Two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls are being tried as adults after reportedly stabbing a friend 19 times in the woods by their house on May 31. The victim is recovering, but the girls claimed to have done the stabbing in hopes to please “Slender Man,” a fictional faceless man who is said to lure little children to their death in wooded areas.

“I think that [the girls] are uneducated about things on the internet,” senior Kellsie Pepponi said.

To be perfectly clear, Slender Man is a completely fictitious character. Eric Knudsen created this character in a contest for the humor site Something Awful. No one could have guessed the virality of this image and the empire soon to come.

Since the creation in 2009, Slender Man has become an internet sensation. With numerous Creepypasta stories as well as other story forum entries, the average teenager uses these stories as simply a scare or as a fun campfire story to tell their friends. The Slender Man wiki page has issued a statement in response to the attempted murder.

As horrid as this event has been, it’s also been a little bit of a publicity stunt.

“Although it’s a horrible thing that happened, it builds on the reputation for people to believe that he’s real. It builds on his publicity,” senior Jaemee Cordero said.

Cordero and her sister are fans of the Slender Man sensation. They play the games about him, but Cordero agrees about the ridiculousness of the stabbing.

“It’s really twisted and ridiculous to believe that he’s real. He’s an animation and it’s very unbelievable to think that he’s alive,” Cordero said.

Cordero believes that at Kaneland High School, other pop-culture figures, such as Jeff the Killer, are well known and used as fun stories. However, she thinks that these trends are slowly fading.

“[Slender Man] is a dying trend at Kaneland,” Cordero said. “Overall, everyone should just have common sense about internet sensations.”