get to stit where
• 20:44
  you get to sit in Dude, the pirate ship game.
• 20:50
  I can't even tell you it was. I mean, it's
• 20:53
  my fucking jam. It was called Dead Storm Pirates and
• 20:56
  let me tell you it was just on.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: Storm Pirates.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Sorry, this is this is actually desperately.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: People are going to see the title of this episode.
• 21:07
  They're going to be like, how are they going to
• 21:08
  get on side tangents with this topic?
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: It's like, oh, you wait.
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: Many thought that the school counselors would have intervened by now,
• 21:16
  but it was more complicated than that. Both the school
• 21:19
  staff and her parents believe she was just acting out
• 21:22
  and being a quirky teen. Part of the problem was
• 21:25
  that the school she attended had over six hundred and
• 21:28
  eighty students with only two counselors to manage them. Morgan
• 21:32
  just happened to be one of the mini children neglected
• 21:34
  by the system in which she was raised. For a
• 21:37
  long time, Morgan's only real friend was Peyton, but as
• 21:40
  they began to drift apart, she met someone new who
• 21:43
  would change the course of her life forever. During middle school,
• 21:47
  Morgan met another girl named Anissa Weir, who lived near
• 21:51
  the Guyser home from an early age. Anissa had a
• 21:54
  normal childhood, but she was allegedly born with an undiagnosed
• 21:57
  severe learning disability that austraized her from people her age.
• 22:02
  While her life had once been stable, it took a
• 22:04
  dark turn when her parents went through a bitter divorce.
• 22:08
  When her parents split, it affected Inness's social life even more.
• 22:12
  What was once a normal kids soon devolved into a lonely,
• 22:15
  desperate little girl seeking approval from anyone in her life.
• 22:18
  With her parents focused on the divorce, her needs were
• 22:21
  sometimes overlooked and she began to feel pushed aside. When
• 22:25
  she met Morgan, it felt like a beacon in the darkness,
• 22:28
  and she clung to her new friend.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: And you think her new friend wanted to do.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: She would do it as long as she could keep
• 22:34
  clutching onto this single connection. Both girls had gone to
• 22:38
  school together but were never close until Morgan's behavior began
• 22:42
  to change, isolating her from her classmates. Since she couldn't
• 22:46
  rely on Peyton as much anymore, Anessa filled in the
• 22:50
  gap that her old friend couldn't, so two grew closer.
• 22:53
  They would spend hours online together, watching videos and visiting
• 22:57
  random websites. Whilst their the net, they stumbled upon a
• 23:01
  form called creepypasta dot com. At the time, creepy copy
• 23:06
  pastas or creepy pastas were at their peak in the
• 23:09
  online sidegeist. Stories like Just the Killer, Sonic Dot Exx,
• 23:14
  and Ben Tround had grown immensely popular and spawned a
• 23:17
  new generation of writers shaped by internet culture. During their
• 23:21
  time on the forum and this, Morgan read countless stories,
• 23:24
  but none interested them.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: More than slender Man.
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: I will say that reading that was like a series
• 23:30
  of flashbacks.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: Well yeah, especially especially for us. It's it's also Sonic
• 23:37
  dot exc Ben Drounded.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: It's so interesting too. Just once again, how these times
• 23:45
  of people whatever. It's like, the finding community online versus
• 23:48
  in schools is such a huge, uh, such a huge
• 23:52
  thing that also people had no idea about yet it
• 23:55
  was still so new. So even still you're like, wait,
• 23:58
  what the fuck? I mean, how many times have you
• 23:59
  did you your mom or dad something? And they're like
• 24:01
  what because it's just such a foreign concept, the idea
• 24:05
  that's like, yeah, I'm online and it's this community and
• 24:07
  we're reading about this thing called Jeff the Killer.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: It's like an online horror story.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: And you're like like okay, you know, like and not
• 24:14
  understanding that, like there's a community and a fandom around
• 24:17
  like this kind of character or you know, these kinds
• 24:20
  of subcultures. That movie what is it We're all going
• 24:23
  to the World's Fair or whatever.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're seeing that.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: I haven't seen that, know what you're talking about.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: That is a great movie that kind of captures the
• 24:31
  isolated feeling and like the only like the isolated feeling of.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: IDT watch it.
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the whole thing's the little girl holding the camera. Yeah,
• 24:38
  just in the room.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: From the camera perspective from her computer. But it's a
• 24:42
  great Uh. It's a great study on like escaping and
• 24:46
  believing in something from the internet and like social isolation.
• 24:51
  It's a it's just like, it's so interesting how all
• 24:56
  these kids who are probably bullied in school or were
• 24:59
  misunderstood in these schools really did flock to these online
• 25:03
  circles in droves and found their community there. And I
• 25:06
  think that's also what helped just like breed these obsessive
• 25:09
  traits when people were just like, well, I don't need
• 25:12
  the fucking people in real life because they suck, Like
• 25:15
  this is a this is my new home. You know
• 25:17
  what I mean, and now more than ever, I would
• 25:20
  say that I would say generally a lot of social groups,
• 25:23
  not all of them, but I would say generally it
• 25:25
  is like a much heavier, like it's a much like
• 25:31
  larger sect of people that are associating generally online versus
• 25:36
  like in you know, in person relationships and stuff that
• 25:40
  you might find even via friendships and stuff.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: It's it's just.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: It's crazy how probably that's like I can't even imagine
• 25:47
  like fucking like like quadruple, I mean, like are it's
• 25:52
  just doubled down in how people approach their conversations now
• 25:56
  that like what was weird back then is now completely normalized.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh, it's interesting how the shift has been.
• 26:05
  I remember one time I was in the car with
• 26:08
  my dad and I wanted my dad to be interested
• 26:10
  in things I was interested in. So I played the
• 26:14
  Russian sleep experiment. So I really liked it, and he
• 26:18
  was just so disinterested.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Did he believe it all that it was a real story?
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: Was that.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: Barely listened to it?
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: And he's like, what they're like, they're like mad or something.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: No, Daddy, listen, he's not sleeping. He's I remember doing
• 26:40
  that thing.
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: When like you know, when you like go to show
• 26:42
  someone something on your phone and they're not paying attention,
• 26:44
  so you just kind of slowly like pull the phone away,
• 26:47
  like yeah, like if they care that you're moving it away,
• 26:51
  That's what I did, but by pausing the video.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: It's a thing that you can definitely tell.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: I'm prety sure my dad hated me when I was younger,
• 27:00
  and like it just these things become more and more blanket,
• 27:04
  like it becomes more and more obvious when you like
• 27:06
  go through it and you do try to show them
• 27:08
  something and you're like, your parent is just like you
• 27:11
  because you went so easy to do to a child.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Lie.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's really cool, Isaiah. Wow, that's awesome. That's
• 27:19
  all it had to be.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: I was playing a banjo kazui sixty four and my
• 27:28
  dad was like, so what the bear could talk? And
• 27:30
  I was like that not like that.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: Really, it's just him and his friend.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: He has a bird in his backpack and he just said,
• 27:36
  he just said, what the hell.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Do you do with your time?
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: I was, I'm like, I have a child, Like, what
• 27:42
  are you talking about?
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: What do you do with your time? It's a banjoke, Dad,
• 27:47
  Come on, man, you know what I mean, What the fuck?
• 27:50
  What kind of response is that? What do you do
• 27:52
  with your time? Well?
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: Sorry, I should be at the mine, right And what
• 27:57
  do you do with your time? It's crazy thing to
• 28:00
  say to it to a kid, to a kid who's like, hey,
• 28:04
  can I show you a band joke?
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: What do you do with your time? It is such
• 28:10
  a fucking hot take your time.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: I guess the only game that my dad ever he
• 28:23
  ever responded to when I was younger was he was
• 28:27
  like one of those gay guys that liked Harley's and
• 28:29
  ship and like loud bikes and stuff. And I was playing, uh,
• 28:33
  I was playing road Rash.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: And he was like, that bike is nice. It's like yeah,
• 28:39
  police Station one graphics. He was like, fucking nice bike.
• 28:45
  I'm like whipping a guy with a chain as we're
• 28:47
  racing down this road. He's like, let's killer bike.
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: That's the coolest bike I've ever seen.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: Holy shit, it was so cool.
• 29:00
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  the show. Their link will be in the description and
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  we are now back to the episode. I wouldn't take
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  a moment to think today's sponsor Chubbies. The weather's getting warmer,
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  and we are now back to the episode. Known as
• 32:28
  one of the original creepypastas, Slenderman was created by Eric
• 32:32
  Knudsen aka Victor Surge Online.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: He submitted a picture of a tall, pale creature.
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: Wearing a suit with tentacles to a photoshop contest on
• 32:40
  the Something Awful forums. From there, internet users would take
• 32:44
  the haunted creature and begin to write stories and fake sightings.
• 32:47
  This cult classic grabbed both girls attention and soon became
• 32:51
  their entire world. Creepypastas acted as the glue that held
• 32:54
  their friendship together but tore others apart. Beaton and Morgan
• 32:58
  would occasionally hang out, during which Morgan was more vocal
• 33:02
  about her visions. Peyton would play along, telling Morgan she
• 33:06
  saw them too. Hoping to rekindle their relationship, Morgan began
• 33:10
  to show Peyton some of the things she was reading online,
• 33:13
  assuming that her old friend would bond with her over them,
• 33:16
  as she and Nissa did. However, Peyton was disturbed by
• 33:20
  what she was being shown and eventually told Morgan she
• 33:23
  didn't want to hang out anymore if they would only
• 33:25
  talk about creepypastas. Though Morgan was upset by this, she
• 33:29
  still valued their friendship and respected her wishes. As their
• 33:32
  friendship dwindled, Nissa grew closer to Morgan as the two
• 33:36
  consumed more content.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: Online, insane that Peyton's uh mental clarity was that was
• 33:42
  that sharp? They at that age?
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: Hey, if you guys were only gonna talk about creepypastas,
• 33:46
  I don't think I should hang outy anymore. I mean,
• 33:49
  we gotta tell that to some of our fans. Did
• 33:51
  whether they talk, they're talking about the separate and shit.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, to be fair, it is jaw.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: I know, I trust me you're talking to You're hearing
• 34:05
  this from a guy who it is his job.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean? You love? I love I
• 34:10
  love the idea of Peyton just being like, hey, so
• 34:12
  if you guys are just gonna be talking about Slender
• 34:15
  Mannigan for twelve hours, I don't really want to hang
• 34:17
  out because if it was me, I'd just be like, well,
• 34:20
  I guess this is as good as it gets. This
• 34:23
  is this is the hoigh rope. I guess this is
• 34:26
  I guess this is pretty much my friends forever. Now.
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: I remember one time so like I showed my dad that,
• 34:31
  And there were times where like like I remember playing
• 34:33
  the goat Man at a sleepover and like a couple
• 34:36
  of guys thought it was scary and stuff like that.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: So you're saying, when you're saying playing this, you're just
• 34:40
  talking about these are online lies.
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: I'm just playing the videos. Yeah, okay, yeah uh.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: And I remember that guys.
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: For I remember one time it was like a mixed
• 34:50
  party or something like that, like guys and girls.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: I played Jeff the Killer because I thought it was scary.
• 34:59
  I remember the girls being like, what this wrong with inside?
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: How strange for a guy or like that's a boy
• 35:12
  to pull out an iPad and play the Jeff the
• 35:16
  Killer creepy pasta to due of people.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: Dude, A fucking.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: A young, a young, no haired Isaiah pulling out a
• 35:27
  genuine iPad. I like to think that you're wearing the
• 35:29
  size of shirt and like the crucifixes just as big
• 35:33
  as your body around your neck.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: And he goes like you want to.
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: Hear a scary story?
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: Lips fat as shit, flapping around like god, damn dude,
• 35:41
  get here's a towel, wipe your lips.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: You're like, sorry, I just get excited for the stores.
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: I just remember that. I just remember for playing it.
• 35:52
  Then someone being one of the girls being like, so
• 35:56
  is this like scary? And I'm like, yeah, the pictures
• 35:59
  really gary. When you think about the story with the picture,
• 36:02
  it's really creepy.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: You know what, though, I'll get I'll give you this.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: I'll give you young yourself this at least for the
• 36:09
  times you showed your dad and around friends. At least
• 36:11
  it was the reading. How many people do you think
• 36:14
  dry read this shit to people?
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: Probably so many? Uh that's rough, that would be that
• 36:20
  would be way work. But there is a layer. There
• 36:25
  is a layer.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I will say you have to have at least
• 36:27
  a sum lay of respect for yourself.
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: There.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: Thanks, man, appreciate it.
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: Do the girls more specifically Morgan. The lives and actions
• 36:35
  described in these online stories began to influence how they
• 36:38
  thought and behaved in real life.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: By this point, the.
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: Girls have been playing the slender Man game and knew
• 36:44
  every little detail. Morgan's obsession with the character would begin
• 36:48
  to manifest in her diary Across multiple pages crawled in
• 36:52
  black ink where drawings of slender Man, along with recreations
• 36:55
  of pages from the game. Her drawings also contained more
• 36:59
  gas the images. In addition to the slender pictures, she
• 37:03
  often drew pictures of a girl, most likely representing herself
• 37:06
  in different scenarios. On one page, she drew a girl
• 37:10
  with cat ears and a tail line on the ground,
• 37:13
  her eyes closed. Floating above her was a skull and
• 37:17
  another young girl holding to scythe while looking at the
• 37:19
  viewer saying, I love killing people. So again, the stuff
• 37:24
  like the cat ears and the cat tail and stuff
• 37:26
  like that's indicative of just like you know, that young
• 37:28
  culture around the time. But obviously all of these things
• 37:33
  are playing into her fantasies and if it wasn't for
• 37:35
  where this story goes, it would just be another cringe kid, right.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: Well, that's the.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: Thing is once again, it's the online realms and forums
• 37:44
  that these kids are existing in, and like the online
• 37:46
  communities where you know, you are getting the more centric,
• 37:52
  like furry different forums where people are like, oh, let
• 37:56
  me show you my art, and people are able to
• 37:57
  express themselves. And I feel like that that is just
• 38:00
  ubbing off and it's uh starting to formulate in just
• 38:03
  this kid's just I mean, how they're fucking writing down
• 38:06
  their diary now, you know, it's just it's just the
• 38:09
  online uh where they're where they're hanging out, you know.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but you're you're right.
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, if it, if it wasn't for this one thing,
• 38:17
  it would have just been a normal like kids experience
• 38:20
  online back in the day.
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, at some point, using black ink wasn't enough. Classmates
• 38:27
  and teachers reported Morgan picked at a scab until it bled,
• 38:31
  later using the blood to write die over and over
• 38:34
  again in her diary. Okay, right, well, normal kid experience
• 38:39
  there we go.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: All right, all right, let's spy.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: I'm not gonna I'm not going to advocate for any
• 38:42
  scab pickers who are also using that scab blood to
• 38:46
  write die over and over again. I don't give a
• 38:48
  fuck where I don't give a fuck what realms of
• 38:51
  the inn of the Internet. You're you're lurking this this
• 38:56
  scab bit that that that would that's.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: Where you lose. You lose me at the scabs. Okay
• 39:02
  yeah yeah scabs? My god? You think she ate the scabs?
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: Maybe maybe she used them like a paintbrush to draw
• 39:11
  on the paper.
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: What kind of animal hair is that? She's like? Big huh?
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: Back home, she was taking her dolls and trying occult
• 39:20
  symbols on their abdomens, cutting off their heads, and etching
• 39:23
  marks on their hands and thighs.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Well, there you go.
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: For many people, their diaries are gateway to their innermost thoughts,
• 39:30
  and Morgan was no exception. In a way, marking these
• 39:34
  dolls and drawing in her diary served as a way
• 39:37
  for her to act out in silence. Her behavior and
• 39:40
  outburst at school and around her parents elicited a little
• 39:43
  more than disgusted an annoyance. With little attention in her
• 39:47
  real life, Morgan would retreat into her drawings and imagination,
• 39:51
  places where she could make herself the focus of any
• 39:54
  world she created.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: Perhaps the most.
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: Concerning drawing found was one depicting slender Man and standing
• 40:00
  over a line of children talking directly to the viewer, saying.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: You are a strange child. It will be of my use.
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: So now she is filling in the dialogue for her imagined,
• 40:17
  for her apparition. So it's another layer into the delusion.
• 40:21
  In a time of desperation, her inner monologue spoke directly
• 40:24
  to her, comforting her with one of the few things.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: That brought her joy. Eventually, she began to.
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: Experience those thoughts as something outside of her own mind,
• 40:35
  similar to her other visions. For years prior to even
• 40:38
  learning about Slenderman, Morgan claimed to have seen an entity
• 40:42
  called it. She described it as a misty, shadowy figure
• 40:47
  that haunted her, was only visible in the mirror. Anytime
• 40:50
  she peered into the reflective glass, she would see it
• 40:53
  standing from afar and watching her. Because she had bonded
• 40:56
  with aness over Creepypastas, she felt comfortable enough to describe
• 40:59
  her visions, knowing that her friend wouldn't think she was crazy.
• 41:04
  Morgan ha told Nissa's she thought she was going insane
• 41:07
  seeing all these visions, but Innsas supported her by saying.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: No, I think you're a medium. I think that you
• 41:14
  straddle two worlds.
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: For the first time in her entire life, someone genuinely
• 41:19
  validated her feelings.
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: I was gonna say, the first time that someone's ever actually, like,
• 41:25
  if someone's ever told you about the medical thing, like
• 41:26
  if you were schizophrenic Isaiah and people told you like, oh,
• 41:30
  your brain's out of whack, and people are continuously telling
• 41:32
  you these things or you should be on this medication, and
• 41:35
  maybe this is the first time ever that someone's ever
• 41:37
  been like, actually, you're.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: Not weird at all. You have a gift. How relieving
• 41:41
  was that? Would that have been? Yeah?
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: And that's also why it's so dangerous, Oh of course, yeah, yeah,
• 41:48
  because any like they'll grasp onto anyone that validates the
• 41:52
  things they're seeing as real. Also, it's terrifying that aside
• 41:57
  from her regular like slender Man and stuff like that
• 41:59
  makes sense because she sees these things, so she imagines
• 42:02
  these things. But to have a new creature that appears
• 42:05
  as a shadowy figure that can only be seen in
• 42:08
  the mirror like something right ute unquote, man.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: I cannot I cannot fathom, Like schizophrenic schizophrenic symptoms must
• 42:19
  be so fucking horrifying it's gonna be I mean it
• 42:22
  must feel I mean, like, can you imagine that feeling
• 42:24
  and it feels like it's a part of this world
• 42:27
  and then it just disappears and like everyone else is
• 42:29
  just like, oh no, it's not there. Yeah, I mean
• 42:32
  that that the mental toll that would take is is,
• 42:35
  I mean, unbelievable.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: I follow some people online who are schizophrenic and they
• 42:41
  talk a lot about the condition and some of the
• 42:45
  stuff they'll say, Man, it is it takes strength to
• 42:49
  to live with.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: There's probably some.
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: Viewers who listen to this show who are in a
• 42:53
  similar case, and I know I would assume the severity
• 42:56
  of it, but I see so many of these people
• 42:59
  talk about you know, they'll be in their house and
• 43:02
  someone will walk in and they'll be speaking to them
• 43:04
  only to look at a camera mirror and realize that
• 43:06
  person's not there, or like they'll they'll one of them
• 43:12
  was talking about they have a dog, uh and if
• 43:16
  the dog doesn't address the person, then they know the
• 43:20
  person's not there.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: Hmm. That's interesting. Do you think that's like a metical
• 43:24
  like do you think people use that as like the
• 43:26
  support animal? Yes, that way they can.
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: Like, yeah, that's what he that's what he was describing
• 43:31
  that the he keeps the dog and takes it everywhere.
• 43:33
  That way, if someone comes up and speaks to him,
• 43:35
  he looks at the dog to see if the dog
• 43:37
  is looking at them, and if they're not, then it's
• 43:39
  just an imagination.
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean smart.
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So the the pages that you're looking at these
• 43:44
  are actually like just schizophrenic people talking about likes especially
• 43:48
  like a.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: Tone of Yeah, people who have schizophrenia who talk about
• 43:51
  what it's like day to day.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: Uh. Some are just auditory, some are visual and auditory. Uh.
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: Some of them will kind of describe what it's like,
• 43:59
  or like a bunch of them will record while they
• 44:01
  know they're having a schizophrenic episode to be like I
• 44:05
  can see someone, they're standing right there, They're trying to
• 44:07
  get my attention, blah blah blah.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: It's the amount of I mean that that that's one
• 44:15
  form of mental illness that's like, I think very misunderstood online.
• 44:21
  The amount of people that will look at like like man,
• 44:25
  especially uh Instagram or something. There's just people having full
• 44:30
  on schizophrenic episodes and they upload stuff to Instagram only
• 44:35
  for people to be like what the fuck is going on?
• 44:37
  Or people just will like fuck with you in the
• 44:39
  comments and be.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: Like it's real. Yeah, he's there. You gotta watch out.
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: I mean like it's it's a very it's it's such
• 44:45
  a fucking crazy system.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: Well, it's like, uh, there's different.
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of schizophrenia is a very wide spectrum.
• 44:52
  But there's people who have like visual and auditory hallucinations.
• 44:55
  There's people who have hallucinations of reality. Uh, there's people
• 44:58
  have kind of breaks with it where they will have
• 45:03
  hallucinations about themselves or their person.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: And then there's like.
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: It used to be schizophrenia was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia,
• 45:13
  but now they realize there's more of a distinction between
• 45:16
  paranoid type personalities and schizophrenia. But there are people who
• 45:20
  have paranoid type with schizophrenia where they're constantly worried of
• 45:24
  others or if something coming to get them and things
• 45:26
  like that. Like, it's such a varied illness. There's so
• 45:29
  much which I do sympathize with. People like Morgan's parents,
• 45:34
  you know, who saw their child going through this and
• 45:37
  that's got to be tough to handle. But at some point,
• 45:43
  like like you know the father, it's like, yes, you
• 45:45
  can sympathize with he was in Morgan saying condition, and
• 45:48
  he has to put up with it. But at one
• 45:50
  point you become the parent who's now responsible for the
• 45:52
  next generation.
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you got yeah.
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and especially if you have firsthand experience with the two,
• 45:58
  you need to know you like.
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: You Assuming he was mentally sound enough to do things
• 46:03
  like hold down a job and raise a daughter and
• 46:05
  things like that, then I would assume he would be
• 46:07
  sound enough to know there's got to be parameters somewhere
• 46:12
  from the guy that said that he didn't want to
• 46:15
  take medication because he liked the demon he saw.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean, which is like, let's step back
• 46:22
  and just you know, which is it's a dangerous mentality
• 46:25
  to bring a child into. Of course, Yeah, it's time
• 46:28
  to put on your adult pants and actually be like,
• 46:29
  what's the best way to prompt my daughter up for
• 46:31
  a happy, more normalized future than what I had?
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, At one point, the sympathy only goes so far. Right,
• 46:39
  at one point someone else is suffering because of it,
• 46:41
  And as this story ends, someone really suffered because of it.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: So no shit.
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: For the first time in her entire life, someone genuinely
• 46:48
  validated her feelings her whole life. She had been dismissed
• 46:52
  and ignored. Now she had someone who related to her
• 46:55
  on a deeper level and who she could truly confide
• 46:58
  in and trust. Her friendship with Nanissa not only made
• 47:01
  her more confident and began feeding into delusions that she
• 47:05
  was special. Slowly, she began to believe her visions were
• 47:08
  not a curse but a gift. Not long after confiding
• 47:12
  to Nissa about her visions, she began to believe that
• 47:15
  the figures she called it was actually slender Man. The
• 47:19
  made up monster had now become so deeply ingrained in
• 47:22
  her life that it began infiltrating some of her earliest memories.
• 47:27
  While hanging out with Nissa, Morgan claimed that when she
• 47:29
  was five, she saw slender Man peeking out from the
• 47:32
  woods near her childhood home. Anissa, pining into the delusions,
• 47:37
  added that she had been seeing the fictional creature in
• 47:40
  the woods while riding home on the school bus. Because
• 47:43
  they had spent so much time online obsessing over the creepypasta,
• 47:46
  they knew all of his tells, all of his lore,
• 47:49
  and what it meant when you saw the slender Man.
• 47:52
  Fear began to creep into the girl's minds as they
• 47:55
  continued telling each other what they believed they had seen.
• 47:58
  It wasn't just their own life lives they were afraid for,
• 48:01
  but their families as well. On a cold winter day,
• 48:04
  both Morgan and Nissa were hanging out when Morgan came
• 48:07
  up with a plan to save their families by stating.
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: Hey, we should be proxies.
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: But then the slender Man lore. Proxies are people who
• 48:16
  believe slender Man is real and are subservient to him,
• 48:20
  either through direct possession or his influence. Proxies carry out
• 48:23
  task slender Man cannot do on his own, such as
• 48:27
  destroying or leaving evidence, influencing victims, or even creating videos.
• 48:32
  In exchange for their work, some proxies are granted protection
• 48:35
  by slender Man himself, which is what Morgan hoped to achieve,
• 48:40
  which again this is you know there's a delusion, and
• 48:42
  then you fear the delusion, so you do things to
• 48:45
  prevent the delusion. Also, the thing about the proxies comes
• 48:55
  from like mostly the OC stuff. I think I said
• 48:59
  incorrectly during the Marble Hornets that they were all proxies. Well,
• 49:03
  and while it's the same mechanism, the word proxy came
• 49:05
  later from like other Slenderman lower stuff. But yeah, the
• 49:08
  idea that you can like become his Hinchman.
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, people just taking ideas from the fandom and
• 49:15
  making it their own and stuff. I mean I still
• 49:17
  think that like proxy, It may not be the correct word,
• 49:20
  but that's.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Basically what that was. Yeah, the same idea.
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: But you know what's interesting though about that too, is
• 49:26
  a Nissa basically going on and saying that she too
• 49:29
  has seen it. Almost like at this point, do you
• 49:32
  think in Nissa is like it's thinking that Morgan is
• 49:36
  not necessarily lying, but do you think that they're just
• 49:38
  it's like taking the role play into this real world,
• 49:42
  like taking the role play into the real world where
• 49:44
  now she also feels like she wants to participate in
• 49:46
  it as well. Or do you think that she's like
• 49:49
  legitimately saying that she also.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: Has visions you're talking about it, Nissa, Yeah, Nissa, because
• 49:54
  Morgan is saying that.
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: I don't think in Nissa is having visions. I think
• 49:59
  she's girl with a learning disability who's going along with
• 50:02
  what her friend says.
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so her friend is basically been like also, by
• 50:05
  the way, so slender Man, and she's like, oh, yeah,
• 50:07
  me too, because she just wants they had that camaraderie together.
• 50:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, she has a friend for the first time. Right
• 50:12
  of course, At the time, Nissa didn't understand what.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: That meant and asked, Okay, how do we do.
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: That, to which Morgan responded, we have to kill BELLA
• 50:22
  shock swept over in Nissa as she couldn't believe what
• 50:25
  she was hearing. Soon, her shock returned to excitement, though
• 50:29
  she was still a little unsure. To get her to
• 50:32
  go along, Morgan began pressuring her by reminding her of
• 50:36
  slender Man's power and that her family's lives were at stake,
• 50:40
  and Nissa eventually agreed after being psychologically coerced and began
• 50:44
  skeep in with Morgan on how they would commit the crime.
• 50:47
  But fear was not the only motivator. Girls were also
• 50:50
  eager to meet slender Man in real life and wanted
• 50:53
  to prove his existence. For almost a year, they had
• 50:56
  become engrossed in an online community that told story about
• 51:00
  a creature living in the woods and haunting people's dreams.
• 51:04
  Believing slender Man was real due to their supposed sightings,
• 51:07
  the girls thought that if they successfully carried out their
• 51:10
  plan to kill Peyton, he would allow them to live
• 51:13
  with him as proxies. They believed he resided in the
• 51:16
  woods of the Chickwamigon Nicolette National Forest, roughly two hundred
• 51:20
  miles north of Wakesha, and that reaching him would grant
• 51:24
  them a permanent place in his mansion. Most people in
• 51:27
  the creepypasta forums knew the stories were fake, but the
• 51:30
  girls took offense at those who said slender Man was
• 51:33
  not real. They decided they needed to prove the people
• 51:36
  on the forums wrong to gain notoriety online and protect
• 51:40
  their families. Yeah, that was another thing. There was this
• 51:44
  slender Man mansion kind of like oc thing where people
• 51:49
  would write themselves into the mansion and like Jeff the
• 51:52
  Killer lived there and Eyelash Jack and all the famous creepypastas.
• 51:57
  So it was like, oh, well, here's my character in
• 52:00
  slender Man mansion, like the Chaine the Killer kind of stuff.
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: For a person, For a person like Morgan, it's like
• 52:07
  having something where now you are having these episodes and
• 52:11
  you're seeing slender Man actually visit you. It has now
• 52:15
  becomed where it has now became a thing where everything
• 52:17
  you're reading about it is real. Right, Those lines would
• 52:22
  begin to blur.
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: Ya the of the delusion?
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well absolutely, well, this one thing is visiting me
• 52:30
  every day.
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: Why is this not real?
• 52:32
  Speaker 2: And then for people to joke around about it. Now
• 52:34
  it's becoming a thing where you're like, what the fuck
• 52:35
  are you talking about? You don't know what you're talking about.
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: Though Innessa was the apprehensive at first, she later admitted
• 52:41
  to being excited about the prospect of killing someone for
• 52:44
  slender Man. This was despite being fully aware they were
• 52:48
  going to actually go through with the murder of someone
• 52:50
  she knew.
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: I'm surprised, but also kind of excited because I want
• 52:55
  to proof that he existed, because there are a bunch
• 52:58
  of skeptics out there saying that he'd didn't exist, and
• 53:01
  there are a bunch of photos online and sources online
• 53:04
  saying that they did see him.
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: So I decided to go along to tag along the
• 53:10
  proof skeptics wrong.
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: With their end goals in mind, the girls began plotting
• 53:14
  how they would commit the crime months in advance, Still
• 53:17
  caring for their shared best friend. They wanted the killing
• 53:20
  to be painless and preferred that Peyton be asleep or
• 53:23
  unconscious when it happened so they didn't have to look
• 53:26
  her in the eyes. The attack was set for Morgan's
• 53:29
  twelfth birthday. She would invite both Vanessa and Peyton over
• 53:32
  to her house for a sleepover and would go forth
• 53:35
  with their plans from there. The first idea they came
• 53:38
  up with sacrificed their friend was to duct tape her
• 53:41
  mouth to keep her from screaming, and stab her in
• 53:43
  the neck before running out into the night at around
• 53:46
  two am. Such brutal, unreal, unreal, un horrific things for
• 53:52
  a child, a twelve year old to be planning for
• 53:55
  their birthday party.
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: You know, do you think that some of these like
• 53:59
  do you think that the idea like or like like
• 54:01
  I'm wondering, Well, a couple of things I'm wondering. One
• 54:04
  has to be in the lore somewhere that people were
• 54:06
  sacrificed or is it just from like the games and
• 54:08
  stuff where it's like Slenderman picks up people trying to
• 54:12
  find him, So therefore that that would.
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: Have it's not from the games or anything like that,
• 54:16
  it's just gonna I mean, but there were hundreds of
• 54:19
  creepypasta stories right.
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: Social just ady of the media that where people probably
• 54:23
  wrote that like you had to sacrifice someone.
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: Wrote something about sacrificing to Slender, and that was enough
• 54:28
  for this to roll with, because all the mainline stuff,
• 54:32
  he's just kind of like a figure that's a lurker, stalkshure.
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: Or something like that. But I mean, maybe someone did
• 54:38
  write a story where.
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: He just said people should sacrifice children to him, and
• 54:44
  that's all it took for, you know.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: The mind to run wild.
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: Right In the weeks leading up to the murder, the
• 54:49
  girls would constantly discuss their plans in school or when
• 54:52
  they hung out. To avoid any suspicion, they began using
• 54:56
  code words to hide some of the grotesque details. Crackers
• 55:00
  were used for the knife they were going to use,
• 55:02
  and itch was used to refer to the killing itself.
• 55:05
  They also gave each other nicknames, with Morgan being Kitty
• 55:09
  and Anessa bean Scorpio Morgan. Again, it's tragic how these
• 55:14
  are like things a twelve year old girl would do,
• 55:16
  you know, but it's around killing someone.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: Well, it's just the level of delusion, yeah, just the
• 55:24
  I mean, it's it's just so horrifying. The people.
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: The amount of people too that probably have these conversations
• 55:31
  that don't go through with it is also probably fucking frightening.
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: That's kind of what I'm thinking about, is the amount
• 55:37
  of people that are upset or translating these thoughts into
• 55:42
  uh possible actions, and maybe it just never comes to
• 55:45
  fruition or the amount that do end up happening. It's
• 55:48
  just yeah, yeah, crazy, crazy, crazy.
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: Morgan believes that these personas would help them be better proxies.
• 55:55
  She planned to draw whiskers on her face and have
• 55:57
  a signature catchphrase.
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: Don't be afraid, I'm only a little kiddy cat.
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: With each discussion, Morgan grew more obsessed and repeatedly searched
• 56:05
  up how to get away with murder and what kind
• 56:08
  of insane am I on her personal computer. As the
• 56:12
  day approached, the thought of murder was no longer something
• 56:14
  out of reach and was slowly becoming a reality. Morgan
• 56:17
  would send out the invites one month before her birthday
• 56:20
  on May thirtieth. The night before the sleepover, both girls
• 56:23
  packed backpacks with granola bars, water bottles, and clothes in
• 56:27
  preparation for the long trek to the national forest where
• 56:30
  slender Man lived. The next day, Peyton was overjoyed and
• 56:34
  excited to go hang out with her friends. She had
• 56:37
  packed her overnight bag with pajamas and her favorite American
• 56:40
  girl doll before her mother dropped her off at the
• 56:42
  Gazer home. After all the guests arrived, the girls headed
• 56:46
  over to the local indoor skating rink, Skateland and had
• 56:50
  a great time before heading back to Morgan's house for
• 56:52
  the sleepover. As two am approached, the girls woke up
• 56:55
  and mulled over whether they would go through with their plan.
• 56:59
  Sitting in the dark, the girls discussed how to start
• 57:01
  until Morgan said she thought the plan would fail since
• 57:04
  hiding the body would be impossible, so they scrapped their
• 57:08
  initial plan, saying they wanted to give Peyton one more
• 57:11
  day before heading to bed. Morgan and Nissa agreed to
• 57:15
  go with their backup plan to take Peyton to a
• 57:17
  public park. The plan was to knock her out and
• 57:20
  murder her in the bathroom stall so her blood would
• 57:22
  go down the floor drains. The next morning, the girls
• 57:25
  woke up as normal and went about their day. They
• 57:28
  had strawberries and donuts for breakfast and played dress up
• 57:30
  while messing around with silly putty. Payne's mother was expecting
• 57:34
  her to call around ten thirty am, so the girls
• 57:36
  knew they were running out of time to save their families.
• 57:40
  They finished plane and went up to Morgan's mother, Angie,
• 57:43
  to ask if they could go to David's Park, which
• 57:46
  was near the home and filled with dense woods. Morgan's
• 57:49
  mother said yes, and the girls all walked down to
• 57:51
  the park, taking the next step in their plan. Again,
• 57:54
  these things are so it's heartbreaking how childish they are
• 57:56
  between like the American girl doll and like, oh, well,
• 58:01
  if we killed them in the bathroom, all the blood
• 58:03
  will go down the train, Like that's how they think
• 58:05
  it works.
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's.
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: Conversas having this conversation around uh Peyton while she's sleeping
• 58:17
  and being like, no, like to imagine that you're sleeping
• 58:22
  at your friend's house and they're plotting to kill you.
• 58:23
  Is I mean I can't ugh, yeah, just keep it
• 58:27
  right my head around that, you know, it's just unbelievable.
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no joke.
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: Before leaving the guys are home, Morgan grabbed a five
• 58:36
  inch long kitchen knife and slipped it in her waistband.
• 58:39
  Seemingly unable to contain her excitement, Morgan would lift her
• 58:42
  jacket and showing this to the knife on the way
• 58:44
  to the park, while they walked with Peyton. Once they
• 58:47
  arrived at the destination, the girls played for a bit
• 58:50
  before Morgan and Vanessa led Peyton toward the public bathroom
• 58:53
  and persuaded her to go inside with them. I'm sure
• 58:55
  of why her friends were so adamant about going into
• 58:58
  the bathroom. Peyton has a but eventually headed inside. The
• 59:02
  loud metal doors slam behind the trio. As they all
• 59:05
  stood in the entryway this, Morgan looked around the concrete
• 59:08
  bathroom where the attack was supposed to happen. Panic began
• 59:12
  setting in. Seeing her accomplished dressed, Nissa asked Peyton if
• 59:17
  she could step out for a little while so she
• 59:19
  could talk to Morgan privately. When Peyton was outside, Organ
• 59:23
  handed the knife to Nissa and said.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: I can't do this. I'm too scared.
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: You have to This began to feel the pressure of
• 59:29
  the situation as well, houcked her friend and petted her
• 59:32
  like a cat to calm her down. Minutes later, Anissa
• 59:36
  brought Peyton back in and sat down with her against
• 59:38
  the wall, while Morgan nervously hovered around the sinks. This
• 59:42
  is when Nissa initiated their plan and asked if Peyton
• 59:45
  could put herself to sleep. Peyton replied, no, I'm not tired.
• 59:50
  Morgan then beckoned to Nissa over and asked if she
• 59:53
  could knock Peyton out so they could get on with
• 59:56
  the murder. Nissa agreed and set back down next to Peyton,
• 1:00:00
  and this to describe the next moment, saying.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: So I asked Belle if she could put herself to sleep.
• 1:00:04
  I kind of went like that to her forehead, banged
• 1:00:08
  her up against the concrete wall.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: Pant reacted defensively and pushing Nissa's hand away as she said,
• 1:00:13
  excuse me, feeling awkward, and this replied, sorry.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: I got bored and I need something to do with
• 1:00:18
  my hands.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: I think too that, uh Peyton is maybe Bella was
• 1:00:25
  like her nickname or something. Yeah, maybe in that case,
• 1:00:29
  who knows.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: Oh god, my word, it's one of those I mean, yeah, yeah,
• 1:00:35
  my god, even in the moment being like I can't
• 1:00:39
  do this and handing it off to someone else and
• 1:00:41
  like it's just the level of delusion there is, I mean,
• 1:00:47
  And also I mean just manipulation too, of like this
• 1:00:49
  other child right being coerced into doing this thing is
• 1:00:55
  just wild.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so like the again, there's something tragically pathetic
• 1:01:04
  about how bad they are at it. Like she kind
• 1:01:06
  of softly hits her head on the wall and Peyton's like,
• 1:01:09
  why are you doing that? And she's like, oh, I
• 1:01:11
  got bored. It's like they can't even hasn't even thought
• 1:01:14
  of what to do here, Like, yeah, just the childness,
• 1:01:18
  the childnessness of it is very tragic.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: It's crazy to me that this situation too, which doing
• 1:01:25
  me wrong. They're obviously so far gone, but it's like
• 1:01:30
  there's still this like there's still this like level of
• 1:01:33
  humanity of like trying to hold them back from doing this,
• 1:01:37
  from doing this action. You know, like, oh, I don't
• 1:01:41
  like they're fighting this urge to do this thing, but
• 1:01:44
  yet they still are able to like push past that
• 1:01:47
  initial gut reaction and follow.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: Through with it. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: The girls did not have the confidence to kill Peyton
• 1:01:54
  in the bathroom, so they moved on to their final plan,
• 1:01:57
  Laurene Peyton into the woods. They were already at the park.
• 1:02:01
  They asked Peyton if she liked to play a game
• 1:02:02
  of hide and seek. She agreed, and all three girls
• 1:02:05
  exited the bathroom and made their way towards the nearby
• 1:02:07
  tree line. Morgan and Annissa chose these nearby woods, hoping
• 1:02:12
  they could coax Peyton deeper into the woods so they
• 1:02:14
  could commit the crime. As they walked deeper in, they
• 1:02:17
  told Peyton to go hide, and both Morgan and Nissa
• 1:02:20
  would seek. Anissa described the moment, saying.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 2: She's going to hide one place, I was going to
• 1:02:26
  hide one another, and then Morgan and I were going
• 1:02:28
  to be like a lioness chasing down a zebra.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: Likening the murder to an active nature unsuspecting prey about
• 1:02:35
  to be slaughtered by a predator for the sake of
• 1:02:37
  their family's survival. As Peyton ran off to find a
• 1:02:40
  hiding spot, the girls met up once again and began
• 1:02:43
  to exchange the knife back and forth. Unsure of who
• 1:02:46
  was going to do the killing, Morgan approached Vanessa and
• 1:02:49
  began panicking as an unwillingness took over. Nissa said she
• 1:02:53
  had to reassure her friend once again, saying.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: Morgan hands me the knife and says, I can't do it.
• 1:02:59
  You know where all the soft spots are.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Nissa hands Morgan the knife again.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: In states you do it, go ballistic, go crazy. Make
• 1:03:09
  sure she's down, Morgan replied, I'm not doing it until
• 1:03:14
  you tell me to.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: Girls part of ways, and began to circle around where
• 1:03:17
  Peyton was hiding. When Morgan was five feet away and
• 1:03:20
  Nisa yelled now, Morgan and Nessa pounced onto Peyton, pushing
• 1:03:24
  her to the ground and restraining her arms and legs.
• 1:03:27
  While fighting against her friend, Morgan muttered her catchphrase.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: Don't be afraid, I'm only a little kiddy cat.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: And pulled out the kitchen knife. Scared by what was
• 1:03:36
  going on, Peyton began to freak out as her friends
• 1:03:39
  stared down at her and brandished the large blade. As
• 1:03:42
  Morgan raised the weapon, she got close to payt and
• 1:03:44
  whispered in her ear, I'm so sorry, before plunging the
• 1:03:49
  blade deep into Peyton's body. Time seemed to slow down
• 1:03:52
  as Morgan repeatedly stabbed her best friend, someone she knew
• 1:03:56
  for most of her life, someone she loved. Peyton's abbed
• 1:03:59
  him in chest would be punctured repeatedly with such force
• 1:04:03
  that it caused blood to splatter over both Morgan and
• 1:04:05
  Nissa's clothing, as well as the nearby trees. Peyton screams
• 1:04:09
  of agony.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: I hate you, I trusted you.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 3: I can't see echoed out into the air as Nissa
• 1:04:15
  stood by and watched again on her best friend to
• 1:04:18
  continue the bloodbath. When all was said and done, Peyton
• 1:04:22
  had been stabbed nineteen times. Her diaphragm had been repeatedly punctured,
• 1:04:27
  causing extreme internal bleeding and severe damage to her stomach
• 1:04:31
  and liver. My God, Believing she was dead, Morgan stood up,
• 1:04:35
  put the knife in her bag and began getting ready
• 1:04:38
  for the trek to slender Man's mansion. Peyton lay on
• 1:04:40
  the ground, clinging to life as her love Hope, Smile,
• 1:04:43
  Beautiful dream t shirt and yellow jeans soon grew soaked
• 1:04:47
  with her own blood. Thinking they had successfully sacrificed their friend,
• 1:04:51
  the girls began to walk away when Peyton showed signs
• 1:04:53
  of life. Her breaths were incredibly shallow and it was
• 1:04:57
  hard to speak, but she had miraculously survived the attack.
• 1:05:01
  Slowly but surely, she managed to pull herself up to
• 1:05:04
  her feet and stumble around before securing herself on a tree.
• 1:05:08
  Her limbs were weak from the blood loss, causing her
• 1:05:10
  to wobble faintly from tree to tree in a desperate
• 1:05:13
  attempt to save herself. Unsure of what to do, both
• 1:05:16
  Nis and Morgan ran back over and urged their friend
• 1:05:18
  to lie down while they ran off to get help.
• 1:05:21
  Girls never intended to help and made their way out
• 1:05:23
  of the woods. The knife, still dripping with blood, was
• 1:05:27
  stashing Morgan's bag as she began to dab Peyton's stab.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: Wounds using a leaf on the ground.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: Realizing they needed to flee the area, both girls walked
• 1:05:35
  to a nearby walmart clean themselves. Inside the bathroom, the
• 1:05:39
  girls splashed water on their bloody clothes, watching us the
• 1:05:42
  pinkish water went down the train. Once they left the store,
• 1:05:46
  their journey consisted of occasionally hiding from police in tall
• 1:05:49
  grass and singing songs as if nothing was wrong. Though
• 1:05:52
  they tried to be excited about what they had just done,
• 1:05:56
  waves of the emotions crept over them, triggering crying fits
• 1:05:59
  and pain. The girls would then make their way through
• 1:06:03
  the streets of Wakesha, eventually walking along Interstate ninety four
• 1:06:07
  to Chikwamigon Nicolette National Forest.
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: It's it's fascinating.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: The how much it sounds like a kid who like
• 1:06:23
  broke something to the house and their mom's gonna find
• 1:06:25
  out soon, you know, Like this childish panic for something
• 1:06:29
  they've done wrong, because it's like to them, that's what
• 1:06:32
  it is. It's like, oh, if we act normal, if
• 1:06:34
  we do this, it'll be fine. And then these random
• 1:06:37
  bounts of panic when you fear you're going to get
• 1:06:39
  in trouble.
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: It's uh no, it's.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: I mean the rollercoaster of just I mean just think
• 1:06:48
  back to what was just read. I mean it's a
• 1:06:50
  saying of stabbed her. She gets up, they run back,
• 1:06:53
  they pretend that they're going to help her, or they
• 1:06:55
  probably think like oh god, okay here, and then they
• 1:06:58
  pretend they're going to help her. They leave again. They're
• 1:07:00
  like having these like emotional fits with their crying, and
• 1:07:03
  then all of a sudden they start singing as if
• 1:07:04
  nothing's wrong. I mean, it's just like such a chaotic
• 1:07:09
  it's it's a fucking chaotic storm that's happening right now.
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh, it's tragic.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, all of its tragic. Obviously. The biggest tragedy
• 1:07:21
  falls with Peyton of course.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: Uh man, just what a what a sick world where
• 1:07:28
  a child can be exposed to an illness that uh
• 1:07:33
  makes her develop these delusions and hurt others.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: Man, it's rough with her friends long gone.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: Peyton would roll over and begin to crawl along the
• 1:07:41
  forest floor as twigs and leaves grazed against her open wounds.
• 1:07:45
  She relentlessly fought as her consciousness threatened to flicker out.
• 1:07:48
  With each labored moment, her vision would fade in and out,
• 1:07:52
  and her shallow breathing would person as she pulled the
• 1:07:55
  weight of her weak body bo.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: It felt like ours.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 3: Peyton crawled until she finally made it out of the
• 1:08:01
  dark forest and felt the sun hit her skin. Grass
• 1:08:06
  was warm as she continued to crawl, hoping to find help,
• 1:08:09
  until she reached a bike trail running parallel to the woods.
• 1:08:13
  But then minutes Greg Steinberg, a Wakasha resident, was riding
• 1:08:18
  his bike and saw the young girl lying in the
• 1:08:20
  grass and asked if she was okay. Through her weak state,
• 1:08:23
  Peyton mumbled.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: Can you help me? I've been stemmed multiple times.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: Greg immediately called the authorities and waited by her side
• 1:08:31
  until they arrived.
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: Unbelievable to have that kind of dex I mean, like
• 1:08:35
  to hold on that long. I mean, oh god, it's
• 1:08:38
  so fucking it's sick. I mean, I'm like, it's just
• 1:08:41
  such a fucking badass move. Oh my god, I can't
• 1:08:45
  even imagine. First of all, she gets up earlier, walks around,
• 1:08:48
  tries to hold herself up, imagining stabbed nineteen times and
• 1:08:52
  like even being able to utter a single word or
• 1:08:55
  move them whatsoever.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 3: Not only that, but find like your way out through
• 1:09:01
  the midst of that. Officer Dan Klein was the first
• 1:09:04
  to arrive on the scene and could immediately tell that
• 1:09:07
  something was very wrong.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: She wasn't moving a whole lot. As I approached her,
• 1:09:11
  I said, Hi, I am Officer Dan. Are you okay?
• 1:09:14
  She said no. As I got closer, I started to
• 1:09:17
  see a lot of blood, And the closer I got,
• 1:09:19
  the more blood I saw.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 3: Paine was able to talk to the officer and identify
• 1:09:23
  Morgan Geyser as her attacker and said there was another
• 1:09:27
  girl with her, whom she identified as a Nissa Wayer.
• 1:09:31
  A manhunt for the girls was launched as Wakesha police
• 1:09:34
  frantically searched the city for the young culprits. One of
• 1:09:37
  the first places official search was the Gayser home, believing
• 1:09:41
  the girls had fled there and were hiding inside. At
• 1:09:44
  the time, Angie Gazer was vacuuming in the basement when
• 1:09:48
  her six year old son ran down the stairs, saying
• 1:09:50
  the police were at the front.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: Door, asking where her daughter was.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: Confused, she rushed upstairs and was met with police standing
• 1:09:57
  in her home adorned in riot gear. Asked where the
• 1:10:00
  girls had gone, and she stated they had gone down
• 1:10:03
  to the park. Seemingly not believing her, they began searching
• 1:10:06
  her home as she frantically asked what was going on.
• 1:10:09
  Officers then said that one of the girls was heard
• 1:10:12
  in an accident. This sa Angie Spiraling. Police arrived at
• 1:10:16
  the Weird House around the same time and told Nissa's mother, Christie,
• 1:10:20
  her daughter was missing. Believing her daughter had been kidnapped,
• 1:10:23
  Christy made her way over to the Gazer residence, where
• 1:10:26
  police were swarming the streets. She made her way into
• 1:10:30
  the home and found her daughter's cell phone, hoping it
• 1:10:32
  would have clues about where the girls might be. As
• 1:10:35
  she searched through the phone, she opened the notes app
• 1:10:37
  and found that her daughter had left a note detailing
• 1:10:40
  her final wishes. Christy quickly showed the message to the police,
• 1:10:43
  which read, this is.
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: My final wish to those who care. Did not agreeve
• 1:10:48
  my absence, but remember me for who I was. I
• 1:10:51
  love and chaish you all, it wouldn't do you harm.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 3: While all of this was going on, Peyton's mother was
• 1:10:56
  at home, peacefully painting an old patio set and awaiting
• 1:11:00
  her daughter's phone call to pick her up from the sleepover.
• 1:11:03
  Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw police
• 1:11:05
  quickly walking towards her along the side of her house.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: Before she could speak, they asked, are you Peyton's mom.
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 3: Immediately, Stacy's heart sank, wondering whether they were for her
• 1:11:16
  daughter or her husband, who had been at work at
• 1:11:19
  the time. The worry she felt soon turned to utter
• 1:11:22
  dread when police informed her that her daughter had been
• 1:11:24
  stabbed nineteen times by her best friend and was fighting
• 1:11:28
  for her life at the hospital. Stacy ran inside and
• 1:11:31
  called her husband frantically, saying.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: Morgan stab Peyton. You need to come home.
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: Payton's younger brother had been playing inside the whole time
• 1:11:39
  and watched as his mother broke down in tears after
• 1:11:43
  her phone call. She approached him and the two began
• 1:11:45
  to cry as they loaded into the car and went
• 1:11:47
  to the hospital. When Stacy identified herself as to Peyton's mother,
• 1:11:51
  it wasn't long before she was guided through the busy
• 1:11:53
  eer to her daughter, who lay looking lifeless on a
• 1:11:56
  hospital gurney. Peyton's mother couldn't believe her daughter's condition, stating she.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: Was pails of ghost, she was terrified, she was crying,
• 1:12:04
  she couldn't breathe. Man, what a horrifying situation. I mean,
• 1:12:09
  I can't even I can't even imagine that. I can't.
• 1:12:11
  I can't. I cannot fuck it even fathom dude. Yeah,
• 1:12:14
  and I won't. I won't even speculate on it me.
• 1:12:17
  I refuse, I love, but I can't imagine it. I
• 1:12:21
  can't imagine it, and I'll tell you what is, Yeah,
• 1:12:23
  I simply won't. I also feel bad.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 3: For uh not Morgan a Niss's mother, right, because Morgan's
• 1:12:33
  I mean, I obviously feel you know, sympathy, of course,
• 1:12:36
  but there were signs that her daughter was unwell. But
• 1:12:41
  I imagined for a Niss's mother who just knew that
• 1:12:44
  her daughter didn't get along well with school and you know,
• 1:12:47
  was a little behind her.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: Other classmates and stuff.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 3: I mean, you just think your daughter has a friend
• 1:12:53
  and then you find all out all of this. That's
• 1:12:56
  got to be crushing as well, right, Oh my god,
• 1:12:58
  I mean, like, oh hey, I got to your friends school.
• 1:13:00
  That's so cool, happy for her, right, and then all
• 1:13:03
  of a sudden, it's like, by the way, we're planning
• 1:13:05
  a fucking murder for a fictitious for slender Man.
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's like it's bordering on the.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: Line of being like, hey, we murdered someone because we
• 1:13:15
  thought that we could steal their v bucks or somebody.
• 1:13:17
  It has like that level of fucking like memory too.
• 1:13:20
  It's unbelievable.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: Murdering someone for their v buck. I mean it's kind
• 1:13:27
  of like that, right or now, I mean, I guess.
• 1:13:32
  I mean, I don't know. I'm all I could say.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 3: I can.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 2: All I can say is this is I very very
• 1:13:41
  happy that uh very happy that I still cannot believe
• 1:13:47
  somebody gettingtabbed nineteen times and just being like also a child,
• 1:13:51
  mind you getting stabbed nineteen times, and then just having
• 1:13:54
  the sheer will power and also just be like I'm
• 1:13:56
  not fucking dying, and then to even just be like.
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: Yo, I need to go to the hospital.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: You just straight up said to the guy when he
• 1:14:02
  came up, Hey, by the way, they stabbed my guts
• 1:14:05
  like twenty times.
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: I need to get to the hospital quick. I looked up.
• 1:14:11
  I looked up has anyone ever killed anyone over v.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 3: Bucks, and the helpful as always Google AI says nope.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: However, there was I don't believe that a.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 3: Case of a man shooting his step son in twenty
• 1:14:25
  twenty four over a dispute involving the nine year old
• 1:14:28
  playing the game against parental rules, and also attend my
• 1:14:32
  boy he made national headlines after shooting and killing his
• 1:14:35
  mother in twenty twenty two because she refused.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: To buy him a VR headset.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 2: I still feel like, I, well, first off, I don't
• 1:14:41
  trust the AI with my life, but I will say
• 1:14:43
  that I refuse to believe that someone has not been
• 1:14:47
  shot and or stabbed four v bucks or because of
• 1:14:51
  v bucks actually four v bucks as if someone was
• 1:14:55
  like stealing petty cash off someone. Yeah, I think there
• 1:14:58
  has to be a v Bucks murder.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 3: Yes, people have been physically assaulted, robbed, and violently targeted
• 1:15:03
  in real life over fortnite v Bucks.
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: You gotta watch out to make currency. There are multiple talking.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 3: Head cases of players meeting up in person to trade
• 1:15:17
  accounts or give v bucks only to be robbed at
• 1:15:20
  gunpoint or god.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: Dude, I don't know what kind of waterhead you have
• 1:15:26
  to be to sit there, And I don't know what
• 1:15:27
  kind of waterhead you have to be to sit there
• 1:15:29
  and be like, I'll be right back.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: I'm gonna go to Chipotle down the road quickly, meet
• 1:15:33
  up a guy to do a v Bucks transfer. There's
• 1:15:37
  gotta be other ways, Bro, There's God, There's gotta be
• 1:15:40
  other ways.
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 3: Man, I gotta okay, this is a topic for a
• 1:15:44
  later day. My God, know about the V Bucks.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: I gotta know about the v B is a future wind.
• 1:15:51
  It might be.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: Minutes before her arrival, Peyton was ushered into Wakesha Memorial
• 1:15:59
  Hospital or trauma surgeon doctor Brian Hucksdorf, rushed down to
• 1:16:03
  the er to inspect a twelve year old girl suffering
• 1:16:05
  severe trauma from stab wounds. When he arrived, he couldn't
• 1:16:09
  believe his eyes. By all accounts, Peyton should not have
• 1:16:12
  survived the attack, let alone been able to crawl out
• 1:16:14
  of the woods. He quickly noticed how badly damaged her
• 1:16:18
  internal organs were, but what scared him the most was
• 1:16:21
  the stab wound that entered what is referred to as
• 1:16:23
  the cardiac box, where the heart and major arteries were located.
• 1:16:27
  During his analysis, doctor Hucksdorf and other doctors saw that
• 1:16:31
  the blade of the knife had missed a major artery
• 1:16:33
  in Peyton's chest by less than a hare, saving her
• 1:16:37
  from an almost instant death. Doctors knew she needed life
• 1:16:40
  saving surgery and began to prep her. As her mother
• 1:16:42
  stood next to her daughter, Stacy repeated over and over again.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: You're gouda be okay, It's gonna be fine.
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 3: As her little girl faintly lifted her hand out seeking comfort.
• 1:16:53
  The longer she stayed in the trauma room, the more
• 1:16:55
  the severity of her daughter's situation sank in. The nurses
• 1:16:59
  next to her were counting out the stab wounds.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: There's five in her arm, there's seven on her leg. Okay,
• 1:17:05
  I count nineteen. I caught nineteen as well.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 3: Hearing these words was something no mother could ever imagine.
• 1:17:11
  Before she could even begin a process her emotions, her
• 1:17:14
  daughter was rushed off to surgery room with a twenty
• 1:17:16
  five to fifty percent chance of survival. By the time
• 1:17:19
  Peyton was entering surgery, multiple police departments were on the
• 1:17:22
  hunt for two suspects of a supposed stabbing while driving
• 1:17:25
  along Interstate ninety four, five miles from David's Park Wakasha
• 1:17:29
  Sheriff's Department Lieutenant Paul Rinks saw the two girls walking
• 1:17:34
  along the interstate after receiving a call of a possible sighting.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: When he stopped and got out.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 3: Of the car, he was shocked to see that the
• 1:17:41
  supposed stabbing suspects were two little girls. Before he did
• 1:17:45
  anything else, he asked if they had anything that could
• 1:17:47
  poke him, to which the girls responded that they had
• 1:17:50
  a knife in their bag. Before he placed the girls
• 1:17:52
  in the back of his squad car, Lieutenant Rinkez noticed
• 1:17:55
  the ungodly amount of blood standing in Morgan's clothing.
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: And asked if she had been injured.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 3: Morgan shook her head and said no, which confused rank
• 1:18:03
  Is even more, prompting him to ask where it came from.
• 1:18:06
  Without hesitation, Morgan replied.
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: I was forced to stab my best friend to death.
• 1:18:12
  My god, yeah.
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, like again, it's she's delusional. She thinks that.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: It's just fuck good God Almighty.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 3: This was the exact moment all doubt was erased in
• 1:18:27
  Paul's mind. Realizing she was the suspect, he read her
• 1:18:30
  her miranda rights and kindly asked if she'd be willing
• 1:18:33
  to talk to him about it.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, dude, well that checks enough boxes for me. I
• 1:18:39
  better call this in. Dude, what also a feeling?
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: You girls covered in blood walking down the interstate? Color
• 1:18:51
  me curious? Do you have anything that could pute me?
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: I had to stab my friend from elt for for
• 1:18:57
  a fictional uh for a fictional tumbling our character.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, another box checked.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 3: He has a box that says, my god, he has
• 1:19:11
  a box stat I had to tab.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: Friend for fictional internet character.
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 2: It's as big as it's as big as Steve's notebook
• 1:19:20
  from Blues Clues.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: He's using a giant crayon and he's like check mark
• 1:19:25
  is like.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: A SpongeBob case from last week. Okay, but that blue
• 1:19:32
  and this is the Internet.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: What do you think Blue?
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: He just has dyed blue German shepherd in the back
• 1:19:37
  of his car.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: Just barking viciously frothy. I think it's a bit of
• 1:19:43
  a quinky dunk, isn't it. Buddy? We just got you
• 1:19:50
  guys to sit back there with Blue. Don't put me
• 1:19:53
  back there.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 3: With I'm thinking of this cough character going to different like.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: Scenes and stuff like that.
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 3: Like like he goes to like someone someone took their
• 1:20:06
  own live and there's a note on the table and
• 1:20:08
  he's like, we just got a letter.
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: Wonder it's from. I have a suspicion that this was
• 1:20:17
  the this was the victim's note.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, all right, girl, what if you looked
• 1:20:23
  at you said, hrighty, girls getting the battle bus.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 3: I think this is so I always worry with these
• 1:20:31
  things that I'm being disrespectful of the story. And my
• 1:20:34
  rule is always that as long as I'm not, you know,
• 1:20:37
  discrediting the tragedy that happened or the people going like, you.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: Know, well, yeah, well we're through. I feel like this
• 1:20:44
  is like, this is writing the handrail of that.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: I'm just trying to make a light of I'm I'm
• 1:20:50
  just trying to make I mean, we are I am
• 1:20:52
  not at all making light of the what the girl
• 1:20:57
  went through, but just the idea of a cop walking
• 1:21:00
  up yeah on two girls covered in blood on the
• 1:21:03
  interstate and it's like, okay, well we're looking for two
• 1:21:05
  girls and he's like, okay, that might be them.
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 3: And they are riddled with blood in the coast. Just
• 1:21:11
  two kids, just two girls covered in blood here. Nothing
• 1:21:14
  starting to inconvenience you. I know, you're covered in blood.
• 1:21:16
  You got Did you get any scrapes?
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: No? Okay, well do you have.
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 2: Anything that it's a thing where it's I don't know,
• 1:21:24
  just a little silly just going.
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: Through the whole question. Can we not have a bit
• 1:21:27
  of brevity in this moment? Sure?
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 3: Right, Hey, man, it's your world, I'm just living in it.
• 1:21:32
  Realizing she was the suspect, he read her a Marina
• 1:21:35
  rites and kindly asked if she'd be willing to talk
• 1:21:37
  to him about it. Once again, Morgan repeated that she
• 1:21:40
  had a sleepover at her house and she and Anissa
• 1:21:43
  were forced to stab Peyton. Ball's mind began to race,
• 1:21:46
  worrying that if this story were true, there was a
• 1:21:49
  victim in Wakesha who needed assistance. After loading them into
• 1:21:53
  the cop car, called dispatch, letting them know he found
• 1:21:56
  the two suspects and wondered if the victim had been found.
• 1:22:00
  After being informed that Peyton was in surgery, Paul rushed
• 1:22:02
  the girls back to the Keshia Police department to be questioned.
• 1:22:05
  Further headlines would soon come out about the attack, causing
• 1:22:08
  uproar in the little town of Kesha's. Reports began flooding
• 1:22:11
  the town. Slender Man was now at the forefront of
• 1:22:13
  every TV as the entire world was being exposed to it.
• 1:22:17
  The creepy apasta community came under fire for the attacks,
• 1:22:20
  with people believing the forum was solely responsible by corrupting
• 1:22:24
  the girls. The creator of slender Man, Eric Knutsen, publicly
• 1:22:27
  apologized and condemned the act.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: I have deeply said by the tragedy Wisconsin. My heart
• 1:22:32
  goes out to the families of those affected by this
• 1:22:34
  terrible act.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 3: He said in a statement to the media. Moderators of
• 1:22:38
  the forum also spoke out against the crime, thinking it
• 1:22:41
  was absurd to blame the creepypasta community for the girl's actions.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 2: Placing blamed solely on an interest in reading slush writing
• 1:22:48
  about horror, paranormal myths, urban legends, etc. For a tragedy
• 1:22:51
  would be off the mark the really young kids. While
• 1:22:54
  I don't believe that creepos stories will cause them to
• 1:22:56
  become evil or sick, I do think it could scare
• 1:22:59
  them and or make them very anxious. And if your
• 1:23:02
  child has issues with violence or destructive or depressive issues,
• 1:23:05
  it's really important to make sure that they're not interacting
• 1:23:07
  with with things that will exactly will exacerbate that.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 3: Correct, I agree. The creepy pasta form was under a
• 1:23:16
  media frenzies. People began to view it as an evil
• 1:23:19
  entity responsible for corrupting two innocent little girls. The media
• 1:23:23
  was so distracted by the creepy pastave forms that they
• 1:23:25
  neglected to pay any attention to the real monsters that
• 1:23:28
  were currently being interrogated.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 2: I do think it's funny that they I do think
• 1:23:32
  it's funny that they like go to the guy who
• 1:23:34
  created the Slenderman image and they're like, how do you feel, like,
• 1:23:40
  you know? For twisting is yeah, exactly. The media is
• 1:23:43
  like twisting it to have him basically back. I mean, like,
• 1:23:46
  I mean, I don't particularly feel great about it.
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: I think it sucks.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 2: So you you you feel remorse, you feel sorry for it.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: It's just twisting in that way. It's just so fucking
• 1:23:56
  scummy man.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh. I remember when this was happening. It
• 1:23:59
  was all the news reports like creepy pastas, is this
• 1:24:03
  the next school shooting? More at eleven, like, just no
• 1:24:08
  understanding of what happened or why it happened.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: At things it was it was a mentally ill child.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 3: Who was wasn't being regulated in a way they should
• 1:24:20
  have been and then acted on those like depraved ideas
• 1:24:23
  and delusions, but viles can do because they just minimize it.
• 1:24:27
  It's it's like I said, the same as the video
• 1:24:29
  game conversation.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: While Slenderman was popular in online circles, did this event
• 1:24:36
  truly skyrocket into a like main stream.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 3: No one knew who Slenderman was in the mainstream like internet,
• 1:24:45
  even Creepypasta's as well. Well, I mean like if you
• 1:24:48
  knew creepy pastas, you knew who Slenderman was?
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: Or no, no, sorry, What I meant was, did it
• 1:24:52
  also just like give more? Did it give more eyes to.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: Also like creepypastas and like those kind of horror commun Yeah,
• 1:24:59
  in general.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember coming home from school when this no,
• 1:25:02
  it was it was in the summer's rider for schools now.
• 1:25:04
  But I remember coming to the living room one day
• 1:25:07
  and I remember my mom being like, what whatever this is?
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: You did, make sure you stay away from it.
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 3: And I'm like what, She's like, this slender Man thing,
• 1:25:17
  you don't you don't know about that, right, And I'm like,
• 1:25:19
  all right, so we need context. I mean I was fifteen,
• 1:25:24
  so I was old enough that you know, my mom
• 1:25:27
  trusted me when I was like, this isn't a bad thing,
• 1:25:30
  this is just you were clearly the news has no
• 1:25:32
  idea what it's talking about.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: You were swirling your glass of whole milk and you're like, listen,
• 1:25:36
  what's this I've been I've been showing.
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 3: I've been showing the ladies these things.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 2: Why don't you suck on your chuck jug and calm
• 1:25:48
  down because I've been showing I've been showing girls that
• 1:25:52
  mister Kitty pasta versions of this for a long time.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I mean it's just like, it's how the
• 1:25:57
  news is with anything. You have a bunch of people
• 1:25:59
  said up the course, yeah, and they're like, can can
• 1:26:02
  you believe this? Like is should this be allowed? Should
• 1:26:05
  the Internet be allowed to use words like die and
• 1:26:09
  kill in front of kids? Anyway, after the commercial break,
• 1:26:12
  we're going to talk about a car bomb in Lebanon
• 1:26:14
  in which thirteen children were killed. It's like, well, yeah, whatever,
• 1:26:19
  if it benefits them, it's justified if it if it
• 1:26:22
  can be sensationalized, it's about whatever. But yeah, this projected
• 1:26:26
  the idea of slender Man into the stratosphere. But because
• 1:26:30
  of that, a bunch of people's interpretation of slender Man,
• 1:26:33
  is that it's something that makes kids kill each other online.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: Oh sure, Like now it's like changed the lore of
• 1:26:40
  it in the public perception.
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 3: In the public perception, I mean, it didn't really change
• 1:26:44
  the online scene. I don't think that much. Most people
• 1:26:47
  kind of have like a reverence for the story to
• 1:26:49
  not touch it or incorporate it, you know.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: But if you ask like some adult.
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 3: Like a boomer who's never read a creepy pasta but
• 1:26:58
  heard about from the news, it's like, oh, slender Man, Yeah,
• 1:27:00
  that's that girl that stabbed that girl right over that
• 1:27:03
  cartoon thing.
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 3: So in the dimly lit rooms of the Wilkesha police station,
• 1:27:08
  the girls were questioned for hours on end. Morgan, being
• 1:27:11
  the main suspect, was questioned for longer and calmly discussed
• 1:27:14
  every detail with the officer. When asked about her motive,
• 1:27:18
  she went into great detail about Slenderman and how they
• 1:27:21
  had to become proxies otherwise their families would have been killed.
• 1:27:25
  Throughout the interrogation, she implied that Denanissa was the main
• 1:27:28
  person behind the crime. Morgan claimed Danissa was the main planner,
• 1:27:32
  she was the one who insisted on the murder and
• 1:27:35
  that she was less remorseful. Unaware that Peyton already identified
• 1:27:39
  her as the main suspect, Morgan tried to portray herself
• 1:27:43
  as an innocent accomplice. With each passing question, she slowly
• 1:27:47
  revealed her sinister mental state by expressing how she felt
• 1:27:50
  while stabbing her friend.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: I felt no remorse, actually felt nothing, she.
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 3: Would continue to say as she questioned why she didn't
• 1:27:58
  feel as guilty as she thought she would for the betrayal.
• 1:28:01
  When she got to the details of the sacrifice, she
• 1:28:03
  broke down cry recalling hearing her friends cries ringing in
• 1:28:07
  her head. Morgan opened up about her visions, her fantasies
• 1:28:11
  of hurting people. When she ended her side to the storage,
• 1:28:14
  started shutting down, saying she was numb down the hall,
• 1:28:18
  Nissa was given a lot of the same information. She
• 1:28:21
  explained how they planned the murder months in advance and
• 1:28:23
  that they had to become proxies. She, on the other hand,
• 1:28:27
  was putting all the blame on Morgan. Nissa said that
• 1:28:30
  it was Morgan who initially proposed killing Peyton, though she
• 1:28:33
  painted Morgan as the mastermind and is admitted to pushing
• 1:28:36
  Peyton to the ground in the woods and restraining her
• 1:28:39
  on the ground.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 2: This is all very brutal too. I don't know if
• 1:28:41
  you've ever seen a documentary Beware the Slender Man on HBO,
• 1:28:45
  but these you can kind of get. They have a
• 1:28:47
  lot of the uh police interrogation room footage of this,
• 1:28:50
  and it's a very haunting, very very very tough to watch.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh, I mean, I don't know, it's a
• 1:29:04
  it's tragic situations like this and you want to be
• 1:29:07
  mad at someone, you know, but then it's like you
• 1:29:10
  for me at least, I look at the perpetrairers, it's like, gosh,
• 1:29:13
  they to like you have a mentally ill child and
• 1:29:16
  another one who was developmentally behind and stuff like that.
• 1:29:21
  It's like, just what a horrible circumstance to lead between them,
• 1:29:26
  to lead this to happen.
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: You know, two lost children that were able to bruin
• 1:29:32
  their fantasies for too long.
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah you know, yeah, no one help, Yeah yeah yeah.
• 1:29:38
  The questions kept coming, one after the other. Is a,
• 1:29:40
  Nissa said, and answered everyone slowly. She began to question
• 1:29:44
  everything about the stabbing and her beliefs about Slenderman, and
• 1:29:48
  Nissa told the officer that while out on the interstate,
• 1:29:51
  She had a nervous breakdown and laid down on the
• 1:29:53
  side of the road. Morgan began to panic and called
• 1:29:56
  out to the woods.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: Sender, if you're listening, please please help us. Oh god.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 3: This is when the wave of panic would fully consume
• 1:30:04
  both girls, as they slowly began to realize maybe Slenderman
• 1:30:07
  wasn't real.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: Oh god.
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 3: Not even halfway through the interview, she colely told the officer.
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: Forehand, I believe, but now I know that it's just
• 1:30:17
  teenagers who really like scaring people and making them believe
• 1:30:20
  false things. Oh god, yeah, just tragic clarity there, my god. Man.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean kids should have just never been
• 1:30:28
  exposed to this kind of thing, you know, if they
• 1:30:31
  can't handle it. In her mind, and Nissa was trying
• 1:30:33
  to control the damage as much as possible and make
• 1:30:35
  herself seem innocent. She clearly stated that she feared for
• 1:30:38
  her family's life and more importantly, feared going to prison.
• 1:30:42
  She claimed to be squeamish and could never stab anyone.
• 1:30:46
  She claimed she wasn't a violent person, yet she was
• 1:30:48
  there every step of the way and only showed remorse
• 1:30:51
  when the murder attempt was over. And this asked if
• 1:30:53
  Peyton was alive, and when they said she was in surgery,
• 1:30:57
  she said she was kind of happy, but worried that
• 1:30:59
  she would hate her when they met again again. Like
• 1:31:02
  the childness of it, the childness of it where it's like, oh, well,
• 1:31:06
  will my friend be mad at me? You know, kind
• 1:31:10
  of ad to the sorrow of the whole thing.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: It's so hard.
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 2: Not to lash out emotionally at that kind of thing too,
• 1:31:18
  you know what I mean. Like I can see a
• 1:31:19
  lot of people who will listen to this or you know,
• 1:31:22
  see the documentary, read about to do whatever and then
• 1:31:24
  just be like, oh, you're just covering your ass. You
• 1:31:26
  don't give a shit, you know, without understanding like the
• 1:31:29
  complexities of like I guess this is the absolute mental turmoil.
• 1:31:33
  And they're like, how just severely mentally broken and destroyed
• 1:31:40
  this person's brain is?
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: Does it? Does it condone what she did?
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 2: I'm just saying that, like it's it's not a justification,
• 1:31:48
  it's just a reason.
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: Not at all.
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 2: It's just what a fucking murky murky waters that is
• 1:31:54
  for a person's brain.
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Because they were being questioned, police dug through Morgan's
• 1:31:59
  room and discovered all of her mutilated dolls in the
• 1:32:02
  pages and her diary. At that point, the police were
• 1:32:04
  already seeing how oblivious the parents and school staff were
• 1:32:07
  during the months leading up to the attack. Police, in turn,
• 1:32:11
  questioned the parents about what they knew about their children's
• 1:32:13
  unhealthy obsession with the creepypasta. Morgan's parents claimed she was
• 1:32:17
  just a typical girl who had an obsession with horror.
• 1:32:20
  Her mother said she would show us some.
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: Of the pictures, and she would read to some of
• 1:32:25
  the stories, and while all the subject matter was a
• 1:32:28
  little dark, I wasn't concerned. When I was Morgan's age,
• 1:32:31
  I was reading Stephen King novels. I remember being eleven
• 1:32:34
  years old and writing home from the library with the
• 1:32:36
  IT book under my arm. That's a very scary and
• 1:32:39
  dark story. So I just thought it was normal for
• 1:32:41
  a child of middle school age to be interested in
• 1:32:43
  scary stories.
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 3: I mean that, So that kind of justification is the
• 1:32:47
  exact kind of thing I would probably say, right like.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: A million percent a million percent once again, though you're
• 1:32:55
  you know, I mean, it just comes down with the point.
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 2: Of being like, huh, my child have schizophrenic tendencies, Like also,
• 1:33:02
  how often like, I mean, there's there's just.
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: No other thing to like, let me let me a
• 1:33:06
  child and the once of them. Yeah yeah, let me
• 1:33:09
  ask you this, Isaiah. If you're let's say, if your
• 1:33:13
  kid was like I like, which obviously your your kid's
• 1:33:16
  gonna like horror stories and all that, and that's just
• 1:33:18
  a given.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 3: She could also just despise me and everything to do
• 1:33:21
  with me, but more than likely.
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they're just also like I actually fucking hate you.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're like, that's weird, buddy, here, I'm not
• 1:33:27
  gonna be okay, door, I'm gonna I'm gonna shut your
• 1:33:31
  door and you get to have six hours alone time
• 1:33:33
  in your room.
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: The uh if you went up to your kid's room
• 1:33:37
  and you saw like mutilated dolls and all that kind
• 1:33:39
  of stuff, like ye, at what.
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: Point are you do you? I mean, do you said
• 1:33:43
  the kid down? Like hey, but are you okay? What
• 1:33:45
  do you? What is this all about?
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 3: If they're like yeah, if they're called I feel like
• 1:33:48
  if they pulled the heads off dolls now, because I
• 1:33:50
  used to do that with action figures, just because uh,
• 1:33:54
  not in any murderous intent. I think I was just like, oh,
• 1:33:57
  how's the head work on the puppet thing. But if
• 1:34:01
  they were like carving symbols into their chest and stuff
• 1:34:04
  like that, I think that's the set down on the
• 1:34:06
  bed and have a long talk, you know, at least
• 1:34:09
  kind of stuff.
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 2: I would probably even if it was a person because
• 1:34:13
  also I'm going to be like because even if let's
• 1:34:16
  if I was you, if I was your dad, Isaiah,
• 1:34:19
  and I went into your room, there was there.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: Was leads off dolls or I'm just curious how they were,
• 1:34:27
  how the blood works.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I would be at some point, I want, at
• 1:34:36
  some point this story has made me or like this
• 1:34:40
  the scenario where they basically like this crime has definitely
• 1:34:44
  maybe be like if you see something weird, you're just
• 1:34:45
  going to sit down and be like.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: You realize buddy, that like you know, this is make
• 1:34:49
  believe right or like fascinating that I don't think it.
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 2: Necessarily just immediately means that like I think that my
• 1:34:58
  child's going to murder.
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: Someone, but it's it's good to do a temperature check, right.
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 3: I think, yeah, because there's a layer between reading it
• 1:35:07
  and uh, you know, writing about how you have to
• 1:35:13
  kill someone to save your family.
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: Like right right, which I you know, once again who
• 1:35:20
  I mean, who knows the amount of like insights she had?
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 2: And yeah, I mean, like I'm just saying in general,
• 1:35:29
  I mean, parenting is hard.
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 3: I completely sympathize with that. But there's got to be
• 1:35:34
  a stop gap. So there also has got to be signs. Well,
• 1:35:38
  I mean they said that got to be scientologists and
• 1:35:41
  stuff like that, and talked about demons biting her.
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 2: So also I want even in the school, there's got
• 1:35:50
  to be something, I mean, the counselor turning a blind eye,
• 1:35:55
  all of these things to where even like let's say
• 1:35:57
  not even the rubber mallet, there's got to be things
• 1:35:59
  of like things said was just who was turning.
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: A blind eye and just be like, ah, kids are kids.
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 4: A kid.
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 3: There had to be a bunch of people that could
• 1:36:08
  have done something drop the ball. I feel like situations
• 1:36:10
  like this are prevented a lot because at least one
• 1:36:14
  adult down the pipe was like, hey, should someone say something,
• 1:36:19
  do something?
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: You know, how do you as a teacher.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: Let's say you're the teacher here Isaiah and you're in
• 1:36:27
  the class, what do you what do you try to
• 1:36:28
  do here to check in on the kid and maybe
• 1:36:31
  divert their path, right.
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 3: There were there were some kids at my school in
• 1:36:36
  high school who were a little questionable as to they
• 1:36:42
  might hurt someone. And I remember one day there was
• 1:36:46
  a kid who made a joke about having an ak
• 1:36:49
  in his backpack, and the moment he made that joke
• 1:36:54
  in school and one of the kids.
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: Went to a teacher and that.
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 3: Teacher ripped him out of the allway immediately and like
• 1:37:06
  took a like with the principal and they like searched
• 1:37:09
  his backpack and everything. And I don't think he had one,
• 1:37:11
  but there was some I don't know all the details
• 1:37:14
  about it, because you know, it's as good on everyone
• 1:37:16
  passed rumors around and stuff like that.
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: Good on that teacher, but he got.
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 3: Expelled for that. But there was because you know, I
• 1:37:24
  don't I don't think yet. I'm pretty sure he did
• 1:37:26
  not have a weapon. But there was something else I'm
• 1:37:28
  found in combination with that that led to enough suspicion
• 1:37:31
  that it wasn't just a joke.
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: Maybe they found a note or something like that. I
• 1:37:34
  don't know. The people. It just takes one people.
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 3: It just takes one adult to be like, hey, hold on,
• 1:37:41
  what's going on here.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: So the people that are doing these things.
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 2: I feel like they nonchalantly say that stuff because I
• 1:37:46
  feel like they want the attention for someone to stop
• 1:37:51
  them or just give them an attention to where I'm curious.
• 1:37:54
  Once again, all speculative hindsight twenty twenty. Right, I'm not.
• 1:37:58
  I'm just talk because we're on a podcast and I
• 1:38:01
  get a talk. I bet you fucking anything Morgan said something.
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 3: Said let me do something, Well, I'm gonna have ghost
• 1:38:12
  her and stuff like that.
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: Ghosts biding.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 2: But I'm even saying to the extent of being like,
• 1:38:16
  gonna have to make a sacrifice, a slenderman, gonna have
• 1:38:19
  to do it. I bet you it was that casual
• 1:38:22
  and people probably were like what the fuck, and kids
• 1:38:24
  are probably like, what the fuck are you talking about?
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean, and like discarded it.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 2: But I'm just I'm just saying now, with this story,
• 1:38:33
  with this information, if I was a teacher and I
• 1:38:36
  heard something like that, I would pull her aside and
• 1:38:38
  I would say, what in the fuck are you talking about?
• 1:38:41
  Explain because if she's this far gone, she might be like, oh, well,
• 1:38:45
  I just I mean, we have to have to make
• 1:38:46
  a sacrifice.
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: She might it might be that.
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 3: None that that's what she did when she was being interrogated,
• 1:38:52
  and there's that.
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. That was a lot with.
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 3: Mentally ill people who commit like murder. You'll see interrogation tapes.
• 1:38:59
  They're just like, yeah, I killed him. Yeah, well I
• 1:39:01
  had to kill him, so I just killed him. Like
• 1:39:03
  it's yeah, that's why.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 2: If you, if you, if you got that, if you,
• 1:39:07
  if you were able to get that far beforehand, with
• 1:39:09
  just a simple conversation of asking a kid like how
• 1:39:12
  they're doing?
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: What is it? You know?
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 2: I just how much of this could have been prevented?
• 1:39:16
  Once again hind Tech twenty twenty, just saying yeah.
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: Miss's mother said she had never mentioned anything to me
• 1:39:22
  about her belief in Slenderman.
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 3: Both fathers were supposedly oblivious to their daughter's beliefs early. However,
• 1:39:28
  a month before the murder, Morgan's dad posted a picture
• 1:39:31
  on Instagram of a slender Man drawing made by his daughter.
• 1:39:35
  Once the interrogations ended, there was little doubt the girls
• 1:39:37
  would face prison time. They were handcuffed and taking a
• 1:39:40
  jail to away trial. I don't know about the Morgans thing,
• 1:39:45
  but do what you.
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: What do you know about them? What do you mean
• 1:39:48
  by the Morgan se I was saying, I don't know.
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 3: How much Morgan's dad actually knew versus like, oh my
• 1:39:55
  daughter drew a picture, right, you know, I'm.
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: Just saying, no, let me just to be a just
• 1:40:02
  to be devil's or just to fucking be the devil
• 1:40:05
  on your shoulder a video. That's what that's your job
• 1:40:08
  on this podcast. But do you really believe that they didn't
• 1:40:10
  understand some shit?
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 3: So again, going back to Morgan's father having schizophrenia and
• 1:40:17
  not taking his medication because he liked the entities that
• 1:40:21
  he would speak to.
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: I hate that.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: Keep bringing that up because now every time, because because
• 1:40:27
  every time you're doing it in a way that's justified,
• 1:40:30
  and you're like you're putting reason behind it, right, But
• 1:40:33
  I'm dumb, Isaiah, and what I'm doing is I'm now
• 1:40:36
  taking it. And then the mom's like, I don't think
• 1:40:39
  that she really believes in this, right, and he's and
• 1:40:41
  the dad's like, no, I got.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: It right, mister Bolopatis, And it's like a giant poke man.
• 1:40:46
  He's like, oh, I don't it. I don't it, mister
• 1:40:49
  Morgan's Doug. So in my.
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: Mind, that's where my mind's going that this is a
• 1:40:56
  full on insane man, which I know is not true,
• 1:41:00
  but the way you keep bringing it up, I just
• 1:41:02
  keep picturing this giant like poke dotted man, who's just
• 1:41:06
  like we all have a crazy interest.
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 3: Don't we, Yeah, man, something like that.
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: We could gut that. I meant that was funny. That
• 1:41:17
  was funny, But the.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 3: I Because of that, I wonder if the father did
• 1:41:30
  know something, how reluctant he would be to share it
• 1:41:35
  or to prevent it, or if he'd get in a
• 1:41:36
  position to prevent it, because all that we get from
• 1:41:39
  this document is that he didn't take it when he
• 1:41:42
  was younger, when or he quit taking it when he
• 1:41:45
  was younger because he liked the entities he was talking to.
• 1:41:47
  That doesn't necessarily mean he didn't take it into adulthood
• 1:41:50
  or got better or anything like that. Just at one
• 1:41:52
  point that was his idea. But I wonder if he'd
• 1:41:58
  be in a state or will to share if he
• 1:42:01
  knew something.
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: So who knows. I fully believe that they they I
• 1:42:08
  fully believe that they thought that it was a a phase, right,
• 1:42:15
  But I am hesitant. I'm I'm hesitant to believe that
• 1:42:22
  she never once ever said yeah, Slnerman's real and they
• 1:42:25
  were like mm hmm, you know, and just ad you know,
• 1:42:28
  like that's nice whatever.
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 2: I'm wondering if that ever popped up of the idea
• 1:42:34
  of of her of Morgan being.
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: Like, yeah, I don't know, I just think he's really cool.
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 2: I can't wait to meet him something like that, right, Yeah,
• 1:42:42
  doesn't mean like, hey guys, this is my god.
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: I don't think that she ever said something like that.
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I just mean that something to where, you know,
• 1:42:49
  if I was like doing the dishes, I would like
• 1:42:50
  turn off the fuss and be like, you know, say whoa,
• 1:42:52
  you know, like that kind of like what do you
• 1:42:53
  like what?
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 2: Because then I'm I'm curious if that ever actually happened,
• 1:42:58
  because you know, I them just saying like no, I
• 1:43:02
  you know, we had no idea about her belief of it.
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Man to quote Michael Scott, which you
• 1:43:07
  know is a funny thing to do.
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 2: Crazy, I'm not super I'm not superstitious.
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: I'm a little stitious. And that's what I was gonna say,
• 1:43:15
  thank you, and actually legitimately cut that because I wanted
• 1:43:19
  I'm going to kill.
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 3: Myself that it's go up you in the midst of
• 1:43:23
  this editor, if you want to keep your job, in
• 1:43:26
  the words of Michael Scott during this step editor, legitimately,
• 1:43:32
  if you want to keep your if you cut that,
• 1:43:34
  if you want to get uh paid double, he has
• 1:43:38
  no pay double whatever Hunter is paying you uh to
• 1:43:41
  leave that in.
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 3: If you leave that in un ironically, I will send
• 1:43:45
  you a tip. So okay, you cannot fight.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: Do not bribe.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 2: I just did te who you want to?
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: You want to? You want Isaiah's tip that immediately smiled.
• 1:44:01
  Isaiah's gonna give you the tip. Huh.
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 3: If you leave that in just yep, just the tip.
• 1:44:07
  You can scare them out of it all you want.
• 1:44:09
  It's already done. The fate is already sealed. If Nate's
• 1:44:14
  editing this, you couldn't pay him to cut that. Peydon
• 1:44:18
  would undergo a six hour surgery before being intubated.
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: Her breathing was weak and.
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 3: Her voice was gone, forcing her to communicate with the
• 1:44:26
  police and her parents by writing on a pad of paper.
• 1:44:29
  Two days after the attack, she was able to speak,
• 1:44:31
  and one of the first things she asked was if
• 1:44:33
  Anisa and Morgan had been caught.
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: I remember the first thing that I thought after I
• 1:44:37
  woke up, was like, did they get them? Are they there?
• 1:44:41
  Are they in custody? Are they still out?
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 3: Her father knelt by her side and assured her that
• 1:44:45
  the girls had been caught.
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: This is my little girl who's lying there, who just
• 1:44:49
  said there's something incredibly horrendous happened, and now she's scared
• 1:44:52
  for her life because these two people could potentially find
• 1:44:55
  her again. No shit, dude.
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 3: With Anes and Morgan in custody, the girls were getting
• 1:45:00
  set up for their trial as prosecutors sought to lock
• 1:45:02
  them away. Psychological evaluations were issued to both girls and
• 1:45:07
  led to Morgan getting an official schizophrenia diagnosis.
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: Her symptoms would only worsen.
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 3: The longer she was in jail, with her mother describing
• 1:45:15
  her as floridly psychotic. Initially, I mean she really oh
• 1:45:20
  this is.
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: A quote, go ahead. Initially, I mean she really behaved
• 1:45:23
  like a caged animal.
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 2: Her hair was wild. The first time I went to
• 1:45:27
  visit her, she looked at me and she had sort
• 1:45:29
  of this flat expression on her face and she said,
• 1:45:33
  why are you here. It's heartbreaking. I sympathize with the
• 1:45:38
  parents in that way once again, of course, Yeah, this
• 1:45:41
  revelation and stuff at the same time Peyton's dad fully on.
• 1:45:46
  I mean, if I was Peyton's dad, I would be
• 1:45:48
  in the same mindset of, like, these people did this
• 1:45:51
  for a fictional character. What makes you think they are
• 1:45:54
  going to stop at like the hospital. I imagine they
• 1:45:58
  would sneak in or the something would happen.
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 3: I can only imagine the rage that Peyton's Oh my
• 1:46:04
  god would feel.
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: Oh I would.
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 2: I would be like my heel your fucking temple, and
• 1:46:08
  I would do a fucking street fighter kick.
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: I look like I'd look like King from from Teken.
• 1:46:17
  That's what I would do.
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 3: I wanna let's get let's get a tally going of times.
• 1:46:22
  Hunter makes pop culture references in the midst of the
• 1:46:24
  child's stab video.
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: I will stop. I'm once again, my brain simple. I
• 1:46:32
  only have references that I can use. I'm trying to Basically,
• 1:46:36
  I'm just skirting around the idea that I would find
• 1:46:38
  these children and I would fucking kill them.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 3: I'm right, right, right, Yeah, No, I get it. I
• 1:46:43
  think that'd be the.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: More palatable, digestible version of that.
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that would be an understandable, uh
• 1:46:51
  you know, anger for the parents to have in that moment,
• 1:46:53
  because I mean, my gosh, your child's stab nineteen times.
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: What kind of parent wouldn't you know?
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 3: Caretakers at the jail recorded more talking to figures that
• 1:47:01
  were not there. On her cell. She continued to talk
• 1:47:04
  to Slenderman, as well as separate Snape Lord Voldemort and
• 1:47:07
  one of the teenage mutant Ninja turtles Unicorns.
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: That that's what, that's what rough, that's for you. That
• 1:47:16
  sentence a lot of land minds for.
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 2: You in that one right literally right after the pop
• 1:47:22
  culture and you hit me with that.
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, go ahead and tell me you're comming. No, no, no, no,
• 1:47:27
  I said I wouldn't it actually didn't. You never said
• 1:47:30
  you wouldn't. I said I wouldn't. I said, I said
• 1:47:33
  I'm done. I said I won'kay.
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 3: Unicorns allegedly filled her room as she pretended to be
• 1:47:38
  a cat and kept ANS's pets. During one of her
• 1:47:42
  competency reviews, she squatted on a chair and laughed uncontrollably
• 1:47:46
  while the psychologist questioned her. She told her doctor directly
• 1:47:49
  that she wasn't afraid of going to prison because she
• 1:47:52
  could use vulcan mind control from Star Trek to believe
• 1:47:55
  whatever she wanted.
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: Go ahead, hunter. No, no, no, Well I'm trying to find
• 1:48:04
  this is this is see, this is another problem with me,
• 1:48:06
  and you're gonna need to ground me. Okay, ground me
• 1:48:09
  right now. My problem right now is I want to say, oh,
• 1:48:13
  how convenient that once you're caught now and now you're
• 1:48:16
  starting to act like a fucking nut in there, you
• 1:48:18
  know what I mean? I don't know. Does it not
• 1:48:21
  feel a tad performative? I mean, am I wrong? No?
• 1:48:24
  Am I just made a bit dooming?
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 3: No, not someone who's that gone. So what it was
• 1:48:30
  is more than likely is when she was outside before
• 1:48:34
  she got arrested, she had so many barriers adjusting her. Like,
• 1:48:39
  for example, if you imagine something.
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 2: You're saying, the floodgates are open now, Yeah, the floodgates
• 1:48:43
  are open now.
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: Like think about this way.
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 3: If you have a condition where you imagine people who
• 1:48:49
  aren't really there, right and you're in public or you're
• 1:48:53
  your house with your family, and you're the only one
• 1:48:55
  who sees them and no one else addresses them, that
• 1:48:57
  kind of acts as like barriers for your mind to
• 1:49:02
  be like, okay, they don't I'm the only one.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: I'm the only one. But then you're locked up by
• 1:49:06
  yourself all day. Well, then you know you're saying so
• 1:49:10
  solitary confinement because there is no Well.
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 3: Let me, I said, I don't even think she is
• 1:49:15
  in solitary confinement, but just being outside of that setting
• 1:49:18
  where you have constant buffers for your mindset, where.
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: There's a buffer not be the cop though, would the
• 1:49:24
  buffer not be the cop? Being like that this is
• 1:49:27
  not real?
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 3: Well, there's not a cop setting there all day doing
• 1:49:30
  that with her.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: Well, sure, I'm all day.
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 3: But there's also the fact that mental illnesses tend to
• 1:49:35
  compound when exposed to things like stress and paranoida.
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, the trauma of actually performing the act was
• 1:49:42
  probably also the opening of the floodgates.
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and now she's in jail, and she's a she's
• 1:49:47
  a young girl who doesn't go to school anymore, doesn't
• 1:49:50
  see people anymore. She's now locked in a room, like
• 1:49:52
  all stre.
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: Reacting.
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 2: I'm reacting emotionally and not real and not you you know,
• 1:50:00
  I'm reacting emotionally, you know what I mean? Yeah, because
• 1:50:03
  I'm just I'm at this point where I'm like, you
• 1:50:04
  cannot get out of this, you know, I'm just I
• 1:50:06
  don't know.
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean spoilers, that's where it goes.
• 1:50:10
  But so when her parents heard her diagnosis, they said
• 1:50:13
  they were not surprised because of her father's history.
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: When they told us what had happened and that she
• 1:50:17
  had to and that she had done it because she
• 1:50:19
  believed Slenderman is real, that's where my mind went, say,
• 1:50:23
  she must be sick.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 3: Angie and her husband even admitted that they knew their
• 1:50:27
  daughter liked basic empathy.
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 2: We had been concerned to show Morgan the movie Bambi
• 1:50:32
  because she was sensitive and empathetic child, at least towards
• 1:50:35
  other people. So we were afraid that when we we
• 1:50:38
  were afraid that when she saw the movie that when
• 1:50:40
  Bambi's mother died, she'd be devastated. She in fact, had
• 1:50:43
  quite the opposite reaction after Bamby's mother was shot. Morgan
• 1:50:46
  just said, run, Bambi, Run, and had no reaction whatsoever
• 1:50:50
  to the mother dying. So it's kind of the opposite
• 1:50:52
  reaction that we expected. Interesting, Well, I think that's that
• 1:50:56
  crazy a response, is it. Well, baby Bamby, get the
• 1:50:59
  fuck out of it.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 3: Well. More so, I mean the fact that because not
• 1:51:05
  showing empathy as sociopathy or psychopathy, which is different, very
• 1:51:09
  different from schizophrenia. But the idea that maybe she couldn't
• 1:51:14
  really project empathy onto something else, that's an interesting idea
• 1:51:21
  from the parents. But also the parents could just be
• 1:51:23
  you know, this is a circumstantial story, like you said,
• 1:51:25
  it could just be she was just thinking to Bambie,
• 1:51:29
  didn't really process the mom yet or something.
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, all speculative. Everything we're saying
• 1:51:37
  take with a grainsalt.
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 3: Noah, With all of her psychological diagnosis, her parents finally
• 1:51:42
  took notice and began to listen to their daughter's delusions.
• 1:51:45
  For years, Morgan cried out and no one listened. Only
• 1:51:48
  after committing a heinous crime did people began to give
• 1:51:51
  her the treatment and care she needed. Her parents petition
• 1:51:54
  that she'd be moved to a mental institute to receive
• 1:51:57
  proper care. After a judge approved the move, her overall
• 1:52:00
  condition improved, though she still had bouts of mental instability.
• 1:52:05
  After numerous visits, her own mother said the best way.
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 2: To describe it is that it was like the light
• 1:52:10
  came back behind her eyes. If I had any idea
• 1:52:13
  that she believes into it was real, we would have
• 1:52:16
  done something about it.
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: We had no idea.
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 2: I think on some level I always feel responsible for
• 1:52:21
  not knowing that my daughter wasn't well. As a mother,
• 1:52:23
  you're supposed to be there to protect her child, and
• 1:52:25
  you know, I think on some level I always feel
• 1:52:28
  that I failed in that regard.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 3: Despite improvement, Morgan had fought hard against being medicated, just
• 1:52:34
  like her father, knowing that once she swallowed the first pill,
• 1:52:37
  her lifelong friends would disappear.
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 2: Morgan is adamant in her perspective that she does not
• 1:52:42
  want medication. She has been told that the medication by
• 1:52:46
  a clinician, not myself, but that the medication will take.
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: Away the voices. She wants the voices to stay. She
• 1:52:52
  doesn't want medication, yeah, same as her father.
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 3: Nissa had been separated from Morgan as soon as she
• 1:52:58
  walked through the front doors of the Kasha Police Department.
• 1:53:01
  After her interrogation, Anissa was moved to the Washington County
• 1:53:05
  Juvenile Detention Center, where guards described her as.
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: A model inmate.
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 3: She excelled in her schooling and looked after other inmates,
• 1:53:11
  acting as a big sister. Though she appeared to be
• 1:53:14
  doing fine, the memories of the attack still haunted Vanessa.
• 1:53:17
  Other inmates harassed her and called her a monster, which
• 1:53:20
  ate away at her psyche.
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: That's what I am, exactly what they called me.
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 3: Her psychological evaluation found that she suffered from follie adieux,
• 1:53:31
  adopting and reinforceing Morgan's delusions as a form of escapism
• 1:53:35
  because the fantasy world felt safer and more appealing than reality.
• 1:53:39
  For years, Nissa's mother struggled to watch her little girl
• 1:53:42
  through the glass in the meeting room while she awaited trial.
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: The visiting area, there's a cement table and a piece
• 1:53:48
  of glass, and we can see each other, but we
• 1:53:51
  can't touch her. I can't wipe away a tear, I
• 1:53:54
  can't give her a hug, I can't kiss her.
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 3: For three years, the girls were held in separate facilities
• 1:53:59
  and brought in and out of court rooms as they
• 1:54:01
  fought for their innocence. After a lot of back and
• 1:54:04
  forth between doctors and lawyers, both girls were deemed competent
• 1:54:07
  to stand trial despite their psychological evaluations, and were said
• 1:54:10
  to be sentenced in an adult court. Their defense argued
• 1:54:13
  they should be tried as juveniles since they were only
• 1:54:15
  twelve years old at the time of the crime, but
• 1:54:17
  the judge denied their request the misguise.
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: To situation based on the nature of schizophrenian mental health law.
• 1:54:24
  Once you left the juvenile system, there'd be no overside
• 1:54:27
  or control, no way to protect public safety.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 3: Stacy Lutner celebrated the court's decision.
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 2: Adult crime is adult court. If they had stolen the
• 1:54:37
  candy bar, sure, that's a child. He tried to kill somebody,
• 1:54:41
  that's an adult crime.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 3: I think we talked about that in a previous episode.
• 1:54:46
  I talked about somewhere where typically the whole like charged
• 1:54:50
  as a child is just for like not capital offense
• 1:54:54
  level crimes. Like once you do that, then it suddenly
• 1:54:58
  not a and I'll court anymore. It's a now adult court.
• 1:55:02
  Knowing how violent the crime was and that it was
• 1:55:03
  planned months in advance, there was no way either girl
• 1:55:07
  was going to be tried as a juvenile. Nissa had
• 1:55:09
  expressed remorse for the crime, but Morgan only began to
• 1:55:12
  show regret after she was medicated. It was the opinion
• 1:55:15
  of one of her doctors that she simply needs to
• 1:55:18
  grow up to be deemed competent. In twenty seventeen, Anissa
• 1:55:22
  was charged with a tempted second degree intentional homicide as
• 1:55:25
  a party to a crime with the use of a
• 1:55:28
  dangerous weapon. It's pretty specific, but I think that that
• 1:55:31
  covers everything. A jury found her guilty but not guilty
• 1:55:35
  due to mental disease or defect with all the evidence
• 1:55:39
  laid out before him, and after hearing the jury's verdict,
• 1:55:42
  Judge Michael Boren sentenced Nissa to twenty five years at
• 1:55:45
  the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, with the mandatory three year
• 1:55:49
  confinement and communal supervision until the age of thirty seven.
• 1:55:53
  Morganstraw would take place six weeks later, where she would
• 1:55:56
  also be found guilty but not guilty due to mental
• 1:55:59
  disease defect for her charges of attempted first degree intentional
• 1:56:04
  homicide as a party to a crime. She would be
• 1:56:07
  sentenced to the maximum sentence of forty years in a
• 1:56:10
  mental institute after her psychological evaluations were read to the court.
• 1:56:14
  When the sentencing was over, Peyton's family breathed a sigh
• 1:56:16
  of relief, knowing justice had been served. Years of waiting
• 1:56:19
  in anticipation were over.
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: With one hit of a gabble.
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 3: Peyton returned home from the hospital one week after the attack.
• 1:56:26
  She constantly ran fevers and had shallow breathing even when
• 1:56:30
  walking short distances.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: It was hard to.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 3: Move on after such a traumatic experience. At only twelve
• 1:56:36
  years old, her life is almost ripped from her by
• 1:56:38
  her best friend, only surviving by the grace of a
• 1:56:41
  good Samaritan passing by and the will to live. Thankfully,
• 1:56:45
  it wouldn't be long until things started to return to normal.
• 1:56:48
  Just six weeks after the attack, Peyton was allowed to
• 1:56:51
  go swimming again. Thousands of letters poured into her mailbox
• 1:56:54
  showing nothing but support as she recovered. By September, she
• 1:56:58
  had fully recovered and could once again attend school. Though
• 1:57:02
  her body had recovered, Peyton's mind still relived the horrors
• 1:57:05
  of that day constantly. She could no longer sleep alone
• 1:57:09
  and had to sleep with a pair of broken scissors
• 1:57:11
  under her pillow while her mother lay next to her.
• 1:57:14
  Even if she had to console her daughter every night,
• 1:57:17
  Stacy was just happy to have her daughter home alive,
• 1:57:20
  but she knew she had a long road ahead to
• 1:57:22
  truly return to normal. Her daughter had lost all trust
• 1:57:25
  in her friends and family, fearing they might attack.
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: She has friends, but initially, even with those friends, she
• 1:57:32
  kept them in orange links, and for a long time,
• 1:57:35
  even trusting fam members was hard for her.
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 3: As time went on, she grew more curious about her
• 1:57:40
  friend's motives and wasn't surprised when she learned that the
• 1:57:42
  girls wanted to appease Slenderman.
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: After I heard what she did, it was all like, well,
• 1:57:48
  this doesn't even surprise me at all, because she believed
• 1:57:50
  so hard in this thing that she would do anything
• 1:57:52
  for it.
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 3: Most people were shocked to hear how forgiving Peyton was,
• 1:57:56
  especially after hearing how critical people were of Morgan's mother, Angie.
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 2: I thought about what she's going through and how heart
• 1:58:02
  it must be for her, because I'm sure a lot
• 1:58:04
  of people are trashing on her and hating her and
• 1:58:07
  saying it was her fault she raised Morgan wrong. It
• 1:58:10
  wasn't Angie's fault. Morgan's schizophrenic. There's nothing she could have
• 1:58:13
  done to stop that or control that. It was not
• 1:58:16
  her fault.
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: God damn it. This does this woman? Does this girl
• 1:58:21
  have angel wings? Good?
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 4: Lord?
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: What? What a what? A swiman?
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 4: Like?
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: My God? Yeah?
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean it is a h It is a
• 1:58:30
  very inspiring level of.
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 2: You know, forgive, forgiveness, Yeah, forgiveness and understanding at that age,
• 1:58:39
  after being that traumatized.
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: It comes with it, yea, And even.
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 2: Facing her own demons of the trauma that that gave her,
• 1:58:46
  she's still able to have the clarity to just be like,
• 1:58:48
  you know, a what man you'd like? It's unbelievable.
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, she's she's cool. Payne's mother had bought into
• 1:58:59
  the hatred spewed at the Gazers for what their daughter did,
• 1:59:02
  but she too learned to forgive them.
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 2: Was angry for a long time, especially at Morgan's parents
• 1:59:08
  knowing that Morgan's dead had schizophrenia.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: For a long time. I thought that they were maybe
• 1:59:12
  just in denial and ignoring her symptoms. But not angry
• 1:59:15
  anymore because I recognize that they're going through their own health.
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 3: That's also a piece of clarity from the mother they're
• 1:59:22
  suffering involved with them. Didn't it say that when she
• 1:59:26
  was a child they had her tested and she had
• 1:59:28
  like schizophrenia like symptoms. Like she was a little little
• 1:59:34
  thing about the ghost her. Yeah, since she was a
• 1:59:38
  little Morgan had experienced weird visual phenomenon. Yeah, as a toddler,
• 1:59:41
  she would approach her parents to tell the ghost we're
• 1:59:43
  talking about her.
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: Oh.
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 3: A psychologist would later reveal she had vivid dreams which
• 1:59:47
  she would change. Okay, so they didn't take her to
• 1:59:50
  get tested or something like that. For a long time,
• 1:59:52
  the father had schizope and she said things that should
• 1:59:56
  have raised alarm but were bypassed.
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I say right.
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 3: The Gayser's and Weir family endured widespread hate from random
• 2:00:03
  strangers nationwide. Their daughters had committed the unthinkable, and they
• 2:00:07
  had been ostracized from society. Even after Nissa came home
• 2:00:11
  in twenty twenty one, her father did their best to
• 2:00:14
  keep her.
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: At home and out of the public eye. To the public.
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 3: Surprise, Morgan in twenty twenty five, would also be set
• 2:00:21
  free from the mental institution and placed in a groop
• 2:00:24
  home where she could be more independent. Once her friend
• 2:00:27
  Anissa was allowed to go home, Morgan began sending petitions
• 2:00:31
  to be released to a group home, which were rejected
• 2:00:34
  until a judge finally upheld her petition and agreed to
• 2:00:37
  send her to one. Wait Morgan would be sent okay.
• 2:00:40
  Morgan started sending them after Anissa got released.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: I got it. Yeah.
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 3: For months, Morgan's caretakers searched for a home that would
• 2:00:47
  take her, but nobody was Willing. A group home in
• 2:00:50
  Milwaukee was initially considered for Morgan's placement, but the plan
• 2:00:54
  was quickly abandoned after officials realized it was only eight
• 2:00:57
  miles from the Lutner family home.
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 4: Oh my god, Yeah, this stuff is so I mean,
• 2:01:06
  this happens all the time when people get declared as
• 2:01:08
  like mentally incompetent around well, which obviously is justified the
• 2:01:13
  majority of the time, but sometimes.
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 3: It'll be horrific case like this, and they'll get sent
• 2:01:18
  and then after five years it's like you're doing better,
• 2:01:22
  you know, kicking back out there.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: A lot it goes. Now this case is differently.
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 3: They're not just releasing her, they're putting her in a
• 2:01:28
  group home, which is a bit you know, less stringent.
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 2: But man, yeah, it's still just eight I mean, oh
• 2:01:35
  my god, I would fucking loose sleep over that.
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 3: The next place they looked was in sun Prairie, Wisconsin,
• 2:01:41
  where the presiding judge was optimistic, stating I.
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: Don't see the rest of the public. That's the exact boys.
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 3: I can't remember the story, but when you're like, did
• 2:01:53
  I mention I'm a crippling alcoholic, I.
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 2: Don't see the risk of the public also, I forgot
• 2:02:02
  to tell you I'm blind.
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: Oh I dared my best friend of her in my life.
• 2:02:07
  That's it. I don't know why not.
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 3: However, a city attorney from Sun Prairie was quick to
• 2:02:16
  reject this transfer and had her move to another facility
• 2:02:19
  in Madison, believing she was still a threat to society.
• 2:02:23
  Citizens of the city were also worried about living in
• 2:02:25
  close proximity to Morgan out of fear that she would escape.
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: Like how they're true.
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 3: I mean, like, yes, I understand keeping her locked up
• 2:02:34
  and stuff like that, but the people in the town
• 2:02:37
  next to the facility like she's the joker in there.
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, at a certain point, it has to be
• 2:02:44
  a thing of being like I don't we don't want
• 2:02:47
  that fucking we don't want that near our family.
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: I get it.
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 3: But there's already a like mentally unwell criminal facility there.
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: It's like.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 2: This one, you know, this one just has a not
• 2:03:02
  so it's it's able people that have the other mental facility,
• 2:03:06
  they're like, well, I don't know their story. They can
• 2:03:07
  like lie to themselves and be like, well it's okay,
• 2:03:09
  versus I don't want my kid getting stabbed nineteen times.
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: Maybe maybe they're only there because they stole money to
• 2:03:15
  give to the homeless.
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 3: It's like, yeah, sure, it's a building full of robin hoods.
• 2:03:23
  That's what happens in the criminally insane building. Building full
• 2:03:27
  of whatever helps you sleep in the misunderstood.
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: They're all heroes.
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 3: And the I bet if you went in there, it'd
• 2:03:34
  be like the Green Mile, like a thousand times in
• 2:03:37
  a row.
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let John Coffee go, John Coffee gos.
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 3: Like twelve hundred people were killed today.
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: God.
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 3: Morgan's attorney argued that the move was actually a good
• 2:03:51
  thing and would help her adjust to living in society.
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 1: Again, people should be aware of what is going on
• 2:03:56
  in their community.
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 2: But people have been released somewhere, and so if you
• 2:03:59
  perm cities to object, then you'd have everybody objecting you
• 2:04:03
  never release people.
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: But that sounds great. Can we do that? Yeah, exactly,
• 2:04:09
  get them in there.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 3: So she's getting transferred to a home right instead of
• 2:04:17
  the like it's still a facility.
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: It's just not like they're still.
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 2: Going to be a facility. Yeah, but it's just way more.
• 2:04:23
  I don't think it's it's definitely not. I mean it's
• 2:04:25
  a Chris home, it's a group home.
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It turns out people were right.
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 3: To be afraid of Morgan moving into their neighborhood, because
• 2:04:32
  one month after her release, she cut her ankle monitor
• 2:04:35
  and fled one hundred and seventy miles south to Post And,
• 2:04:40
  Illinois with forty three year old Chad Mecca, whom she
• 2:04:44
  met at the group home.
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: My fucking god, I mean, could.
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 3: You imagine all these people in town who are terrified
• 2:04:54
  of her getting out, and everyone's like, she's not gonna
• 2:04:56
  get out?
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well like it, posh, I don't see the risk
• 2:05:01
  of that. She's a motherfucker's house right there. We'd have
• 2:05:07
  a straight up pig roast.
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 2: That happened, Oh boy, not four weeks into her release.
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 3: Immediately, like comedic timing, gets out runs away. After moving
• 2:05:19
  her monitors, she simply walked out the front door on
• 2:05:23
  a great ound bus.
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: She didn't even have to break a window.
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 3: Kind of with a pair of children's safety scissors, and
• 2:05:31
  walked out the goddamn front door.
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: All right, you can be trusted off. You go.
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 3: From there, they walked through Chicago to a Pace bus
• 2:05:39
  station and rode twenty miles to Posen. Police would find
• 2:05:42
  her at a truck stop aided by numerous tips and
• 2:05:45
  surveillance footage across Chicago. When officers confronted her, she refused
• 2:05:48
  to identify herself and snipped at police, saying, just koggle me.
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: The police knew that your voice. Now police knew.
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 3: Who both of them were, arrested them and extra ouded
• 2:06:02
  them back to Wisconsin. Morgan was sent back to Winnebago
• 2:06:05
  Mental Health Institute, where she will reside for the remainder
• 2:06:08
  of her forty year sentence.
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: Wow, so she was, so she had to go back
• 2:06:12
  to the original place. She obviously, Wow, Well, I.
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 3: Mean you're they trust you in a group home and
• 2:06:18
  you're out in four weeks, Like, no, you can't go
• 2:06:20
  back to one?
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: Well exactly, it just seems like God, it's man.
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 2: I sometimes the rehabilitation aspect, like she was she just
• 2:06:32
  putting on a show. She saw that Anissa was able
• 2:06:35
  to get out, and then someone told her, and she's
• 2:06:36
  just like, I should just put in for the same thing.
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 3: I think, like the intention of these facilities as originally
• 2:06:42
  is there are some people who are so unwell they
• 2:06:44
  cannot be trusted to interact with a.
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: Society, which is also because they're unwell.
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 3: It's not their fault and they shouldn't be punished for
• 2:06:51
  it in like a prison or execution or something like that.
• 2:06:55
  But if people, you know, are to the degree that
• 2:07:00
  the rest of us are not safe if they're around,
• 2:07:04
  then that's what these facilities are. And she clearly seems
• 2:07:06
  like the case of that, because the moment she had
• 2:07:08
  any leeway, another guy was like, hey, she used monitor
• 2:07:11
  and run, and they're like, yeah, of course that makes
• 2:07:15
  sense to me. So all it takes is someone else
• 2:07:16
  to meter and be like, thank god, I attack someone else.
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: Thank god for the.
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 2: Tips and the surveillance, and thank god that there was
• 2:07:23
  another another cop there with the giant Blues Clues notebook.
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: Hey do I think you are who you are? You
• 2:07:32
  think you think? She said that.
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 3: He just pulled out a comedically large phone and started
• 2:07:37
  typing it.
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: You had a.
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 2: Giant old person phone. Looks like one of it. It's
• 2:07:42
  just huge buttons. He's hold on a second.
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: You have to tap through the numbers to get to
• 2:07:47
  the letters. Yep, yep. Oh I gotta go back now.
• 2:07:54
  Dangn big fingers.
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 3: It's been twelve years since that fateful day. Payne graduated
• 2:08:03
  from high school in twenty twenty and wanted to pursue
• 2:08:05
  a medical degree inspired by the doctors who saved her life.
• 2:08:08
  She's saying to Morgan for changing her life and turning
• 2:08:10
  her into the person she is today.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: I would probably initially thank her, Luner said mirror. I
• 2:08:17
  would say, just because of what she did.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: I have the life I have now, and I really
• 2:08:22
  really like it, and I have a plan. I didn't
• 2:08:25
  have a plan when I was twelve, and now I
• 2:08:27
  do because of everything that I went through. I wouldn't
• 2:08:30
  think that someone who went through what I did would
• 2:08:32
  ever say that. But that's truly how I feel that
• 2:08:36
  the whole situation, I wouldn't be who I am.
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 3: That is a girl who had such a horrific tragedy
• 2:08:42
  happened to her, but she has such a great perspective
• 2:08:45
  on where she is now that she doesn't Hold'm telling
• 2:08:47
  you that's true forgiveness.
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 1: The world is going to be a better place with
• 2:08:51
  her in it.
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: In that perspective, Yeah, of course, whatever she does, she
• 2:08:55
  is going to impact people in such a positive way.
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 1: God blessed that child. I think.
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 3: Being able to have that optimism afterwards is a very
• 2:09:07
  very blessed thing. Very cool person worried that other young
• 2:09:10
  girls might face the same fate as her. Peyton urges
• 2:09:12
  parents to educate themselves and talk to their kids about
• 2:09:15
  the content they consume online. She also offered some wisdom
• 2:09:18
  to other children who may be stuck in toxic, manipulative friendships.
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 2: Get out before something bad happens to you, even if
• 2:09:25
  you're guilted into it, if you've been friends with them
• 2:09:27
  for years, If you feel like something's bad, you need
• 2:09:30
  to get out while you still can preach.
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 3: She never would have suspected that her lifelong best friend
• 2:09:36
  would be the one to nearly take her life. Life
• 2:09:39
  can truly be fragile. The distance of one human hair
• 2:09:43
  would have changed. This story lives with those in the
• 2:09:45
  town of Wakesha forever, and.
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 2: That, my friends, as of recent, as of today, is
• 2:09:52
  the story of the slender Man stabbing. It is the anniversary.
• 2:09:55
  Cannot believe it's been twelve years. I feel like it's insane,
• 2:09:58
  it's been that long now, But.
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: My God, I gotta tell you that is to end
• 2:10:03
  it on. That quote from Peyton is so true.
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 2: Toxic relationships, friendships even is something that I feel like
• 2:10:13
  people get walked over all the time. It's crazy and
• 2:10:17
  I think that, Like, there's been so many cases, especially
• 2:10:20
  from online communities, that have transferred the things that they
• 2:10:23
  do online into actual tangible physical relationships.
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: Like another example that's a great.
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: Video online from Frederick Nunsen is the Final Final Fantasy House.
• 2:10:33
  That's another one where it's people online interactions they have
• 2:10:39
  like it's just a niche community, those people meet up
• 2:10:42
  in real life and then the toxic traits of that
• 2:10:45
  person completely consumes the other person, and like it basically
• 2:10:48
  just ends in abuse and in this case was almost murder.
• 2:10:52
  Is just insane, and that that's the true fucking horror
• 2:10:56
  story of this. That's the true horror of the story
• 2:10:58
  is the is the kind of relationships you put yourself
• 2:11:01
  through or the kind of things that you do that
• 2:11:03
  can result in actual physical altercations or.
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 1: Even life and death scenarios pretty fucking crazy. Man.
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, uh, it's it's tragic, but I do
• 2:11:14
  love the optimism that came out of and man, thank
• 2:11:16
  god she lived in mid senses, but.
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: Gosh, unbelievable. It's amazing.
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 3: It is a miracle she lived and I'm glad she did,
• 2:11:23
  of course, and also all the optimism she's able to
• 2:11:27
  have on the other side of it. But you see
• 2:11:29
  that a lot with like a lot of tragedies that happen,
• 2:11:32
  it's because someone had a friend who got them closer
• 2:11:36
  and closer to a spot that they should have come
• 2:11:39
  out of but didn't. I mean, like the classic example Columbine, right,
• 2:11:42
  Dylan and Eric. And then you have, like I mean, tragically,
• 2:11:46
  the shooting that happened just the other day at the
• 2:11:48
  mosque in California, two friends that knew each other from school,
• 2:11:53
  and then they got into the seven six', four WHICH
• 2:11:55
  i mean that group is responsible FOR i don't know
• 2:11:58
  how many deaths at this pointween mass shootings and stuff like.
• 2:12:01
  That but, again that entire group operates on getting people
• 2:12:05
  to be your, friend inducting, them blackmailing, them stuff like,
• 2:12:08
  That SO i don't.
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: Know at some, POINT i understand that.
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 3: Relationships can be hard to break, off and you, know
• 2:12:17
  you can't have dependence on, people but that doesn't object
• 2:12:21
  you from any of the wrong you do with.
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 2: Them so, yeah it's a it's a slippery, slope. Man
• 2:12:29
  AND i think it all starts with self love starts
• 2:12:31
  with knowing how you should be treated by. People and
• 2:12:34
  as long as you have that and also to just know, that, like,
• 2:12:36
  man there's better people out, there and also, TOO i,
• 2:12:40
  mean this is a huge case for unchecked mental.
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 1: Illness AND i, mean like it's just this is such
• 2:12:47
  a crazy what a crazy storm that results in.
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 2: This it's like fucking getting struck by lightning or. Something
• 2:12:53
  it's just like the perfect storm that hit this, tar
• 2:12:56
  you know WHAT i. Mean it could have happened to,
• 2:12:57
  anybody but it happened to this, girl and then it
• 2:13:00
  just got it got swept in with everything. Else it's
• 2:13:03
  just such a, wild wild. Story AND i don't. KNOW i,
• 2:13:09
  mean like we were talking about. This it was the
• 2:13:12
  anniversary of the, stabbing and it was just such a crazy.
• 2:13:16
  Thing and we had just recently within the, past like
• 2:13:19
  however many months just finished The Marble hornet series as.
• 2:13:22
  WELL i remember we were just talking about it and
• 2:13:24
  we figured that we would try to do this. FORMAT
• 2:13:26
  i know it's a little. New hopefully you all enjoyed.
• 2:13:28
  IT i thoroughly enjoyed. THIS i thought that it was
• 2:13:30
  a fun way to kind of tell the story in
• 2:13:33
  a way that still lets you, narrate and we can
• 2:13:35
  kind of use these quotations and stuff for the normal
• 2:13:38
  things that we do also what we'll do as well
• 2:13:40
  for all the documentation and stuff of the. Story we'll
• 2:13:42
  be sure to put our links and sources below in the.
• 2:13:45
  Description and just want to thank our researchers and stuff
• 2:13:48
  for writing up this document because it was it was
• 2:13:51
  very informative and just eye OPENING i mean gut wrenching
• 2:13:54
  at times.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 1: Too.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah so thank you guys so much for listening
• 2:13:59
  today's episod so we appreciate. You if you are listening
• 2:14:02
  on the audio platforms Like spotify And apple podcasts anywhere
• 2:14:05
  you can listen to, podcasts be sure to give us
• 2:14:07
  a nice rating if you enjoyed the. Episode and also
• 2:14:09
  to our beautiful patrons who just got some more episodes this.
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: Week we just read one that was really. FUNNY i
• 2:14:15
  think the uh ear it was a good.
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 2: Story you have to be there to listen to, it but,
• 2:14:19
  yeah kind of a it was a bit of a,
• 2:14:22
  recording but it was a fun. One so thank you
• 2:14:23
  to the patron who help the content and also.
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: Get a little extra. Side we appreciate. You until next, time,
• 2:14:29
  guys stay.
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 3: CREEPED i DON'T i feel like this is too serious
• 2:14:32
  to have a funny final line, With so what he,
• 2:14:37
  said stay creeped or.
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 1: Whatever