2 Things that must be said: 1. Your mental illness is not your fault BUT it is your responsibility. If you are a minor your parents also have a responsibility to keep your mental illness in check (talking to you, making sure you take your medicine, see a doctor if your condition changes, etc.). 2. Blaming fanfiction for attempted murder is like blaming school shootings on video games. These girls needed more supervision & their parents failed them.
Yep, you're supposed to monitor your kids online activities even without mental health coming into it, when your child has a 50/50 chance of having a mental health issue you have even more reason to. If I remember right one of the girls dads had schizophrenia, the girl was only diagnosed after the arrest...if there was a chance their daughter had the same condition they should have been looking for signs. I think the other was diagnosed high functioning autistic, so the defence team claimed she was "easily mislead" 🤦♀️
To elaborate on your first point, it's also society's and the government's responsibility to (1) understand mental health and (2) provide adequate resources for treating mental health issues. For #1, people who ignorantly tell depressed people to "stop being dramatic" or "just stop being so sad and try looking on the bright side" for example only make things worse by instilling a sense of guilt for not being able to function like a typical person when they shouldn't be expected to. And for #2, plenty of people can't be solely responsible for their own mental health issues. Think of severe neurological disorders such as autism which require a dedicated caretaker just for someone affected to be able to perform basic tasks. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of mentally ill people who were left to their own devices and eventually "took responsibility" for their condition in their own way by committing horrible crimes. With a bit of help and direction to find a more healthy outlet for their symptoms, some of those people could've avoided a lot of suffering for themselves and others.
I have to push back a bit on #2. I don't think fanfiction solely led these girls to murder, but I do think that some kids really have a hard time telling reality from fiction. And when that happens, the parents need to be aware of what the kids are consuming and steer them towards more positive things. And as he pointed out in this video, it is very possible they were being encouraged by someone else in the fanfiction community or at least being led on.
@@mrpickles619depressed person here I get your example but sometimes saying stop being dramatic is the best thing for you As for the autism bit I am a sperg and at the moment could probably function like a normal human if I dodnt have other stuff going on
Kind of weird, but things like this make me so glad for cellphones. The cyclist was able to call for help. I was watching an old murder mystery show, and when someone staggered out of the woods bleeding, the person who saw them had to leave them there, to run and go find somewhere to call for help. Like, leave the person bleeding out to ride their bike back to town. Say what you want about tech addiction, but response time matters, and a way to call for help is huge
Kids that grew up in the internet age will really never understand having to call your parents once you got to your friends' house to let them know you got there okay - and the amount of trust it showed when they stopped asking you to call!
That cyclist was something else. He sees a little girl bleeding to death from stab wounds and he not only calls for help but then stays with her despite the obvious threat that her attackers might still be in the area.
My great great uncle died in the 30s because he was shot in the leg and bled out. He was crossing under a barbed wire fence with his brother to go hunting and passed the rifle through the wire. It got caught on the wire and fired and hit him in the leg. His brother had to carry him two miles back to their house and then run another two miles to the nearest neighbor who had a car because no one in their neighborhood had a phone. They drove him to the hospital, but by the time they got there, he had bled out, and the floorboards of the car were filled with blood. If one of their neighbors had a phone, they could have maybe stopped the bleeding while the ambulance got there.
@@Slinky_Loki1967 I'm so sorry for your families loss, my family lost my great uncle in WWII. My mom still has the book of poetry his mom wrote about his going to war, losing him, and life after. Those stories are hard sometimes, but they're written into our dna and I believe they're important to pass down
Ah, Creepypasta. 15-16 year old me's hyperfixation. For context, a lot of fanfiction wrote the mansion as sort of a "found family" type of living arrangement, where the famous creepypastas lived in a manner similar to siblings, with Slenderman being the head of the house/a sort of father figure. The Creeps were specifically portrayed as acting like a real family. Many of the characters came from broken homes, and/or had mental health issues. They often werent portrayed as the wicked characters they are. Rather, they were portrayed as regular people, just with problems. As a teen, having lived in an abusive/neglectful family, and suffering from a lot of complications from mental illness and disability, it sounded like heaven. A whole house of "siblings" that took care of and respected each other? A parental figure that wanted their adoptive children to thrive and be safe? It sounds amazing. I would have killed to have family that cared about me and my mental health struggles. I have distinctive memories of staring out the window during my morning science class in 10th grade, mentally begging slenderman to come take me there. I wanted an escape. It's really sad, and I can look back on this time in my life and take pity on the sad and sick person that I had become due to the circumstances. I'm doing a lot better now.
I'm so sorry you had such a troubling upbringing. I hope you find solace in the knowledge that you were not alone; many of us grew up in VERY less than ideal households.😔 I'm glad you're doing much better now.🤗
You weren't alone. Only I wasn't even in an abusive family. I'm just autistic and have ADHD and I had friends, but I never felt like I really belonged anywhere. I had depression and anxiety and I was lonely as hell despite having loving, caring parents. Though at the time, my dad was having to live and work away from us, and what was supposed to be a year at most turned into 4. My entire high school, I didn't have my dad. My mom was depressed, though to her credit she did get up, make us food, make sure we were okay and taken care of. But...she kinda shut down for a little bit. I was just one of those cringe kids.
To any of Mind Unveiled's supporters here trying to tank this video before it goes live (bros we can see the analytics), at least wait until after its feasible for you to have watched it. Especially nasty for y’all to be doing that on a video about attempted murder.
crazy what the human body can endure. More crazy is how Aidan can endure MindUnveild's Lunatic followers. You guys make Alex Jones look like a scientist.
I remember hearing about this years ago. Especially with things like Marble Hornets, DarkHarvest, EverymanHYBRID, etc. were on going still back then, too. It's appalling these two girls weren't watched over better by their families, especially with what they were getting into. Much more so that something fictional can make them do something so heinous to one of their own friends. The victim definitely didn't deserve this and the creator of Slenderman especially did not want this. I'm glad the victim survived all of this but I also can't imagine the trauma this has probably inflicted in the end.
I agree that letting a young girl (with a learning disability that makes it hard for her to separate reality from fiction) have unsupervised internet access: is downright negligent.
I remember playing some Roblox slender man game when I was 12 and I mentioned the game to my grandma and she said she didn't want me to play it. Real boomer behavior. Still funny to me now none the less.
There's a concept in the paranormal called a tulpa. The idea that enough people thinking of something can manifest it into reality. That's why even though we know slenderman was created on a message board in 2009-2010, people actually believe in him and even report sightings. My way to debunk the existence of tulpas is the fact Spiderman isn't seen swinging around Manhattan. Spiderman occupies far more brains than anything ever claimed to be a tulpa.
Do you think the sheer collective belief that something is real is the thing that does it? Like, we all know that Spider-Man isn't real, he's a character in a comic book. I have no doubt that loads of people believe in stuff like Bigfoot and Slenderman, on the other hand, and so make it into reality through the tulpa method. Not saying I think it's true, just some food for thought.
@@Dex-ik4js Maybe? People know that Slenderman is internet mythology the same way people know Spider-man is a comic book though. Those two girls crossed over into belief, but given the decades he's been around and the millions of kids who grew up with him it could have happened with Spider-man too. One example of a tulpa I read about that's my basis of understanding is an author who wrote a horror novel featuring entities made of shadow. Supposedly his house became haunted by shadow entities and they persisted even after he died. That guy knew they were the creation of his own mind, but he spent a lot of time thinking about them writing the book. So if tulpas work the way I understand it then there should be a Spider-man in Manhattan. But if it's based on actual belief? I dunno. Camping in the woods where they filmed the Blair Witch Project would be a good test of that theory. People got tricked back in '99 into thinking that movie was made from actual tapes found in the woods. That's why it was a huge hit. People are aware of viral marketing now, but back then it was new and people were naive. Millions believed The Blair Witch was real.
Thats not exactly how it works, you would need to truly believe it exists, not just know about it and have it occupy some of your thoughts. Thoughtforms, egregires, tulpas, etc are more complex then that and esotericism has much more depth than that, and like all things of this nature, are not easily proven or disproven by their very nature as you cannot prove the existence of something more spiritually inclined within a material framework.
Okay but the problem with that is that most people don't believe that Spiderman is real. The entire idea of a tulpa is that people need to believe it's real for it to become real.
That sounds nice. I'd probably read that. A vigilante Slenderman that kills predators and safely returns children to their respective families... I LOVE IT!!! START WRITING!
Omg totally!!! Like omg, Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Mengele, they got nothin on teenage girls! Your dad so smart he must slay so hard 100%!!!
this story is so disturbing. i was around their age when this happened. even though we knew it wasn’t real, kids were terrified of the story. we had a hiking field trip that year for all middle school students. on our way there multiple teachers had to tell kids to stop talking about it because of how panicked some of the younger kids got
I worked at a middle school as a teaching assistant at the time. I had to show the kids the old forum post and explain the history of Slenderman because so many of them thought this story meant it was real.
@@darkshotgun209 People doing batshit insane things for the sake of imaginary beings is nothing new, religions have been around for a long time after all and most, if not all, of them were born from just imaginary stories of ancient people trying to understand the world around them.
I remember going on a hike with my class around a local college campus. My friends and I were definitely the kinds of kids to take the piss, and I still remember every time we came across some paper laying in the trail we would jokingly say "oh no, a page!"
I remember this story. My mom had actually been worried by it because I had talked about how Slenderman scared me a few months prior. It’s quite horrific but I’m glad the girl survived this attack by some seriously sick individuals.
Okay this is some Mandela Effect shit because I distinctly remember these two girls SUCCESSFULLY murdering their friend. Like, that was what the whole news cycle was about. Attempted murder doesn't get nearly the same coverage.
I was working at a middle school and some kids actually believed that Slenderman was real because of this. You could still find the original forum that created Slenderman and I had to show them that to convince them that no, Slenderman wasn't real
The parents of the murderous girls should be ashamed of themselves for not keeping a better eye on what their children were researching, and probably not telling them that fiction characters don't exist.
Easy to say. But no reasonable person would have seen this coming. I believed in dogman as a kid, being from Michigan. The song about it played all over every Halloween, and school busses would turn it way up for all the kids. Slenderman is no more inappropriate or scary than that, and had one of us kids killed another to try to bait the dogman or something, no one would be able to say it was the parents' fault with any validity. If you have kids, they've either done bad stuff you know isn't your fault but their's, or they do stuff you don't know about while you think you've got the perfect eye on them.
@@godwarrior3403 I suppose that’s true, I can’t say I’ve never believed in mythical creatures before, (mainly Bigfoot, Jersey Devil, and Melon Heads). However while I still believe some moderation from the parents should’ve been there. So many kids nowadays do so much behind their parent’s back so they don’t get in trouble. So I’ll retract my statement about parent responsibility.
@@Mr.SnekMeister One of the girl's turned out to have very early onset scizophrenia, inherited from her father but usually it's something that doesn't set in until late teen years, so they really had no idea. I think the other girl's parents were definitely partially responsible, but she also could have simply been gullible or easily frightened by the other girl's thoughts.
This is gonna be such a weird correction, but as someone who was also a 12 year old girl who was obsessed with creepypasta fanfic in a far more normal way, a vast majority of "Slender Mansion" content had slenderman as a father figure for whatever reader insert than a romantic partner. It was all the other murderers that tended to be the romantic interests. However, slenderman was not uncommon.
I just wanted to say that the Slenderman Mansion was a fairly popular headcanon around the peak Slenderman popularity. It consisted of Slenderman owning a mansion in the woods with other popular characters (Jeff the Killer, Ticci Toby, Ben Drowned, Smile Dog, etc) living in a mansion in the woods together. Kind of sitcom-esque. A lot of stories and comics took place in this mansion and it was often depicted as a whacky family dynamic. It was really popular on Wattpad and Quotev, and sites like that! Just wanted to share that bit of information since I was heavily involved in the fandom at the time.
yeah, its still a relatively popular depiction today. you can find a lot of fan fictions that have a dynamic involving creepypastas living in a mansion, or even in the same town/city/forest. i remember reading a few (had a phase,) where the creepypastas had their own cabins dotted around the forest, and there was a main mansion in the centre. a sense of community within fucking serial killers.
@@beesley6252 Interesting that it's still a common thing. Yeah, I had a phase, but jumped ship after the stabbing. It made me realize that some of the people I was interacting with were taking it way too seriously.
@@zabrina1019 Same! It made them seem just kinda goofy, rather than the 'terrifying' killers they were! I remember this, like comic series. Something about a little girl demon named Lazarus, I think? That was my introduction to the trope, if I'm remembering correctly!
@@ellikat1750 Yeah, her name was Lazari. I don't remember the comic's name. I know the author changed the characters around later, so they were all OCs instead of common creepypastas
I have watched the police interview footage for these girls. It is so sad how one of the two was clearly very deeply mentally ill and was manipulated by the other to carry out these horrific acts. She was more or less entirely detached from reality and did not understand properly the consequences of what was happening and genuinely believed Slenderman was real, a thought that was planted into her head by the other girl who very clearly did not believe in it. Basically, this is the story of one little girl tricking another mentally ill little girl into stabbing her own best friend.
Omg exactly. I’m so annoyed by all the people that act like they were both evil! One of them was completely not in reality, and one was sick enough to convince the other to go along with everything.
I remembering being incredibly young and seeing one of the old creepypasta chain emails about a little girl who was abused and murdered and would haunt you in your tub if you didn't share her story with everyone you know. I believed that *so much* that I printed it out and read it aloud to my parents and younger sister at the dinner table that night, I was so scared and genuinely believed that if I didn't tell everyone I knew that me and my family were going to die at the hands of the sad abused demon girl. My family were christian fundamentalists so i also believed that like, the rapture was real and to take things very literally and very seriously. While i never attempted to kill anyone, hearing specifically Morgan say she did it bc she truly believed Slenderman would kill her and her whole family makes me wonder if their backgrounds weren't somewhat similar to mine. V good video, thank you!
The story from 1966 is actually a near direct copy of an encounter of a similar sounding but completely different entity than Slenderman. This entity is known as the Grinning Man also known by the name Indrid Cold. He is better associated with the Mothman sightings as he was also encountered near Point Pleasant, West Virginia by a traveling salesman a few days before the Mothman sightings began. He's also apparently an extraterrestrial as the salesman reported him emerging from a cigar shaped craft.
This video was so informative and thank you for not demonizing the 2 very young girls with severe mental illnesses. So many of the docu-series I've seen cover this story make them out to be these evil monsters, when in reality, they were two sick children whose parents failed them fucking miserably.
I remember hearing about this when I was really young, and even then, I was like... this thing comes from a fandom where there is a game where there was a mod that made him play the saxophone, why did they think it was real. Then I learned about mental illness!
Ya know, the slender man thing always freaked me out because of something my son went through. When he was maybe 2 or 3 he had a period where he would wake up at night screaming bloody murder. Eyes closed , completely beside himself. Nothing would snap him out of it while he would beat himself off the bars of his crib. We got him a firetruck bed in hopes of him getting through it with a big boy bed , or at least if he could come into our room if he woke up scared. Nothing helped until I covered his bed in a sheet. He eventually told us that a man named chip would crawl in through his window at night and tell him he was going to take him and if he didn't go with chip that chip would hurt his mom and dad. He never mentioned his clothes, but he told us chip had no face. Just black holes where his eyes and mouth would be. He was born in 07 so this was happening before slender man even became a thing and we'll before he was on the internet or influenced by scary movies or anything. I know it was probably something silly, but there was so much in that house that just didn't feel right. Door knobs turning on their own. Shadows walking down the hall or floors creaking. Horrible energy between me and my son's mom at the time, was some of our worst time. I'll never forget that shit.
I vaguely remember being about 3, and seeing a creature I called the bear man. My mom years later when I was an adult also reminded me of it. It was a tall wide shadow with red eyes I'd see outside of my bedroom window. Fast forward to when I was 16, my older sister moved into the house I lived in when I was 3 (hard to explain, a family home different relatives would rent at different times.) Her son, 3, was scared to death of the bathroom. Finally his mom asked him why and he said because of the man without a face. As he got older he explained he looked in the mirror and saw an all black figure with no facial features. Fast forward again, I'm 19, into the occult, and walking around town at midnight with my best friend. We're walking about 100 yards behind what looks to be another man on the sidewalk, but as we get closer and closer he looks like he's staying in the same spot. But we can see his legs moving. As we get closer still, it looks like he's changing height. Like really tall one second and like 3 feet the next. Me and my friend aren't saying a word and haven't acknowledged this man to each other at all yet. As we walk up on him, like 3 yards away, he's no longer a man, but a black smoky looking pair of hips and legs walking in place on the sidewalk. We walk right through it and it disappears. Finally I say "Is it just me or" and my friend cuts me off "We just saw a ghost." We circled ALL the way back around town, excited like a couple kids about this crazy thing, hoping we'd see it again if we gave it time to show up. It did. It stayed tall this time, and walked as smoothly and lifelike as any human. Swinging arms and everything, just back and forth under the streetlight. We watched it for at least a minute before it started crossing the street at us, first it had no face at all. Then, red eyes began to develop on it and I dragged my friend out of there. It wasn't too long after I found God, and repented of all that demonic crap. But, let's Fast forward again. I'm 28 at this point, staying with my aunt for a while because I fell on hard times. During this time I got angry at God, and went back to the occult even though I knew it was evil. Due to His mercy I believe, I never saw the creature, but I woke up one day and four seperate people had seen and been seeing what they described as a shadow looking person in something like a trench coat with an old timey hat. By this point I'd of course heard of the hat man, and heard he's often seen before someone dies. So I thought God had had enough of my back and forth and was letting me have the consequences of my actions. I repented, and haven't gone back to that darkness. My point is two fold, one, what your kid likely saw was a shadow person, they are real. I never heard one talk, but I have heard of them talking. The second point, is that God is real. And that if shadow people are around, there's some type of darkness you might not be aware of, or even be aware that it is indeed darkness. If there's any occult interest or beliefs, if there's any drugs, if you're a Christian who's straying, these are things I've personally seen bring the demonic around. And people will tell you to use sage, and different mystic practices to flush out negative energy and all that, but that's not how it works. Jesus Christ is the only way to get rid of the devil. If you don't believe, I recommend you pray to Him, and ask Him to help you seek Him. He says if you seek you will find, when you seek with all your heart. I'm living proof of that. Whatever brought that spirit around, assuming it wasn't just childhood imagination, is something spiritual in nature. And the Holy Spirit is the only way to fight it. The tension during that time isn't surprising either. Demons will always grab whatever weakness we have and work it to destroy us. That's why the bible says not to give the devil a foothold. And I'll leave off with this, something I keep having to remember myself: John 10:10 "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." Wish you the best, hope I wasn't too off-putting haha Ive just seen enough of this stuff to write a book I swear. And I consider it dead serious more than I consider it entertainment.
32:28 as someone who was a really big fan of marble hornets it really irks me that ‘hoodie’ and ‘masky’ were always seen as proxies and followers to the operator they were actively working against slenderman in the series. kinda sets up how accurate and serious people took the creepypastas in the 2010s
When I first heard of Slender man, a friend from school was telling me about him. He failed to mention it was an internet story, and he left out that it had tentacle arms/multiple arms. I thought it was some psycho killer in our area who was killing and stealing their victims faces, and was wondering why the hell no media outlet was talking about this. Then a quick google search that night showed me it was just a creepy pasta xD
What I had heard was that one of the girls was experiencing hallucinations that looked remarkablely similar to what Slenderman "looks like" so when she saw pictures of him online, she became convinced he was actually real. I feel that we as a society really-really need to take mental health more seriously and do our best to accept "the true nature of reality" so that situations like these won't occur. It doesn't take much to mess a brain up. Our neuro-chemistry is very delicate.
This is my hometown. Thank you for getting the pronunciation correct. This was so surreal when it happened and was an absolute media circus. Thank you for treating this with candor and skepticism. Not everyone’s coverage was so grounded. It is wonderful to hear Payton is doing well.
This is the most in depth video I’ve seen on the motive and lore side. I really enjoyed listening to you talk about the Slenderman mythos, as it’s something I personally am really interested in. Then we went back to reality. I hope all of them are getting the help they need
my partner and I watched hours of footage of the police interviews and news clips for a case study she was doing. it's tragic stuff, but in one of the news clips someone says "they wanted to go to the slendermansion with the creepypastas" and I completely lost it when they said that, it's the funniest way to phrase their motivations
I've seen this covered on either EWU or one of those other true crime channels. I was slightly afraid of just another retelling, but your video is way more than that. It enhances and digs deeper if you already know the events and have seen the police interrogation. Your Lore Lodge lens that you look through when covering a topic is what keeps bringing me back for more. I love the way you two write out the script for your videos. It has a great flow to it while dumping tons of information without overloading/overwhelming the viewer.
The EWU video is fantastic. However I think the breakdown of the interrogation makes them out to be more attention-seeking than actually insane, which maybe makes it even scarier? Idk
i've always found this case really saddening. i was into creepypasta at their age (altho i'm 2 years older than they are -- i was 14 in 2014) and i remember this incident really killing the scene for a while. i read a lot of the "all of the creepypastas live in the Slender Mansion and also regularly fight zalgo" type fanfics, and I even tried my hand at writing one myself (went absolutely nowhere. the document died with my last computer and i'm okay with that) but i remember a lot of the circles i ran in quieting down a considerable amount after this happened. i even stopped listening to narrations for a while, picked it back up in 2016, and dropped it again because I couldn't stop thinking about this case. it took me a while to comfortably get back into creepypasta, even a little, now that i'm in my early 20s.
I appreciate you breaking down the Slenderman mythos in such detail, because I will admit when I heard about this case the first few times I did have a moment of thinking "how dumb are these kids? it's not that hard to tell that this is just a story and Slendy doesn't really exist" but after hearing how deep the mythos actually goes, I can understand it a little better now plus I now understand how insensitive my first response was since there is in fact mental illness involved and I should've been more mindful of that
I remember hearing about this case when it happened, and never knew about any of the mental disabilities the two girls had. While of course what they did was awful, I'm glad they might be able to get any help they need.
This may be one of those stories that everyone’s done, but this is the first one I’ve seen that dives into the pseudo-history parts of the Slenderman mythos. Very on brand for the Lore Lodge, and that’s why I love coming here 😊
Hearing you talk about how you believed some stupid stuff as a kid reminded me of when Lost Tapes was airing on Animal Planet and, being the dumb kid that I was, I thought that that was actual found footage of cryptids that they were airing. Thank God I wasn’t on the Internet back then, otherwise I would have found myself going down some really strange rabbit holes.
@@carlycrays2831 I agree: a lot of children probably got confused and unnecessarily frightened because most parents probably only associated Animal Planet with educational documentaries and shows about animals being rescued and rehabilitated and, therefore, did not think to really look into what their kids were actually watching. Not to mention, there were these pseudo-documentaries like the ones about mermaids that got a lot of flack for being insufficiently clear that it was fiction presented in a documentary-style.
I'm from Wisconsin, so I'm very familiar with this case. I just couldn't believe that something like this could happen so close to home. It's kind of unfair, but this really put a black spot on any Slender horror for me. Something so heinous to someone innocent, and all they can't even take responsibility for it.
I remember this story when it first broke out. I’m a 2000’s baby so I was about the same age as them and had an almost crippling fear of Slenderman. A friend of mine was deeply interested in the old creepypastas of that era like Jeff The Killer, Laughing Jack, Ben Drowned, etc. and I think that influenced my fear a lot. I don’t remember exactly when it changed, but this story may very well have shook the fear out of me for some odd reason. It wasn’t until watching this video that I learned that nobody died, I very well thought the poor girl did die. Thank you for talking about this, Lore Lodge.
Regarding the Mansion thing: I'm the same age as them, and I was reading the same fan fiction about Slenderman and his proxies, so. From what I remember, there was a lot of it on Quotev (since that's the site I read on) and in a lot of the stories, the proxies were basically adopted kids and young adults taken in by Slenderman. It was very appealing to kids who, for whatever reason, were unhappy at home - and a lot of kids that age *are* unhappy at home, even when they have generally good home lives, just because that time is rough psychologically. So I can definitely see how, if they were feeling lonely and unhappy, they would've been drawn to this guy who, in a lot of writing, was depicted more as a fatherly figure than something evil - it was found family a la fun horror characters, and that can be very entrancing to people that age.
This is always such a horrible story to hear. And I’m really sad it’s how a lot of people initially learned about Slenderman. He’s a very interesting urban legend and I had no idea he had this whole alternate history document thing going on. That’s amazing. But yeah, combine that with psychosis that isn’t being treated properly and you’ll get something super ugly. A part of me can’t help but despise the girls responsible, but the other part of me is glad they’re at least getting help. I hope their mental states have improved.
Besides being a respectful discussion of the crime, I appreciate that this went into the shift in the popular Slenderman mythos from "unstoppable eldritch horror with a long terrifying history" to "he hangs out in a mansion full of kewl murder bois". That feels like a very key part of the story that's glossed over in a lot of retellings. Also, agreed on the NJ Turnpike as a New Jersey native. We all drive like we're equally driving at the Le Mans 24 Hours and trying to evade the Jersey Devil. It sucks.
Thanks for doing this bro! As a Wisconsin native this story was EVERYWHERE for a while and it really seemed to spook some kids I knew. I love Slenderman and I miss the content based around him since that dude sold the rights to thar production company. Congratulations on your shoes!
In 2014-2015, I was really into the whole creepypasta thing. I was in a weird state mental health wise, and while I knew people on the internet had created creepypasta as a work of fiction, I still one hundred percent believed in slenderman, jeff the killer, the rake, etc. This entirely stemmed from my love of fanfiction and fanart, so there are chances I read some of the same fanfics these girls had read. I'm just sort of speculating here, and don't know anything about the attack aside from what is in this video, but their desire to be 'proxies' might not have been about just Slenderman. A lot of creepypasta fanfiction has a sort of, idk, club house vibe to it. As in, at Slenderman's supposed mansion, there are a bunch of other 'creepypastas' living there, like Jeff the killer, ticci toby, eyeless jack, ben drowned etc. But to actually live in the mansion you'd have to be selected by Slenderman after comitting some kind of murder or violent assault. Then, once in the mansion, you'd meet up with all these other creepypastas and, in pretty much every fanfiction I remember reading, it was some kind of cult club house with no real end goal (if there was some nefarious plot, I can't remember what it was). All they'd do is go around murdering people every so often and that's about it. Again, just speculation, but that might have been the end goal of these girls. Living in a mansion with a bunch of murderers might have been an appealing to them.
Ey my hometown, nice vid 🥰 If you want something else weird to explore here, there’s tunnels under the city. No one really talks about it but at a bar I used to work at there were tunnels carved into the cement walls. One lead in the direction of the fire station, the other towards the bank. I asked the owner what they were and he said he thought they might have been used for prohibition, but who knows? I had a DJ quit because he kept seeing a child down there and it scared him enough to GTFO. Waukesha’s an interesting place.
I remember being around the same age or younger as these girls when all the creepyasta hype was all over the place (Jeff the Killer, Slenderman, etc.). My friends and I would play by drawing the famous Slenderman posters and creating our own characters, but there was never a point in which we thought harming someone would be a) something we needed to do and b) a rational excuse for any federal crime. However, my point isn't that we were smarter than them or anything like that- in fact, I think it's important to always teach children about what they may see and interact with on the internet, especially since it's more integrated into our everyday life (school, work, entertainment). Every child nowadays is equipped with a phone. It's great that we now have modern child restrictions but they will not always protect younger users, and let's be honest: us kids were still able to disable them when our parents didn't notice. That's why it's so important to: teach children that there is media that are pure fiction; encourage creators to make it blatantly clear to audiences that their work is not real/not fitting for children; and be stricter on parents in terms of how they cyberprotect their children on the internet.
I remember when this went down. I was really into creepypasta at the time, just a baby horror fan, probably about 15 years old. I remember being so horrified and repulsed that it had happened at all, but also terrified, as only an autistic 15 year old can be, that I would somehow go to jail for reading scary stories on the internet. It's still one of the most disturbing events in my memory, and I'm so so glad that Peyton survived.
Hi! I have been obsessed with this whole method for about 10 to 12 years, since I was a small child. Spoilers for marble hornets ahead. - “Hoodie and Masky” were not ‘proxy’ characters. They worked against him. - the fanfiction of the time was VERY obsessed with “all of the creepypastas live in a mansion and have a great time.” Very very common trope. It was also a common trope to say that the mansion was in an undescribed forest, anywhere you wanted it to be. Yeah. I know a LOT about this. These girls tried to kill in order to “go to the mansion” and meet fictional killers and creepypastas, such as Jeff the Killer, Smile Dog, or the Rake.
I legit thought I was being hunted by the Slenderman once. I don't think I've ever been that terrified in my entire life. Seeing the Slenderman standing over you while everything burns while dreaming is utterly terrifying.
I discovered you Aiden, from your Missing 411 videos, and im staying because of these videos of various spooky/mysterious topics that I've been seeing lately. Keep it up, you're becoming one of my favorite spooky channels ❤
I remember hearing about this case and my mom being worried about it because my some of my friends and I at the time were really into the fandom and creepy pastas. She was worried we thought it was real too 😬
When ever one of these videos come out i get so excited. I listen to them like a podcast while doing work and other boring stuff. Keep them coming I love the lore loge!
Just found your channel a week ago, and subbed immediately. I’ve really enjoyed the long form content, and the collaborations! Gives me a great listening plan for long workdays! Thanks!
I actually live in waukesha and used to live only a few minutes from the location of the stabbing. It's a very surreal feeling knowing that something this horrible happened not far from my own residence. I believe that a housing development went up nearby/ over the location and I remember discussing with my spouse if people buying those homes are/would be informed of this event.
It's honestly really frightening how close I was to these girls' mental states back in middle school. Even though by the time I'd gotten into creepypasta and stuff, they had already committed the crime, plenty of my friends had frighteningly similar aspirations as them, to become proxies. Myself included. Of course, neither me nor my friends ever ended up on the news for doing something like that, and we've since grown out of it, it's still frightening to know exactly what communities those girls were in. And how easy it is/was to fall into their pipeline of thinking.
i remember going to college not far from the area this happened at the whole situation was almost taboo to talk about because so many local students knew the victims/their families. Crazy stuff.
I live in Waukesha. I’m excited he got it right. I was waiting for Wak-EE-sha like out of town journalists do so often. Although, his version of Potawatomi does feel legit based on pronunciations other Algonquin based groups. Like is the way we say it now just an evolution from the real thing being butchered by white people for a couple hundred years.
this story had always felt incredibly eerie because it happened around when i discovered creepy pasta/my enjoyment of horror and i live about 25 minutes from where it happened
I can just imagine someone in early american settler days coming to work sober and his foreman is just like: "By Jove! Do ye wanna be snatched by the Hide-Behind? Have a whiskey boy!"
as someone who was very into creepypastas at that time, i remember a LOT of fanfiction would talk about slenderman's mansion, basically just his home base. i never saw any explicit stuff for him specifically but other creepypastas....yea. it wouldn't surprise me. i remember specifically there was this idea that the other creepypasta characters lived in slenderman's mansion and that the people slenderman took (who lived anyway) also lived there and did his bidding. not really specific on what that bidding was other than to lure in more people i remember this case when it happened and it actually turned me off of creepypasta for a bit, it was just so shocking to me that they were my age and did that... i got really worried about the people i was associating with lmao
It definitely doesn’t seem to have been super common, but I talked to some people who remembered reading some explicit stuff based around the mansion so I had to consider the possibility
some days i have no energy to watch a full video.... but then i convince myself that i need to just hear what horribly delightful pun you're going to make at the begining of the episode.... and then i'm listening and cleaning or cooking and doing the things i need to get done LOL
Pontiac’s War was in 1763 following the French and Indian War. Fun fact, the war included what may be the deadliest game of lacrosse in recorded history. Look up the Battle of Michilimackinac.
We definitely need more of Slenderman and The Rake in this world. Terrifying isn’t good enough anymore. It must also be flat out creepy as hell. We actually have TV shows where groups of people supposedly go out searching for Bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs. Go ahead. Get your friends together and go searching through the forest for the Rake. There isn’t enough toilet paper in five Walmarts.
Crazy what the human body can endure. More crazy is how Aidan can endure MindUnveild's Lunatic followers. You guys make Alex Jones look like a scientist.
@@angrynapolean3820it’s because it’s his job. Believe me a very average dude could walk out of the pentagon and blow your mind. I could at 18 years old the technology I was seeing as a damn intern. You got no idea what’s out there brother. Jones runs with every story. He’s bound to hit a few. Nobody else is trying to do that.
This is just awful. Why do parents not take more note of what their children are doing or thinking. One wonders if the parents of these two girls ever sat down and had conversations with them, went shopping, took holidays, did family things together. Apart from the mental health issues it seems to me that both girls were very 'isolated' from the 'real' world, and this gives me the impression that there was little or no normal family life.
16:13 Not to be “that guy” but that seems more like an Indrid Cold (The grinning man) sighting then a slender sighting. The grinning man is often associated with aliens, MIBs, and even the mothman. It is said he goes by the name “Indrid Cold”. He even got a Fallout 76 cameo.
incredible video, as always Aiden, the one thing that I always want to clarify that you got a little off in the mythos though, as a die hard Marble Hornets fan (and a hater of what creepypasta fans did to their characters) is that the concept of slendermans proxies doesn't originate from Marble Hornets. Within Marble Hornets, while the Masked man and hooded man are morally complicated and not good people, they hate the slenderman and are explicitly not working for him. The creepypasta fandom is wholly responsible for the idea of slenderman having proxies by not actually understanding the series and misinterpreting things really heavily, which I suppose also helps to show how these girls could have ended up believing in him the way they did. If an entire group of people could misinterpret characters so heavily as to get their roles and relationship to the slenderman that wrong, it's not as hard to understand how these kids could start believing some scary things about him. Once again though, great episode, as someone who grew up watching Marble Hornets as it was posted, and who was heavily involved in creepypastas and horror, I remember watching this case absolutely horrified at how we'd ended up there.
I'm not going to go into much detail, but I was once "friends" with a girl who was an attempted copycat of this story, and thought she could actually "get the job done" as a 14y/o. However, she was super dumb, and bragged about her whole plot to sacrifice me while we were at school, and was obviously caught. I was the last one to know as the police didn't find it important to let the target of a premeditated murder plot know the girl who lived a few blocks from her wanted to kill her. I found out from the friend who took what she heard to my principal, counselor, and also the police. It was something I learned 5 years after the fact that it was such a hot topic, all the middle schools in my town knew about it, and yet, no one thought to tell me for an obscene amount of time. Still something I suppress as I feel very detached from the situation based on how it was handled, and I was referred to as a victim, when I knew nothing about the situation, even after the girl was admitted to a mental hospital, and released months later. And why it was such a huge issue I wasn't told; I ran into the girl several times after she was released, not knowing what she wanted to do to me, and she still lived in my neighborhood. Like I said, I'm not going to go into all the little details, but seeing this video brought that odd little story up. And I did know the girl believed in creepypastas, but I genuinely thought she was joking around. Unfortunately, she was not
I must say: thank you for bringing up the possibility of the girls being influenced by fanfiction! I thought the same because I never heard of a mansion being part of the mythos except in fanfiction, which this content makes it out to be as some great place to be in (like all outcasts and edgy people are welcome). Not that is bad that the headcanon exist, can be an interesting concept to work with, but sometimes gave me the impression that some people took it as a fantasy escapade. Never heard any RUclipsr bring up this point, so salute you!
In 2014 i was driving through nevada in the middle of the night listening to coast to coast. Bad idea tbh. The guest argued that slender man is real, a terrestrial cephalopod. My cars cam sensor acted up periodically, sometimes killing the car, and had an episode at that time. 💀 Terrible night
It may have already been pointed out but the picture with 3 people in the mirror was taken in the myrtles plantation in Louisiana (its got its own interesting history) .... but its kinda cool to see it be included in a story like this
This story always makes me viscerally mad that the two girls could be so viciously cruel. I know they claimed the whole insanity thing but the fact that they never stopped for half a second and rethought what they were doing. Disgusting girls but so glad the victim lived.
These girls were teenagers. Even seven-year-olds can tell that Slenderman is fiction. They definitely got off too light for what they tried to, it was all due to sadism and morbid curiosity.
I have to wonder if most of the sensationalism of this, and your horror, has to do with the fact that it is about 12-year-old girls. If this were about anyone else, an adult man, say - would it still have the same certain quality that makes you mad?
I had NO IDEA how deeply developed and convoluted the slenderman lore and mythos was HOLY SHIT! This is another good example of why not to believe everything you see cause it can be so close to reality that you just don’t question it!
Bro I was and grew up with kids with imaginations and obsessions. I don't think there needs to be any article or template for what they did. Me and my friends when I was 12 had a whole dogman headcannon. I never actually believed it, but me and my friends did pretend to, and never admitted to each other we were just making stuff up. So there could have potentially been one of us who legitimately believed it. My point is kids can completely nake up a head cannon about something they like and potentially run with it to extremes. Looking back on how i thought then, i can see where an adult might think there had to be a source but to me I'd assume they came up with it by themselves.
I loved the Slenderman mythos so much until this happened, to the point that I ran a Slenderman-based campaign in my roleplay game in 2012. (It was inspired by a comment on TV Tropes about Slendy possibly being a tree god gone mad; I played Herne the Hunter, basically, in the game and had to do something with that. In the end Slendy was carried off by the Wild Hunt. Good times.) I’m so glad Peyton is thriving. I’m grateful, too, that other creepypastas haven’t crept into reality that way.
One of the girls, if i remember right, was diagnosed with schizophrenia that contributed to their actions. She was noticeably disturbed and there is no way the parents didnt notice it.
Oh Creepypastas, I remember having nightmares every night I went to bed, eventually I tried to keep myself from reading them because everytime I read them it felt like they would jump out of the screen suddenly live with me in the small apartment my parents and I lived in. I never slept alone until my brother was born and even then the first night I couldnt sleep because I was CONVINCED that one of the monsters would take me. I dont remember most of it but all I can remember was the absolute terror I lived in for almost 6 years I think? I wouldnt wish this type of thing on anyone tbh.
When I was 12 I believed I was an interdimensional princess sent to Earth because of a terrible tragedy, so, yeah, Slenderman being real doesn't feel too far-fetched. When I first found Slenderman, I absolutely believed that all of the blog-type first-hand accounts were real, if not slightly exaggerated like people do on the internet. I watched Marble Hornets as it came out, and I honestly feel like I was totally spoiled on what a good creepypasta should be; very little of that type of content I consume comes even close to the early Slenderman mythos.
Such beliefs tend to be a person's way of dealing with trauma. Imagining, pretending..fine. but flat out believing lends to credence of something deeper going on. In which case, I hope you got help!
First time I heard about slenderman, was in the very early days, and with the context of the creation of it. I was going to bed that night, and the lights were out, and the thought popped into my head, if enough people believed in it, what if that brought it into existence? I was so scared I lay awake for hours crying. I was freaking 25 at the time, crying in fear of a made up boogy man. Slendy was scary back in the day, and I absolutly played the game and freaked out the entire time. Then drew them IRL and snuck around the apt complex hanging them up to scare the kids who were obsessed. No one stabbed anyone though. They treated it as a fun game, and then we all sorta moved on to other spooky things to scare ourselves with
I believed he was real when i was young. I had really bad insomnia so I would often stay up for 48 hours at a time, this plus my interest in slenderman spawned me seeing vague slenderman-y shapes out of the corner of my eye(or I at least thought they were) needless to say it maed me paranoid. I grew out of it pretty quick though.😅
Recommended this before but if you like horror stuff on RUclips, I recommend both the Magnus archives and old gods of Appalachia. They are both wonderful horror, anthology podcasts available on RUclips. Good stuff
I was never into creepypasta, but most of my friends were I spent a night with a few of them in a tent outside one of their houses, next to a nice wooded area I was in middle school at the time I remember when night came around, two of my friends wanted to summon one of the creepy pasta characters. I can't remember which one, I think it was jeff the killer. They had found some website on how to "summon" them, and so I stayed with one friend in the tent while the two others went out into the woods. They came back looking incredibly nervous, and when we asked what had happened, they said they had done the "ritual" for slenderman instead. Me and the other person who had stayed in the tent freaked out. I think we ended up moving to the house and sleeping there instead. Obviously nothing came of it, but it made for one of the most memorable sleep overs I've had. We definitely weren't the most mentally stable kids. I think all of us had some form of depression, anxiety, or both. But we still were mentally stable enough to know right from wrong, etc etc. I don't ever think those girls (my friends) would have done anything to hurt us. I ended up being friends with two out of the three of them up until I graduated, and still talk to one of them today. Even then though, hearing those stories and seeing those photos, with that child naivety of believing everything? Even I thought slenderman was going to come and get us that night, and I knew next to nothing about creepy pastas. I'm not excusing what those girls did. I feel sympathy for Payton, and I was very relieved when I heard that she was alive and well. But, I am not surprised that a couple of kids, in just the right (or rather, wrong) circumstances, ended up believing in slenderman, to the point where they did something that awful. Edit: I accidentally clicked the send button before I was done with my comment
I remember around that time a lot of people in my school feeding into the slender man craze, particularly outcast girls. It’s horrible what happened, but I’m glad nobody in my area tried the same thing.
😅yeeeessssss!! I agree!!! Where's the pictures! you guys should have kept showing them, but we just see you on the screen, sitting the exact same way, more and more often lately, ohhh yay! ... Lol 🎉🙄🎉....... 🙈🙃
If this is what happened in waukesha wisconsin (when I was a little kid) I live 30 mins from there and my gf lives like 10 mins walking from the park I was terrified it was such a scary thing to hear so close to me especially as a little kid I can't watch right now sadly I can't use another of data but have a great stream ill catch you guys live sometime
2 Things that must be said: 1. Your mental illness is not your fault BUT it is your responsibility. If you are a minor your parents also have a responsibility to keep your mental illness in check (talking to you, making sure you take your medicine, see a doctor if your condition changes, etc.). 2. Blaming fanfiction for attempted murder is like blaming school shootings on video games. These girls needed more supervision & their parents failed them.
Yep, you're supposed to monitor your kids online activities even without mental health coming into it, when your child has a 50/50 chance of having a mental health issue you have even more reason to. If I remember right one of the girls dads had schizophrenia, the girl was only diagnosed after the arrest...if there was a chance their daughter had the same condition they should have been looking for signs. I think the other was diagnosed high functioning autistic, so the defence team claimed she was "easily mislead" 🤦♀️
To elaborate on your first point, it's also society's and the government's responsibility to (1) understand mental health and (2) provide adequate resources for treating mental health issues.
For #1, people who ignorantly tell depressed people to "stop being dramatic" or "just stop being so sad and try looking on the bright side" for example only make things worse by instilling a sense of guilt for not being able to function like a typical person when they shouldn't be expected to.
And for #2, plenty of people can't be solely responsible for their own mental health issues. Think of severe neurological disorders such as autism which require a dedicated caretaker just for someone affected to be able to perform basic tasks. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of mentally ill people who were left to their own devices and eventually "took responsibility" for their condition in their own way by committing horrible crimes. With a bit of help and direction to find a more healthy outlet for their symptoms, some of those people could've avoided a lot of suffering for themselves and others.
And blaming the weapon of choice to do the deed aswell.
I have to push back a bit on #2. I don't think fanfiction solely led these girls to murder, but I do think that some kids really have a hard time telling reality from fiction. And when that happens, the parents need to be aware of what the kids are consuming and steer them towards more positive things.
And as he pointed out in this video, it is very possible they were being encouraged by someone else in the fanfiction community or at least being led on.
@@mrpickles619depressed person here
I get your example but sometimes saying stop being dramatic is the best thing for you
As for the autism bit I am a sperg and at the moment could probably function like a normal human if I dodnt have other stuff going on
Kind of weird, but things like this make me so glad for cellphones. The cyclist was able to call for help. I was watching an old murder mystery show, and when someone staggered out of the woods bleeding, the person who saw them had to leave them there, to run and go find somewhere to call for help. Like, leave the person bleeding out to ride their bike back to town. Say what you want about tech addiction, but response time matters, and a way to call for help is huge
Kids that grew up in the internet age will really never understand having to call your parents once you got to your friends' house to let them know you got there okay - and the amount of trust it showed when they stopped asking you to call!
That cyclist was something else. He sees a little girl bleeding to death from stab wounds and he not only calls for help but then stays with her despite the obvious threat that her attackers might still be in the area.
My great great uncle died in the 30s because he was shot in the leg and bled out. He was crossing under a barbed wire fence with his brother to go hunting and passed the rifle through the wire. It got caught on the wire and fired and hit him in the leg.
His brother had to carry him two miles back to their house and then run another two miles to the nearest neighbor who had a car because no one in their neighborhood had a phone. They drove him to the hospital, but by the time they got there, he had bled out, and the floorboards of the car were filled with blood.
If one of their neighbors had a phone, they could have maybe stopped the bleeding while the ambulance got there.
@@Slinky_Loki1967 I'm so sorry for your families loss, my family lost my great uncle in WWII. My mom still has the book of poetry his mom wrote about his going to war, losing him, and life after. Those stories are hard sometimes, but they're written into our dna and I believe they're important to pass down
The tech addiction is only a problem because of smartphones. You don't need a phone with internet to help someone in the woods.
Ah, Creepypasta. 15-16 year old me's hyperfixation. For context, a lot of fanfiction wrote the mansion as sort of a "found family" type of living arrangement, where the famous creepypastas lived in a manner similar to siblings, with Slenderman being the head of the house/a sort of father figure. The Creeps were specifically portrayed as acting like a real family. Many of the characters came from broken homes, and/or had mental health issues. They often werent portrayed as the wicked characters they are. Rather, they were portrayed as regular people, just with problems.
As a teen, having lived in an abusive/neglectful family, and suffering from a lot of complications from mental illness and disability, it sounded like heaven. A whole house of "siblings" that took care of and respected each other? A parental figure that wanted their adoptive children to thrive and be safe? It sounds amazing. I would have killed to have family that cared about me and my mental health struggles.
I have distinctive memories of staring out the window during my morning science class in 10th grade, mentally begging slenderman to come take me there. I wanted an escape. It's really sad, and I can look back on this time in my life and take pity on the sad and sick person that I had become due to the circumstances. I'm doing a lot better now.
I'm so sorry you had such a troubling upbringing. I hope you find solace in the knowledge that you were not alone; many of us grew up in VERY less than ideal households.😔 I'm glad you're doing much better now.🤗
You weren't alone. Only I wasn't even in an abusive family. I'm just autistic and have ADHD and I had friends, but I never felt like I really belonged anywhere. I had depression and anxiety and I was lonely as hell despite having loving, caring parents. Though at the time, my dad was having to live and work away from us, and what was supposed to be a year at most turned into 4. My entire high school, I didn't have my dad. My mom was depressed, though to her credit she did get up, make us food, make sure we were okay and taken care of. But...she kinda shut down for a little bit.
I was just one of those cringe kids.
To any of Mind Unveiled's supporters here trying to tank this video before it goes live (bros we can see the analytics), at least wait until after its feasible for you to have watched it. Especially nasty for y’all to be doing that on a video about attempted murder.
crazy what the human body can endure. More crazy is how Aidan can endure MindUnveild's Lunatic followers. You guys make Alex Jones look like a scientist.
Mind Unveiled probably does like 20 grams of meth a day to keep coming up with that amount of dumb-fuckery.
Lmfao, so there is some drama I need to catch up on, nice.
Good to see they're as belligerent as they are ignorant.
I'll solve this right now. Anyone who messes with Aiden is not cool. You don't wanna be not cool do ya?
I remember hearing about this years ago. Especially with things like Marble Hornets, DarkHarvest, EverymanHYBRID, etc. were on going still back then, too. It's appalling these two girls weren't watched over better by their families, especially with what they were getting into. Much more so that something fictional can make them do something so heinous to one of their own friends. The victim definitely didn't deserve this and the creator of Slenderman especially did not want this. I'm glad the victim survived all of this but I also can't imagine the trauma this has probably inflicted in the end.
I agree that letting a young girl (with a learning disability that makes it hard for her to separate reality from fiction) have unsupervised internet access: is downright negligent.
I think the thing is, a lot of people even today don't understand how these fan communities can be
I remember playing some Roblox slender man game when I was 12 and I mentioned the game to my grandma and she said she didn't want me to play it. Real boomer behavior. Still funny to me now none the less.
To be fair, kids getting into internet creepypastas isn’t an instant red flag for “they’re gonna murder their best friend”
My favorite part of this video was that in between two cuts, the doggo was like, "No, I must be in your lap now."
He’s very insistent
There's a concept in the paranormal called a tulpa. The idea that enough people thinking of something can manifest it into reality. That's why even though we know slenderman was created on a message board in 2009-2010, people actually believe in him and even report sightings. My way to debunk the existence of tulpas is the fact Spiderman isn't seen swinging around Manhattan. Spiderman occupies far more brains than anything ever claimed to be a tulpa.
ahem
ruclips.net/video/KpBHE9en89w/видео.html
Do you think the sheer collective belief that something is real is the thing that does it? Like, we all know that Spider-Man isn't real, he's a character in a comic book. I have no doubt that loads of people believe in stuff like Bigfoot and Slenderman, on the other hand, and so make it into reality through the tulpa method. Not saying I think it's true, just some food for thought.
@@Dex-ik4js Maybe? People know that Slenderman is internet mythology the same way people know Spider-man is a comic book though. Those two girls crossed over into belief, but given the decades he's been around and the millions of kids who grew up with him it could have happened with Spider-man too. One example of a tulpa I read about that's my basis of understanding is an author who wrote a horror novel featuring entities made of shadow. Supposedly his house became haunted by shadow entities and they persisted even after he died. That guy knew they were the creation of his own mind, but he spent a lot of time thinking about them writing the book. So if tulpas work the way I understand it then there should be a Spider-man in Manhattan. But if it's based on actual belief? I dunno. Camping in the woods where they filmed the Blair Witch Project would be a good test of that theory. People got tricked back in '99 into thinking that movie was made from actual tapes found in the woods. That's why it was a huge hit. People are aware of viral marketing now, but back then it was new and people were naive. Millions believed The Blair Witch was real.
Thats not exactly how it works, you would need to truly believe it exists, not just know about it and have it occupy some of your thoughts. Thoughtforms, egregires, tulpas, etc are more complex then that and esotericism has much more depth than that, and like all things of this nature, are not easily proven or disproven by their very nature as you cannot prove the existence of something more spiritually inclined within a material framework.
Okay but the problem with that is that most people don't believe that Spiderman is real.
The entire idea of a tulpa is that people need to believe it's real for it to become real.
"Be very clear: Hans Holbein the Younger did not die in a Slenderman attack."
We need an "Aidan out of context".
Slendy fanfic where he eats child predators and returns the victims to their families
That sounds nice. I'd probably read that. A vigilante Slenderman that kills predators and safely returns children to their respective families... I LOVE IT!!! START WRITING!
My father once said that there's no one crueler than teenage girls.
Like most things my late father said, he was absolutely right.
Omg totally!!! Like omg, Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Mengele, they got nothin on teenage girls! Your dad so smart he must slay so hard 100%!!!
@@jzdude01 He was speaking in general terms.
And sadly he's dead.
@@jzdude01is this guy simping for teenage girls?
@barelyillegal2866 Why were you playing with teenage girls...?
this story is so disturbing. i was around their age when this happened. even though we knew it wasn’t real, kids were terrified of the story. we had a hiking field trip that year for all middle school students. on our way there multiple teachers had to tell kids to stop talking about it because of how panicked some of the younger kids got
Same here
I worked at a middle school as a teaching assistant at the time. I had to show the kids the old forum post and explain the history of Slenderman because so many of them thought this story meant it was real.
I kinda feel bad for the original guy who drew em and possibly saw this and felt responsible for it
@@darkshotgun209 People doing batshit insane things for the sake of imaginary beings is nothing new, religions have been around for a long time after all and most, if not all, of them were born from just imaginary stories of ancient people trying to understand the world around them.
I remember going on a hike with my class around a local college campus. My friends and I were definitely the kinds of kids to take the piss, and I still remember every time we came across some paper laying in the trail we would jokingly say "oh no, a page!"
I remember this story. My mom had actually been worried by it because I had talked about how Slenderman scared me a few months prior. It’s quite horrific but I’m glad the girl survived this attack by some seriously sick individuals.
Yea, i remember watching on the News when i was 6-7
Okay this is some Mandela Effect shit because I distinctly remember these two girls SUCCESSFULLY murdering their friend. Like, that was what the whole news cycle was about. Attempted murder doesn't get nearly the same coverage.
@@MaraW1832 I remember them killing her.
@@cornpop8586same here. Maybe me and you are from a parallel universe
I was working at a middle school and some kids actually believed that Slenderman was real because of this. You could still find the original forum that created Slenderman and I had to show them that to convince them that no, Slenderman wasn't real
Step 1 kill
Step 2 ???
Step 3 fan fiction
Ngl it’s in my notes in much the same way
The parents of the murderous girls should be ashamed of themselves for not keeping a better eye on what their children were researching, and probably not telling them that fiction characters don't exist.
Easy to say. But no reasonable person would have seen this coming. I believed in dogman as a kid, being from Michigan. The song about it played all over every Halloween, and school busses would turn it way up for all the kids. Slenderman is no more inappropriate or scary than that, and had one of us kids killed another to try to bait the dogman or something, no one would be able to say it was the parents' fault with any validity. If you have kids, they've either done bad stuff you know isn't your fault but their's, or they do stuff you don't know about while you think you've got the perfect eye on them.
@@godwarrior3403 I suppose that’s true, I can’t say I’ve never believed in mythical creatures before, (mainly Bigfoot, Jersey Devil, and Melon Heads). However while I still believe some moderation from the parents should’ve been there. So many kids nowadays do so much behind their parent’s back so they don’t get in trouble. So I’ll retract my statement about parent responsibility.
@@Mr.SnekMeister One of the girl's turned out to have very early onset scizophrenia, inherited from her father but usually it's something that doesn't set in until late teen years, so they really had no idea. I think the other girl's parents were definitely partially responsible, but she also could have simply been gullible or easily frightened by the other girl's thoughts.
@@aff77141 Can Schizophrenia come early on in a child’s life?
@mandlgamer1785
It can come very early for many reasons and since it's also somewhat genetic
This is gonna be such a weird correction, but as someone who was also a 12 year old girl who was obsessed with creepypasta fanfic in a far more normal way, a vast majority of "Slender Mansion" content had slenderman as a father figure for whatever reader insert than a romantic partner. It was all the other murderers that tended to be the romantic interests. However, slenderman was not uncommon.
I just wanted to say that the Slenderman Mansion was a fairly popular headcanon around the peak Slenderman popularity.
It consisted of Slenderman owning a mansion in the woods with other popular characters (Jeff the Killer, Ticci Toby, Ben Drowned, Smile Dog, etc) living in a mansion in the woods together. Kind of sitcom-esque. A lot of stories and comics took place in this mansion and it was often depicted as a whacky family dynamic.
It was really popular on Wattpad and Quotev, and sites like that!
Just wanted to share that bit of information since I was heavily involved in the fandom at the time.
yeah, its still a relatively popular depiction today. you can find a lot of fan fictions that have a dynamic involving creepypastas living in a mansion, or even in the same town/city/forest. i remember reading a few (had a phase,) where the creepypastas had their own cabins dotted around the forest, and there was a main mansion in the centre. a sense of community within fucking serial killers.
@@beesley6252 Interesting that it's still a common thing. Yeah, I had a phase, but jumped ship after the stabbing. It made me realize that some of the people I was interacting with were taking it way too seriously.
I remember reading comics about it on Deviantart. Seeing the characters acting funny made me not as afraid of them anymore
@@zabrina1019 Same! It made them seem just kinda goofy, rather than the 'terrifying' killers they were! I remember this, like comic series. Something about a little girl demon named Lazarus, I think? That was my introduction to the trope, if I'm remembering correctly!
@@ellikat1750 Yeah, her name was Lazari. I don't remember the comic's name. I know the author changed the characters around later, so they were all OCs instead of common creepypastas
I have watched the police interview footage for these girls. It is so sad how one of the two was clearly very deeply mentally ill and was manipulated by the other to carry out these horrific acts. She was more or less entirely detached from reality and did not understand properly the consequences of what was happening and genuinely believed Slenderman was real, a thought that was planted into her head by the other girl who very clearly did not believe in it. Basically, this is the story of one little girl tricking another mentally ill little girl into stabbing her own best friend.
Omg exactly. I’m so annoyed by all the people that act like they were both evil! One of them was completely not in reality, and one was sick enough to convince the other to go along with everything.
Oh Hogwash.
Manipulation that took place over time.
Both were detached from reality, just one more than the other
I remembering being incredibly young and seeing one of the old creepypasta chain emails about a little girl who was abused and murdered and would haunt you in your tub if you didn't share her story with everyone you know. I believed that *so much* that I printed it out and read it aloud to my parents and younger sister at the dinner table that night, I was so scared and genuinely believed that if I didn't tell everyone I knew that me and my family were going to die at the hands of the sad abused demon girl. My family were christian fundamentalists so i also believed that like, the rapture was real and to take things very literally and very seriously. While i never attempted to kill anyone, hearing specifically Morgan say she did it bc she truly believed Slenderman would kill her and her whole family makes me wonder if their backgrounds weren't somewhat similar to mine. V good video, thank you!
Well the Rapture is real, it's just post-tribulation, so it's not gonna just happen randomly.
@@fatstrategist it depends on what faith you believe in or if you believe in any at all
@@tubalord3693 True, some people won't be raptured, haha
The story from 1966 is actually a near direct copy of an encounter of a similar sounding but completely different entity than Slenderman. This entity is known as the Grinning Man also known by the name Indrid Cold. He is better associated with the Mothman sightings as he was also encountered near Point Pleasant, West Virginia by a traveling salesman a few days before the Mothman sightings began. He's also apparently an extraterrestrial as the salesman reported him emerging from a cigar shaped craft.
So I wasn't the only one who thought of the Ginning Man in this video.
This video was so informative and thank you for not demonizing the 2 very young girls with severe mental illnesses. So many of the docu-series I've seen cover this story make them out to be these evil monsters, when in reality, they were two sick children whose parents failed them fucking miserably.
I remember hearing about this when I was really young, and even then, I was like... this thing comes from a fandom where there is a game where there was a mod that made him play the saxophone, why did they think it was real. Then I learned about mental illness!
Ya know, the slender man thing always freaked me out because of something my son went through. When he was maybe 2 or 3 he had a period where he would wake up at night screaming bloody murder. Eyes closed , completely beside himself. Nothing would snap him out of it while he would beat himself off the bars of his crib. We got him a firetruck bed in hopes of him getting through it with a big boy bed , or at least if he could come into our room if he woke up scared. Nothing helped until I covered his bed in a sheet. He eventually told us that a man named chip would crawl in through his window at night and tell him he was going to take him and if he didn't go with chip that chip would hurt his mom and dad. He never mentioned his clothes, but he told us chip had no face. Just black holes where his eyes and mouth would be. He was born in 07 so this was happening before slender man even became a thing and we'll before he was on the internet or influenced by scary movies or anything. I know it was probably something silly, but there was so much in that house that just didn't feel right. Door knobs turning on their own. Shadows walking down the hall or floors creaking. Horrible energy between me and my son's mom at the time, was some of our worst time. I'll never forget that shit.
That freaks me out man
I vaguely remember being about 3, and seeing a creature I called the bear man. My mom years later when I was an adult also reminded me of it. It was a tall wide shadow with red eyes I'd see outside of my bedroom window. Fast forward to when I was 16, my older sister moved into the house I lived in when I was 3 (hard to explain, a family home different relatives would rent at different times.) Her son, 3, was scared to death of the bathroom. Finally his mom asked him why and he said because of the man without a face. As he got older he explained he looked in the mirror and saw an all black figure with no facial features. Fast forward again, I'm 19, into the occult, and walking around town at midnight with my best friend. We're walking about 100 yards behind what looks to be another man on the sidewalk, but as we get closer and closer he looks like he's staying in the same spot. But we can see his legs moving. As we get closer still, it looks like he's changing height. Like really tall one second and like 3 feet the next. Me and my friend aren't saying a word and haven't acknowledged this man to each other at all yet. As we walk up on him, like 3 yards away, he's no longer a man, but a black smoky looking pair of hips and legs walking in place on the sidewalk. We walk right through it and it disappears. Finally I say "Is it just me or" and my friend cuts me off "We just saw a ghost." We circled ALL the way back around town, excited like a couple kids about this crazy thing, hoping we'd see it again if we gave it time to show up. It did. It stayed tall this time, and walked as smoothly and lifelike as any human. Swinging arms and everything, just back and forth under the streetlight. We watched it for at least a minute before it started crossing the street at us, first it had no face at all. Then, red eyes began to develop on it and I dragged my friend out of there. It wasn't too long after I found God, and repented of all that demonic crap. But, let's Fast forward again. I'm 28 at this point, staying with my aunt for a while because I fell on hard times. During this time I got angry at God, and went back to the occult even though I knew it was evil. Due to His mercy I believe, I never saw the creature, but I woke up one day and four seperate people had seen and been seeing what they described as a shadow looking person in something like a trench coat with an old timey hat. By this point I'd of course heard of the hat man, and heard he's often seen before someone dies. So I thought God had had enough of my back and forth and was letting me have the consequences of my actions. I repented, and haven't gone back to that darkness. My point is two fold, one, what your kid likely saw was a shadow person, they are real. I never heard one talk, but I have heard of them talking. The second point, is that God is real. And that if shadow people are around, there's some type of darkness you might not be aware of, or even be aware that it is indeed darkness. If there's any occult interest or beliefs, if there's any drugs, if you're a Christian who's straying, these are things I've personally seen bring the demonic around. And people will tell you to use sage, and different mystic practices to flush out negative energy and all that, but that's not how it works. Jesus Christ is the only way to get rid of the devil. If you don't believe, I recommend you pray to Him, and ask Him to help you seek Him. He says if you seek you will find, when you seek with all your heart. I'm living proof of that. Whatever brought that spirit around, assuming it wasn't just childhood imagination, is something spiritual in nature. And the Holy Spirit is the only way to fight it. The tension during that time isn't surprising either. Demons will always grab whatever weakness we have and work it to destroy us. That's why the bible says not to give the devil a foothold. And I'll leave off with this, something I keep having to remember myself: John 10:10 "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." Wish you the best, hope I wasn't too off-putting haha Ive just seen enough of this stuff to write a book I swear. And I consider it dead serious more than I consider it entertainment.
@@godwarrior3403Amen, happy to hear your story, it is kind of like mine. God bless!
Call a priest next time please
@@godwarrior3403please stop with the god bs...
32:28 as someone who was a really big fan of marble hornets it really irks me that ‘hoodie’ and ‘masky’ were always seen as proxies and followers to the operator they were actively working against slenderman in the series. kinda sets up how accurate and serious people took the creepypastas in the 2010s
When I first heard of Slender man, a friend from school was telling me about him. He failed to mention it was an internet story, and he left out that it had tentacle arms/multiple arms. I thought it was some psycho killer in our area who was killing and stealing their victims faces, and was wondering why the hell no media outlet was talking about this. Then a quick google search that night showed me it was just a creepy pasta xD
What I had heard was that one of the girls was experiencing hallucinations that looked remarkablely similar to what Slenderman "looks like" so when she saw pictures of him online, she became convinced he was actually real.
I feel that we as a society really-really need to take mental health more seriously and do our best to accept "the true nature of reality" so that situations like these won't occur.
It doesn't take much to mess a brain up. Our neuro-chemistry is very delicate.
This is my hometown. Thank you for getting the pronunciation correct.
This was so surreal when it happened and was an absolute media circus. Thank you for treating this with candor and skepticism. Not everyone’s coverage was so grounded. It is wonderful to hear Payton is doing well.
Love that there is always a preface with the indigenous history of the area for each story. Refreshing and very worthwhile touch.
This is the most in depth video I’ve seen on the motive and lore side. I really enjoyed listening to you talk about the Slenderman mythos, as it’s something I personally am really interested in. Then we went back to reality. I hope all of them are getting the help they need
my partner and I watched hours of footage of the police interviews and news clips for a case study she was doing. it's tragic stuff, but in one of the news clips someone says "they wanted to go to the slendermansion with the creepypastas" and I completely lost it when they said that, it's the funniest way to phrase their motivations
I've seen this covered on either EWU or one of those other true crime channels. I was slightly afraid of just another retelling, but your video is way more than that. It enhances and digs deeper if you already know the events and have seen the police interrogation. Your Lore Lodge lens that you look through when covering a topic is what keeps bringing me back for more. I love the way you two write out the script for your videos. It has a great flow to it while dumping tons of information without overloading/overwhelming the viewer.
The EWU video is fantastic. However I think the breakdown of the interrogation makes them out to be more attention-seeking than actually insane, which maybe makes it even scarier? Idk
i've always found this case really saddening. i was into creepypasta at their age (altho i'm 2 years older than they are -- i was 14 in 2014) and i remember this incident really killing the scene for a while. i read a lot of the "all of the creepypastas live in the Slender Mansion and also regularly fight zalgo" type fanfics, and I even tried my hand at writing one myself (went absolutely nowhere. the document died with my last computer and i'm okay with that) but i remember a lot of the circles i ran in quieting down a considerable amount after this happened. i even stopped listening to narrations for a while, picked it back up in 2016, and dropped it again because I couldn't stop thinking about this case. it took me a while to comfortably get back into creepypasta, even a little, now that i'm in my early 20s.
I appreciate you breaking down the Slenderman mythos in such detail, because I will admit when I heard about this case the first few times I did have a moment of thinking "how dumb are these kids? it's not that hard to tell that this is just a story and Slendy doesn't really exist"
but after hearing how deep the mythos actually goes, I can understand it a little better now
plus I now understand how insensitive my first response was since there is in fact mental illness involved and I should've been more mindful of that
growing up in a town 15 minutes away from there it was such an insane story it was in our school everywhere.
I remember hearing about this case when it happened, and never knew about any of the mental disabilities the two girls had. While of course what they did was awful, I'm glad they might be able to get any help they need.
They need a firing squad not help
This may be one of those stories that everyone’s done, but this is the first one I’ve seen that dives into the pseudo-history parts of the Slenderman mythos. Very on brand for the Lore Lodge, and that’s why I love coming here 😊
Hearing you talk about how you believed some stupid stuff as a kid reminded me of when Lost Tapes was airing on Animal Planet and, being the dumb kid that I was, I thought that that was actual found footage of cryptids that they were airing. Thank God I wasn’t on the Internet back then, otherwise I would have found myself going down some really strange rabbit holes.
God, I love Lost Tapes, but fuck, sometimes I look back and feel like it did more harm than good
@@carlycrays2831 I agree: a lot of children probably got confused and unnecessarily frightened because most parents probably only associated Animal Planet with educational documentaries and shows about animals being rescued and rehabilitated and, therefore, did not think to really look into what their kids were actually watching.
Not to mention, there were these pseudo-documentaries like the ones about mermaids that got a lot of flack for being insufficiently clear that it was fiction presented in a documentary-style.
thank you aiden for telling us about the real history of slenderman that mainstream historians are trying to hide!
I can't tell if you're trolling or not
I'm from Wisconsin, so I'm very familiar with this case. I just couldn't believe that something like this could happen so close to home. It's kind of unfair, but this really put a black spot on any Slender horror for me. Something so heinous to someone innocent, and all they can't even take responsibility for it.
I remember this story when it first broke out. I’m a 2000’s baby so I was about the same age as them and had an almost crippling fear of Slenderman. A friend of mine was deeply interested in the old creepypastas of that era like Jeff The Killer, Laughing Jack, Ben Drowned, etc. and I think that influenced my fear a lot.
I don’t remember exactly when it changed, but this story may very well have shook the fear out of me for some odd reason. It wasn’t until watching this video that I learned that nobody died, I very well thought the poor girl did die. Thank you for talking about this, Lore Lodge.
15:53 as a Connecticut native, this is fact. they drive like their car and health insurance will render them immortal
Regarding the Mansion thing:
I'm the same age as them, and I was reading the same fan fiction about Slenderman and his proxies, so. From what I remember, there was a lot of it on Quotev (since that's the site I read on) and in a lot of the stories, the proxies were basically adopted kids and young adults taken in by Slenderman. It was very appealing to kids who, for whatever reason, were unhappy at home - and a lot of kids that age *are* unhappy at home, even when they have generally good home lives, just because that time is rough psychologically.
So I can definitely see how, if they were feeling lonely and unhappy, they would've been drawn to this guy who, in a lot of writing, was depicted more as a fatherly figure than something evil - it was found family a la fun horror characters, and that can be very entrancing to people that age.
Ive never seen anyone touch on the fanfic aspect before. I picked up on it while watching a documentary, but it wasnt elaborated on. Great job man.
This is always such a horrible story to hear. And I’m really sad it’s how a lot of people initially learned about Slenderman. He’s a very interesting urban legend and I had no idea he had this whole alternate history document thing going on. That’s amazing. But yeah, combine that with psychosis that isn’t being treated properly and you’ll get something super ugly. A part of me can’t help but despise the girls responsible, but the other part of me is glad they’re at least getting help. I hope their mental states have improved.
They were both mentally ill at the time and listening to fan fiction that had images not appropriate for them
Aiden you pronounced Waukesha correctly!! I'm so proud. Everyone always butchers town names around here😂
Won’t lie by sheer chance someone pronounced it correctly in front of me the day before filming, I definitely had it wrong beforehand hsha
@@TheLoreLodge that's amazing 😂
Besides being a respectful discussion of the crime, I appreciate that this went into the shift in the popular Slenderman mythos from "unstoppable eldritch horror with a long terrifying history" to "he hangs out in a mansion full of kewl murder bois". That feels like a very key part of the story that's glossed over in a lot of retellings.
Also, agreed on the NJ Turnpike as a New Jersey native. We all drive like we're equally driving at the Le Mans 24 Hours and trying to evade the Jersey Devil. It sucks.
Thanks for doing this bro! As a Wisconsin native this story was EVERYWHERE for a while and it really seemed to spook some kids I knew. I love Slenderman and I miss the content based around him since that dude sold the rights to thar production company. Congratulations on your shoes!
In 2014-2015, I was really into the whole creepypasta thing. I was in a weird state mental health wise, and while I knew people on the internet had created creepypasta as a work of fiction, I still one hundred percent believed in slenderman, jeff the killer, the rake, etc. This entirely stemmed from my love of fanfiction and fanart, so there are chances I read some of the same fanfics these girls had read.
I'm just sort of speculating here, and don't know anything about the attack aside from what is in this video, but their desire to be 'proxies' might not have been about just Slenderman. A lot of creepypasta fanfiction has a sort of, idk, club house vibe to it. As in, at Slenderman's supposed mansion, there are a bunch of other 'creepypastas' living there, like Jeff the killer, ticci toby, eyeless jack, ben drowned etc. But to actually live in the mansion you'd have to be selected by Slenderman after comitting some kind of murder or violent assault. Then, once in the mansion, you'd meet up with all these other creepypastas and, in pretty much every fanfiction I remember reading, it was some kind of cult club house with no real end goal (if there was some nefarious plot, I can't remember what it was). All they'd do is go around murdering people every so often and that's about it. Again, just speculation, but that might have been the end goal of these girls. Living in a mansion with a bunch of murderers might have been an appealing to them.
No, living in a mansion surrounded by people who understood them was the appeal
Ey my hometown, nice vid 🥰 If you want something else weird to explore here, there’s tunnels under the city. No one really talks about it but at a bar I used to work at there were tunnels carved into the cement walls. One lead in the direction of the fire station, the other towards the bank. I asked the owner what they were and he said he thought they might have been used for prohibition, but who knows? I had a DJ quit because he kept seeing a child down there and it scared him enough to GTFO. Waukesha’s an interesting place.
Now this is interesting
That's actually pretty interesting 😮
This story is the reason why my mom and dad didn’t allow me on the internet unsupervised until I was in 6th grade
I remember being around the same age or younger as these girls when all the creepyasta hype was all over the place (Jeff the Killer, Slenderman, etc.). My friends and I would play by drawing the famous Slenderman posters and creating our own characters, but there was never a point in which we thought harming someone would be a) something we needed to do and b) a rational excuse for any federal crime.
However, my point isn't that we were smarter than them or anything like that- in fact, I think it's important to always teach children about what they may see and interact with on the internet, especially since it's more integrated into our everyday life (school, work, entertainment). Every child nowadays is equipped with a phone. It's great that we now have modern child restrictions but they will not always protect younger users, and let's be honest: us kids were still able to disable them when our parents didn't notice. That's why it's so important to: teach children that there is media that are pure fiction; encourage creators to make it blatantly clear to audiences that their work is not real/not fitting for children; and be stricter on parents in terms of how they cyberprotect their children on the internet.
I remember when this went down. I was really into creepypasta at the time, just a baby horror fan, probably about 15 years old. I remember being so horrified and repulsed that it had happened at all, but also terrified, as only an autistic 15 year old can be, that I would somehow go to jail for reading scary stories on the internet. It's still one of the most disturbing events in my memory, and I'm so so glad that Peyton survived.
As someone who grew up half an hour away from Waukesha, no matter how many times I hear about this case it never ceases to boggle my mind.
Hi! I have been obsessed with this whole method for about 10 to 12 years, since I was a small child. Spoilers for marble hornets ahead.
- “Hoodie and Masky” were not ‘proxy’ characters. They worked against him.
- the fanfiction of the time was VERY obsessed with “all of the creepypastas live in a mansion and have a great time.” Very very common trope. It was also a common trope to say that the mansion was in an undescribed forest, anywhere you wanted it to be.
Yeah. I know a LOT about this. These girls tried to kill in order to “go to the mansion” and meet fictional killers and creepypastas, such as Jeff the Killer, Smile Dog, or the Rake.
I legit thought I was being hunted by the Slenderman once.
I don't think I've ever been that terrified in my entire life. Seeing the Slenderman standing over you while everything burns while dreaming is utterly terrifying.
I discovered you Aiden, from your Missing 411 videos, and im staying because of these videos of various spooky/mysterious topics that I've been seeing lately. Keep it up, you're becoming one of my favorite spooky channels ❤
I remember hearing about this case and my mom being worried about it because my some of my friends and I at the time were really into the fandom and creepy pastas. She was worried we thought it was real too 😬
When ever one of these videos come out i get so excited. I listen to them like a podcast while doing work and other boring stuff. Keep them coming I love the lore loge!
Just found your channel a week ago, and subbed immediately. I’ve really enjoyed the long form content, and the collaborations! Gives me a great listening plan for long workdays!
Thanks!
I really can't express with simple words, how much I love this guy and the channel. Great stuff!
I actually live in waukesha and used to live only a few minutes from the location of the stabbing. It's a very surreal feeling knowing that something this horrible happened not far from my own residence. I believe that a housing development went up nearby/ over the location and I remember discussing with my spouse if people buying those homes are/would be informed of this event.
It's honestly really frightening how close I was to these girls' mental states back in middle school. Even though by the time I'd gotten into creepypasta and stuff, they had already committed the crime, plenty of my friends had frighteningly similar aspirations as them, to become proxies. Myself included. Of course, neither me nor my friends ever ended up on the news for doing something like that, and we've since grown out of it, it's still frightening to know exactly what communities those girls were in. And how easy it is/was to fall into their pipeline of thinking.
It's always fun to hear non-wisconsinites pronounce Wisconsin names haha
i remember going to college not far from the area this happened at the whole situation was almost taboo to talk about because so many local students knew the victims/their families. Crazy stuff.
😂 right? potAhwatamy???
I live in Waukesha. I’m excited he got it right. I was waiting for Wak-EE-sha like out of town journalists do so often. Although, his version of Potawatomi does feel legit based on pronunciations other Algonquin based groups. Like is the way we say it now just an evolution from the real thing being butchered by white people for a couple hundred years.
Glad you addressed this case. Great breakdown and analysis.
this story had always felt incredibly eerie because it happened around when i discovered creepy pasta/my enjoyment of horror and i live about 25 minutes from where it happened
I can just imagine someone in early american settler days coming to work sober and his foreman is just like:
"By Jove! Do ye wanna be snatched by the Hide-Behind? Have a whiskey boy!"
as someone who was very into creepypastas at that time, i remember a LOT of fanfiction would talk about slenderman's mansion, basically just his home base. i never saw any explicit stuff for him specifically but other creepypastas....yea. it wouldn't surprise me. i remember specifically there was this idea that the other creepypasta characters lived in slenderman's mansion and that the people slenderman took (who lived anyway) also lived there and did his bidding. not really specific on what that bidding was other than to lure in more people
i remember this case when it happened and it actually turned me off of creepypasta for a bit, it was just so shocking to me that they were my age and did that... i got really worried about the people i was associating with lmao
It definitely doesn’t seem to have been super common, but I talked to some people who remembered reading some explicit stuff based around the mansion so I had to consider the possibility
some days i have no energy to watch a full video.... but then i convince myself that i need to just hear what horribly delightful pun you're going to make at the begining of the episode.... and then i'm listening and cleaning or cooking and doing the things i need to get done LOL
Pontiac’s War was in 1763 following the French and Indian War. Fun fact, the war included what may be the deadliest game of lacrosse in recorded history. Look up the Battle of Michilimackinac.
We definitely need more of Slenderman and The Rake in this world. Terrifying isn’t good enough anymore. It must also be flat out creepy as hell.
We actually have TV shows where groups of people supposedly go out searching for Bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs.
Go ahead. Get your friends together and go searching through the forest for the Rake. There isn’t enough toilet paper in five Walmarts.
A hunt for the Rake or Slenderman will only end in disappointment.
@@crypto1223unless you have that one a-hole friend that sets the thing up and scares the bejeezus out of the rest of them
… Unless you’re the unlucky 3rd wheel.
@@crypto1223 not with my luck lol
@@crypto1223 JUST LIKE MY MARRIAGE
Crazy what the human body can endure. More crazy is how Aidan can endure MindUnveild's Lunatic followers. You guys make Alex Jones look like a scientist.
AJ was more correct than most scientists about certain topics between the years 2019-2022
@@angrynapolean3820it’s because it’s his job. Believe me a very average dude could walk out of the pentagon and blow your mind. I could at 18 years old the technology I was seeing as a damn intern. You got no idea what’s out there brother. Jones runs with every story. He’s bound to hit a few. Nobody else is trying to do that.
Happy second birthday to the channel! Can’t wait to watch the rest of the video
I actually didn't know a lot of that slenderman mythos even though I knew a lot about the character. I learned a lot from this
This is just awful. Why do parents not take more note of what their children are doing or thinking. One wonders if the parents of these two girls ever sat down and had conversations with them, went shopping, took holidays, did family things together. Apart from the mental health issues it seems to me that both girls were very 'isolated' from the 'real' world, and this gives me the impression that there was little or no normal family life.
16:13
Not to be “that guy” but that seems more like an Indrid Cold (The grinning man) sighting then a slender sighting. The grinning man is often associated with aliens, MIBs, and even the mothman. It is said he goes by the name “Indrid Cold”. He even got a Fallout 76 cameo.
Bingo. It's an exact duplicate of a Grinning Man sighting and it was two boys that saw him not two grown men.
incredible video, as always Aiden, the one thing that I always want to clarify that you got a little off in the mythos though, as a die hard Marble Hornets fan (and a hater of what creepypasta fans did to their characters) is that the concept of slendermans proxies doesn't originate from Marble Hornets. Within Marble Hornets, while the Masked man and hooded man are morally complicated and not good people, they hate the slenderman and are explicitly not working for him.
The creepypasta fandom is wholly responsible for the idea of slenderman having proxies by not actually understanding the series and misinterpreting things really heavily, which I suppose also helps to show how these girls could have ended up believing in him the way they did. If an entire group of people could misinterpret characters so heavily as to get their roles and relationship to the slenderman that wrong, it's not as hard to understand how these kids could start believing some scary things about him.
Once again though, great episode, as someone who grew up watching Marble Hornets as it was posted, and who was heavily involved in creepypastas and horror, I remember watching this case absolutely horrified at how we'd ended up there.
I'm not going to go into much detail, but I was once "friends" with a girl who was an attempted copycat of this story, and thought she could actually "get the job done" as a 14y/o. However, she was super dumb, and bragged about her whole plot to sacrifice me while we were at school, and was obviously caught. I was the last one to know as the police didn't find it important to let the target of a premeditated murder plot know the girl who lived a few blocks from her wanted to kill her. I found out from the friend who took what she heard to my principal, counselor, and also the police. It was something I learned 5 years after the fact that it was such a hot topic, all the middle schools in my town knew about it, and yet, no one thought to tell me for an obscene amount of time. Still something I suppress as I feel very detached from the situation based on how it was handled, and I was referred to as a victim, when I knew nothing about the situation, even after the girl was admitted to a mental hospital, and released months later. And why it was such a huge issue I wasn't told; I ran into the girl several times after she was released, not knowing what she wanted to do to me, and she still lived in my neighborhood.
Like I said, I'm not going to go into all the little details, but seeing this video brought that odd little story up. And I did know the girl believed in creepypastas, but I genuinely thought she was joking around. Unfortunately, she was not
I must say: thank you for bringing up the possibility of the girls being influenced by fanfiction! I thought the same because I never heard of a mansion being part of the mythos except in fanfiction, which this content makes it out to be as some great place to be in (like all outcasts and edgy people are welcome). Not that is bad that the headcanon exist, can be an interesting concept to work with, but sometimes gave me the impression that some people took it as a fantasy escapade. Never heard any RUclipsr bring up this point, so salute you!
In 2014 i was driving through nevada in the middle of the night listening to coast to coast. Bad idea tbh. The guest argued that slender man is real, a terrestrial cephalopod. My cars cam sensor acted up periodically, sometimes killing the car, and had an episode at that time. 💀 Terrible night
I would love to watch a video where you talked in depth about the Slenderman Mythos.
It may have already been pointed out but the picture with 3 people in the mirror was taken in the myrtles plantation in Louisiana (its got its own interesting history) .... but its kinda cool to see it be included in a story like this
im italian af and have never heard of creepy pasta
This story always makes me viscerally mad that the two girls could be so viciously cruel. I know they claimed the whole insanity thing but the fact that they never stopped for half a second and rethought what they were doing. Disgusting girls but so glad the victim lived.
I had no idea the girl lived! This is great!
These girls were teenagers. Even seven-year-olds can tell that Slenderman is fiction. They definitely got off too light for what they tried to, it was all due to sadism and morbid curiosity.
@@liamwashington6841 Looking at the victim vs. the perps too... You think jealousy about appearance had something to do with it too?
@@Morec0 ugly personalities create ugly people lol
I have to wonder if most of the sensationalism of this, and your horror, has to do with the fact that it is about 12-year-old girls. If this were about anyone else, an adult man, say - would it still have the same certain quality that makes you mad?
I had NO IDEA how deeply developed and convoluted the slenderman lore and mythos was HOLY SHIT! This is another good example of why not to believe everything you see cause it can be so close to reality that you just don’t question it!
13:46 That dog is adorable!
Bro I was and grew up with kids with imaginations and obsessions. I don't think there needs to be any article or template for what they did. Me and my friends when I was 12 had a whole dogman headcannon. I never actually believed it, but me and my friends did pretend to, and never admitted to each other we were just making stuff up. So there could have potentially been one of us who legitimately believed it. My point is kids can completely nake up a head cannon about something they like and potentially run with it to extremes. Looking back on how i thought then, i can see where an adult might think there had to be a source but to me I'd assume they came up with it by themselves.
I loved the Slenderman mythos so much until this happened, to the point that I ran a Slenderman-based campaign in my roleplay game in 2012. (It was inspired by a comment on TV Tropes about Slendy possibly being a tree god gone mad; I played Herne the Hunter, basically, in the game and had to do something with that. In the end Slendy was carried off by the Wild Hunt. Good times.)
I’m so glad Peyton is thriving. I’m grateful, too, that other creepypastas haven’t crept into reality that way.
I love this channel. Look down for 1 second to "cut" my diner pancake and look back up to a wild floof
Oh my god thank you so much Aidans. I remember asking for a slendussy video a month ago and now y’all delivered. May you be in gods good graces.
One of the girls, if i remember right, was diagnosed with schizophrenia that contributed to their actions. She was noticeably disturbed and there is no way the parents didnt notice it.
They definitely knew, and she was on medication at the time. I’m guessing they just didn’t realize how far this had gone.
Yeah, they knew because her father was also diagnosed.
Ah damn I’ve already seen this case the story and the interrogations, very sad case
The slenderman fandom will never recover
Oh Creepypastas, I remember having nightmares every night I went to bed, eventually I tried to keep myself from reading them because everytime I read them it felt like they would jump out of the screen suddenly live with me in the small apartment my parents and I lived in.
I never slept alone until my brother was born and even then the first night I couldnt sleep because I was CONVINCED that one of the monsters would take me.
I dont remember most of it but all I can remember was the absolute terror I lived in for almost 6 years I think? I wouldnt wish this type of thing on anyone tbh.
When I was 12 I believed I was an interdimensional princess sent to Earth because of a terrible tragedy, so, yeah, Slenderman being real doesn't feel too far-fetched.
When I first found Slenderman, I absolutely believed that all of the blog-type first-hand accounts were real, if not slightly exaggerated like people do on the internet. I watched Marble Hornets as it came out, and I honestly feel like I was totally spoiled on what a good creepypasta should be; very little of that type of content I consume comes even close to the early Slenderman mythos.
Such beliefs tend to be a person's way of dealing with trauma. Imagining, pretending..fine. but flat out believing lends to credence of something deeper going on. In which case, I hope you got help!
First time I heard about slenderman, was in the very early days, and with the context of the creation of it. I was going to bed that night, and the lights were out, and the thought popped into my head, if enough people believed in it, what if that brought it into existence?
I was so scared I lay awake for hours crying. I was freaking 25 at the time, crying in fear of a made up boogy man.
Slendy was scary back in the day, and I absolutly played the game and freaked out the entire time. Then drew them IRL and snuck around the apt complex hanging them up to scare the kids who were obsessed.
No one stabbed anyone though. They treated it as a fun game, and then we all sorta moved on to other spooky things to scare ourselves with
I used to believe as a child no one else had a soul, or was really alive, only automatons reacting to my actions
@@teaspoonsofpeanutbutter6425 America makes children way too adult. 12 is still a perfectly normal age to believe in fairy tales.
I believed he was real when i was young. I had really bad insomnia so I would often stay up for 48 hours at a time, this plus my interest in slenderman spawned me seeing vague slenderman-y shapes out of the corner of my eye(or I at least thought they were) needless to say it maed me paranoid. I grew out of it pretty quick though.😅
Recommended this before but if you like horror stuff on RUclips, I recommend both the Magnus archives and old gods of Appalachia. They are both wonderful horror, anthology podcasts available on RUclips. Good stuff
The Magnus Archives and their classification of fears really changed my worldview
I was never into creepypasta, but most of my friends were
I spent a night with a few of them in a tent outside one of their houses, next to a nice wooded area
I was in middle school at the time
I remember when night came around, two of my friends wanted to summon one of the creepy pasta characters. I can't remember which one, I think it was jeff the killer. They had found some website on how to "summon" them, and so I stayed with one friend in the tent while the two others went out into the woods.
They came back looking incredibly nervous, and when we asked what had happened, they said they had done the "ritual" for slenderman instead.
Me and the other person who had stayed in the tent freaked out. I think we ended up moving to the house and sleeping there instead.
Obviously nothing came of it, but it made for one of the most memorable sleep overs I've had.
We definitely weren't the most mentally stable kids. I think all of us had some form of depression, anxiety, or both. But we still were mentally stable enough to know right from wrong, etc etc.
I don't ever think those girls (my friends) would have done anything to hurt us. I ended up being friends with two out of the three of them up until I graduated, and still talk to one of them today.
Even then though, hearing those stories and seeing those photos, with that child naivety of believing everything? Even I thought slenderman was going to come and get us that night, and I knew next to nothing about creepy pastas.
I'm not excusing what those girls did. I feel sympathy for Payton, and I was very relieved when I heard that she was alive and well. But, I am not surprised that a couple of kids, in just the right (or rather, wrong) circumstances, ended up believing in slenderman, to the point where they did something that awful.
Edit: I accidentally clicked the send button before I was done with my comment
I remember around that time a lot of people in my school feeding into the slender man craze, particularly outcast girls. It’s horrible what happened, but I’m glad nobody in my area tried the same thing.
13:00 your editing is usually so good, why not show those art pieces you are comparing those shown before to?
😅yeeeessssss!! I agree!!! Where's the pictures! you guys should have kept showing them, but we just see you on the screen, sitting the exact same way, more and more often lately, ohhh yay! ... Lol
🎉🙄🎉....... 🙈🙃
If this is what happened in waukesha wisconsin (when I was a little kid) I live 30 mins from there and my gf lives like 10 mins walking from the park I was terrified it was such a scary thing to hear so close to me especially as a little kid
I can't watch right now sadly I can't use another of data but have a great stream ill catch you guys live sometime
I swear like 80% of the mad shit I hear about in america happens in wisconsin
@@NGRevenant your right it's crazy how much happens here
Thank you for a interesting and informative video. Love your channel ❤❤❤❤❤❤
Ooo... Loved this one. I never played much attention to Slenderman, because he seemed after my time, but you guys made it a very compelling story.