(Newser) – In what prosecutors in Wisconsin say is one of the most chilling cases they've ever encountered, two 12-year-old girls are accused of stabbing a classmate 19 times in an attempt to please a mythical forest creature they read about on the Internet. According to court papers, the pair invited the girl, also 12, to a sleepover and attempted to murder her in a park the next morning, the New York Daily News reports. After being held down and stabbed, the girl managed to crawl out of the woods and was rescued by a passing cyclist. The girls allegedly planned to flee to the forest lair of the "Slender Man" creature.

One of the girls told police that they had read about the creature on the Creepypasta Wiki website, which is devoted to horror stories. She said the Slender Man—described as a thin, tall man with a blank face who stalks children in forests—appeared in her dreams and by killing their classmate, the girls hoped to become "proxies" of the creature. The girls have been charged as adults and could face up to 65 years in prison if found guilty of first-degree attempted murder. The district attorney says he finds it especially disturbing that the girls told investigators that they had been planning the attack since December, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Most of the time in a crime like this, with such violence like this, there's spur of the moment, there's the heat of passion," he says. "It's troubling when a person lashes out in anger. It's more troubling when they lash out in cold blood. Isn't that the worst kind of killer, the cold-blooded killer?" (Read more attempted murder stories.)

