Out Came the Girls: Adolescent Girlhood, the Occult, and the Slender Man Phenomenon

Here is an image, picked from the notebooks of an eleven-year-old girl in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a head portrait, in pencil, of a man in a dark suit and tie. His long neck is white, and so is his face—bald and whited-out, with hollows where his eyes should be.

Here is another: an androgynous kid (a girl, like the artist?) in a sweatshirt and flared jeans leaping across the page. She has huge, glassy black eyes and dark, stringy hair; she reaches out with one hand and brandishes a dagger in the other. Filling the page around her, tiny rainbows and clouds and stars and hearts—all the signatures of the little girl the artist recently was—burst in a fireworks display.

There are cryptic messages, too: a page covered in Xs; another inscribed he still sees you. These notebooks are charged with the childlike paranoia of sleepovers after bingeing on horror movies, of Ouija boards and Light as a feather, stiff as a board…

What is occult is synonymous with what is hidden, orphic, veiled—but girls are familiar with that realm. We have the instinct. Girls create their own occult language; it may be one of the first signs of adolescence. This is a language of fantasy, of the desire for things we can't yet have (we're too young), of forces we can't control (loneliness, an unrequited crush, the actions of our family). This invention of a private language, both visual and verbal, shared with only a chosen few, gives shape to our first allegiances; it grants entry into a universe with its own rationale—the warped rationale of fairy tales. Its rules do not bleed over into the realm of the mundane, of parents and teachers and adult consequences.

But in May 2014, the occult universe of two young girls did spill over into the real. And within days of her twelfth birthday, all of Morgan Geyser's drawings and scribblings—evidence of the world she had built with her new best friend—were confiscated. More than three years later, they are counted among the state's exhibits in a case of first-degree intentional homicide.

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On a Friday night in late spring of 2014, in the small, drab city of Waukesha, Wisconsin, a trio of sixth-grade girls gets together to celebrate Morgan's birthday. They skate for hours under the disco lights at the roller rink: tame, mousy-haired Bella Leutner; Anissa Weier, with her shaggy brown mop top; and Morgan, the "best friend" they have in common, with her moon of a face, big glasses, and long blond hair. They are three not-so-popular girls at Horning Middle School, a little more childish than the others, a little more obsessed with fantasy and video games and making up scary stories. Morgan casts herself as a creative weirdo, and she relates to her new friend Anissa on this level, through science fiction—Anissa, who has almost no other friends and who moved down the block after her parents' recent divorce. When they get back to the birthday girl's house, they greet the cats, play games on their tablets, then head to Morgan's bedroom, where they finally fall asleep, all three

together in a puppy pile in the twin-size loft bed.

In the morning, the girls make a game out of hurling clumps of Silly Putty up at the ceiling. They role-play for a while—as the android from Star Trek and a troll and a princess—then eat a breakfast of donuts and strawberries. Morgan gets her mother's permission to walk to the small park nearby.

As they head to the playground, Bella in the lead, Morgan lifts her plaid jacket to show Anissa what she has tucked into her waist-band: a steak knife from the kitchen. Anissa is not surprised; t h e y have talked about this moment for months. After some time on the...