A Crime in Wisconsin

On Kathleen Hale, "Slenderman":

There is a saying: If you treat people like wolves, they will become wolves.

Several years ago, in Wisconsin, an untreated schizophrenic man decided to have a child. (There would be a one-in-ten chance the child would also have schizophrenia, but I'm not sure that figure was known, in this case.)

The little girl, Morgan, quickly began having hallucinations, but no one seemed to notice. She found RL Stine-adjacent stories about boogeymen in the woods. So she took a mallet to school, "for self-defense," and the mallet was confiscated. No one asked her to explain herself. She spent a day at home, then returned to class.

Morgan asked to write a hagiographical report on Adolf Hitler, and she sometimes seemed to become a cat (through her posture and vocalizations). Adults wagged a finger and made notes about "attention-seeking behavior," and that was the end of the response.

Eventually, Morgan persuaded a friend to help with a murder plan. The two girls would need to assault a third girl, Bella, as a kind of sacrifice to Slenderman, a demon living in the forest. After the assault, Morgan would walk into the woodsy heart of Wisconsin, to Slender Mansion, where she would assume the role of "proxy" for her ghostly overlord, and, at least, her own life would be safe.

The assault--which didn't actually end in murder--became a big, sensational story. Reporters suggested that the main villain was a dangerous online cult, but, really, the villain was mental illness. The little girls were tried "as adults," and they were denied appropriate therapies, and now one, Morgan, is rapidly deteriorating in an asylum. She may never see the world again, and she has started to say that she prefers her current situation to life in the world.

This is a disturbing story about how a community failed three kids, and it makes me anxious about the middle-school years. An eye-opening work of non-fiction.

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