Two Wisconsin teens are facing up to 65 years in prison today after being arrested for attempting to murder a friend in a bizarre blood offering to a fictional Internet meme named Slender Man.

According to the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, Morgan E. Geyser and Anissa E. Weier, both 12 years old, were charged on Monday of this week for attempting first-degree homicide on a 12 year-old friend by stabbing her more than 19 times. The victim survived, but is currently hospitalized in serious condition.

Geyser and Weier, who will be tried as adults, told police that they tried to kill their friend in order to pay homage to Slender Man, a fictional character created on the Internet more than 10 years ago. The girls said they believed Slender Man was real after reading about him on the Creepypasta website which is devoted to sharing horror stories.

The plan was to invite their victim to a sleepover, then kill her during the night by taping her mouth shut and then stabbing her in the neck to kill her. They would then run away to Slender Man’s mansion, which they believed was located in the Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin.

But the two changed their mind and decided to kill the girl at a nearby park the following day. Their bloodied and seriously injured victim was found crawling alongside a road by a bicyclist who immediately called 911. Weier and Geyser were later found walking along an interstate with the knife used in the attack still in Weier’s backpack.

When questioned later, Weier told police that Slender Man is the “leader” of Creepypasta, and that in order to show dedication, they must kill in order to become his “proxies”. Weier said she was excited about having the opportunity to prove skeptics wrong who believe Slender Man doesn’t really exist.

In reality, he doesn’t. Slender Man was created in 2009 by Eric Knudsen of Florida in response to a call for submissions from an online forum named SomethingAwful. Knudsen created the faceless character who is an abnormally tall and slender being in a black suit with unnaturally long arms and who supposedly lurks near forests where he awaits to “absorb” or kill his victims. He submitted photo-shopped images of this fictional character along with a phony news report.

Slender Man immediately went viral and began to appear in an assortment of movies, video games, and made-up stories by others who claimed to have seen him. The figure also began to show up in doctored photos on websites which made it look like Slender Man was indeed real.

Somewhere along the line, Weier and Geyser came across Slender Man and were drawn into the lore, eventually coming to believe that he really existed.

As far-fetched as it may sound, experts already know that the teen brains lacks the ability to discern between fiction and reality, which is why so many of them are against the constant diet of dark and dystopian literature that is common fare among youth today.

Maria Nikolajeva, director of the Cambridge/Homerton Research and Training Center for Children’s Literature, which is dedicated to studying children’s media, told the Washington Post that teenage brains lack the ability to make judgments.

“In plain words, they may get wrong ideas. Not because they are stupid, but because their brains are wired like that. Because they are socially and emotionally unstable. The so-called social brain is under development during adolescence. Small children presumably do and believe what they are told to. Adolescents start to think for themselves, they interrogate, they doubt,” she said.

“Teenage readers can get extremely engaged with what they read, for instance, ‘fall in love’ with fictional characters. . . . As adults we can take distance from what we read or see. For teenagers, it’s all real and close.”

This was apparently the case with Geyser and Weier who are now being held on $500,000 bail and facing decades in prison.

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