By Riley Tanaka · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 8, 2026
The Slender Man Stabbing: What Happened and Why It Mattered
On 31 May 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin lured a third girl, Payton Leutner, into a wooded park behind David’s Park and stabbed her nineteen times. They told investigators they were trying to earn the favor of a fictional internet character named Slender Man. Leutner survived. Her two attackers, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, were charged as adults with attempted first-degree intentional homicide. The character they cited was less than five years old, born on a comedy forum.
The attack forced a public reckoning with something internet folklorists already knew: digital-native characters can carry the same weight as oral tradition, and a small subset of vulnerable users will not hold the boundary between the screen and the world. The screenshot is dated. The thread is archived. The original Photoshop is preserved. Working the chain backward to where Slender Man started, and how a fictional figure ended up cited at a stabbing scene, is a clean case study of how contemporary folklore actually moves. For wider context on how modern stories pass from subculture to mainstream and back into rumor, see contemporary mysteries and theories.
This piece traces the origin post on Something Awful, the propagation through Creepypasta Wiki and the Marble Hornets web series, the Waukesha attack and its aftermath, and what folklorists call ostension: the moment a story stops being told and starts being performed. It honors Payton Leutner, whose recovery is the only fully good news in the record, and treats the attackers’ shared psychotic delusion with the clinical seriousness the court testimony established.
Where Slender Man Actually Came From
Slender Man was created on 8 June 2009 by Eric Knudsen, posting under the screen name Victor Surge, in a thread on Something Awful’s comedy forum titled “Create Paranormal Images.” The thread brief was simple: photoshop a normal photo to look paranormal and add a caption that implies a backstory. Knudsen submitted two black-and-white images of children on a playground, one with a tall faceless figure in the background and the second with that figure’s tendril-like arms reaching toward a group of kids. He added captions that read like archival fragments and dated the photos to 1986.
The character had three load-bearing design choices. He was tall, faceless, and dressed in a black suit, a silhouette that registered cleanly at thumbnail size and felt off-archive whether the viewer believed in the photo or not. The captions framed him as preexisting and recurring, which gave other forum members a structure to extend without needing permission. And the photos were photoshopped well enough that, scrolled past quickly on a phone, they read briefly as found rather than made. The Know Your Meme entry on Slender Man documents the post and the thread that followed, including the immediate riffing by other Something Awful users who began producing their own Slender Man images and short fiction.
From Comedy Forum to Creepypasta
Within weeks, the character migrated off Something Awful. The Creepypasta Wiki, founded in 2010, became the clearinghouse for short horror fiction submissions, and Slender Man was one of its earliest viral entries. By 2010 he had a defined cluster of conventions: he stalked children, he caused memory loss and paranoia in those who saw him, he was associated with static or visual distortion in photos and video, and his attacks were preceded by a slow approach. None of these conventions were in Knudsen’s two original photos. They were group-authored by anonymous and pseudonymous writers across forums, wikis, and YouTube comment sections in roughly eighteen months.
This is normal for digital folklore. What was unusual was the speed. As folklorist Andrea Kitta of East Carolina University has documented in her work on online belief, oral folklore typically takes generations to stabilize a creature’s iconography. Slender Man’s stabilized in under two years.
Marble Hornets and Slender: The Eight Pages
Two artifacts cemented the character. Marble Hornets, an analog-horror web series on YouTube, launched on 19 June 2009, eleven days after Knudsen’s Something Awful post, and ran through August 2014. The creators, Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, built a found-footage narrative around a stalking entity they renamed The Operator but who carried Slender Man’s silhouette and behavioral conventions. Marble Hornets ran for 87 entries plus alternate-channel material and is widely cited by media scholars as the first sustained ARG-style elaboration of the character.
The second artifact was a video game. Slender: The Eight Pages, released in June 2012 by Parsec Productions developer Mark J. Hadley as a free download, became one of the first viral horror Let’s Play subjects on YouTube. Markiplier and PewDiePie reaction videos pushed the game to tens of millions of views in 2012 and 2013. For a generation of children who could not legally watch the game’s R-rated atmosphere on cable, watching another adult play it on YouTube was the access point. Many of the children who later cited Slender Man as a real figure first encountered him through Let’s Plays.
What Happened in Waukesha on 31 May 2014
Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, both twelve years old, planned the attack on their classmate Payton Leutner over months. According to the criminal complaint filed in Waukesha County Circuit Court, Geyser and Weier had been reading Slender Man stories on the Creepypasta Wiki, and Geyser later told investigators she believed Slender Man was real, lived in a mansion in the Nicolet National Forest, and had granted them the assignment of killing a friend to become his “proxies.” On 30 May 2014, the girls hosted Leutner for a sleepover at Geyser’s house. The next morning, the three biked to David’s Park.
In a public restroom in the park, Weier reportedly told Geyser to “go ballistic, go crazy.” Geyser stabbed Leutner nineteen times with a five-inch kitchen knife. The wounds passed within a millimeter of a major artery and missed her heart. Leutner crawled to a roadway and was found by a passing cyclist, Greg Steinberg, who called 911. She survived. Geyser and Weier began walking north toward what they described as Slender Man’s mansion and were arrested several hours later on Interstate 94. The criminal complaint, archived by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, contains both girls’ recorded statements describing the attack as required to “prove” Slender Man’s existence.
Charges, Diagnoses, and Trial Outcomes
Geyser and Weier were charged as adults with attempted first-degree intentional homicide under Wisconsin’s reverse-waiver statute, which automatically charges juveniles aged ten or older with violent felonies in adult court. Both defenses requested transfer to juvenile court; both motions were denied, a decision the Wisconsin Court of Appeals upheld in 2016. Forensic psychiatrists testified that Geyser had been experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations consistent with early-onset schizophrenia. She was later formally diagnosed. Weier did not meet criteria for a primary psychotic disorder; instead, court testimony introduced the possibility of folie à deux, the shared psychotic disorder in which a delusion held by a primary individual is adopted by a second, suggestible partner.
Anissa Weier accepted a plea deal in August 2017 and was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. She was committed to a state mental health facility for 25 years. In December 2017, Morgan Geyser pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide as a party to a crime, and a jury accepted her not-guilty-by-reason-of-mental-disease finding in October 2017. She was committed for 40 years. According to PBS Frontline reporting, Weier petitioned for conditional release multiple times and was granted it in 2021, transitioning to her father’s home with intensive monitoring. By 2024, she had completed conditional release. Geyser remained institutionally committed as of early 2026, with periodic reviews of her status. Payton Leutner has spoken publicly twice, in a 2019 ABC News interview and a 2024 podcast appearance, and is reported to be doing well.
Ostension: When the Story Is Performed
Folklorists have a term for the phenomenon Waukesha represents. Ostension, introduced into folklore studies by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi in their 1983 paper “Does the Word ‘Dog’ Bite?”, refers to acting out a folk narrative in real life. Most ostension is harmless: a teenager visiting a haunted hospital because a Reddit thread told them to is performing low-grade ostension. The Waukesha attack was the first widely publicized case of severe pseudo-ostension associated with a digital-native folk character.
A small but useful research literature has formed around it. Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill’s 2018 edited volume Slender Man Is Coming, published by Utah State University Press, is the standing reference: it collects essays from folklorists, internet-culture scholars, and digital-rhetoric researchers analyzing why this particular character produced ostension at this scale. Their argument, distilled, is that Slender Man’s design (faceless, silent, photographable, group-authorable) and his distribution (free, modular, embedded in YouTube and gaming culture) made him uniquely portable into the imagination of children too young to fully separate group fiction from group fact.
The HBO Documentary and the Parental-Anxiety Cycle
In January 2016, HBO premiered Beware the Slenderman, a documentary directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky that followed the Geyser and Weier families through the early phases of the prosecution. The film prompted a second cultural cycle: a panic among American parents about creepypasta, online horror communities, and the Slender Man character specifically. Major outlets ran explainers. School districts circulated awareness memos. The character that had been a niche horror artifact in 2010 was, by 2016, a household name primarily because of the harm done in his name.
Eric Knudsen, the original creator, distanced himself from any commercial Slender Man use after the attack. He had previously been involved in licensing discussions; those slowed dramatically. A 2018 Sony Pictures film adaptation, Slender Man, drew protests from the Leutner family and was widely panned by critics, but it was the only major commercial Slender Man release after Waukesha.
What Slender Man Reveals About Digital Folklore
Read as a propagation event, Slender Man is the cleanest case study of digital-native folklore in the early 2010s window. He moved from a comedy-forum image-edit thread to a wiki, then into long-form analog-horror video on YouTube, then into a free downloadable game, then into Let’s Play culture, then into the imagination of children whose parents had no functional way to track the chain. The platforms did not collude; the propagation was emergent. Each platform layered a different convention onto the character, and by 2014 the result was thick enough to feel inherited rather than invented.
The Waukesha attack is not a verdict on Slender Man as a character or on creepypasta as a genre. It is a verdict on what happens when an emerging psychiatric illness in a young person finds a culturally available script that explains the unexplainable internal experience and tells that person what to do about it. Geyser was, by trial-stage testimony, in early psychosis before she fully internalized Slender Man as a real entity. She would have organized her psychotic symptoms around something. Slender Man was the available script. Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner argue, in their 2021 book You Are Here, that any sufficiently ambiguous online artifact will accumulate community formation around it; the same ambiguity is what allows it to be recruited into a delusional system. The two are the same property seen from opposite directions.
What Has and Has Not Changed Since 2014
Creepypasta Wiki still exists and remains active. Marble Hornets is preserved on YouTube and Internet Archive. Slender: The Eight Pages is still freely downloadable. Slender Man as a character has been folded back into mainstream horror iconography, appearing in Halloween costumes, video games, and parody work. The original Something Awful thread is harder to reach: Something Awful’s archive structure has shifted multiple times, but the thread itself was preserved by Wayback Machine snapshots dating to 2009 and 2010, which remain navigable.
What has changed is the awareness layer. Pediatric psychiatry literature now routinely cites the Waukesha case as a teaching example of how internet-folklore exposure interacts with emerging psychotic illness in pre-adolescents. School counselors are trained to ask, when a young patient brings up specific creepypasta characters as real, whether the belief is in the character or in the character’s instructions. The folkloric work is also better resourced: Blank and McNeill’s volume, Andrea Kitta’s research, and ongoing programs at Indiana University’s Folklore Department mean that the next Slender Man will at least have an academic apparatus tracking its propagation in something close to real time.
Honoring the Person Hurt
Payton Leutner is the person at the center of this story. She survived nineteen stab wounds, walked herself to the road for help, and has spent more than a decade rebuilding. She has chosen specific, limited public moments to speak. The reporting record honors her stated preference for being known as someone who lived through this rather than as a victim of internet-driven harm. Most write-ups about Slender Man bury her. This one tries not to. The character matters because of what was done in his name. The person who had it done to her is the only reason the story has any moral weight.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who created Slender Man?
Slender Man was created by Eric Knudsen, posting under the screen name Victor Surge, on the Something Awful comedy forum on 8 June 2009. He submitted two black-and-white photoshopped images of children with a tall faceless figure in the background to a thread titled “Create Paranormal Images.” The character grew through subsequent group authorship by other forum members and Creepypasta Wiki contributors.
What happened in the Slender Man stabbing?
On 31 May 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls named Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier stabbed a third twelve-year-old, Payton Leutner, nineteen times in a wooded park behind David’s Park. They told investigators they were trying to please Slender Man, a fictional internet character, by killing a classmate to become his “proxies.” Leutner survived after crawling to a road and being found by a cyclist.
Did Payton Leutner survive?
Yes. Payton Leutner survived nineteen stab wounds, including injuries that came within a millimeter of major arteries and just missed her heart. She crawled from the wooded park behind David’s Park to a nearby roadway, where a passing cyclist found her and called emergency services. She has spoken publicly twice, in a 2019 ABC News interview and again in 2024, and is reported to be doing well.
What were the trial outcomes for Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier?
Both were charged as adults with attempted first-degree intentional homicide under Wisconsin’s reverse-waiver statute. Both were ultimately found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Anissa Weier was committed to a state mental health facility for 25 years in 2017; she was granted conditional release in 2021 and completed her release transition by 2024. Morgan Geyser was committed for 40 years in 2018 and remained institutionally committed as of early 2026, subject to periodic review.
Was Morgan Geyser diagnosed with a mental illness?
Yes. Forensic psychiatrists testified that Geyser had been experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations consistent with early-onset schizophrenia at the time of the attack and was formally diagnosed during the prosecution. Court testimony also raised the possibility of folie à deux, a shared psychotic disorder in which a delusional belief held by a primary individual is adopted by a second, suggestible partner. Weier did not meet criteria for a primary psychotic disorder.
Is Slender Man real?
No. Slender Man is a fictional character created by Eric Knudsen on Something Awful in June 2009. He has no documented existence prior to that post. The character’s iconography (tall, faceless, suited, with tendril-like arms) was wholly invented by Knudsen and elaborated by anonymous and pseudonymous contributors on Creepypasta Wiki, in the Marble Hornets web series, and in subsequent fan fiction and games.
What is Marble Hornets?
Marble Hornets is an analog-horror web series on YouTube created by Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage. It launched on 19 June 2009, eleven days after the original Slender Man post on Something Awful, and ran through August 2014 across 87 entries plus alternate-channel material. The series renamed Slender Man as The Operator but kept the silhouette and behavioral conventions, and is widely cited as the first sustained narrative elaboration of the character.
What is Slender: The Eight Pages?
Slender: The Eight Pages is a free downloadable horror video game released in June 2012 by Parsec Productions developer Mark J. Hadley. The player must collect eight pages in a wooded environment while avoiding Slender Man. The game became one of the first viral horror Let’s Play subjects on YouTube, with Markiplier, PewDiePie, and others driving tens of millions of views in 2012 and 2013, and serving as the access point for many children who later encountered Slender Man as a perceived real entity.
What is ostension in folklore?
Ostension is the act of performing or living out a folk narrative in real life rather than simply telling it. The term was introduced into folklore studies by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi in their 1983 paper “Does the Word ‘Dog’ Bite?”. Most ostension is harmless, such as visiting a haunted location because a story said to. Severe pseudo-ostension, in which a person commits violence in the name of a folk character, is rare; the Waukesha attack is the most cited modern example.
What does the HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman cover?
Beware the Slenderman, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky and premiered on HBO in January 2016, follows the Geyser and Weier families through the early phases of the prosecution. The film traces how each girl encountered the character, the role of creepypasta in their thinking, and the immediate aftermath of the attack. It is widely credited with prompting a second wave of public attention to creepypasta and to the parental-anxiety panic cycle that followed.
Did the Waukesha attack change how Slender Man is treated culturally?
Yes, on multiple fronts. Eric Knudsen substantially withdrew from commercial Slender Man licensing after 2014. A 2018 Sony Pictures film adaptation drew family protest and critical rejection. Pediatric psychiatry literature now routinely cites Waukesha as a teaching example of how internet-folklore exposure can interact with emerging psychotic illness in pre-adolescents. The character himself remains active in fan culture, but the public conversation around him has been permanently reshaped by the attack.
Where can the original Slender Man Something Awful thread be read today?
The original 8 June 2009 thread on Something Awful’s Photoshop Phriday-adjacent “Create Paranormal Images” forum is preserved primarily through Wayback Machine snapshots taken in 2009 and 2010. Something Awful’s own archive structure has shifted multiple times, making direct in-site navigation unreliable. Know Your Meme has compiled the canonical record of Knudsen’s two original images and the immediate forum response.
