Truth With Light

𝖤𝗇𝗍𝗋𝗒 #𝟤𝟥: 𝖶𝖺𝗎𝗄𝖾𝗌𝗁𝖺, 𝖶𝖨

On May 31st, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a pair of twelve-year-old girls—Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser—attempted homicide. After spending the night together, the two led their mutual friend, Payton "Bella" Leutner, into the woods. They stabbed her nineteen times with the 5" blade of a kitchen knife before ultimately leaving her for dead. Later reports revealed their alleged motivation was to appease and prove the existence of Slender Man by becoming his proxies and resuming the rest of their lives at Slender Manor.

With the media in an uproar, the official Creepypasta website faced threat of removal of its content. To combat the backlash, the community brandished the phrase "It's creativity, not reality" across social media. Among the outcry of support, the website and its content remained.

HBO released a true crime documentary on the case in 2016 entitled Beware The Slenderman, just shy of two years after the attempted murder. With it were exclusive interviews from the perpetrators' families and friends, segments of court case hearings, evidence photos, and interrogation footage among other sources of information.

As of July 1st, 2021, Anissa Weier has been granted conditional release by a judge and awaits another hearing in September. Morgan Geyser serves her sentence of forty years in a mental health facility, with prescribed treatment for schizophrenia. Payton Leutner has survived and recovered from her wounds, but continues to live in paranoia.

{ quotev's response. }

As a preventative measure in response to the stabbing, any works tagged as Creepypasta on Quotev would later be filtered with an additional tag: fan fiction. Even years later, this tag is prevalent on any and all Creepypasta-associated works posted to the site—given they're tagged appropriately.

The original source for this work has also been labelled as fan fiction, regardless of any effort to dispute it with Quotev's genre system.

Quotev acted as an origin point for the trend of the creation of experience journals, and seemed to be the lead inspiration for users expanding and translating them to different platforms. With such a massive impact to spawn a separate subculture in the Creepypasta community, it's likely Quotev headquarters were aware of the possible effects of these journals. To protect the company and its potential role in future cases, they altered the filtering system.

At least, that's one possible stance of few.

It's easy to dismiss this by giving the benefit of the doubt, but something has always seemed off about Quotev's response. It seemed less like a company tactic to prevent further discourse, and more as a method to erase or minimize damage present in the community at the time.

{ accountability. }

Through the articles and research projects dedicated to the case, little has been disclosed about either of the perpetrators having a connection to Quotev or its experience community.

In the hypothetical scenario they did, it's uncertain who all could've played an instrumental part and hadn't even known. It could even be me or other members of the Top Ten. This presents a glaring question of whether any of us owe an apology or a sense of accountability for what happened. And if we do, how are we supposed to approach it? At what cost?

With the mental deterioration each one of us experienced, we could've advocated these behaviors more than we'd realized. I was volatile and reckless and threatened violence more than once. Even if they were empty threats, I contributed to normalizing a thought pattern that wasn't healthy. Regardless of their actions being their own, if Morgan and Anissa had ever read my journals, I could be partially responsible for their perceptions toward Creepypasta and violence.

{ folie à deux. }

During the initial interrogations, Anissa recalled a simultaneous thrill and terror in the Creepypastas being aware of their observers as their observers grew awareness of them. This was also a shared conviction used to caution the experiencing community on Quotev, though it seemed to have never been fully explained why.

It was common practice to believe any of the characters mentioned in an experience journal could haunt the viewers upon entry. This was evidently proven time and time again upon testimonies from readers.

Though in retrospect, it's more probable the journals featuring these disclaimers appeared instantly more enticing and led readers into them with a heightened range of fear. Like a demented domino effect, the journal author spread their overactive imagination to another, and that person would continue to spread it by sharing links to the journal or compiling their own.

It's no wonder the experience community was as tight-knit as it was. Everybody knew each other through some effect of that interconnectivity. It may as well have been our shared delusions. Unfortunately, said delusions give way to common ground with Morgan and Anissa as well. I just can't shake that somehow, some way, one or both of those girls could've been in those entangled threads somewhere—however long of a time that may have been.

It's not entirely impossible they could've constructed an artifice, whether through an alias, a misleading or vague profile picture, or both. Afterall, some of my best friends at the time were incredibly private about their identity. Anonymity has never been a stranger to this site.

Even if it's not this particular case, we may never know how many people we truly damaged with our spread of misinformation. And I don't think there's anything I or the other experiencers could do to erase that. I don't like thinking about it, but if I were to express these thoughts to anyone who could possibly understand, it'd be through here. Let's open a dialogue about this. Is this a shared fear nobody likes to talk about? Or is this something I have to stand alone on?