Welcome to the Thing about Salem.

I'm Josh Hutchinson.

I'm Sarah Jack Skellington.

So we're looking at monsters this month because witches are monsters, and we want to find answers to questions about monsters.

What is a monster?

Why do we need monsters?

And why do we treat humans as monsters?

What does that do for us?

Today we're joined by returning guests, fellow podcaster Sean and Carrie of the amazing podcast Ain't It Scary with Sean and Carrie to talk about the internet's most infamous creation.

We're talking Slender Man, the faceless boogeyman born in the digital age, and we end up talking about Salem because.

Of course we do.

We always find our way back to the Witch, Charles.

Let's get started.

We thought it would be interesting today to talk about Slender Man in particular.

I think your audience will be familiar with the concept of Slender Man, but that is a story that has evolved from basically a post on an image board to something that eventually jumped in a very scary way into real life and into the news.

Yeah, it's sort of a case study on Internet folklore, which is kind of one of the most popular kinds of of new age folklore nowadays is because like, how is everyone connected usually?

Back in the day it was word of mouth or books and things like that.

But now with the Internet, things move so quickly and you can connect to so many people across such a vast space that these stories really spread and evolve and take on minds of their own even more than the urban legends we grew up whispering at summer camp.

So these Internet based urban legends, they're called creepypasta.

And that's kind of from the term copypasta, which was like those emails that you'd get back in the day that was like copy this and then send it to 10 friends or you'll have bad luck or whatever.

So creepypasta was sort of the Internet Horror Story version of that.

So no one was going into this thinking, oh, this is like a ghost photo that someone really took or this is someone's real experience.

It was like, how legit can they make it seem like how interesting can they make the story?

So people started to submit to this back in 2009.

It was just the one message thread.

And it's sort of at the the intersection of like creation and fantasy and real life fear that the Slender Man story eventually led to what was eventually called the Slender Man stabbing.

Well.

That is a spoiler.

Well, it's an attempted murder case.

We're going to spoil that up top because there are children involved here and there was an attempted murder.

But in May 2014, the basic story is that 212 year old Wisconsin girls stabbed their friend in the woods.

She was also their age.

They had fully intended to kill her and it was meant to appease what they believed to be the real Slender Man, to prove themselves to him.

And I think it's hard to believe that 12 year olds children could be capable of such horror.

At the same time, it's also hard to believe that children as old as 12 it 12 feels a little too when you're on the face of it.

It feels a little too old for this level of falling into a fantasy.

Right.

So it's surprising in both ways.

Yeah, Now this is it was combined with obvious other issues at play, probably mental illness.

And so this idea of like this hysteria and shared madness is really prevalent in a lot of stories that both of our podcasts cover.

And this event really was evocative to me of the Salem witch trials.

Now of course, it's the one that I know the best, but the fact of the young girls being the catalyst here, they're influenced by a variety of factors that are still debated even to today.

Wasn't their God, but they're they include societal pressures, paranoia in their cases, the real difficulties of colonial living and being a young girl in the pre revolutionary era.

And that's just the dreadful boredom.

You don't have much to do from childhood to getting married.

You're just getting ready to get married a lot of the time.

You're helping your mom, you're helping around the house.

And then you're you're getting, you're waiting to be a wife and a mother.

And that was a really lonely and difficult place to be, I'm sure, as a young woman in the colonial era.

So that's sort of in the Salem witchcraft trials case, they had these shared stories that they would go back and forth and participate in, and they sort of whipped each other into a frenzy, building on each other's stories until it did leak out into the real world and had really large implications for their society with adults as well.

So it wasn't just limited to the children.

And that's how the shared storytelling of the Slender Man in this little group led to those real life consequences.

I think those girls probably were feeling their power.

Yes, I think so.

And like the Salem Witch Trial afflictions, that was full of emotion, the shared delusion of Anessa and Morgan.

I wonder how?

It it seems like there was like this void of emotion.

Yeah.

And some of that could be their particular individual mental States and mental health struggles.

Morgan might just have a very flat affect generally.

I think part of it is also what they were doing was so involved in this other being, you know, doing things for this other being or through this other being.

They could kind of lay blame for this other being.

And I think that they probably knew they were doing something wrong, depending on the mental illness factor, but they knew that killing was wrong.

She said I'm sorry.

Yes.

But the girls in the witch trials, I think initially they probably didn't understand what they were doing was wrong.

Eventually things escalated to such an extent that it was like, oh, people are dying.

This is getting serious.

But I think they were.

They had the fantasy.

They thought they were in the right.

They thought they were doing what was right in a way, I think.

They put a baby in prison pretty early.

They did.

I think by that point they were probably figuring it out.

But initially, and again, they have childlike motivations too.

They don't want to get in trouble, so they have to start blaming other people.

And then eventually they're whipping each other into a frenzy of this is really happening.

And then they have to keep the ruse going because, again, they could get in trouble.

Like, it's a very childlike thing, but has these really drastic implications in the lives of so many people.

And that's what happened in the Slender Man stabbing as well.

You can see how the girls in the Salem witch trials and it seems like these two girls, the Slender Man case, like they're really influenced by what adults are saying.

Also, because adults invented Slender Man and adults in Salem, we're saying, hey, the devil's all around you.

He's walking around these woods right now trying to get people.

So, you know, they're on heightened alert, believing what the adults say.

And then the adults are reinforcing them and saying, OK, good job accusing that person.

Why don't you accuse another?

We're going to have that person arrested.

We're validating your accusation so it.

Exactly.

If your mom's telling you the devil's real and you don't have a lot of outside experience in the world to tell you that it's not real, you're going to believe that it's real.

And if your mom is telling you I don't want you looking at that Slender Man stuff anymore, it's not right.

Then part of you as a child might think, well, maybe there is some like, why is my mom afraid of him if he's not real?

Why doesn't she want me looking at this?

You know it.

And yeah, it is eventually like they are two stories told by adults, two children.

And the children take it and really run with it for different reasons.

But it's interesting that they're young women and feeling, I think probably both of them did feel powerless.

I think any 12 year old girl kind of feels powerless in a way of the changes going on around her, with her friend groups, with her microcosm of society, with her body, things that we where you're not understanding how you're feeling from moment to moment.

Sometimes you feel powerless.

So you can either take action in the Salem witch trials case, or you could be a proxy to another being and not have to make these decisions for yourself.

I was just thinking, one of my favorite, one of my favorite.

It's more than a character, 'cause she's a real person.

But Abigail Hobbes, she had the most wild confession about her contract with the devil.

And I was just thinking, man, how would have Abigail Hobbes, what would have she had to say about Slender Man?

What actions would she have taken the Slender Man?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you think any of those, I mean, obviously those are all coerced confessions to 1° or another.

In which trials do you think people get into?

And do you think any of those people got into a place where they were just like, ended up in the delusion with everybody else?

Or is it always a case of please stop hitting me?

I would I saw I I wrote in the book.

Well, I don't.

I mean, Josh, what do you think about Abigail and Slender Man?

Well, I think Abigail Hobbs, she confessed.

I think because she wanted to, she's like an outlier.

She's a 15 year old girl who's like the wild child of Topsfield, Massachusetts.

She like has a lot of squabbles with her step mom and she's like tells.

She's has the habit of telling people before the witch trials like, oh, I know the devil, he'll come with, like Olive, things like that, that you shouldn't be saying at any time in 17th century Massachusetts.

But I think that she was like, yeah, I know the double what of it?

And she felt she had some certain cache because of it.

By the way, I know you have the trial of George Jacobs up on your wall there.

We do.

Yeah, we have.

So my parents had my dad's an English teacher and growing up we had the famous portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne over our fireplace from he we got at the House of Seven Gables.

He was, you know, my dad was a big fan.

And so when we moved in here, he gave it to us and we were like, it was kind of, I really like these paintings.

And we, I think it's just, I don't know, I like we.

We've themed this dining room around Salem, MA.

We have the witch house on one wall.

We have Hawthorne there and I.

Just I always.

Think the companion piece actually the two those two big witch trials paintings.

They're such.

And again, it's the witch hunt, the witch trials that I'm most familiar with and most people are, but it is one of my particular interests.

And I think something about the the reminder of what we can do to each other when we're not civil, when we don't talk, when we don't try to understand each other.

And these are things that I really value is like civil discourse, empathy, trying to understand each other.

That's really important to me.

So that's why I like the reminders of in a weird way reminds me of my own like moral hierarchy I.

Guess and the importance of critical thinking.

Yes, critical thinking, very important now maybe more than ever, but certainly then too.

Yeah, definitely.

When you're confronted with some of these ideas, like that your neighbor is a witch, you should stop and think for a minute on that.

Like could there be another explanation to why my butter soured or by my pudding split down the middle which are things that happen?

You say that, Josh, you say that, but she looked through the window right when the right when I took the sip of the sour milk.

So I if you were here, I think you would agree with.

They were in such a reduced experience of the world, like children.

All they had was their religion.

All they knew, most of them was the local area, their neighbors, their hometown.

Some of them had been in in nearby States and have gone through traumas with Indian wars and things like that.

But all they knew was their very comparatively to nowadays, they didn't have the Internet right.

But they're smaller realities.

They're very insulated communities and in the Slender Man stabbing, it is like a very insulated situation.

There is this connectivity to the Internet and stuff, but the access ends up just making them more and more obsessed with this one thing and feeding it into it on each other.

And they don't have the life experience of an adult.

They haven't travelled, they haven't met a lot of people.

So it's easier to believe certain things when you don't have the experience not to.

Also, when you're forming a personality, when you're a adolescent, a teenager even, I would say this flies through collagen for some people through their 20s, you are looking for things to build that personality around.

And sometimes you can become obsessive about something just because there's not you haven't figured out what else you're really about yet.

You're trying to find the thing.

And I think it's harder for some people than for others.

But they must have been talking a lot about Slender Man, because when Peyton heard the reasoning behind the stabbing, she was just like, that Makes sense.

The real question here, and I think we're probably like minded of this, but like, does that make them monsters?

Is it this monstrous act?

This the planning, this monstrous act?

Can 12 year olds be monsters?

Are they capable of that?

Are children capable of that?

Their brain isn't fully developed.

Maybe they're not totally understanding everything they're doing, but can you still be a monster as a child?

What about the mental health factor?

And then this applies to many people.

We've talked about many criminals and stuff and not to say anything about mental illness there.

There are factors in a lot of crimes where that is a contribution.

Can you be fully a monster if you're not fully in charge of your mind?

Many of us would probably, I hope, say that only a monster could coldly stab their best friend and leave them for dead, but can these girls really be defined as that?

It was a monstrous action, but can you define them as monsters?

Yeah, I don't think so.

I think it reminds me going back again to Salem because I love it so much even though it was awful.

Yeah, exactly.

People like to blame the girls for, you know, for the accusations that they made.

But they're Anne Putnam Junior's 12 years old, Abigail Williams, 11 years old.

How much responsibility could they possibly bear if you were going to try them for, say, false accusations or something?

How much responsibility can they actually bear because of where they are in their mental development?

Exactly.

And adults are the ones giving them the power of the adults weren't listening to them, the adults weren't making the arrests, It wasn't the girls who were doing the hangings or whatever.

It was the adults that gave them the power.

So at the end of the day, they were the ones that kind of helped it happen For what makes a monster if those defined by society at large really are monstrous, if it's their actions that define that.

And often times urban legends really explore these, you know, where like fictional and real monsters sort of coexist.

And that's pretty appropriate for the time of year, I think.