Defence attorneys for two girls accused of stabbing their friend 19 times to appease an online fictional monster known as “Slender Man” have presented a chilling series of pictures from one of the suspects’ notebooks to the court.

The pair, who are 12 and 13 years old, were arrested in May 2014 after their victim, who survived the attack, was found in the woods by a cyclist. The two suspects told detectives that they had stabbed the victim to prove Slender Man’s existence, and to become his “proxies”.

Slender Man is a work of fiction, created as part of an informal “create-a-paranormal-image” competition on a message-board site called SomethingAwful.com. But since the character’s inception in June 2009 it has grown exponentially. A vast mythos quickly coalesced, with stories, art and several popular YouTube series.

When the stabbing in Wisconsin happened, the community was horrified.



‘I want to die’. Photograph: Supplied

A district court judge in Waukesha, Wisconsin, is currently hearing evidence to decide whether the two defendants will stand trial as adults.



Much depends on whether the judge allows the prosecutor’s charge of first-degree attempted homicide to stand – in which case they will be tried as adults – or accepts the defence’s motion to downgrade the charge to second-degree attempted homicide, in which case the trial will transfer to juvenile court.

Excerpts from the notebooks and possessions of one of the two accused, which were presented as evidence to the court this week, were given to the Guardian by her defence attorney.

The notebooks contain scrawled slogans and pictures, many of them of Slender Man or with reference to the Slender Man literary canon.

One page simply says “I can never die. He is Alive.” The last word is strongly underlined. Some just have an O with an X drawn through it, a Slender Man sigil.

On another page, in much fainter text, the words “help me escape my mind” hover around a picture of a girl leaning against a wall, next to a knife in a pool of blood. Another picture, of a path winding through trees, is accompanied by the words “at the end of the path ... He Waits.”

Also presented as evidence were a series of mutilated dolls, also belonging to the girl.



Anthony Cotton, the girl’s defence attorney, told the Guardian that his client still believes in Slender Man. She was not, he said, being given medication.

