Slenderman Story

On the morning of May 31st, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their friend Payton Leutner into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. Leutner crawled to a closed off path, where a cyclist happened to be riding, and he called 911. Although Leutner survived the attack, the two twelve-year-old girls, whom she thought to be her friends, still committed this gruesome act of violence. It was all done in the name of Slenderman.

In 2017, Geyser and Weier were tried as adults in this case, diagnosed with mental illnesses, and sentenced to a mental hospital for 40 and 25 years respectively. The mental health crisis is rising dramatically in America, especially in children. Such children are struggling in their own minds and going unnoticed.

Medical professionals diagnosed Geyser with schizophrenia and Weier with shared psychotic disorder. Both girls went untreated for years; Geyser’s mother said her daughter told her she had been having hallucinations since the age of three.

Mental illness across the US frequently goes undiagnosed and untreated, especially in children. Many times, children in these conditions have committed violence against others, even killing people. However, Americans can prevent these mental health crises.

According to the 2015 Children’s Mental Health Report by the Child Mind Institute, 49.5% of American children will have developed a diagnosable mental illness by adulthood. Approximately 23% of children, 17.1 million, currently have or have had a mental illness. However, only 7.4% of children are seeing mental health professionals.

The girls’ visions of Slenderman polluted their minds, and they became obsessed with the idea of him. They were frightened. Geyser and Weier believed that Slenderman would harm them or their families if they did not kill Leutner. After the attack, they started searching for Slenderman’s mansion. These twelve-year-old girls were trapped inside their minds by mental illness.

Tessa Diestel, a Journalism senior at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that “to get in that headspace to actually plan this and carry it out, they were just so engrossed in this idea of him that there was nothing else that they could see.”

Click here to listen to more from Diestel

Geyser’s mother said that when doctors treated Geyser with schizophrenia medication after her diagnosis, her delusions of Slenderman disappeared. She again became the healthy girl her mother once thought her to be. However, Geyser’s mental illness went undiagnosed and untreated for nine years, and it almost ended in tragedy.

According to Dr. Peter Langman, a psychologist who specializes in the study of school shooters and mental health, there are steps Americans can take to prevent mental health crises that end in violence. They are to know the warning signs, report them or get help for them, and follow through to make sure the person got the help they needed. He also said that the public needs better mental health education, needs to destigmatize mental health treatment, and that Americans should go in for regular psychological checkups. Langman said that several acts of violence committed by children could have been prevented if people had followed these steps.  For example, the Geyser/Weier case or the Columbine shooting case.

Dr. Langman said that “knowing how many people had pieces of the puzzle, but the pieces were never put together” in mental health crises is distressing.

There were warning signs of Geyser’s mental illness, but none of the steps were completed. Her friends and family had no idea that she would commit a violent act against her friend, because they had no idea that she had a mental illness. Geyser did not talk about her delusions or hallucinations to anyone except for Weier.

However, Geyser’s bedroom had several warning signs. There were dismembered Barbie Dolls, drawings of Slenderman, and notes planning the attack. Furthermore, her father is Schizophrenic, and Schizophrenia can be passed on through a combination of genetics and environment.

If these girls’ friends and families had noticed the warning signs, the stabbing of Leutner and the hospitalization of Geyser and Weier could have been prevented. These children are not invisible, Americans simply aren’t looking hard enough.

Through the media, Americans see a large amount of news about violent crimes. However, mentally ill individuals are actually not more violent than other Americans; According to the American Psychological Association, the majority of mentally ill individuals are not violent, criminal, or dangerous.

Dr. Melissa Westendorf, a forensic psychologist who diagnosed Weier with shared psychotic disorder, said that “there is not a high rate of violence in mentally ill individuals… they are not at high risk to commit violence.”

Westendorf also said that the media blows stories of mental illness out of proportion, making mentally ill individuals seem to be more violent and dangerous than the rest of Americans. However, this is not the case. Instances like these, such as the Slenderman case, are extreme and rare.

There were a number of factors that led to the violent crime Geyser and Weier committed. In Weier’s initial interview by police, she said that she believed none of this would have happened had she not introduced Slenderman to Geyser. That is factor number one.

Factor number two is Geyser’s schizophrenia. This mental illness led her to believe that Slenderman was real. She had both hallucinations and delusions of Slenderman, in which she believed he told her they needed to kill Leutner.

Factor number three is Weier’s shared psychotic disorder and the relationship dynamic that she and Geyser shared. Weier had never had many close friends from school, and when she developed a close friendship with Geyser, she began to share her delusional belief system.

Had any one of these factors not been present, the attempted murder of Leutner likely would not have occurred.

Diestel said that “It was something that wasn’t talked about with people who didn’t understand him. So Morgan and Anissa talked about it with each other, but they both had the same understanding. I feel…that if you say something out loud... and they respond in a positive way, I think that that helps them kind of solidify that yeah this is real and what I’m thinking isn’t insane and isn’t totally out of this world that I’m making sense to someone else.”

March, 2018