What in the actual Hell?
Two 12-year-old girls from Waukesha, Wisconsin are being charged with first degree attempted murder after they stabbed one of their friends 19 times with a knife.
The duo had been planning it for months, and after a sleep-over they coaxed the victim into the woods where they attacked her, held her down, and stabbed her with a knife. The blade punctured her heart, pancreas, and stomach; and at one the blade missed a major artery by one milometer. Luckily, she was left for dead, but managed to escape to a nearby road where she was discovered by a bicyclist. She is listed as in stable condition at a local hospital.
The girls motive for the vicious assault was to appease Slender Man, a fictional character that is popular around the internet. They were quoted as saying that Slender Man appears to them in their dreams and they would prove he was real with the slaying, having become his proxies.
The attackers, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, are facing 65 years in prison if convicted.
Slender Man originated as an internet meme around 2009. He is often described and pictured as an unnaturally tall, skinny man with a blank face. His arms, which often look like tentacles, are used to abduct children.
He is a fictional character, he is not real. This horrifying attack on a child, perpetrated by two children will likely re-spark the media and social debate on whether or not horror culture spurs real life violence.
