The Morgan Geyser Case: What We Owe To Youth And Mental Health

Slenderman, in Wisconsin.

If you are unfamilar with who Morgan Geyser is, the easiest thing would be for me to say “Slenderman,” and then you might be familiar. If you’re still not, Geyser (top right in the above photo) and her friend Anissa Weier (bottom right) stabbed their friend Peyton “Bella” Leutner in May 2014 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The narrative on the stabbing was that the two friends got obsessed with an online character called “Slenderman” on the creepypasta Wiki, and they needed to become “proxies” of Slenderman, and the way to do that was to kill their friend Bella. It should be noted here that Bella did not die and is actually a college junior right now. She was stabbed 19 times, however — mostly by Morgan — and she apparently has 26 different wounds on her body now. A lot of people refer to this case as the “Slenderman Murders,” although no one was murdered. Bella, again, survived — although it was pretty close.

There is a similar case in West Virginia where someone was murdered. Her name was Skylar Neese, and she was murdered apparently because her two friends were in a lesbian relationship and didn’t want anyone to find out:

The Slenderman story is different. Years later, most of the interrogation video has been released on Geyser and Weier: