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August 19, 2022
Kathleen Hale's Playlist for Her Book "Slenderman"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kathleen Hale's Slenderman is an exhaustively researched and compelling account of the Slenderman murder, a book that shockingly dispels the myths and rumors surrounding the case.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Searing . . . As the first researcher into the case to draw extensively from transcripts of vital records, Hale has produced what stands as the most accurate account to date of this horrifying episode. This is a must for true crime fans."
In her own words, here is Kathleen Hale's Book Notes music playlist for her book Slenderman:
In 2014, twelve year-olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier planned to honor “Slenderman,” a fictional Internet demon concocted on the creative writing website, “Creepypasta,” by killing Morgan’s best friend, Bella. They believed that, unless they sacrificed someone in Slenderman’s name, he would kill them and their families—and while each girl later blamed the other for choosing Bella as their specific target, it was decided, somehow, that their victim needed to be someone Morgan loved.
After stabbing Bella 19 times at Morgan’s 12th birthday party, Morgan planned to escape with Anissa and move into Slenderman’s house. Instead, the two were arrested and charged with attempted homicide. Miraculously, Bella had survived the attack—a fact that quickly got lost in media coverage of the case, which focused on Slenderman and the number of stab wounds at the expense of almost everything else. Morgan and Anissa’s crime became the perfect cautionary tale—a ghost story about the dangers of screen time. But for Morgan and Anissa, the real horror was just beginning.
In keeping with Wisconsin’s “tough on crime” laws, which prosecutes children as young as ten in adult court, the two were charged as adults. Together they faced more than one hundred years in prison. My book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, dispels myths surrounding the case and traces Morgan and Anissa’s hallucinatory journey through our draconian justice system. It includes never-before-seen details of what happened before, during, and after their crime, and provides the first full account of what’s now become known as the “Slenderman Stabbing.”
As with any coming-of-age narrative, the story’s “soundtrack” ricochets between heart-soaring jubilee and intoxicating loneliness. I hope that when people listen to these songs, they will remember what it felt like to be a child. As Thornton Wilder put it:
I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young.
And particularly the days when you were first in love
When you were like a person sleepwalking
And you didn’t quite see the street you were in
And didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you.
You’re just a little bit crazy.
Will you remember that please?
“Love Hurts” by Roy Orbison
Morgan and Bella met in the fourth grade cafeteria. Morgan liked the way that Bella drew kitties. Bella thought Morgan was funny. They became best friends. At sleepovers, they drew up contracts of eternal friendship. When Morgan, who would later be diagnosed with early onset childhood schizophrenia, confided in Bella about her visual and auditory hallucinations, Bella pretended to see and hear them, too.
“Love Hurts” by Roy Orbison paints a picture of Morgan and Bella in that fourth grade cafeteria, sitting alone at their respective tables, stealing glances at each other. Both girls were bullied. Both hurting. And both found respite in each other’s company. Eventually, the “popular girls” would approach Bella and offer to be her friend, on the condition that she stopped being friends with Morgan. But Bella refused. She chose to be Morgan’s friend when no one else would. It was a decision she would come to regret, a love story doomed from the start.
“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel
One of many details glossed over in media coverage of the Slenderman case is the fact that both Morgan and Anissa were children at the time of their crime. (News outlets repeatedly referred to Bella as a child, or a 12 year-old girl, while Morgan and Anissa were called “assailants” or “young women.”) Prior to her arrest, Morgan’s mother was still tucking her in at night, reading books and singing lullabies—one of which was “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.”
Later, in jail, Morgan tried to slit her wrists with a red colored pencil. In response, guards stripped her naked, dressed her in a suicide smock, took away her glasses, and left her in her cell for a week. Unable to see, Morgan occupied her time by rocking back and forth, and singing herself this song.
“God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys
Before they became friends, Anissa was one of Morgan’s many bullies. They waited at the same bus stop, and in lieu of making conversation, Anissa simply punched Morgan in the arm.
But eventually, the two started talking, and discovered that they had a lot in common. Unlike Bella, who was easily frightened, and called scary things “mean,” Anissa shared Morgan’s love of horror stories. She started punching Morgan’s other bullies, and began bullying Bella at school, likely seeing her as a rival for Morgan’s affection.
The lyrics, I may not always love you, but long as there are stars above you, captures the heady infatuation of Anissa and Morgan’s initial connection, which was upended by their arrest and criminal prosecution. While awaiting trial at the windowless Washington County Juvenile Detention Center, Anissa would not see the night sky for nearly three years. The deep, questioning sense of attachment she’d felt toward Morgan—God only knows what I’d be without you—became a different sort of question, one about fate: where might Anissa be, if she’d never met Morgan at all?
“Nobody Speak” (feat. Run The Jewels) by DJ Shadow
At home, Anissa sat alone in her bedroom, waiting in vain for invitations to birthday parties, and silently willing her distracted parents to notice her. But at school, she fronted as a bully. When I hear this song, I picture her walking down the sixth grade corridors, headphones on, shoving kids out of her way.
“Trouble” by Cage the Elephant
The closer Morgan and Anissa became, the more they felt the walls closing in. They rode the school bus together. Read scary stories on Creepypasta. Stared out the window and saw monsters in the trees. Morgan was wrapped in psychosis, barely holding onto reality. After she and Anissa stabbed Bella, they planned to walk 300 miles to Wisconsin’s Nicolet National Forest, where they had decided Slenderman lived in his “Slender Mansion,” and become his servants forever.
When I hear the lyrics to ‘Trouble’ by Cage the Elephant, I think of Anissa and Morgan’s murder pact. Got so much to lose. Got so much to prove. God don’t let me lose my mind.
Anissa later said that she set out to kill Bella in part because she wanted to prove that Slenderman was real—only then, she thought, would the world know she wasn’t crazy.
But Anissa had other reasons for wanting to escape. After years spent yearning for her parents’ full attention, Anissa’s half-siblings, Bubba and Sarah, were moving into Anissa’s condo. Bubba and Sarah had just weathered the death of their mother (Anissa’s father’s ex-wife), which likely signaled to Anissa that they would become her father’s sole focus. On May 31st, 2014, he would be picking up Bubba and Sarah in a U-Haul. Anissa and Morgan scheduled their escape mission for that same day. They planned to leave all their troubles behind them.
“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper
In the months leading up to the stabbing, Morgan and Bella remained close friends. Morgan wanted to spend as much time with Bella as possible before losing her. As Morgan later told police, ‘I wanted to see if I could put it off forever.’ So, she and Bella had sleepovers. They stayed up all night. They played Barbies. They had fun.
“Terrified” by The Rural Alberta Advantage
The opening verse of this song reminds me of Morgan and Anissa for obvious reasons. It’s easy to picture them on the bus, drawn together out of fear and loneliness, whispering promises to each other to never back down, never give up, and never leave one another behind. But after the stabbing, everything fell apart, as reality set in: they had feared a non-existent demon; all of this had been for nothing. Their lives would never be the same.
“Runaway” by Del Shannon
For their trek to Slender Mansion, Morgan and Anissa packed an assortment of granola bars and some maxi pads. Running away was fun, at first. But their escape quickly lost its appeal. They hadn’t brought phones, or a map, and ended up walking five miles in the wrong direction. Police caught up with them after they were spotted walking on the highway. Anissa told the police she was scared. Morgan had blood on her coat.
To me, “Runaway” conjures the giddy disorientation of that morning, when Morgan and Anissa were still friends and thought they would end up in a mansion filled with Internet characters. Its upbeat tune captures the girls’ detachment from reality, as they failed to grasp what lay ahead, and the seriousness of what they’d just done.
“Toes” by Glass Animals
During one of our many interviews, Morgan tried to explain to me how schizophrenia feels—how the voices in her head sounded as if she were standing in front of a very loud intercom system (they reverberated inside and outside of her skull), while her visual hallucinations looked just like real people. She could even smell their breath.
Unbeknownst to Morgan, schizophrenia actually ran in her family. After her diagnosis (post-arrest) she denied medication for 19 months. During that time, she had no access to sunlight, therapy, or medical treatment, and was sexually harassed, courted by pedophiles, and isolated in a cell by herself. “Toes” by Glass Animals evokes the feverish waves of delirium she might have experienced while trying to make sense of those surroundings. Despite multiple bids by her attorneys, she would remain in that dreamlike state for over a year.
“The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel
After starting anti-psychotics, Morgan’s hallucinations (some of which were her oldest friends, and had kept her company in jail) disappeared, one-by-one—and each loss registered as a sort of death. It was almost as if she’d slept through the sixth grade, only to wake up two years later in a locked, adult psychiatric ward. Suddenly, Morgan understood what she had done to Bella. But clarity came at a cost. Depression set in. To this day, Morgan struggles with suicidal ideation. “The Sound of Silence” reminds me of the loneliness she felt after her visions and voices disappeared—that bittersweet silence. On one hand, she was finally lucid. But she was also friendless, and she missed her companions terribly—especially the ones that no one else could see.
“Adam’s Song” by Blink 182
At the psychiatric hospital where Morgan now lives, patients enjoy occasional recreational activities, such as “karaoke night.” Morgan’s go-to song is “Adam’s Song” by Blink 182. Content about mental illness makes her feel less alone in the world.
“You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by Randy Newman
After a year or so of trying and failing to connect with other patients at the hospital, Morgan finally found a friend. Like Morgan, Katy suffered from schizophrenia. She’d been found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) for suffocating her toddler. Both she and Morgan hated themselves for what they’d done. In Katy, Morgan found an opportunity to be the sort of friend she should have been in sixth grade. For Katy, Morgan represented a new chance at being a maternal presence in a younger person’s life. (She is significantly older than Morgan.) To me, their friendship is the closest Morgan’s story could get to a happy ending.
“Spicks and Specks” by the Bee Gees
Whenever I hear this song, I think of the three young girls at the heart of this story, and how far they’ve come since the stabbing. Last I checked, Bella was at college, on a full scholarship, studying medicine—a field that has held her interest ever since the stabbing, which necessitated several life-saving surgeries by doctors that Bella came to know and trust.
Anissa has finally been released, and now lives with her father.
Morgan remains at the psychiatric hospital, where she was sentenced to 40 years. But strange loopholes in NGRI laws could make her stay indeterminate. In 40 years, her petition for release will cross the desk of an elected judge. And if that judge so desires, they can simply ignore the petition altogether, causing Morgan’s time in the hospital to roll over indefinitely.
Statistics on NGRI patients are hard to come by. But there’s a basic consensus that people like Morgan end up serving much longer in hospitals than they would have served in prison. Still, Morgan finds ways to make her life inside the hospital meaningful. She tries to be a good friend. She writes novels and creates elaborate works of art. More than anything, her case has brought home for me how resilient children are.
Kathleen Hale is the author of two young adult novels and one essay collection. She has written for the Guardian, Hazlitt, and Vice, among others, and is a writer and producer for Outer Banks on Netflix. She was born in Wisconsin and lives in Los Angeles.
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