The Slenderman Stabbing | CreepCast

On May 31, 2014, in the quiet Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, twelve-year-old Payton Leutner was stabbed nineteen times by her two best friends. The girls had planned the murder for nearly a year, believing it was a sacrifice to Slender Man, a fictional internet monster. Payton was left for dead in the woods, but she crawled to a bike trail, was found by a passerby, and survived after a six-hour surgery. The attack was not a simple act of childhood cruelty—it was the tragic collision of untreated schizophrenia, a desperate friendship, and an online folklore that became dangerously real for two isolated girls.

The Girls Behind the Attack

Morgan Geyser had experienced disturbing visions since she was a toddler. She told her parents that ghosts hugged and bit her, claimed a character from an anime show named Seth felt real to the touch and slept in her bed, and regularly saw colors melting off walls. Psychologists would later diagnose her with schizophrenia—the same condition her father had, for which he stopped taking medication as a teen because he enjoyed the entities he saw. Morgan's behavior escalated: she barked at classmates, smuggled a rubber mallet into school for protection, picked scabs to write "die" in her own blood, and mutilated her dolls, drawing occult symbols on them. Her parents and school counselors dismissed these signs as quirky teenage behavior