MySpace Pages Of Deceased Frozen In Time

(AP)  Somewhere deep in cyberspace, where reality blurs into fiction and the living greet the dead, there are ghosts.

They live in a virtual graveyard without tombstones or flowers. They drift among the shadows of the people they used to be, and the pieces they left behind.

Allison Bauer left rainbows: Reds, yellows and blues, festooned across her MySpace profile in a collage of color. Before her corpse was pulled from the depths of an Oregon gorge on May 9, where police say she leapt to her death, she unwittingly wrote her own epitaph.

"I love color, Pure Color in rainbow form, And I love My friends," the 20-year-old wrote under "Interests" on her profile. "And I love to Love, I care about everyone so much you have no idea."

Now her page fills a plot on www.MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that archives the pages of deceased MySpace members.

Behold a community spawned from twin American obsessions: Memorializing the dead and peering into strangers' lives. Anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits per day.

The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. Here, death roams cyberspace in all its spectral forms: senseless and indiscriminate, sometimes premeditated, often brutally graphic. It's also a place where the living — those who knew the deceased and those who didn't — discuss this world and the next.

There's a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There's a 20-year-old whose body was discovered burned to death on a hiking trail; and woman, 21, who overdosed on drugs and was found dead in a portable toilet, authorities say.

Their fates have been sealed, but their spirits remain very much alive — frozen in time, for all the world to see.

Scrolling down a dead person's MySpace profile wall is like journeying into the past. The pages were abandoned hastily, without warning. Most telling is the date of each person's last log-in.

For 16-year-old Stephanie Wagner, it was Sept. 29, 2006 — a month before she was strangled and stabbed on Halloween night. Her frivolous teenage profile pales against the terrible facts of her murder.

"This site does kind of let you look into the heart of darkness," says Bob Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. "We see those kinds of things that we try not to think about, which is how we are all dancing on the edge — how quickly mortality can come in and claim us."

The human bits scattered carelessly across each profile form a vivid clip of life in motion. It's a final resting place for the various "selves" people project online: the ironic self, the joyful self, the bitter self, the courageous self.

"I do not fear what the future holds for me," Navy Hospitalman Geovani Padilla-Aleman, 20, blogged months before he was killed in Iraq. "I will stand and fight. I am not afraid to die."

Weeks before she stood in the path of a commuter train, Cheryl Lynn Duca pondered mortality in a poem: "over my life i've watched people die in front of me. wondering why this happens."

Many families of the deceased leave the profiles up as memorials. Each profile "wall" — a feature MySpace members typically use to post messages to each other — becomes a conduit for one-way communications with the departed. Days are marked by post-mortem birthday wishes or life updates.

"I made that B in Statistics. and I certainly missed you sittin next to me during the final," a friend wrote to Casey Hastings, 19, a cheerleader who was killed in a traffic accident.

Some profiles are used as digital billboards to publicize a little-known atrocity. One profile is dedicated to a 3-year-old murder victim.

MyDeathSpace grew out of one person's morbid curiosity in December 2005, when two teenage daughters were slain by their father. Mike Patterson, 26, a paralegal from San Francisco, tracked down their MySpace pages one day when he was bored. His voyeurism grew into a live journal that later became MyDeathSpace.

"I'd come across these stories where teens would be ending up dead or killing themselves, or killing others," he says. "And more often than not, when I looked them up on MySpace, they had profiles."

Permission to use the profiles is not requested from MySpace, which is not affiliated with the site and did not respond to requests for comment on it. MySpace said in a statement it handles deceased members' pages on a "case-by-case basis" and does not "allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile." Profiles can be deleted if that's requested by family members.

MyDeathSpace matter-of-factly catalogs each death in headline format: "Belford Ramirez (19) died after being stabbed in the neck outside of a Burger King." Click on the link and you'll find a detailed description of the fatal attack — an element usually pulled from a news article or blog — his photograph, and a link to his MySpace profile.

The site even charts death geographically on a digital "death map" of the continental U.S., using black skulls to signify victims.

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[michaelh2001]

Myspace does not remove profiles unless asked to. I've looked for people who are still quite alive, only to find that they walked away from their pages - sometimes years before.

Anyway, I'm a 36 YO who uses Myspace to network with friends. So long as people are honest about themselves and their interests, then Myspace is a great way to stay in touch. If people aren't honest then the process breaks down.

[toldyouso21]

MySpace and other blogs that include pictures, etc, may seem like just social fun to those who use them--but for a more sinister types of users, the site is a meat market. No matter where they are, if they have access to a computer and can get that site, they can obsess, plot and fantasize about their next victim in lurid detail--until such time they are ready to act.

The deathspace may sound cool, until we all realize that the first site might be feeding the other. My daughter had an admirer, who just saw her pics and wanted to meet, etc and was willing to fly to the US to do so. She never responded to him or his many attempts and eventually removed her info/bio from the site. The man supposedly lived in England--but for him, it appeared to have been virtual love at first sight. He might be a really cool guy and a nice person or a sicko. He could be a dirty old (or young man or woman) she would never know if such a person came for her and would have no clue of their intentions.
In a way, this age makes ordinary people "stars" that can be seen or see others--and just like stars, they are subject to fans who may not be to their liking, one only has to remember John Lennon, Versace, and others to realize the pursuit of an attaining of fame can be dangerous.


MySpace, Facebook, etc sound great but rarely provide anonymity. Consider the habit of posting pics of oneself or friends.

[toldyouso21]

The truly sad thing about MYSpace are not the deaths per se, but the potential MySpace played in unwittingly helping to bring those deaths about. What is often mentioned are brutal murders. If they are by strangers--the introduction, address and first meeting of the attacker and the victim may have taken place on those sites.

Now, people who never would have known of each other's existence, much less meet...can stroll (or scroll) through images, intimate information and thoughts from strangers--and if the wrong person is interested, they can glean information often from profiles, of where a person lives, works or goes to school.

If they use any real information or clues the perp can then look them up in yearbooks or other records, to learn their full name and where they live. Then the victim is being stalked by someone they never met, often still does not know exist--but the person knows a lot about them. This is believed to have happened to young Kelsey who was snatched from a suburban Target in Overland Park, KS, by a stalker and later was found murdered. The abduction was caught on tape.

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[usayesterday]

A very sad and somewhat thought provoking website. Thought provoking in the sense that you can probably can find some similarities between your life and the lives of one or more of the deceased on this website.

The thought provoking part of that reflection, is that the vast majority of the dead were young people.

To put this into perspective, consider your life as an ongoing movie. At some point of the movie, between the beginning (your birth) and the present in which you live.... pick a point and cut off that 'movie' and call it 'the end'. Now that would make your movie, your life, rather incomplete....

...just as incomplete as the lives memorialized on the MyDeadSpace.com site.


(From the first post, I had my AVG anti-virus updated before I entered the site and I had no warnings from my AVG software).

[raphaelschil]

Warning....I was checking out the website discussed in this article and my AVG caught threats twice while I browsed.