Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to The Thing About Witch Hunts. I’m Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: I’m Sarah Jack Skellington.
Josh Hutchinson: So Sarah, quick question. If you saw a very tall man with no face watching you from the edge of the woods, would you run toward him or away from him?
Sarah Jack: I’ve got a bunch of questions for him, so I am going to run towards him.
Josh Hutchinson: Well, of course you are.
Sarah Jack: Does he have tentacles?
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, he’s got tentacles. All right.
Sarah Jack: I have questions. I gotta go find him.
Josh Hutchinson: Ah, it looks like you have company.
Sarah Jack: I hope so.
Josh Hutchinson: So we are looking at monsters this month because witches are monsters and we wanna find answers to questions about monsters. What is a monster? Why do we need monsters? And why do we treat humans as monsters? [00:01:00] What does that do for us?
Sarah Jack: I have questions for all those monsters, too.
Josh Hutchinson: Today we’re joined by returning guests, fellow podcasters, Sean and Carrie of the amazing podcast, Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie, to talk about the Internet’s most infamous creation?
Sarah Jack: We’re talking Slender Man, the faceless boogeyman born in the digital age.
Josh Hutchinson: From creepypasta legend to real world nightmare, we’re exploring how folklore goes viral.
Sarah Jack: And we end up talking about Salem, because of course we do.
Josh Hutchinson: We always find our way back to the witch trials.
Sarah Jack: Four podcasters who love things that go bump in the night.
Josh Hutchinson: So grab your jack o’lantern and keep it close.
Sarah Jack: Don’t wander off the path, keep the porch light on, and get cozy for this spooky one.[00:02:00]
Josh Hutchinson: Let’s get started.
Sarah Jack: He’s skeptical. She’s spooky. Together, they explore the unknown, unsolved, unbelievable, and just plain weird on their podcast, Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie. With their passion for history and the truth, they bring their different perspectives to today’s episode team up. It’s about to get scary with Sean and Carrie and Josh and Sarrie.
Sarah Jack: Welcome back to the podcast, Ain’t It Scary with Sean and Carrie?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us. We are getting back in the podcast saddle after a long absence, sothank you so much for helping us do that.
Josh Hutchinson: Absolutely. We’re really looking forward to talking to you guys again. And of course, as always, lowering the usually very high level of discourse on this show. Just a touch. Just a touch. Yeah. Keeping it lighter. the
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And thank you for having us during the most Ain’t it Scary time of [00:03:00] year, duringspooky season, just as we roll into October here.
Sarah Jack: I was so excited when we connected and it was a go, so thanks for helping us roll out some fun Halloween talk.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, and, and with that, I mean, for Halloween we always I mean, just traditionally, it just sort of happened, we always end up talking about urban legends. It’s such a like a spooky campfire time of year, and more and more over the years, I particularly have been really fascinated with like how folklore evolves over time and how folklore exists in our world nowadays. And usually that’s wrapped up in like scary stories. And I think with both of our podcasts we have kind of this mutual interests in the idea of monsters, not necessarily like [00:04:00] crazy creatures from the abyss, but you know, well for, for us sometimes it’s crazy creatures sometimes, sometimes, you know, but, or you know, Jeff the Talking Mongoose.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But really society’s like definition of a monster. What makes a monster? If those defined by society at large really are monstrous, if it’s their actions that define that. And oftentimes, urban legends really explore these, you know, where like fictional and real monsters sort of coexist. And that’s pretty appropriate for the time of year, I think.
Sarah Jack: I’m so fascinated with how the stories are told.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And how they evolve, too. We thought it would be interesting today to talk about Slender Man, in particular. I think your audience will be familiar with the concept of Slender Man. They might even see a few Easter eggs in one of these screens. I don’t know, Slender Man, may be lurking. May be lurking.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But that [00:05:00] is a story that has evolved from basically a post on an image board to this, to something that I, you know, eventually jumped in a very scary way into, into real life and into, into the news. Yeah. It’s, it’s sort of a case study on internet folklore, which is kind of one of the most popular kinds of, of new age folklore nowadays is because like how, how is everyone connected?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: You know, usually back in the day it was word of mouth or you know, books and things like that. But now with the internet, things move so quickly and you can connect to so many people across such a vast space that these stories really spread and evolve and take on minds of their owns even more than, you know, the urban legends we grew up whispering at summer camp.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, I was thinking about, you know, hoping to see Bloody Mary in the mirror, but not really wanting to, but you hope, will that image appear? Will the image [00:06:00] appear? And then of course there were not computers for me to go look at scary images yet at that age. When I was that age a hundred years ago.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And I think what’s interesting about those like urban legends that we grew up with and those that maybe, you know, younger people are growing up with now that are really internet-based is that they still kind of function the same way. A lot of them,you know, the, the ones that really stick, the ones that are really, that really are evocative and really grab people. They, they’re often cautionary tales. They’re sort of these like heightened warnings of horrific possibilities lying around every corner. So, you know, we grew up hearing stuff like the man with the hook for a hand. You know, the, the kids are, the teenagers are on Lover’s Lane, and they’re necking in the car and then blah, blah, blah. And a, you know, murderer has escaped an asylum and kills one of [00:07:00] them and leaves a hook in the car and it’s, oh, it’s the guy with the hook for a hand. Now the warning here is obviously like, don’t, don’t be kissing. Don’t be kissing.And, but it, you know, it is kind of influenced by real life, too. There was a real life crime that still hasn’t been solved, the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. Those happened to teenagers on lover’s lanes. They were killed or victimized, and no one ever found who did it. So you know, that’s not something that happened in every town. You know, like every town had the urban legend of like, did you hear about the escaped convict that killed those kids?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But it, you know, it, this cautionary tale sort of melded with a real life crime and sort of, again, took on a life of its own, but it took a lot longer, you know, to snowball back in the day. The Texarkana Moonlight Murders were in the forties, and we were hearing those [00:08:00] iterations of the legends in like the seventies, eighties, nineties. And so, you know, it kind of took a long time to spread and, and sort of define its classic story structure.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But with the internet, things are created and they spread immediately. You know, if they really hit, they become viral. Everyone knows about it eventually.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: I also feel like for parents, the internet is a fear or a danger. Yes. Or the, and so one angle of Slender Man to me is a folklore, a modern folklore story to parents of the dangers of your child. What are they looking at on the internet? And I mean, in a way, with the crime that happened, it kind of makes sense. Obviously, this, this, like the, the Lover’s Lane Murders is a very heightened example. This is a very specific example.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: These, these are the Slender Man stabbings. Like, there’s just these, [00:09:00] this one stabbing, but you know, parents can look at that and think like, I knew the internet was a bad place. They, they create these monsters and, and the kids are enraptured by them.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Or, or do you remember Momo? The Yes. Image that was supposedly making kids like unalive themselves? Yes. Yeah. there are, there are things like that all over the place. And, I mean, I, you know, Sean worked in the news, and I feel like you guys covered, you know, this is the new internet thing. Oh, Momo, we, we did cover Momo. Yeah. Like on the local news, because parents were probably calling in, being like, Hey, what’s going on? I heard that this is happening to everyone.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And just like an urban legend, just like with the Lover’s Lane murders or Slender Man, like this is a very centralized situation of, of influence in real life, but people kind of take it and run with.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So these [00:10:00] internet-based urban legends, they’re called creepypasta,and that’s kind of from the, the term copypasta, which was like those emails that you’d get back in the day that was like, copy this and then send it to 10 friends or you’ll have bad luck or whatever. So creepypasta was sort of the internet horror story version of that.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Oh, the, the word “creepypasta.” I, I was reviewing the notes on theSlender Man crime that we’ll get to in a minute. No spoilers. And it struck me that the word creepypasta was, was a big part of these girls’ vocabulary. Yeah. Like, like they’re talking, we’ll, we’ll get into it, but they’re talking about going to a, a mansion in the woods where all of the creepypastas live. Yeah. Like the creepypastas as in like they’re the Universal monsters or something. Yeah. The shared universe, the shared cinematic universe of the creepypastas.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So,yeah, you know, it’s, it’s pretty fascinating how those things take on a life of their own. And [00:11:00] I’m curious how much you guys knew about Slender Man, like when it first started becoming popular, and then did the crime really register with you guys, as well?
Josh Hutchinson: I don’t think I knew about it until the crime. I wasn’t in the creepypasta world. So,it was a new, exposure for me to see that. Andsince then I’ve, I like the creepypastas, but I don’t like taking them and turning them into real life.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah, for sure.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Agree to agree on.
Sarah Jack: I was aware of creepypasta, but I wasn’t aware of Slender Man, and my niece was 12 when things happened, and I remember, I think I probably, the first thing Aunt Sarah said was, “you know what’s fantasy, what’s not fantasy, right?” Because it, it was so I think that was one of the real shocking things is [00:12:00] like the, you know, what is in our, actually in our world, what is real in our world?
Sarah Jack: But I was so fascinated because of how his image, just that the history of him, and I know you might talk about that a little bit, but how he just wasn’t thought of and then he was presented and then the stories were, you know, they just ran with the stories. Yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: The visual hasn’t even evolved that much. In those first two Something Awful posts, it didn’t have to, it was so evolved. It’s there. It’s a really good creature design, you know. Well, it’s very Men in Black. We, we did, 1, 1, 1 of our last runsof episodes before we departed for our hiatus was a Hot Moth summer. And we talked about the,you know, you talking about the Moth Man, and we talked about the Men in Black a lot. There is a Slender
Sarah Jack: Sing it. Sing it. I’ve heard you sing it. Sing it.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: The Will Smith, uh,
Sarah Jack: Okay. Yay.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It’s, it’s been so [00:13:00] long. I forgot what,I forgot which, I was gonna bust into Will Smith’s Miami, and I was like, I don’t know why we’re doing this, but it’s a jam. Yeah. I mean, there’s something really evocative about the imagery and, and we’ll get to that in a second. And yeah, for me, like 2009 is when this first sort of hit the scene and I was in early college, I was probably the perfect age to like really appreciate creepypasta culture and I was on Tumblr, I was on all that fun stuff, but I, I didn’t take it seriously.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Like, I was old enough to not take it seriously. I was old enough to be like, this is cool. I like reading horror. And it’s cool that everyone’s kind of contri, it’s almost like fan fiction, you know? It’s like this really, like anyone could do it. Anyone could share their work and I think that’s really cool and, and special on. On the creepypasta subreddit, which I was on, from time to time. Um,it was always like. Nobody would say that it was fake. Oh. But you could tell no [00:14:00] sleep was the subreddit, and that was oh or no sleep is great. That was the conceit, was like, yeah. Everyone kind of was role-playing.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: That these stories were real. If you said you were posting a fake story, it would get taken down. Like the rules of the sub were, you had to pretend it was real because you want, people wanted the experience of likecould it be real? Like, yeah, this, it’s almost a role play, right? Like, like clicking through these creepy stories and going, oh, who posted this? Yeah. But even though, but everybody’s participating in a shared, like agreed delusion in that, in that space where they all know it’s fake, but, but you know,maybe a preteen stumbling on the creepypasta wiki doesn’t know that. Yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So, you know, they had the, the girls, part of the crime, which again, we’ll get to, you know, they were experiencing this story, after it had evolved and spread for years. So they didn’t have that root of knowing where it came from and knowing it was fictional.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: No, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Yes. Should we start with something awful? Well, yeah. So [00:15:00] Something Awful, which is, what happened, but also this forum, it was like a message board forum, a really popular thing in the mid two thousands. and what’s interesting about this is that not, you know, unlike what we were just talking about with like the role play aspect, this forum started a spooky image contest. So it was. Enter your spooky pictures that you create with like a little spooky story. And everyone knows this is fake because it’s like a Photoshop contest.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So no one was going into this thinking, oh, this is like a ghost photo that someone really took, or this is someone’s real experience. It was like, how legit can they make it seem? Like, how interesting can they make the story? So people started to submit to this back in 2009. It was just, you know, one message thread.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Until, I pretty early on, one user named Victor Surge, which is not his real name, submitted what would probably [00:16:00] become the most memorable because that’s what we’re talking about today. So he posted two photos that he created and then it was part of the thing that he created them. And one of them was a black and white photo. So,like a real picture. He had obviously found it somewhere in, you know, stock imagery and, it’s like a group of young teens. They’re walking toward the camera and then there’s this strange, faceless figure just barely visible behind them, which was, you know, photoshopped in, but like, really well done. It’s a, it’s a pretty good edit. Very tall. Long arms. Yeah, tall, long arms. Big, strong guy. Dear. Streaming dentist. Yeah, bald, like faceless.And then below the photo in the post was this quote, “we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them. But its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time.”
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And then there was a date, 1983, photographer [00:17:00] unknown, presumed dead. So it’s I love, Ooh, I love photographer presumed dead. Yes, that’s, that’s a chef’s kiss. Dead, like you don’t even know they’re dead.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And then there was a second photo. So again, like a real life, probably a stock image, black and white picture of a little girl on these like ladder steps up to a small slide. And she’s smiling at the camera, you know, like, almost like,her mom’s taking the picture. There’s a few other kids playing around her in like a park or a playground, and then in the shadows, in the far background, there’s again this same strange, tall, faceless figure. And he’s got these like odd, tentacle-looking limbs and he’s standing with a few children around him.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And the photo bears a seal on the top right saying City of Stirling Library’s local studies collection. He’s, he’s reaching down to them, right? He might be holding the kids’ hands or something with his weird tentacles. It’s kind of like he’s beckoning and bringing them in, like, [00:18:00] you know, like attracting them to him.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Any listeners or viewers who aren’t, who think they’re not familiar with these pictures, if you are familiar with what the Slender Man looks like, you probably have seen one of these, because they’re like the most. But if you just Google, or use search engine of your choice, original Slender Man pictures. Yeah. Original Slender Slender Man pictures. These are the two pictures that you’ll find.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And then on the second, there was this backstory, one of the two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. So that sounds like something from a Stephen King novel already. Specifically, it is, it is basically ripped off from It, actually. Notable for being taken the day which 14 children vanished and for what is referred to as the Slender Man, so this is the first time that the name is used. Deformity cited as film defects by officials. So this seems to be a reference to, the weird, creepy guy in the background. Fire at library occurred one week later, actual photograph confiscated as evidence. 1986, photographer [00:19:00] Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So he just posted these pictures. He just posted like a sentence, a little paragraph, and then everyone freaked out. People still were submitting their own things, but everyone was kind of like this Slender Man. Like, this story is cool. Like, I love this guy. People were, were starting to, I love this guy. I love,I love this, the idea of this monster people were submitting their own images based on Slender Man from a few days before.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So it became its own thing within the message board that like the first people to see this sort of latched on immediately. Like, this is a really effective, creepy story and a really effective monster.which is, which, says a lot about how great of an idea it was.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It has to be, you have to be a really good creature [00:20:00] design, a really good, creepy idea, to start in a post that literally acknowledges that it’s fake and then get to a place where there’s widespread belief in the, in, in the thing. And in the post, you know, everyone was still very much aware that it was fake. They were making their own versions of the story, and that’s kind of how it would spread.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It came out of the post. People were sharing the post with other people. People started contributing their own versions of the story and their own imagery and their own lore. And it started out slow because again, this was just, you know, a popular but random message board. It wasn’t like a, you know, it’s not like how social media is today.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But once it really picked up speed, speed, it just kept on going and going and spreading. Yeah. So Surge, who his real name is Eric Knudsen, told Vanity Fair that he wanted to formulate something whose [00:21:00] motivations can barely be comprehended, which caused unease and terror in a general population.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Andit is it, right? It’s Pennywise. Well, that’s always going to be the thing, for kids. it goes back to that cautionary tale idea that, in this case, Slender Man was targeting and victimizing children and, with Stranger Danger being such a thing and such a influence on urban legends and modern day folklore since, I mean, I guess the eighties was like when it really sort of like became a hysteria.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It could kind of be that Slender Man became this modern day boogeyman for kids who, you know, like, Hey, don’t stray too far from the crowd. Don’t be too much of an outsider that monsters could lie in wait and get you.
Josh Hutchinson: I was just gonna say it kind of, you know, goes back to the [00:22:00] why Hansel and Gretel’s so successful. It’s that children in danger, they’re being lured by somebody, they’re being taken by somebody. And we see that with the witch trials. Anytime a child was put in danger, then they go after the danger like intensely. You know, we had the whole Satanic panic going on in the eighties, too. The parents were just freaking out about this stuff.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And they never stop. They, they might latch onto a new fear. So one of the most prevalent ones, as Sean said, is the internet, is what could be connecting to kids, what your kids could be looking at when you don’t know. And there is, that’s a not an unfounded fear, right? There’s lot of No, I mean, it’s, it’s very legitimate dangers out there.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. So, you know, it, it all develops and what’s interesting is that I think the adult perspective is just [00:23:00] as involved in the spreading of the story and the formulation of the story as the kids who are consuming it, too. ‘Cause you know, like I was a college kid, I guess I was an adult, but like young adults, like they, they read, you know, spooky stories online because people like reading horror stories, but, you know, they have different perspectives of it, but the adult fears of, of what could happen to your child or a child’s fear of what could happen to them, this, it kind of both combined in this story. It’s also unclear to me in that first flurry of Slender Man posts, and you get into this as the lore, the weird Slender Man lore builds up with the Slender Man proxies. and we’ll get into that. it’s unclear in those first two images whether he’s threatening those children or whether he’s, I mean, the photographers are presumably adults, right? And they go missing. So is it that Slender Man’s weaponizing these children? Is it fear of the children? Well, the 14 children did go missing at the fire. Yeah, ’cause they followed Slender Man. But the [00:24:00] lady who took the picture, she did. Yeah. Yeah. mean, it, it could be he, he is just, he’s just going after everyone.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. He’s just having fun. He’s just, he’s just having a good time.
Sarah Jack: Why do you think it seems to have stayed as the Slender Man and not Slender Men?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: What a good question. I think it kind of, I mean, There are versions of the legend that have multiple of these creatures, or like, there’s the Slender Woman. Of course people are gonna spin it off, you know, like the Bride of Slender Man. But I think it’s just so much creepier, like a Pennywise the Clown, to have like one monster. It’s the Michael Myers. You can’t get away from him. Like even he’s just one guy. But even so, he’s still gonna get you. And this guy, particularly this guy, I mean, whatever it is, it can’t be reasoned with, he’s got no face. [00:25:00] Like you can’t talk to him. You know? He is, he is just lying in wait, lurking. Mm-hmm. Like coming to get you.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And these original posts, they’re, they’re not saying how, like they’re just saying, these kids vanished. they’re not saying oh, he, he murders them like this, or he does this. His motivations are unclear and you can’t talk to him about his motivations, and you can’t, there, there’s no understanding, there’s no humanity because you can’t, look ’em in the eye or you can’t connect on that level.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So I think the monstrosity of just this, like this unknowable creature again, so many things go back to the fear of the unknown and what’s more unknown than a faceless face. Just something that looks human but isn’t.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: I’m trying to figure out what, how the timeline on this works, but now I’m also thinking of the, the Silence from Dr. Who, the [00:26:00] Dr who villain, which are a whole alien race of Slender Mans. But I don’t know if that, those episodes came out after the Slender Man legend, probably, but they also could just be men in black. Yeah. again, and the men in blackreally quick overview. But they’re this, these beings.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And there, there are more than one. So it’s unlike the Slender Man, but it’s, they’re attached to stories of alien abductions and encounters. And these weird guys in suits show up to your house and they’re, they threaten you not to talk. And it, they look human at first, but then it turns out like their faces are weird and they start acting funny.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And again, it’s that thing of they seem like us, but they’re not quite right. Yeah, there’s, and that’s always going to make, like we are, that’s why the uncanny valley is so frightening is because we can look at something and go, but the eyes are not quite human. It’s not real. And that makes [00:27:00] people instinctually very afraid, which is why this was so effective.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: He has the somewhat of a guise of a guy in a suit, but he’s like too lanky. And he is got these tentacles sometimes, and he is got no face. There’s things that are off and that are wrong, and that’s what makes it frightening.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It’s like how movie robots have to look like Johnny Five or they have to be human actors because,something in between is a little too weird. A little too freaky. Yeah. C3 Pocus in between, but Yeah.So Indiana University folklorist Jeff Tolbert noted, “the Slender Man indexes at least two separate intellectual strands, two distinct, but related conceptual frameworks. First, Slender Man is a sign of abject fear, the ultimate other, the final evolution of radical alterity. Second Slender Man subtly references the self-conscious communicative processes that give rise to the tradition itself and are in fact the reason for its continued [00:28:00] existence as an internet icon. Slender Man offers critical commentary on the legend genre by enabling individuals to participate in the creation of a legend through reverse ostension.”
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So basically, there are two really important factors, to this professional folklorist, as to why this was such an evocative story, and it’s because he represents this, this fear of the other, which is something that you guys talk about all the time, is that, you know, why? Why do people ostracize other people?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And why do they turn them into boogeymen is because they’re afraid of them for some reason. They are other, they are different. And that combines with howthe nature of urban legends, and especially internet urban legends, which are just easy to access, like quick to update. You can, you don’t have to wait years for things to like get told through word of mouth. [00:29:00] It’s the participatory nature, and that sort of combined into like this really powerful story that kind of just snowballed and snowballed and snowballed.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And it is the, participatory nature that can also be the scary thing, right? When impressionable minds come across this, this stuff.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. And just like anything on the internet and people are experiencing that now. And, and this is, you know, even this is like dated in a way, like how think this story spread initially. Now it’s like TikTok, it’s conspiracy theories. But it’s, at the end of the day, it’s fear of the unknown. I don’t understand why this thing happened. I need an explanation.We’re making up stories at the end of the day, but they spread, because people need to understand what they don’t understand. And I, and people do, there are, [00:30:00] since we’ve been researching the Slender Man, there have been people who believe that there might be Slender Man out there. And I think a lot of them fall into one of two camps. One is children, who don’t know any better necessarily, and think they see adults talking semi-seriously about something on the internet and think that it must be semi-serious or greater. and then you’ve also got very interestingly, the school of thought around tulpas, Carrie, aroundthought-form energy ghosts. If enough people believe in something, then they will The Secret style manifest it into being somewhere in the world. Yeah, it’s a very old folkloric. I mean, that’s from like old religious and even, certain pagan folklore is, creating something out of pure belief. If you believe something hard enough, you can create something and sometimes that is used for good to, to [00:31:00] manifest to your vision board, but sometimes, according to folklore of all different traditions, that can be used to create like your own little monsters to do your bidding.And it’s at the intersection of like creation and fantasy and real life fear that the Slender Man story eventually led to what was eventually called the Slender Man Stabbing. that is a spoiler. it’s an attempted murder case. We’re gonna spoil that up top because there are children involved here and, it’s good to know that it’s not, it turns out full murder. Yeah, it turns out okay. But yeah, there was an attempted murder. So this was in May 2014, so this is only five years after this, the, the first images were posted. So, you know, we, we were telling the same urban legends for decades. You know, Bloody Mary, the hook hand, you know, aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the [00:32:00] light like the, the college roommate one, like those had decades and decades to percolate. This had spread so far and wide.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: There were YouTube, web series, there were indie video games by this point, I think, I don’t know if there had been a film yet, but there have been since then. So in only five years, this kind of influenced this major crime. So it’s, it just goes to show how the internet has affected how folklore transmits nowadays.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But in May, 2014, the basic story is that two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls stabbed their friend in the woods. She was also their age. They had fully intended to kill her, and it was meant to appease what they believed to be the real Slender Man, to prove themselves to him. [00:33:00] And,I think it’s hard to believe that 12 year olds at children could be capable of such horror.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: At the same time, it’s also hard to believe that children as old as 12, 12 feels a little too, when you’ve, on the face of it, it feels a little too old for this level of falling into a fantasy. Right. So it’s surprising in both ways. Yeah. Now this is, it was combined with obvious other issues at play, probably melt mental illness, which we’ll we’ll talk about.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But it made it so it seemed like this, to them, this was a reasonable course of action. So the victim, Payton Leutner, she was originally friends with the perpetrators. these were Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, and Morgan and Payton had been friends since fourth grade. Anissa had been a recent addition to the two at the beginning of sixth grade.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So you have this situation where like there’s [00:34:00] these two best friends forever. And then one girl kind of comes in and she’s kind of close with Morgan, but Payton’s not really like into it, but now they’re a trio, and that’s kind of okay, that’s our friends now.Morgan was always a little odd. Her mother recalled that she wasn’t sad about Bambi’s mother dying in Bambi as an example, but rather she just said, run Bambi, run, get out of there, save yourself.
Sarah Jack: Yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: The save yourself is pretty, and this like very, very young. This is obviously years and years before this stabbing happened, so, you know, she had some things going on. Mm-hmm. And she was the first of them to really become obsessed with Slender Man. She got really into reading creepypasta online. She found the Slender Man story and she just became obsessed with it. She would draw Slender Man, she would look up art, she would, engage with the stories. And she sort of influenced Anissa [00:35:00] with this.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: This obsession. So they fed off of each other. And again, Payton, who is originally Morgan’s best friend, is getting left behind a little bit and they’re becoming like really, really insular and really interested in this thing together. And Payton’s not really interested in it.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So she naturally becoming more and more ostracized the more they become almost addicted to this story and like experiencing more versions of the story and art and videos and all these things. Well, Carrie, they’re working to become proxies to the Slender Man, right? Yes. Because what these girls believed is that Slender Man lives in a mansion somewhere in the woods, an abandoned mansion, except he lives there with all of the other creepypastas.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: that was an idea. Yes. And it was specifically in Nicolette National Park, which was in Wisconsin. That’s convenient.
Josh Hutchinson: they are.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yes. Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: We believe it. That he has a mansion. It’s right back here in the woods.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: [00:36:00] Exactly it, it, which is like a, like a childlike way to, well, you know, if, if he has a secret mansion in the woods, it’s gotta be those woods, ’cause those are the only woods I know. It, it, you know, there is this childlike fantasy to it all that is interjected with this just horror, which is really interesting to see it meld together.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So,in 2014, after a slumber party, the three of the girls headed over to a local park,Morgan and Anissa baited Payton with a game of hide and seek. So again, they’re kids like, this is like the natural, you know, they’re walking to the park after a slumber party. They’re playing hide and seek.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: They pull her deeper and deeper into the woods. And eventually Morgan got on top of Payton, told her, I’m so sorry, and pulled out a knife and began stabbing her. Anissa told Payton to lay down away from the road and be quiet so she’d lose blood slower. And the girls said that they were gonna go get help for her, but just fled.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: [00:37:00] So this poor girl, Payton, her friends have just attacked her, tried to kill her. she is really badly wounded and she’s hoping that they’re going to send help too, because again, there’s this childlike aspect of I can’t believe my friends did this. This can’t be real. Yeah. Why? I don’t know why they did this, but I don’t know why they would say they’re gonna send help if they’re not.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So hopefully, yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Why do you think they wanted to kill her with such a violent act? Or why not just lead her to the mansion with them and then trade her for admittance? Why do you think I, it’s, it is really hard for me to comprehend that violent
Sarah Jack: Me too, too. that
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: I think there’s a sacrificial aspect, especially for Morgan, ’cause she was always so close to Payton. I’m, I don’t know if Anissa was feeling the same sort of intense sacrifice of it all, but there was a development in the Slender Man lore, which, [00:38:00] came years later where you could, and again, there’s a zillion different ways this plays out. But you could, this is a really dark bloody Mary. Yes. You could do a very bloody, do terrible acts and act as his proxy and he would then take you under his wing and trust you. So I think there is a sacrificial aspect of this is my best friend. What could be better to sacrifice to Slender Man than my best friend? Oh, it’s like Thanos. It’s a bit like Thanos. So Slender Man wants to be out in the world and or he wants to have impact on the world. He wants to be doing bad stuff and killing people and being a naughty little boy. but sometimes you don’t want to go out, sometimes you want to eat DoorDash, and that’s where he, they’re DoorDash has the proxies step in, I think is what’s going on.
Sarah Jack: And then my other question about the proxies is because, I’m thinking always thinking about, witchcraft accusations and just, our, humanity’s idea around [00:39:00] witches. so these proxies, were they ever, could somebody be accused of being a proxy or did people just wanna identify as proxies or were they being identified by other fans?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: That’s fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it going that way. I think most of the time, and I think probably where the lore came from was people wanting to be part of the story. And in this case, what’s interesting is, you know, it seems to me that these, the two perpetrators, Morgan and Anissa, they were feeding off of each other, they were playing into each other’s mental illness and obsession with this story. And also they were creating this very intense bond that ostracized this other friend. And also she didn’t struggle with mental illness. She was known as being more well [00:40:00] adjusted. So she, what is interesting is that it’s the reverse of a lot of witch hunts and witch trial cases where the other islike a socially awkward or un doesn’t fit in an outsider. But in this sort of micro group little, yeah, microcosm, this three person group, it’s the two that are, struggling with their mental health, obsessing over this horror monster, and they’re ostracizing the girl that is more well-adjusted, less of an outsider, but to them she has become the outsider. She is the one that needs to be scapegoated and sacrificed.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And they probably are dealing with some social ostracization outside the group. Oh, absolutely. Especially Morgan. Yeah. They both really struggled with friendships in school. Payton and Morgan, it seemed like Payton was making other friends and able to be social and things like that. And maybe Morgan [00:41:00] saw that and was very jealous of that as well, because these were her only friends.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Now didn’t Anissa tell Morgan or the other way around maybe that Slender Man would kill their parents? So there’s also like a, there’s a carrot and a stick angle. Like you can come live in the mansion with me and Michael Myers or whatever, or, I’ll kill your parents. Yeah. So to get that to that in a second, yes. The girls do flee. They go to try and find Slender Man in the woods in his Slender Mansion. Is that what they called it? I, I, it’s good brand. It’s in my mind is that, but I dunno if that’s what they called it. But I colloquially, I think people are like the Slender Mansion.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It’s right there. So they run. Now Payton was miraculously found alive by like a biker, just like a passing person. She was rushed to the hospital, and Morgan and Issa were discovered walking by the highway and detained for questioning. So again, there’s this really childlike aspect of like, there’s not really a plan here.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: How [00:42:00] are you going to get into the deep woods of the, this national park, which I’m sure is massive to two kids who don’t know where they’re going. They’re just wandering by the highway. They just figured Slender Man would swoop in and be like this way, you know?But they were able to do such a horrific act that is, world altering, that almost ended a person’s life, but that there’s no real plan and that is real, really childlike, but then wrapped up in all of this horror. , questioning, Morgan said that they had to do what they did because Anissa had told her that Slender Man would kill their families, so that was from the stand.
Josh Hutchinson: You know, what struck me watching the HBO documentary, they talked about Morgan and Anissa planning this for like six months to like work out the details of this plan, but then they kind of changed some of the elements [00:43:00] towards the end. Like, they want to kill her at night while she’s sleeping at first, but then they go with this other plan and.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: This was like the third option. I think they, they tried to do something in the bathroom at the park and I don’t know if Anissa couldn’t go through with it. So like they kept on putting it off. Again, it’s the child like, oh, we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: it’s fun to, as a kid to like fixate on something and make a little plan or whatever. And I used to do that with like murder mystery parties. Like, that was my thing when I was, in high school or whatever. Like we would plan and we would create the characters and everything and that was so fun. But it was fake and I knew it was fake and it was just for fun. But they were using this as their entertainment as well, because it was their entertainment reading. creepypasta was their entertainment and fixating on it, and obsessing on these stories. And then they just brought it into their lives.
Sarah Jack: I was just thinking [00:44:00] about, attacking her was power. Like how do children look at that? Like, look for power? Did they feel like they were taking some power, like having power to hurt their friend to serve Slender Man? So then are they like even, they’re adjusting his power because they’re not gonna be victims of his.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: I think that was part of it, is that,Morgan especially, who was the one who did the stabbing, she had a flat affect too. I don’t think it, it seemed like it affected her a ton, at least initially, and I think part of it was she was wrapped up in this fantasy that she’s just doing this for this monster. she’s just in a way, part of this monster. she’s, his right hand doing this action for him. And I think it’s a way to remove yourself, as well. It’s [00:45:00] like, well, I’m only doing this for such and such, and for a child it might be a little easier to pull those things apart and be like, this isn’t me, ’cause if you’re already wrapped up in this fantasy, it’s not so hard to remove the blame from yourself. So I think she probably did feel power, but she didn’t feel like she was doing it just for herself or doing it to get one over on Payton. She was doing it to, to, go be with Slender Man.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. that’s what they wanted at the end of the day. Maybe a power dynamic was at play, but they weren’t consciously thinking about it. Super hard. Yeah. I think with what we talked about, how they had been othering her in their three person friendship, I think that was really the expression of it was, this is gonna be the victim because she is the most, unlike the two of us, like the two of us get it. We’re a little, we’re a little more weird. We’re, we’re obsessed with this [00:46:00] story and she’s not like us. And the power there is victimizing her. It’s like they, they felt powerful to make the decision, to make her the victim, to choose her as the sacrifice. But I don’t know if they thought of it as necessarily even against her, you know?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It’s interesting because it seems like it was just very much like,this is what we have to do to meet Slender Man. Yeah. If one of them fully got cold feet and the other one said, I’m so sorry. They weren’t like exci, they weren’t up in an angry blood lust or, excited to, to get to the stabbing.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: They, and they seemed both interested in Slender Man and also fearful. Morgan said that Anissa said that he would kill their families, and she also said that she had been seeing him in her dreams, which I’m sure was frightening for a child. And Anissa said, “from what the creepypasta Wiki said, he targets [00:47:00] children most, so I was really scared knowing Slender Man could easily kill my whole family in three seconds.”
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But here’s where I get stuck on that word creepypasta again, because to me maybe this is the difference of being an adult, but to me, or maybe this is a difference of mental illness for that matter, but for me, the word creepypasta means that the stuff’s fake. It’s fake. that’s an attending like mental tag on the word creepypasta as it, it might have just been a genre, true crime, like horror. It was just the genre that they were looking at. But I think they really played into each other’s fears so much so that, you know,they started believing it through the power of just influencing each other back and forth, back and forth, obsessing about this thing, fixating on it, and then fixating on this plan.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It became more and more real because you had someone else telling you that they believed in, they thought the same things as you. So it’s how a conspiracy theory spreads. It’s, [00:48:00] well, if someone else believes the same thing, I can’t be crazy, because there’s something here.It’s really interesting because again, they’re kids.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So it’s, seeing it through that lens is very different than seeing it through an adult lens. And we talked about the Satanic panic, we talked about Pizzagate and all that stuff. And those are very adult hysterias, based in fears, just like this fears about children and some of them ha resulted in crimes or accusations leveled at people.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: McMartin preschool. Yeah, McMartin, preschool, like very baseless sort of situations at the end of the day, that was legally found. and that those were the adult cases. So it’s interesting that this is like a, again, a microcosm of that.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And Morgan was the one that really went with the proxy thing. She was the one that told Anissa like, this is what we do to be proxies for him and go meet him. It was her that said that they [00:49:00] should kill Payton, because they have to prove themselves to him. So it makes sense that she’s the one, first of all, she’s the one doing the stabbing, but she’s the one making this choice, because she was the one who was the closest to Payton, so maybe she also felt the most jealous of her being more integrated in their young society. She might’ve felt left behind by her in some senses and betrayed by her. And she figured I have this new friend, I need to prove myself to this new friend, as well. We both believed the same thing, so let’s cut out this other person that is not part of our group anymore.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah,I, it just would’ve been better if they just got into like Ed Sheeran or something. Ed Sheeran will never demand stab your friend in the woods, and if he does, that’s not good.
Josh Hutchinson: If you play him backwards.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: yeah, exactly. Back [00:50:00] masked, ed Shean, it’s can I have some tea?that’s a very pleasant backlash. So after the interrogation, the girls were arrested for first degree attempted homicide.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: The trial began September, 2017, so this is a few years later. Morgan was charged with attempted first degree homicide, ’cause she was the one who perpetrated the stabbing, and Anissa with attempted second degree. Now, because of a get tough on crime initiative in Wisconsin, they were required to be tried as adults. They were not even teenagers during the stabbing and they still were like 14 or 15, yeah, 14 or 15, but they were being tried as adults for attempted murder, and they were both facing life in prison if found guilty. So this kind of, it wasn’t a whim, right?There was planning that went into it, but they didn’t grasp the seriousness of it, for a variety of reasons.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But again, they [00:51:00] were 12. Like,you’re going through puberty, hormones are crazy like. You’re kind of crazy when you’re 12 in a way. Like just taking out any question of underlying, mental illness or anything like that. Like you are, you’re not your most reasonable as a 12, 13-year-old person.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: That’s also a bad,it’s a bad position to put the jury in, because these girls definitely are guilty of attempted murder. Yes.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Sarah Jack: Oh yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Is, how much did they understand they were doing something wrong?
Sarah Jack: Yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Or how much do you want to, how much, who does it serve to put them in prison for and the max punishment, you know?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So Morgan was eventually diagnosed by court psychiatrist Kenneth Casser, with schizophrenia and oppositional defiant disorder. for schizophrenia, Casser said the patients could lose track of reality in a number of ways, hallucinations, hearing voices, and delusional thought, like believing Slender Man is real.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: During the [00:52:00] trial, another psychologist stated that he felt Anissa was susceptible to delusional disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and this particularly is a diminished ability to determine what is real and what is not real. He also felt that she had no characteristics, of, psychopathy, or sociopathy, but she was diagnosed with a shared psychotic disorder with Morgan. we talked about this in our show. It’s like a folie a deux, madness of two, where you kind of share delusions so deeply, you egg each other on so much, that you enter into a psychosis with another person, and that,the fact that it’s with another person makes it stronger because you’re going back and forth.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It’s an endless feedback loop of this really damaging thought. It’s what’s probably going on with Betty and Barney Hill or those two ladies who say they went back in time atVersailles. Versailles, yes. Yeah. You say, oh, isn’t this [00:53:00] weird? Isn’t this weird? Isn’t this weird? And then it just goes back and forth. You know what? You’re right. That was Maria Antoinette. Yeah, exactly.And so this idea of this hysteria and shared madness is really prevalent in a lot of stories that both of our podcasts cover. hysteria is often a factor in what leads to Witch trials and the scapegoating of those perceived as others, and this event really was evocative to me of the Salem Witch Trials. Now, of course, it’s the one that I know the best, but the fact of the young girls being the catalyst here, they’re influenced by a variety of factors that are still debated even to today. Wasn’t ergot.
Josh Hutchinson: No.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: But they’re, they include societal pressures, paranoia. In their cases, the real difficulties of colonial living and being a young girl in the pre-revolutionary era and the, just the dreadful boredom. You don’t have much to [00:54:00] do from childhood to getting married. You’re just getting ready to get married a lot of the time. You’re helping your mom, you’re helping around the house, and then you’re lots of socks to darn, you’re getting, you’re waiting to be a wife and a mother. Um,and that was a really lonely and difficult place to be, I’m sure, as a young woman in the colonial era. So that sort of, in the Salem Witch Trials case, they had these shared stories that they would, go back and forth and participate in. There was a role play element of making their, their little poppets and doing a little spells and things.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. And they whipped each other into a frenzy building on each other’s stories until it did leak out into the real world and had really large implications for their society, with adults as well. So it wasn’t just limited to the children. And that’s how the shared storytelling of the Slender Man in this little [00:55:00] group led to those real life consequences. It’s this shared hysteria that leads to tragedy. I think those girls probably were feeling their power. Yes, I think so.
Sarah Jack: And like the Salem Witch trial afflictions, that was full of emotion. Did the shared delusion of Anissa and Morgan, I wonder how, it, it seems like there was like this void of emotion.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. And some, some of that could be their particular individual mental states and mental health struggles. Morgan might just have a very flat affect generally. I think part of it is also what they were doing was so involved in this other being, you know, doing things for this other being or through this other being. They could kind of lay blame for this other being. And I think they probably knew they were doing something [00:56:00] wrong,depending on the mental illness factor, but they knew that killing was wrong. She said, I’m sorry. Yes.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Um, but the girls in the Witch trials, I think initially they probably didn’t understand what they were doing was wrong. Eventually, things escalated to such an extent that it was like, oh, people are dying. This is getting serious. But I think they were, they had the fantasy, they thought they were in the right, they thought they were doing what was right in a way. I think.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: They put a baby in prison pretty early. They did. I think by that point they were probably figuring it out. But initially, and again, they have childlike motivations too. They don’t wanna get in trouble, so they have to start blaming other people. And then eventually they’re whipping each other into a frenzy of this is really happening.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And then, they have to keep the ruse going, because again, they could get in [00:57:00] trouble. Like it’s a very childlike thing, but has these really drastic implications in the lives of so many people. And that’s what happened in the Slender Man stabbing, as well.
Josh Hutchinson: You can see how the girls in the Salem Witch Trials and it seems like these two girls, it, the Slender Man case, like they’re really influenced by what adults are saying, also, because adults invented Slender Man and adults in Salem, were saying, Hey, the devil’s all around you. He’s walking around these woods right now trying to get people so you know, they’re on heightened alert, believing what the adults say, and then the adults are reinforcing them and saying, okay, good job accusing that person.
Josh Hutchinson: Why don’t you accuse another, we’re gonna, have that person arrested. We’re validating your accusation. So it.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Exactly. If your mom’s telling you the devil’s real and you don’t have a lot of [00:58:00] outside experience in the world to tell you that it’s not real, you’re gonna believe that it’s real. And if your mom is telling you, I don’t want you looking at that Slender Man stuff anymore, it’s not right, then part of you, as a child, might think, maybe there is some, like, why is my mom afraid of him If he’s not real? why doesn’t she want me looking at this? you know it, and yeah, it is eventually, like they are two stories told by adults, two children, and the children take it and really run with it for different reasons, but it’s interesting that they’re, the young women and feeling, I think probably both of them did feel powerless. I think, any 12-year-old girl kind of feels powerless in a way of the changes going on around her with her friend groups, with her microcosm of society, with her body, things that we were, you’re not understanding how you’re feeling from moment to moment. Sometimes you feel [00:59:00] powerless. So you can either take action,in the Salem Witch trials case, or you could,be a proxy to another being and not have to make these decisions for yourself.
Sarah Jack: I was just thinking one of my favorite, one of my favorite, it’s more than a character, ’cause she was a real person, but Abigail Hobbs, she had the most wildconfession abouther contract with the devil, and I was just thinking, man, how would have Abigail Hobbes, what would’ve her, what would’ve she had to say about Slender Man? What actions would she have taken with Slender Man?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. Do you think any of those,obviously those are all coerced confessions to one degree or another in witch trials. Do you think people get into and do you think any of those people got into a place where they were just like, ended up in the delusion with everybody else, or is it [01:00:00] always a case of please stop hitting me, I saw. I’ll tell you whatever you wanna know. I wrote in the book.
Sarah Jack: Well, I don’t, I mean, Josh, what do you think about Abigail and Slender Man?
Josh Hutchinson: I think Abigail Hobbs, she confessed, I think because she wanted to, she’s like an outlier. She’s a 15-year-old girl who’s like the wild child of Topsfield, Massachusetts. She like, has a lot of squabbles with her stepmom and she like tells, she’s has the habit of telling people, before the witch trials, like, oh, I know the devil. He’ll come if I call him. Things like that that you shouldn’t be saying at any time in 17th century Massachusetts. But I think that she was like, yeah, I know the devil, what of it. And she felt she had a certain cachet because of it. By the way, I know you have, the trial of George Jacobs up on your wall there.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: We do. Yeah. [01:01:00] So we have, so my parents had, my dad’s an English teacher, and growing up we had the famous portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne over our fireplace from, he, we got at the House of Seven Gables. He was a, you know, my dad was a big fan, and so when we moved in here, he gave it to us and we were like, this kind of I really like these paintings and we, I think it’s just, I don’t know. I like we, we’ve themed this dining room around Salem, Massachusetts. We have the Witch House on one wall. We have, Hawthorne there, and we have, I just, I always think this and its companion piece actually, the two, those two big witch trials paintings, there’s such, and again, it’s the witch-hunt, the witch trials that I’m most familiar with and most people are, but it is one of my particular interests and I think something about the, the reminder of what we can do to each other when we’re not civil, when we don’t talk, when we don’t try to understand each other. And these are things that I really value is like civil [01:02:00] discourse, empathy, trying to understand each other. That’s really important to me. So that’s why I I like the reminders of in a weird way, it reminds me of, my own like moral hierarchy, I guess. And the importance of critical thinking. Yes, critical thinking, very important, now maybe more than ever, but certainly then too.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, definitely. When you’re confronted with some of these ideas like that your neighbor is a witch, you should stop and think for a minute on that. Likecould there be another explanation to why my butter soured, or why my pudding split down the middle? Which are things that happened in Witch trials?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Josh, I, you say that, but she looked through the window right when the, right when I took the sip of the sour milk. So I, if you were here, I think you would agree with it. But, they were in such a reduced experience of the world, like children, they, all they had was their religion. All they [01:03:00] knew, most of them was the local area, their neighbors, their hometown. Some of them had been in, in nearby states and had gone through traumas withIndian wars and things like that. But all they knew was their very, comparatively to nowadays they didn’t have the internet, right, but, they’re smaller realities, they’re very insulated communities. And in the Slender Man stabbing it is like a very insulated situation. There is this connectivity to the internet and stuff, but the access ends up just making them more, more obsessed with this one thing and feeding into it on each other. And they don’t have the life experience of an adult. They haven’t traveled, they haven’t met a lot of people. So it’s easier to believe certain things when you don’t have the experience not to.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Also, when you’re forming a personality, when you’re a adolescent and a teenager even, I would say this applies through collagen and [01:04:00] for some people through their twenties, you are looking for things to build that personality around and sometimes you can become obsessive about something, just because there’s not, you haven’t figured out what else you’re really about yet. You’re trying to find the thing. And I think it’s harder for some people than for others, but they must have been talking a lot about Slender Man because when Payton heard the reasoning behind the stabbing, she was just like, that makes sense.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. They would do that basically. I know they were obsessed. I wasn’t really into it, but yeah, that, that makes sense to me why they would think that’s a good thing to do.So yeah. So at the end of the day, Anissa pled guilty, and the jury found her guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, so not insanity, but she’s not fully in charge of her faculties. Morgan accepted a plea deal, wherein she would not go to trial and would leave it up to psychiatrists how long that she would be held in a mental hospital. And then [01:05:00] later she pled guilty, but was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Anissa received 25 years to life. She had a few years of locked confinement and involuntary treatment at the State Psychiatric Institute. Morgan received the maximum sentence of 40 years to life. She was in three years of locked confinement and involuntary treatment at the Psychiatric Institute. And then eventually Anissa was released in 2021, and Morgan continues to live in a state mental facility.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: I think it’s good that they weren’t sent to prison forever. I don’t think that would serve anybody.But I think they just, I don’t. Usually the standards for the insanity defense as it’s called, is whether you know right from wrong is whether you know right from wrong and if you apologize to your victim before you stab them, I think you are blowing that defense outta the water. But I also think they probably just shouldn’t have been tried as adults ’cause they were children both [01:06:00] before and after.
Sarah Jack: It makes me feel frustrated with the adults. It’s like, are we too lazy to learn how to try children for horrific crimes? Let’s just, follow this template over here, because it’s so bad. Well, they got help, the help that was available.
Sarah Jack: I can’t even, like you mentioned what it would’ve been like for the jury, when you’re thinking about the judge, but even the medical staff who wanted to see these girls heal and be okay, I can’t imagine what that journey was like for everybody. but I’m, I don’t know, adult trials for children, it just seems like can we do better than that? But also it is, it was a very, she almost died. She could have been dead, and she survived. That survival
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Full recovery, which is good. Yeah. And yeah, so it seems apparent that Morgan and Anissa latched onto this outsider monster, because they [01:07:00] themselves felt like outsiders and then fed into each other’s delusions until they enacted this crime in his name.The real question here, and I think we’re probably like-minded of this, but like,does that make them monsters? Is it this monstrous act, this planning, this monstrous act? Can 12 year olds be monsters? Are they capable of that? Are children capable of that? Their brain isn’t fully developed. Maybe they’re not totally understanding everything they’re doing, but can you still be a monster as a child?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: What about the mental health factor? And then this applies to many people, we’ve talked about many criminals and stuff and not to say anything about mental illness, there, there are factors in a lot of crimes where that is a contribution. Can you be fully a monster if you’re not fully in charge of your mind?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Many of us would probably, I hope, say that only a [01:08:00] monster could coldly stab their best friend and leave them for dead, but can these girls really be defined as that?They are getting, they’ve had years of, of help, one of them’s free out in the world. Oh, no, now, but were they monsters when they did this crime?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: It was a monstrous action. But can you define them as monsters?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah, I don’t think so. I think, it reminds me, going back again to Salem, because I love it so much, even though it was awful. Yeah, exactly.
Josh Hutchinson: People like to blame the girls for, you know, for the accusations that they made, but there were, Ann Putnam Jr. was 12 years old, Abigail Williams, 11 years old. How much responsibility could they possibly bear, if you were gonna try them for say, false accusations or something, how much responsibility can they actually bear [01:09:00] because of where they are in their mental development.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Exactly, and the adults are the ones giving them the power. if the adults weren’t listening to them, the adults weren’t making the arrests, it wasn’t the girls who were doing the hangings or whatever. It was the adults that gave them the power. So at, at the end of the day, they were the ones that kind of helped it happen.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah, I was just, do you know with the three friends in Wisconsin, was it common for them to be out on their own wandering? Because I know that that’s an age, right ,where I was,at that age, out in the neighborhood. A hundred percent.
Sarah Jack: But you just, I don’t know. It’s, you hate to think that, they left the house with a weapon. It just is wild to me that they left the house with a weapon.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: I think, the initial thing was [01:10:00] that they were going to the park. I, that’s something I, we would have a slumber party and then we’d walk over to the park and sit on the swings or whatever and whatever. Just hang out for like two hours for doing nothing. I think that was probably what they assumed and what they usually did.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And then it, like when Payton’s being brought further and further into the woods, like even she’s understanding this is strange. So I don’t think that was something that was expected of like, oh, they’re gonna go to the national park. They’re gonna go into like deep into the woods,and I think the girls didn’t really know what they were doing either, ’cause they thought that there was like a mansion in there. Yeah, I think they probably were just going to the park and they took advantage of that trust that their parents put in them, they’re like, oh, they’ve gone to the park a thousand times and this will be like any other time. You’re not gonna expect that someone’s gonna get stabbed by one of the girls, you know?
Sarah Jack: [01:11:00] Yeah, I, the question on monsters and were they monsters at that point? And just, at what point is a human, a monster? Andthere is so much that plays into bad choices as we’ve learned about these attackers. There was, there were things that weren’t okay within their own minds, but do we need to admit that humanity is capable, that people are just very capable of monstrous acts? Is that important or do we just, is there just like you hit this limit and now you’re not a human, you’re a monster. Are you a human acting like a monster?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. it’s interesting. Because even in, in certain other cases, like John Wayne Gacy, right? A famous serial killer, probably widely considered a monster, very famously had grew [01:12:00] very abused and had traumatic brain injury, head trauma, which is a, another common thing. and I say that as someone who got a really severe concussion playing hockey, so I’m not saying every person with head injuries is a murderer. She has no victims that we know of. Yes.But that is a common factor. and there is a nature versus nurture aspect. A lot of these people, obviously John Wayne Gacy was dealing with a lot of mental trauma from his upbringing and brain trauma, but I think most of us would say that guy was a monster. Is that because he was an adult when he made those decisions? Is that the factor? Are we, do we assign more innocence logically to a 12-year-old?I think when it comes to serial murderers and, when it comes to Gacys and Bundys, I think it’s the repetition of it. No, I think we want to, I think we want to define them as monsters as a way to other them [01:13:00] and put up a wall between, well there’s, but not me. It could never be, I would never do anything like that obviously. ’cause I am a totally different species than that.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Exactly.
Josh Hutchinson: That’s exactly what I was just thinking. Yeah. Like why do we call people monsters? It’s because we don’t want to think about,are we capable of doing the things that they’re doing? We want to be so different from them and we want an easy explanation, too. We don’t want to think about, well, he had some head trauma and some other trauma in his life and you know, that contributed and then you know this and that.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: There was the, there have been a couple of like scary, sniper guys, but one of them had a, just a brain tumor. And a note on his body, that said, I think there’s something going on in my head. Please cut it open. And there was a big old tumor pressing on his brain. It’s really scary to think that just a physical, something physically going on could turn [01:14:00] you into a monster. And at the end of the day, the girls that perpetrated this crime, they thought they were doing this for this faceless, inhuman creature, but Payton only saw her very human friends at the end of the knife.
Sarah Jack: Wow.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And she didn’t see a faceless non-human monster. She saw two girls that she grew up with, that she trusted. What would she define as monstrous? Would she blame Slender Man or would she blame the very human girls that, that chose to do this to her, probably the girls.
Josh Hutchinson: Hopefully.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So, yeah, it’s a very interesting question of what defines a monster, what defines othering, and I think we both found in our shows and the different cases we’ve investigated that there’s a lot of factors and it changes from story to story and even sometimes within a story. Maybe [01:15:00] these girlsdid a monstrous action, but,then there was later context found to those actions and that sort of informs on what happened previously, and, the definitions change. So yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: That holding, these perpetrators at arm’s length or othering them, or breaking down those, barriers a little bit to explore what’s going on under the hood, is all very of a piece of that true crime world that we sometimes swim into. I think that is the fascination of serial killer stories for true crime people is like, we’re all people, but how could they be like me? They, him like me, him like me, how, you know?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: That’s the, that’s the dread of serial killers, I think. For a lot of people. So that’s the Slender Man Stabbing, and that’s the story of Slender Man and how internet folklore kind of turned into this real life horror story. And I think, we’ve seen the conspiracies and things like that [01:16:00] in, in their own way, kind of internet folklore nowadays have also continued doing a lot of the same things.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: So yeah, it’s really about that critical thinking. but, it can be hard if you have other factors at play, sort of, messing with how you are thinking.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Has his suit gotten more suyng over the years? I feel like the tie is more defined now. He definitely has a tie. Sometimes there’s like sexy Slender Man too. Yeah, that guy, that one’s built, we just found a pretty built slender, like I, but he’s not that slender. I mean his, yes. He shouldn’t look like he’s,ripping out bench press. Yeah, for sure.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. So thank you so much.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Oh, thank you guys. This has been a blast. Great blast.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. This was
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: like I’ve shaken off the dust and the rest,
Sarah Jack: Yay.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: and the cobwebs just in time for October. Yeah. I’ll put them in other parts of the house.
Josh Hutchinson: I’ll hit
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: thanks for [01:17:00] having us and, have an amazing, spooky season. And, yeah, don’t let Slender Man get you, Yeah. and, we’ll look forward to our next collab, guys. Please. please, invite us back and, We can, maybe we can get you into the scary studio sooner rather than later.
Sarah Jack: that would be really fun. And I have to tell you, I was like, I, you could tell Josh this week, I was like, I hope they bring up men in black. I hope they bring up men in black. I hope I can get ’em to sing. What if I can get ’em to sing it?
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Wasn’t even in So embarrassed. I running down
Sarah Jack: oh,
Josh Hutchinson: Surprised you didn’t get jiggy with it.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Yeah. No, I really have, just, enjoyed your episodes so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. we have loved, watching your show grow and develop and the scope develop and also how you guys have helped influence, the sort of real world out outside of podcast stuff. That’s really important and, again, in influencing more critical thought [01:18:00] and interest in history and knowing how history informs what we’re doing now. I think that’s more important now than ever, probably.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: And some, sometimes how some of the stuff isn’t fully left in the past. No, it just, a lot of the times it just recycles and repeats and hopefully we can approach it in a more critical and tempered way. That’s not always the name of the game nowadays, unfortunately.
Sarah Jack: Yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Ain’t it Scary with Sean and Carrie: Start by not calling people monsters. That’s true.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.