Two 12-Year-Old Girls Stab Their Friend 19 Times Because Of A Fictional "Internet Meme"

Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier have been charged with attempted murder. The unnamed victim was stabbed 19 times on Saturday and left in the woods.

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A bicyclist found the wounded girl alive Saturday, lying on a sidewalk in Waukesha, Police Chief Russell Jack said. She was in stable condition at a hospital Monday.

A court commissioner set bail at $500,000 cash per child. "I recognize their young ages but it's still unbelievable," Court Commissioner Thomas Pieper said during one of the girls' initial court appearances Monday.

The girls were trying to impress a certain "Slenderman," the complaint read. One of the girls encountered the name on a website known as Creepypasta Wiki.

He's the Internet's own monster, a ghoul who lurks in its darkest corners and, like the Web itself, has mutated time and again to suit the dreams and desires of his devotees. He is Slenderman, a menacing, faceless specter in a dark suit -- sometimes portrayed with octopus-like tentacles -- known to haunt children and those who seek to expose him. He was born in 2009 in an online forum for people who enjoy creating fake supernatural images.

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And, on Saturday, police say, he played a role in the attempted murder of a 12-year-old girl in suburban Milwaukee by two female classmates who stabbed her 19 times. According to police, the girls said the attack was meant to impress the fictitious bogeyman. To be clear, the origin story of the monstrous character (sometimes referred to as The Slender Man) in no way urged readers to kill to earn his favor. But Slenderman has undergone hundreds of permutations online in his five-year existence.

In June 2009, a Photoshop contest for images that appeared to be paranormal was launched in a forum on the website Something Awful. According to Know Your Meme, a blog that chronicles Web culture, the goal of the contest was to create the images and then use them to fool, or "troll," other Web users by submitting them to paranormal websites. Site member Eric Knudsen (under the screen name "Victor Surge") submitted two images to the contest, both black-and-white images of children, one of which appeared to show a largely undefined figure lurking in the background.

They were presented as being from 1984, and one included the text " 'We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time...' -- 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead." (Know Your Meme has documented these posts, although links to the original thread no longer work.) A day later, according to Know Your Meme, Knudsen added a third photo and a fictional doctor's account of a mass killing. And, from there, Slenderman's assault on the Internet began.

"Some people joked in the thread, 'Wouldn't it be funny if some of these ended up on those paranormal websites or someone said these pictures look real,' " Knudsen said in an interview this year with National Public Radio's "On the Media." "But I don't think anyone really expected that to happen." Other Something Awful users began creating their own Slenderman stories. And they spread to other sites. Over the past five years, he's appeared in fan art, short stories, videos, video games and other media all over the Web. A Google search for "Slenderman" on Tuesday returned more than 4 million results.

Slenderman has also been a popular subject of "creepypasta," a form of Web-based short fiction. A play on the term "copypasta," which itself is derived from the keyboard action "copy-paste," creepypasta is horror fiction written with the Web in mind and, often, done in a style that makes it appear like a news item or other piece of true crime.

The girls accused in the Milwaukee stabbing told police they knew the character from the Creepypasta Wiki, a site that compiles such fiction. The site has issued a statement condemning the attack. "This is an isolated incident, and does (not) represent ... the Creepypasta community as a whole," the statement reads. "This wiki does not endorse or advocate for killing, worship, and otherwise replication of rituals of fictional works. There is a line of between fiction and reality, and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not a satanic cult."

The criminal complaint said the defendants allegedly invited the girl to a sleepover at one of their houses last Friday, planning to stab her to death and then run away to Slenderman's mansion.

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They allegedly backed out of that plan, deciding to kill her Saturday in a nearby park bathroom so blood could be disposed of through a drain. The complaint said the pair convinced the girl to go to the park with them on the day and got her into the bathroom, but neither could bring themselves to stab the victim.

They went into the woods, where one girl allegedly pushed the victim down and sat on her. The girls then traded the knife back and forth between them before one of them finally tackled the victim again and began stabbing her, according to the complaint.

The girls allegedly left the victim lying in the woods. The victim suffered 19 stab wounds; one missed a major artery near her heart by a millimeter, doctors told police. The court documents didn't name her.

"The bad part of me wanted her to die, the good part of me wanted her to live," the girl allegedly told the investigator. Detectives allege the other girl said they both stabbed the victim. At one point that girl said she was sorry and what she did was "probably wrong."

Both girls are due back in court on June 11 for a status conference.