Halloweens Shadows

Halloween night — when masks hide faces, and fear hides the truth.
In this special edition of Sinister Psyche, we unravel three chilling real-life cases.

A Tennessee mother vanishes after a Halloween party — her disappearance leaving a trail of silence and suspicion.
A teenage exchange student shot on his way to a Halloween party — mistaken identity turns fatal.
A sleepover turns into a modern horror story inspired by an internet myth: Slenderman.

Three stories. Three victims. One night when the line between fantasy and fear disappears.

🕯️ Psychological analysis, forensic insight, and the haunting truth behind the costumes.

🎙️ Hosted by Gabi & Sonia | @sinisterpsychepodcast

TW: [Murder] [Violence] [Psychological Delusion]

"Sinister Psyche Theme” — © 2025 Gabriela Duran

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Chapters

• 1:08 The Disappearance of Karen Swift
• 9:38 The Murder of Yoshihiro Hattori
• 20:39 Slenderman Stabbing

Transcript

Gabi: 0:31

Welcome to Sinister Psyche, where true crime meets the twisted corners of the human mind. Let's dive into this case file. Hey there, Sinister listeners. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Gabi. I'm Sonia. And this is episode three of Sinister Psyche. But it's not just our episode three, guys. It's our first ever Halloween episode. And instead of giving you just one spooky case, tonight we cracked open three case files. Three stories, three victims, and a whole lot of what the fuck moments.

News : 1:06

Please. Let us know.

Gabi: 1:17

On October 29, 2011, in the town of Diversburg, Tennessee, it's still buzzing from trick-or-treaters and costume parties. It's the kind of community where everyone knows everyone. It's quiet and it's conservative. 44-year-old Karen Swift spends that night at a Halloween party at a local country club. She's dressed up, smiling in photos, she's chatting with friends, and by all accounts, she seems very happy. But when she leaves the party just after midnight, Karen Swift is never seen alive again. Karen Swift was a 44-year-old mother of four living in the tight-knit town of Dryersburg, Tennessee. Friends had described her as witty, kind, and strong-willed. She was the kind of mom who others looked to. She was active, caring, and a private person who they trusted very deeply. In the months leading up to her disappearance, Karen had begun spending more time with a newer social circle. She was attending parties, she was staying out later than she had been before. She was shifting from her previously quieter domestic rhythm. One friend noted she was the life of the party, usually. But that on that night of the event, she told someone she wasn't having a very good time. At home, Karen Swift had touched many lives. Her high school friends had said that growing up, she was always athletic. She's just one of those mothers that everything was about her children. Yet those closest to her also saw signs of strain. Friends observed that her husband, David Swift, often hovered during group gatherings. In other rooms, he would be listening in, offering remarks about how she dressed or how she behaved. All of this paints a more textured image. A woman known for warmth and family, but someone whose personal life was shifting beneath the surface. Her daughter, Ashley Swift, who was only nine years old at this time, would recall her mom suddenly staying out later and going out more. She said, I remember nights of me begging and crying for her not to leave. I didn't want her to go out, and I just wanted her to stay home with us. The next morning on October 30th, Karen's white 2004 Nissan Morano is found abandoned along a rustic road not far from her home. The passenger window is cracked open and the doors are unlocked, but there's no sign of Karen. There's a flat tire, her purse is still inside, and there's no sign of a struggle, at least not right there. It's like she simply vanished in the middle of the night. Now the detail that really unsettled investigators came a little later. Two of her cell phones both found shattered near a neighbor's yard. They weren't lost, they weren't dropped, they had been deliberately broken. Clearly, somebody was trying to cover something up. At the time, Karen was married to David Swift. They had four children and at least publicly looked like a normal suburban family. But just three weeks before Halloween, she had filed for divorce. Friends say she was ready to move on and maybe start fresh. Still, the couple continued living under the same roof while they sorted things out. I could never imagine living with somebody when we break up. I know people have to do that because of like like you know, like the lease or whatever, like if like like we can't go yet or whatever, but like get the fuck out of my house. If we break up, get the fuck out of my house. Like, I don't even care if we leave on good terms. Get out of my house. Like, go sleep outside if anything. According to David, he saw Karen come home from the Halloween party at around 1: 30 a.m. She changed clothes, she went to bed for a while, and then he said she left early that morning to work out at the country club gym. But she never made it there, and no one saw her car leave the neighborhood. When she didn't pick up her kids from church that morning, alarm bells went off. Friends tried calling Karen, texting, but they got no response. Her phone was dead, and her car was sitting by the highway, and her husband claimed he had no idea where she'd gone. The search for Karen Swift took over Dyer County. There were helicopters, ATVs, search dogs, and volunteers who had combed through fields and drainage ditches for weeks. Fliers with her smiling face went up on every streetlight, but as October turned to November, and then December, hope started to fade. On December 10th, six weeks after Karen's wife disappeared, a deputy discovered human remains tangled in vines near Blestow Cemetery, in a quiet overground patch of land off a back road. It was confirmed to be Karen. Karen's body was not dressed, she was found in only black underwear that was down to her thighs, so not all the way on. And due to the state of decomposition that the body was in, sexual assault or misconduct could not be confirmed or denied. The autopsy of Karen's was later confirmed she died from blood force trauma to the head. Examiners described a pretty wide dead taking up the most right portion of the skull. She had also suffered multiple injuries consistent with being beaten by suggesting whoever did this did it up close. For years, the case had just stalled. Investigators publicly said little, but privately, most people in town believed they knew who was responsible. Her husband, David Swift. It had been discovered that Karen had been filing for divorce just weeks before her disappearance. David maintained his innocence the entire time. There wasn't any clear forensic evidence tying him to her death. There was no DNA, there were no witnesses, and no confession. And in a small county with limited resources, that meant there wasn't enough to prosecute. Karen's family, meanwhile, they spent more than a decade waiting. Every holiday, local papers would run the same headline. Who killed Karen Swift? Then in August 2022, 18 years later, David was finally arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors argued that the couple had fought the night of the Halloween party, that he had killed her at home and then ducked her body near the cemetery. They said that the flat tire and abandoned car were set up to make it look like she'd broken down on her way to the gym. When the trial began in 2024, the evidence still wasn't enough. There was still no physical proof beyond suspicion and motive. The jury found David Swift not guilty of murder. They couldn't reach a unanimous decision on a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, so the case ended in a mistrial. Thirteen years after Karen Swift had went missing, and her family still has no justice. And what makes the story so haunting, it started on Halloween night, a time when people wear masks, and it ended with a man who might still be wearing one. That case was pretty it was pretty cut and dry. The husband did it. The husband always does it. It's funny because like as as I'm doing the research for case one for Karen Swift, it just reminded me a lot of like the Watts family murders. It's just it's always the husband just not being able to find an alternative to murder. Which just gets me. It's like and it's like they were already getting divorced. If David did it, he did it out of spite. Because what other reason would you have to do it? You were already in the process of being separated. What more would you gain? It's also like you fuck ass, did you think you weren't gonna get caught realistically? Anyone know whenever whenever a woman goes missing or ends up dead, the first person you look at always boyfriend husband. That's just a fact. Everyone knows that. It's just like, did you really think you were like your wife ends up she turns up missing? Her car her car is still there, and it's like the first person that the police are gonna look at is you. You do know that, right? So it's like I don't know, like I want to know what goes through these men's mind. Apparently, nothing. But but yeah, I think it's just like rage. You know you're gonna get caught eventually. Like you're the first person you look at.

Sonia: 8:59

You know, it's the heat of the moment kind of thing, where it's like they don't think about the consequences later on.

Gabi: 9:04

Okay, so as the years went by, Karen's four kids grew up in the shadow of her disappearance. Her daughter Ashley Swift became one of the most vocal advocates for her mom. Yeah, Ashley Swift was a teenager when she had to live through nobody getting arrested, no answers for her mom's murder. She was forced to kind of live with the silence.

Sonia: 9:31

This case before. I remember when it first started, I was like, what this case?

Gabi: 9:36

Yeah. Yeah, case two is all about the murder of Yoshihiro Hatori. It's really freaking sad. I know, like he was so young. Um it's October 17 in 1992. It's just two weeks before Halloween in Batbouroge, Louisiana. And 16-year-old Yoshihiro Hatori has only been in the United States for two months. He's an exchange student from Nogoya, Japan. He's living with the Haymakers. They are a local family who volunteered to host him for a year. Yoshi was born in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. He was the second out of three children. I might be saying these names wrong, so sorry. His parents were Masaichi and Maiko Hitori. Yoshi had come to the U.S. on an exchange program with American Field Service. He was a great student, and he was supported by the Morito Foundation Scholarship to study at McFinlay High School. To everyone who met him, Yoshi was energetic. He was endlessly polite. He was a little clumsy with English, but he was super eager to learn everything about American life and culture. He played the saxophone in the high school band. He loved Michael Jackson and he was fascinated by American pop culture. Especially Halloween, which just doesn't carry the same weight as it does back home. That night, he and his host brother, Webb Haymaker, are heading to a Halloween party thrown by another student. Webb's driving. Yoshi's dressed for the theme. He has a white tuxedo, he ruffled his shirt, and he has a bright red bow tie. An imitation of John Travolta from Saturday Night Beaver. Yoshi and Webb are running late, they have the address to the party scribbled on a note. And when they pull up into a quiet suburban neighborhood just after 8 p.m., they make a small mistake that will change everything. They stop at what they think is the right house, but it's actually two doors down from the actual party. The porch light is off, so Webb rings the doorbell, and no one answers. Then, a woman peeks out through the doorframe, frightened. That woman is Bonnie Pierce. She calls out to her husband, Rodney Pierce inside, get your gun. Moments later, as Yoshi steps forward, smiling with his arms open, he calls out, We're here for the party. His accent is heavy and his expression is open and excited. Rodney Pierce opens the door, gun in hand. Yoshi keeps walking, maybe not understanding the fear or the commands of freeze, a word that might not even fully register. Seconds later, a single shot rings out. Yoshihiro Hitori is struck in the chest. He collapses onto the driveway, bleeding. Bonnie Pierce calls 911, telling them her husband had shot someone who had kept coming towards the house. Officers arrive only moments later at the residence to see Yoshihiro still alive, lying on the driveway. But unfortunately, Yoshihiro will be pronounced dead in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. At first, the community is silent. They're in a mix of shock, disbelief, and uneasy justification. Rodney Pierce tells police he thought Yoshi was a burglar and that he was scared for his life. Rodney isn't arrested immediately. Police cite Louisiana's justifiable homicide statue. But as the story spreads, outrage builds both locally and back in Japan. The Japanese media cover the killing extensively. Newspapers in Tokyo and Nagoya print Yoshi's smiling face, calling it a symbol of American gun violence and fear of the unfamiliar. The tragic death has now become a political standpoint on the merits of gun violence in the US. In Bat Rouge, candlelight vigils formed. The haymakers stand beside Yoshi's grieving parents who fly from Japan to attend the funeral. They are heartbroken but remarkably composed. They say they don't want revenge but only understanding. In 1993, the district attorney eventually filed manslaughter charges against Rodney Pierce. In the case of State vs. Rodney, Rodney Pierce is on trial for manslaughter. At trial, Pierce lawyers argue he was simply protecting his home. And more so, he was worried for his wife that had panicked in the dark. But the prosecution argues that Yoshi wasn't unarmed, harmless, and polite. He was simply a teenager wearing a costume and holding nothing but confusion. Did he even understand when Rodney was telling him to freeze? The question is, did Rodney have a right to protect his home with deadly force? The courtroom is packed. The jury deliberates for three hours and finds Rodney Pierce guilty of negligent homicide, the lowest homicide charge in Louisiana law. He receives a sentence of seven years suspended, meaning he never goes to prison. Rodney just pays a $10,000 fine. Rodney Pierce pays a $10,000 fine and serves no joke on it. This verdict outrages Japan. Protesters scatter outside the U.S. embassies hearing signs that say we don't understand America. The Attorney family returns home determined to make change, launching a global gun control movement called the Yoshi Coalition and meeting with President Clinton the following year to discuss firearms report. Yoshi's mother later said, She could not believe a country could value a gun over a life. Sorry...that was ironic. Little does she know this country can value a gun over a life. Her advocacy inspiredMieko Hattori would later tell reporters, we could not understand how a country could value a gun more than a life. But if this is where fate has brought us, we will make something good come from Yoshi's death. Which is like, it's such a positive way to kind of like turn a really bad situation into something kind of good. So no single US federal law was passed successfully in Yoshi's name, but Yoshi's death put a lot of public pressure on the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, also known as the Brady Bill, which passed in 1993 and took effect in 1994. If you guys don't know the story of James Brady, I suggest searching it up. It's pretty fascinating. James Brady took a bullet that was met for President Reagan and left partially paralyzed. The Brady Bill required federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the United States and introduced a waiting period for hand sale. While the Brady Bill had been in the works since the 1981 shooting of James Brady, Yoshi's face re-energized national conversation and gave the movement an international face. President Clinton publicly referenced Yoshi when discussing the law's passage, thanking the Hatoris for their courage in the face of unimaginable loss. But for the haymakers and everyone who knew Yoshi, the loss never left. Every Halloween, a web haymaker, who was his host brother, lights a candle on his porch and tells his own kids the story of a friend who came to America to experience its magic and found an experience said. The tragedy of Yoshihiro Hatsori isn't a monster story. It's about how fear, just a split second of it, can turn joy into death. A costume, a smile, a word loss in translation. And a nation is so divided over what it means to feel friend. So this case, I feel like it hit me differently because it's just so fast. One one second, they're excited to go to this Halloween party, and then they show up at this door, they're at the wrong house, and then everything changes.

Sonia: 17:16

That's a problem with this country. There's so many times where you you pull up to the wrong house at the wrong time. Yeah. And the homeowner is you can literally lose your life. Yeah. People have lost their lives. There's there's another story that I don't know, like the specific game. There was this girl, and she also pulled up to the wrong house because she thought it was her friend's house. And she opened the door, and you know, she was a black woman, and the homeowners were white. And yeah, she ended up being child killed. Yeah.

Gabi: 17:45

So is he?

Sonia: 17:47

They want to claim self-defense. Right.

Gabi: 17:49

But is it though, like, at what point is it actually because I understand, especially like us being women, I totally get the fear of like if somebody comes up to your house and it's late at night and you don't know who it is. At what point, at what point are you just kind of like, oh no, this person is trying to hurt me? Okay, let me hurt them. You know what I mean? Because, like, in this case, for example, Yoshi, he's it's Halloween. He's wearing a Halloween costume. This kid's showing up to this house with a smile on his face, and he's saying, Oh, we're here for the party, and then you just pull out your gun and you shoot him. Like, yeah, and he's from a different country, mind you.

Sonia: 18:23

He doesn't understand like the issues that we have here, right? So it could be different.

Gabi: 18:27

And the owner's like, sure, the owners probably didn't know like the language barrier and that maybe he didn't understand when they said freeze or something. He didn't have a weapon on him.

Sonia: 18:36

He didn't like if they were wearing costumes, like we need to like together. Oh, it's Halloween, they're probably gonna go to a party, but it's not at my house. Yeah.

Gabi: 18:46

Exactly. So it's like it's like hard to tell. It's like, did Yoshi die because of racism? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if he did. I wouldn't, I would lean towards it. They shot him, yeah. Yeah, I would lean towards it if this was racial motivated. Like I think just a little bit. Yeah, I think if it was like his white host brother had come up to the door instead, or like any other white person had come up to the door instead, do we think they would have lost their lives? Probably not. I think it probably would have been they probably would have put more effort into like, hey, like who are you? Like, why are you on my porch? Like, leave me to instead of just bang, you know. But yeah, but I just thought there never really was justice. The killer wasn't held as responsible as we would have liked, especially the people in Japan were really disappointed with the results of the trial, just having to pay ten thousand dollars and then you never even have to go to jail. Like let's say you just get to r like live the rest of your life. And Yoshi doesn't, which is that. But yeah, but that's that's just what makes this case sick of people like. I also love that his parents didn't respond with hate, which they totally could have, and I think they would have been absolutely justified, but instead they just decided to turn it into something positive, and something good did come out of it, like they did influence the brain build. But but it also sucks that it's like we have to wait for things to get to one point before we can see change happening, which is really disappointing. It shouldn't have ever gotten to that point.

Sonia: 20:20

But yeah, I guess we gotta make sure now every Halloween party we gotta go to. Yeah, I know. Okay, this is the address.

Gabi: 20:27

Right, you guys are going to the Halloween party, double check that address for sure. Yeah, don't just show up and knock on someone's doors, especially not in the US, maybe. Okay, now this case didn't happen on Halloween, but it's about one of the scariest internet myths we all remember around Halloween time, and it's proof that kids can be, honestly, fucking terrifying. Um, May 31st in 2014 in Wakesha, Wisconsin. It's supposed to be a sleepover between three 12-year-old girls, Peyton Leitner, Morgan Geyser, and Anisa Weir. They've been best friends for years. It's the kind of friendship that defines middle school. They have inside jokes, matching bracelets, they spend hours drawing, whispering, planning imaginary worlds. But that morning, after a birthday sleepover, something shifted from innocent to unthinkable. By the end of the day, one of the 12-year-old girls would be bleeding out in the woods. And it all starts with an internet myth. The night before, the girls had celebrated the 12-year-old birthday of Morgan Geyser. They had pizza, they had snacks, the girls were playing dress-up. It's like the usual slumber party chaos. Super nostalgic. But behind the laughter, there is a secret. Something Morgan and Anisa had been whispering about for months. They believed in someone called Slenderman, an internet-born figure from the creepypasta forums. He's a tall, faceless figure. He wears a black suit. He's really like long with like spider-y arms and legs. Slenderman was a character created in a Photoshop contest in 2009. He was never real, he was never alive, but in the minds of these two three teens, he had become something else. In June 2009, on an internet forum called Something Awful, users were challenged to create paranormal images, fake photos that looked real. One user, Aaron Newson, had posted under the name Victor Surge, and he uploaded two black and white photos of children at play. Behind these two children stood a tall, faceless figure in a black suit. He was unnaturally thin and his arms were impossibly long. He called the figure the Slenderman. The captions told a story. The children had gone missing, there were whispers in the woods of something watching, and the internet did what the internet does best. It ran with it. Within days, his message boards lit up with fabricated sightings. There was fan art and journal entries of Slenderman. Slenderman wasn't static. He grew. He was reshaped by every storyteller who touched him. By 2010, he had migrated from something awful to YouTube, Tumblr, Reddit, and the emerging world of creepypasta. Creepypasta is like short war stories that are traded like digital campfire tales. Creators added new rules, new lore. Slenderman could teleport, then he could feed on your fear. He hunted horrors, especially children. Slenderman's face, or lack of one, became a blank canvas for the imagination. Then came the game. In 2012, a free indie game titled Slender, the eight pages went viral. It was a simple, lo-fi, terrifying game. Basically, you would wander through a fog-shrouded forest at night with a flashlight flickering, collecting eight scraps of paper. As you wandered through this fog-shrouded forest at night, you had to collect eight scraps of paper. Each page was scrolled with desperate warnings like, don't look, or it takes you. And if you turned around in the game, even once, the tall figure would be there waiting for you. The game spread like wildfire across YouTube. Gamers filled their reactions with screams, gas, laughs, laughter, turning Slenderman from a niche internet myth into a cultural icon of fear. I remember playing this game in middle school, guys. I'm not even old, I'm 23, but I remember playing it in school and we would have like a substitute or a free period. And we had this one kid in our class. He was like our game distributor for things like this, or like five nights at Freddy's. He would buy the game at home, get it on a USB, and then help everybody else in the class download it to the school computers, and we would just play it all day. So Morgan and Anisa told each other that Slenderman was real. Psychologists would later call it a perfect storm. We have the age of digital folklore combined with the impressionable minds and echo chambers of online storytelling. Slenderman was never real, but the belief in him was, and that belief became powerful enough to justify violence. Morgan and Anisa believed that Slenderman had lived in a mansion deep in the Nicolette National Forest, and that if they didn't prove their loyalty to him, he would hurt their families. And the only way to prove themselves was to kill someone. The target they chose was Peyton, their best friend. The plan was brutal and childlike all at once. They would lure her somewhere secluded, stab her to death, and then walk to Sunderman's mansion to become his proxies. The morning of May 31st, they asked Peyton to go play hide-and-seek at a park called David's Park, and they let her into the woods. When Peyton turned her back, Morgan whispered, go ballistic. And then, they stabbed her 19 times. Peyton screamed, begged, and crawled. When she said that she couldn't see, Anisa told her to lie down and be quiet so that you can lose blood faster. And then the two girls just left her there, in the dirt, surrounded by trees, believing they had fulfilled their mission. At around 9.50 a.m. on May 31st, a man named Greg Steinberg, who was an amateur cyclist, he was pedaling along Big Bend Road near Interstate 94. It's a route he took almost every weekend. He was planning to head toward David's park, where the trail opened up to a quiet bike path. And then, out of the corner of his eyes, David saw something that didn't fit. A girl lying in the grass near a concrete curve. She was pale, smeared with blood, and her clothes were torn. At first, Greg thought that she'd been in a bike accident, but then she spoke. Ayton, at 12 years old, somehow suffering 19 stab wounds, had pulled herself out of the woods, crawling through leaves and gravel until a cyclist found her lying near a bike path. She whispered, Please help me, I've been stabbed. Greg called 911 and stayed with Ayton while online with the dispatcher. He used his shirt to press to one of her wounds to stop the bleeding, telling her it was gonna be okay. I'm like grabbing my shirt as I'm like this breathing badly. Peyton was in shock but coherent. When Greg asked who hurt her, she said, My best friend.

Sonia: 27:11

Which is so sad. I wanted to cry when I read that.

Gabi: 27:16

She was airlifted to Wakesha Memorial Hospital where surgeons discovered stab wounds to her arms, her legs, her torso, and one of the stab wounds missing a major artery near her heart by less than a millimeter. If Greg, this random cyclist, hadn't found her when he did, Peyton would have bled out and died in the forest. When police caught Morgan and Anisa hours later, they were walking down a highway with backpacks on. They looked exhausted and their shirts were covered in what appeared to be dirt and a ton of ripe stains. Neither girl showed any real understanding of what they'd done. Anisa asked the police officer, will we get to see Slenderman after this? Morgan told detectives, he watches us, he always knows. And like, I can't imagine just being a cop going about my patrol, and then I just see these two little girls on the side of the highway, and they're just covered in blood, and they just have like their backpacks on. Like they're like, I'd be like, Are you shouldn't you be like in school? Like, where are you? Where are your parents on the side of the highway, just covered in blood? Am I like stumbling into? The interrogation tapes would later become infamous. You have these two 12-year-olds describing a myth as though it were a god. At the police station, the interrogation tapes would capture the full extent of their delusion. At the police station, the interrogation tapes would capture the full extent of the girls' delusion. Both girls believed that Slenderman would hurt their families if they didn't obey him. They said that they'd been planning the attack for months. They even had maps printed out from the internet, directions to the Nicolette National Forest, more than 200 miles north. Inside their backpacks, they had granola bars, water bottles, a family photo, and the knife that they had used on Peyton, which was a five-inch kitchen blade taken from Morgan's house. Both girls were charged as adults with attempted first-degree intentional homicide. Psychiatric evaluations revealed something chilling. Morgan Geyser was diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia. Child psychologists would find out Morgan had been experiencing hallucinations for years, way before she thought Slenderman was real. She spoke about hearing voices. She saw a ghost when she was younger. She even recalled seeing a woman with wings she called Maggie, who she thought was like the guardian angel of sorts. And I think this psyche combined with the discovery of the Slenderman game was probably really validating some of her delusions. Anissa Weir was diagnosed with shared delusional disorder. It's also no I can't say that word. I can't say this word. It's always French words in psychology. I know. She's thinking you know how to say it. I don't.

Sonia: 30:11

Because it's French, girl.

Gabi: 30:15

Freud say. Yeah, I was wrong. Folio dirt. Folio dirf. Anyways, okay, so. So, Anissa Weir was diagnosed with shared delusional disorder, also known as folia duo, which is a fr it translates in French to madness for two. It's a rare psychological phenomenon where two people share the same delusion. So basically, Anissa Weir believed in Slenderman because Morgan believed in Slenderman so strongly. So in court, the girls appeared small, they wore their middle school sweatshirts. They had wide eyes, they had ponytails, but the the details of the case were nightmarish and the trials lasted years. Experts testified that Morgan's schizophrenia was so severe that she couldn't distinguish fantasy from reality. She truly believed that killing Peyton would make her Slenderman servant and keep her family safe. Anissa testified that she thought the act would prove loyalty and prevent Slenderman from killing her own parents. In 2017, Anisa Weir was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, and sentenced to 25 years in a mental institution. Morgan Geyser received a 40-year sentence under the same ruling, and she was confined to a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison. Peyton Leitner survived the encounter and she grew up quietly at the spotlight. In 2019, she finally broke her silence in an interview with ABC News. She said she doesn't hate Morgan or Anissa. What she wants is to move forward and to live. She said, I've come to accept all of this as part of who I am. I wouldn't be who I am today without this happening. At the same time, Hagan gave her interview. Anissa Weir in 2021 was granted conditional release. She must live with her father, wear a GPS tracker, attend therapy and take all her prescribed medications. She's also forbidden from using the internet without supervision. Morgan also petitioned for conditional release in 2023, but the judge denied her request citing safety. Every year, as May 31st comes around, the story resurfaces. Not as a tale of monsters in the dark, but as a reminder that sometimes, the scariest places we can go are the corners of the human mind. Slenderman wasn't real, but the blood on the forest was. And Peyton Lightner, the girl who crawled out of the woods, is proof that even in the most terrifying stories, survival can be the last twiz. Peyton Lightner went on to graduate high school in 2020, which is the same year as me, which sucks because it was COVID year. Anyways, her awesome asset was so inspired by the paramedics who saved her life that day in the woods that she went on to sending to become a medical professional. But yeah, um, and also like this case is wild too because it sparked a lot of real discussions about like mental health in kids. Like what happens when kids are left online, unmonitored, untreated. Like this one girl, they found out that what is it, Morgan, that she was suffering from schizophrenia for years apparently, and she was having these hallucinations and these delusions way before she even started believing in slenderment. Which kind of makes me think, like, in terms of the parents, like, what were you what were you doing?

Sonia: 33:40

Like, and you usually there's like signs.

Gabi: 33:42

Right, yeah, like did you not notice at all if your daughter's like, hey, like I see a random woman with wings in my room. Yeah.

Sonia: 33:48

What's up with that? Like, how do you exactly do you even like try it's I think too, it's like the parents that like don't have any communication with kids, like they just look like sound like, yeah, hey, like, how's your day going?

Gabi: 34:03

You have no idea what your kid is doing when they're like not in your super, you don't know what they're doing online, you don't know what they're doing in school. Your child can be a completely different person from who you know at. Exactly. Which is so true. Yeah, but um, and then then the star of the case, Peyton, she's honestly, she's one of the strongest survivors, I think, that I've ever read about in true crime. For her to survive that at 12 years old. 19 stab wounds, one of them missing her heart. And she, the only reason that she was found, I think, is because she was strong enough to crawl to where somebody could find her. If Greg, if the cyclist, if she wasn't there where he was able to see her, she could have totally I think she would have died in the woods that night, for sure. So, yeah, a lot of strength and bravery from a 12-year-old, which is a lot more than you can say for some of the real grown adults we have walking around. Yay! And those are the three cases we have for you tonight. We hope you enjoyed this Halloween episode. Three cases is a wild idea from Sonia, but we totally don't mind doing this again if you guys like it.

Sonia: 35:11

Okay, so follow us on Instagram at Sinister Psyche Podcast for visuals with each episode for just some fun stuff that we're posting relating to each case. Our YouTube is at Sinister Psyche Pod for some subtitles. We're here once a month, and if this is your first time with us, there's two episodes for you to listen to. So make sure you check those out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere that you want to listen to us. Literally, iHot Radio. And then also, if you have any other cases you want to recommend, please let us know in the comments or shoot us a DM. Anyways, happy Halloween, everyone.

Gabi: 35:46

Happy Halloween, stay safe out there, and we'll see you when we crack open our next case. If me and Sonya get 75 downloads on this episode, we're gonna play Slenderman Live on YouTube. We'll play, we'll play Slenderman Live on YouTube in my room. Oh my god. It'd be fun. I kind of like I miss the game. You remember the game? I missed.