Three girls, all friends and classmates, have a slumber party on a Friday night in small town Wisconsin. The next day, two of the girls lead the third into some nearby woods. They have a kitchen knife and a plan. They proceed to stab their unsuspecting companion 19 times, transforming her from friend to victim, and themselves from normal pre-teens to attempted murderers.
This event occurred on May 31, 2014, reported amid the troubling tide of mass shootings that are on America like a plague. Some rough similarities between this crime and others might be drawn, such as speculation about the role of mental illness. There are differences, though. The perpetrators were female. They were young (all 12 years old). There were no guns involved. But the most curious distinction of all was the motive, plainly stated by the attackers: they acted in service of the Slender Man.
The Slender Man is a mythical entity found mostly online. As previously explored by The Stake, the meme has grown, evolved, and seeped into a digital public consciousness in much the same way other monsters would have done in the minds of our ancestors as they sat around the campfire, surrounded by dark forests. The Slender Man mythos has inspired an online community, an ongoing web series, and even episodes of well-known television shows. It is studied as one of the most traceable cultural myths of the digital age, and though it had a distinct beginning (complete with a creator and calendar date), like all good myths there is no foreseeable ending. So how did it come to be the motivation behind a murder attempt? Did the fiction itself have a hand in motivating these girls? Did they realize the weight of their thoughts, turned actions?
Some early reports of the Wisconsin event touched on apparent comments by the two girls taken into custody, in which they expressed some regret for the incident. It was very much a planned attack, and nothing so far has indicated that the girls thought they were acting out a fantasy. At least, not in regards to their end game—they seemed to realize that their actions would have taken the life of a real living, breathing human. But they did fall into a fantasy somewhere along the way. The two girls wanted to “become ‘proxies’ of Slender Man” by proving their allegiance through ritual sacrifice.
Although at first it may seem odd that these two actually believed that Slender Man existed, and while the detailed inner workings of their minds may remain murky and complex, on a broader scale it is entirely feasible that yes, someone could believe that a fictional being could dictate a real life murder. In our superstitious world, their beliefs do not come off as particularly unique. The Slender Man is novel in name, but scapegoat devils and demons have been around forever. And it’s still unclear how a society can safely use these dark, unreal stories without tapping into something all too real and dangerous.
Recently, science popularizer Richard Dawkins made non-news when some of his statements were misinterpreted as saying that fictional stories are detrimental to children. What he actually said was more in the form of a conversation starter, posing the question of whether or not, could the proper research be done, fiction has a net positive or net negative effect on developing minds. While not a controversial concept on its own merits, the idea is interesting, timely, and mostly untested. Dawkins’ personal guess is that the effect is positive, in part because stories can help exercise critical thinking.
I tend to agree, and think the positive effect touches something much deeper. Humans are built on storytelling. We need patterns; we need beginnings and endings. We need connections and common threads. The human tribe would go collectively insane without stories to live by, to examine ourselves through. And in a fractured society where personal histories and experiences are so individualized, collective stories seem all the more necessary. This is why websites like Creepypasta, a main source of Slender Man content, exist. One expert in the horror genre notes how these types of stories help us to “explore and understand our own fears.” And to the credit of the online Slender Man community, they have been nothing but empathetic to the victim and concerned about the whole situation. No cause-effect blame should be placed there. The stories are, after all, just stories. Even at this dark turn of events (and others like it—a similar crime has been reported since the one described here), I would not condone the suppression of the Slender Man mythos in any way.
But as necessary as stories are for whole cultures, things get tricky in the experiences of the lone individual. Here things can flip: a break with reality can occur when stories become too powerful and overwhelm an unprepared psyche. So now, with the Wisconsin case, we have a potent starting point for that research topic of the effects of fiction, specifically in regards to developing brains. It was originally reported that a disclaimer on Creepypasta stated its content to be appropriate for ages 13 and up; the two perpetrators were just short of that mark. Click into that site today, and you have to be 18 to enter. While age is only one indicator of mental stability, it is an important one, and we will need to figure out at what point we can be reasonably confident that a person is old enough to keep fiction properly framed as such.
There is a fine line between creativity and superstition. Unfortunately, that line always has the potential to widen into a crack that otherwise sound minds can fall into. We have to train those minds, especially young ones, to not let stories override reality. We need to recognize the emotional truths that stories provide, while clearly identifying the fictional details that make up the stories themselves. Will it be possible to guide children through the intensity of online interaction while keeping them from getting derailed by the unreal? Let’s get those surveys and studies going, and get strategies in place soon. The myths won’t wait.
Levi C. Byers is a contributor to The Stake. You can find him at leviandlaura.wordpress.com and on Twitter @Leviathan_B.
Pingback: The Believing Brain | Leviathan, Bound