June 3, 2014

In Wisconsin, two 12-year-old girls are said to have stabbed another 12-year-old girl 19 times to win favor from Slender Man, a character they read about on the internet.

I'm reading about this in The Washington Post, which struggles to write factually about the attack. It's always a little hard to write about arrests. These articles are full of statements about statements — "the criminal complaint stated" and so forth. But assertions about what the police say the accused said present special problems, and in this case, the attackers are said to have given a stunningly stupid explanation that invites us to satisfy our own sick love of the lurid:
One of the girls told a detective they were trying to become “proxies” of Slender Man, a mythological demon-like creature they read about on creepypasta.wikia.com, a Web site about horror stories and legends. One of the girls told police the character is the “leader” of Creepypasta, and in the hierarchy of that world, one must kill to prove dedication, the Journal Sentinel reported. After the slaying, the girls planned to run away to the demon’s mansion in the Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin, the complaint said.

One girl said she sees him in her dreams. She said he can read her mind and teleport.

Creepypasta... stories often include anecdotes, rituals or lost episodes of TV shows.... Rituals include a “list of instructions for the reader, claiming that if they go to a certain place at a certain time, and perform specific actions, something remarkable and/or horrifying will happen,” the site states.
It seems that 2 young girls chose to viciously attack their erstwhile friend, and because they said ridiculous things about why they did it, they are the talk of the internet today. The Washington Post censors their photos and names, because they might be tried as juveniles, but if you click through to the Journel Sentinel article, you will see their names and their photographs.

Is this what we should be talking about today — how on-line horror stories inspire the young to acts of violence? Teenagers murder or attempt to murder each other every day, so there's no fame without crazy details. We're still talking about Elliot Rodgers and the "pick-up artist" websites that might have inspired him. As we feel drawn to peer into other people's possibly unsound minds, we are submitting our own impressionable minds to the lures of the lurid.

51 comments:

Anonymous said...

Commenting on the Wrong Post Drunk Guy says:

Sure, I'm a little drunk, but that doesn't mean I don't have a point to make. There is a woman where I work who eats a banana at her desk every morning. Monday through Friday, 10:00 am, five bananas. And any man who says otherwise is a liar: you can't watch a woman eat a banana and not think blow job, it's not possible. Banana, blow job, banana, blow job. And if I stare at her and helplessly think 'blow job' she'll no doubt see me and think that I must be thinking 'blow job' and then think I'm a creep, and it's not fair, it's not my fault, I didn't gently push the banana back and forth in her open glistening mouth. So I have to look away the entire time and pretend it's not happening, but then I can't concentrate, I can only hope to catch the reflection of her eating the banana in my monitor screen. So now I can't concentrate and I have an erection and a meeting at 10:15, I don't want to masturbate in the office bathroom just so that I can go to my 10:15 meeting without an erection. Women should use better judgment at the office, and I think it is wrong for you to comment on things you really don't know about.

richard mcenroe said...

You know, by the time I was twelve, I was reasonably well informed that stabbing people was frowned on. What are these kids being taught -- or not taught -- at home and in school these days?

Anonymous said...

Betamax did not create Slender Man.

Anonymous said...

Commenting on the Wrong Post Drunk Guy says:

Sure, I'm a little drunk, but that doesn't mean I don't have a point to make. It's not my fault, I have a condition: when a woman leaves her chair I have to touch the seat with my hand before I can leave the room, I have to, I am compelled. I do this casually, of course: like sometimes I drop my pen by the chair and then surreptitiously use the seat as balance as I kneel down to retrieve the fallen pen. Or I kneel to tie my shoe and touch the seat as I get up: there are many ways to be discreet in touching these warm, warm vacated seats: loose pocket change, a dangerous loose staple to be kindly picked up before someone can be poked in the foot. It's not like I then instantly smell my hands, I'm not a creep, I can wait. Sometimes when I'm down there retrieving the pen or loose change or whatever I'll see a piece of gum the woman has discarded in her trash and now I have to put it in my mouth, it is like we are sharing a secret that only I know about: it was in her mouth and now it is in my mouth, I can still taste the pre-moistened mint and that undefinable something extra, something that is intrinsically her. I enjoy the intimacy without hurting anyone, and I think it is wrong for you to comment on things you really don't know about.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

Is this what we should be talking about today . . .?

Well, self-evidently, YOU do.

Gahrie said...

I would point out that this is not an isolated incident. This is the same sickness that caused the Salem Witch scare and the Manson family.

RMc said...

We, as a society, don't want to accept the fact that crazy people do crazy, random, violent things for no apparent (preventable) reason. It makes us feel vulnerable; yes, even us, the good liberal recycling people of the world. So, we look for something/someone to blame. (Incredibly, the culprits we finger are nearly always the very people and things we already despise.)

Paco Wové said...

Obviously, some part of society I don't like must be to blame.

Or maybe it's Peter Jackson's fault.

The Crack Emcee said...

Society as horror show? Do tell:

"As we feel drawn to peer into other people's possibly unsound minds, we are submitting our own impressionable minds to the lures of the lurid."

If whites would cop to what they do to blacks, this wouldn't be so bad but, since they don't/won't/can't (signs of a white, mass, mental problem right there) blacks are having our minds submitted to the cowardly, deceitful, and lurid.

It explains ghettos anyway.

Really sick place we've got here,...

Spiros Pappas said...

These children were smart enough to mask their true motive and are likely caught up in a frenzy of lies. The setting of the crimes, however, is important. This is a white, homogeneous suburb in America's Middle West, gripped by fear and suspicion of foreigners (and terrorists) and their hedonistic religions. This might become another Salem. Imagine the idiots at Fox News covering Satan worshipers, teenage wicans and witches conducting child sacrifices, etc.

madAsHell said...

Is this what we should be talking about today . . .?

We need to boil the Wisconsin stabbing down to one or two words. Like.....

Bullying.
Ban Bossy.
Boston Bomber.

I'd recommend the Slender Stabbing. It has the alliteration, and we can also highlight the discrimination against fat people, and maybe a few other victim groups.

Big Mike said...

This isn't even really the most heinous case of murder committed by young girls. The drawn-out torture killing of Shanda Sharer was committed by four 15 year old girls.

Brando said...

Some people are just plain dangerous. I don't know if "insane" is the right word for them--most mentally ill people aren't dangerous at all, and most dangerous people don't suffer an identifiable mental illness--but there are a lot of people out there with no moral brake. By "moral brake" I mean the part of most people's minds that prevents them from destroying, stealing, or murdering just as casually as a normal person would order a sandwich. Their brains don't hold them back from shooting up a school or stabbing some girl.

We can try to blame various triggers (video games, Internet rumors) or the relatively easy access to weapons, or a system that doesn't identify and prevent such tragedies before they happen, but a number of these will keep slipping through the cracks. It's not that society's doomed (unless such numbers reached a critical mass somehow) but rather that society will continue to suffer such things.

The scary part is for the parents of the victim--how could they know their 12 year old would be subject to a stabbing like this?

Big Mike said...

@Crack, the ghettos will end when inner city Blacks get their own act together. It's not white people selling drugs in the inner city. It's not white men impregnating your teenaged girls. How many white men are in the Bloods and the Crips?

You should feel guilty about inner city problems, but that would mean you'd have to try to fix them and it would be too much like work. I shouldn't feel guilty and I don't.

Gahrie said...

Wow...thank you for that explanation Crack.....These two girls committed an act of horror because of White racism against Black people.

Another thread hijacked by an asshole.

If you weren't such an asshole, I could almost feel sorry for you.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

It used to be we'd all sit around the fire and recount how Og got eaten by a dinosaur.

Anonymous said...

What we should be doing is banning knives. all knives, and things that can be used as knives...

Only licensed Chefs should be allowed to purchase knives and then only with a background check...

oh, and no carving set with more than 7 knives...

Larry J said...

Rob McLean said...
We, as a society, don't want to accept the fact that crazy people do crazy, random, violent things for no apparent (preventable) reason.


Some may be crazy. Others may be evil. It's hard to tell sometimes.

How can this be spun into the "War on Women" narrative? Perhaps they'll blame it on the fictional man, Slender. Girls can't possibly be at fault for anything they do.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

"(signs of a white, mass, mental problem right there) blacks are having our minds submitted to the cowardly, deceitful, and lurid"

Dang, Democratic Party in a nutshell, right there.

You're on fire, my man.

Antiantifa said...

Anyone else have a problem with trying these kids as adults? Isn't the whole point of a juvenile justice system was that Children don't understand reality and morality the way adults do? Adults can separate fiction from fantasy. These two could not.

mccullough said...

Tweener Gothic

Strelnikov said...

"Slender Man" does sound hipper than "Manson".

traditionalguy said...

This is not new stuff. The dungeons and dragons game set was the channel for similar unexplained cold blooded murders.

Joe McGinnis, (Yes, the Palin's spy next door, McGinnis) wrote a very good non-fiction book in 1991 about a young duo who planned and carried out murderers of one of them's parents. The book was Cruel Doubt, which Google says was made into TV mini series.

This is just one more absurd cold blooded killing of innocent friends and family that started out as a role playing game about demonic beings that demanded the killings.

Charles Manson and David Berkowitz were earlier famous players. The Demons were unavailable for comment.

Anonymous said...

This is no surprise. Waukesha County is a hot bed of demonic possession, and much evilness has come forth from that part of the state.

pst314 said...

Meanwhile, it seems that a cross-dressing Crack was arrested for assault when, asked to turn off his cell phone during takeoff, he refused and said "I kill white people like you". When you're a paranoid racist, everything is an excuse to hate white people.

lemondog said...

Leopold/Loeb and Nietzsche.

n.n said...

The Drill SGT:

And scalpels, too. The leading cause of unnatural human deaths involves both sanctioned and unsanctioned use of scalpels.

SJ said...

@Brando,

the United States has spent half a century reducing the effects of social pressure towards conformity.

There is still an "upper class" morality. There are quite-visible differences between the behaviors of various classes and social groups.

A strong component of moral behavior in the U.S. is an urge to not judge others for their behavior...unless the others are being judgemental.

I suspect that some of the conformity to moral codes of the past was conformity to social pressure. People didn't want to lose their respectability.

However, this can't explain everything.

The specific case of these young girls may include the broad cultural assumption that (middle-class) people just aren't violent. Not that they see little need for violence, and are unfamiliar with it. But that there is no violence in their nature.

Then a group of kids from a happy-looking family in a nice-looking town does something like this.

People are capable of great evil. Which may be why, in the past, there were so many social restrictions on behavior. The restrictions may not all have been to reduce evil. Some may have remained even when the necessity was long gone.

But a general destruction of social restrictions may leave behind nothing that can oppose evil.

Anonymous said...

The dungeons and dragons game set was the channel for similar unexplained cold blooded murders.


Charles Manson and David Berkowitz were earlier famous players.


Dungeons and Dragons was first published in 1974, 3 years after Manson was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.

There is nothing documented to suggest that the Son of Sam rolled a d20, but he was linked to a Satanic cult.

Shawn Levasseur said...

Jodie Foster was unavailable for comment.

Strelnikov said...

"Waukesha County is a hot bed of demonic possession, and much evilness has come forth from that part of the state."

Forsooth. Consider the Kringle.

wildswan said...

Waukesha "gripped by fear and suspicion of foreigners (and terrorists) and their hedonistic religions"
Waukesha "a hot bed of demonic possession"

I'm fairly new to the area so I can't tell - is all this some kind of joke? Waukesha? Should I mention that when I passed through one night there were dark shadows beyond my headlights beams? In the distance a door slammed. Then an eerie silence. A cat slipped across the road ahead of me. I hoped no one would realize I came from another state. Yet there just ahead a wavering ...

furious_a said...

Slender Man is well known among the Minecraft community, and you see Slender Man t-shirts at the mall skate-chic shops and Halloween costumes at the party superstores.

So, yes, the character is out there in the culture, and more widespread than just on the website noted in the article.

furious_a said...

Shorter Crack, apropos of nothing: Where's my check, whitey?

firstHat said...

A theme of much literature and art is devoted to how literature and art can overtake reality and result in evil: Heavenly Creatures (that one based on fact), Lord of the Flies and bits of Dostoevsky. I saw it up close and personal when a classmate of mine convinced herself her aunt was a witch and killed her.

Heard a discussion or two or three talking about how great it is that children can be tried as adults. My sense is that while children can be smart and precocious, they don't quite have the ability to sort out what is the truth of their feelings from the truth of reality. Then these things happen. Is it part of our relative morality? or ?

I don't know, but it does happen and I don't think the kids really should be tried as adults.

firstHat said...

@furious_a - In fact there are tons of video games based on slender now. Some are only related in that their main feature is the "jump scare," but they are most certainly part of the genre. (I mentor a 15 yr old girl so I get wind of all these fun memes).

Ann Althouse said...

"Heavenly Creatures"

I was going to mention that movie in my post… it had 2 girls entering a crazy fantasy together and committing murder.

carrie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
David said...

No guns.

No boys.

No black people.

How can this be?

The Crack Emcee said...

Gahrie,

"Wow...thank you for that explanation Crack.....These two girls committed an act of horror because of White racism against Black people."

Didn't the girl say something about not feeling remorse?

Isn't that the culture whites have created around blacks, since slavery, to peer at?

Reparations? No way! This country has got nothing to feel guilt or remorse about.

I have heard/seen those words spoken here, relating to "horror" you or those girls can't imagine, with clear white pride that no one can change either your mind or the white position.

Yeah - the Nazi/KKK white supremacist God Complex thing - that's pretty much it from where I sit,…,

Joe said...

The problem with writing about sociopaths is they live in a different mental world than our own. Any attempt to explain what they do is only an approximation. Moreover, you can't trust anything a sociopath says. What they say will be self-serving in a very twisted way, meaning it may just be a pack of lies intending to inflict pain on someone else.

Big Mike said...

@furious_a, the proper interpretation of Crack is that he's a black problem so throw money at him. Isn't that the Democrats' solution for every problem?

Unfortunately for Crack there are people in the world who are not Democrats.

Christy said...

When I was 12, my two friends and I wanted to find a way to travel the world by Tesseracts. We had all read A Winkle in Time - that Newberry Award winning YA novel. A dream showed the most imaginative of us that we all needed was for all three of us to go to sleep on a certain night with a dinner fork in our bed. I confess, nearly half a century later, that I didn't do it. Was I afraid it might work? Did I lack belief? All I remember is that I never confessed.

So, nothing new except perhaps the increased acceptance of violence for 12 year old girls.

Patrick said...

I did notice how many press outlets simply parroted the original headline that these two girls stabber their "friend." At least you thought before reciting it, and modified it with the "erstwhile," which is correct.

traditionalguy said...

@ madisonfella. Yes the D&D role playing games came after Mansion's family and Son of Sam's activities. My point was that the activities being played were the same.

Imagining an authority hierarchy of Demon Lords is a game, but when the game players encounter answers from the Lords that give impressionable persons sets of plans and demands they carry them out, then we have a problem from the spiritual world.

Alex said...

Crack - the definition of insane is spewing your racist bile no matter what the thread.

The Crack Emcee said...

Big Mike,

"@furious_a, the proper interpretation of Crack is that he's a black problem so throw money at him."

@furious_a,

Count how many times whites accuse blacks of greedily wanting money - and doing it as a way for whites to protect the money they greedily stole from blacks.

See? Whatever they've already been proven to be - for hundreds of years - that's the accusation they expect you to believe about others.

Because they're innocent of theft, rape, deception - you name it - innocent babes, one and all:

It's a con game they're playing, and not very subtly,...

The Crack Emcee said...

As Ta-Nehisi Coates said, it's all about running out the clock:

But blacks aren't dying quick enough to make it happen the way they want,...

SGT Ted said...

We're still talking about Elliot Rodgers and the "pick-up artist" websites that might have inspired him.

That's because attacking dissenters from the feminist supremacist party line is seen as a useful tactic to shift blame onto them for something they've never advocated. The PUA sites are about getting laid, not shooting women or stabbing men.

But, the feminists Nazis need to portray out and proud male heterosexuality as some sort of aberration to be corrected, rather than acknowledge simple biological reality and a part of ordinary maleness.

I am an Out and Proud Male Heterosexual and I won't be taking their bullshit anymore.

The Crack Emcee said...

SGT Ted,

We're still talking about Elliot Rodgers and the "pick-up artist" websites that might have inspired him.

"That's because attacking dissenters from the feminist supremacist party line is seen as a useful tactic to shift blame onto them for something they've never advocated."

No, it's because the "pick-up artist" websites are a joke for joke dudes,...

Nichevo said...

furious_a said...
Shorter Crack, apropos of nothing: Where's my check, whitey?
6/3/14, 2:20 PM


More lyrical Crack:

Kill de white people,
But buy my record first!

On topic, too bad we're not talking about how these girls were thrown into a juice press.