If I die soon, perhaps from falling off a balcony following some drunken pill-popping, what will anonymous Internet people say about me?
If you have a MySpace profile, this might be something to consider, especially if you include photos of yourself drinking vodka straight from the bottle.
MyDeathSpace.com, an unaffiliated spinoff of the popular social networking site MySpace, serves as an obituary database for MySpace users who have died. It links news accounts of the deaths with their MySpace profiles, and the result is haunting and, to some, addictive.
It’s so addictive that some users of MyDeathSpace have single-handedly posted as many as 5,000 messages on the site’s forums analyzing, debating and, in some cases, mocking the dead.
The site has given way to a subculture of morbidity-obsessed amateur detectives ranging from goth kids to grandmothers who plunder MySpace profiles and the rest of the net looking for incriminating pictures, blogs, police and autopsy reports and other bits of information that will either add weight or levity to the death stories.
A regular visitor to MyDeathSpace, 25-year-old Sheena Farley of Las Vegas, remembers her reaction when she first found the site earlier this year.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I hit the wonderland jackpot,’” she says.
“I’m naturally curious, especially about death,” says Farley, a member of the Sin City Rollergirls roller derby team. “You can research their relationships, find all these people who are connected to the victims, backtrack and read their messages. Sometimes you’re reading the last things people wrote.”
Drunk drivers who die don’t get much sympathy on the site, and Farley isn’t above poking fun at them.
In a forum discussion about a 19-year-old woman from Indiana who died driving on the wrong side of the highway while drunk, Farley posted a picture of the woman from her MySpace page. She’s standing on a table with a friend and both are chugging alcohol from bottles. Under the picture, Farley typed, “LIKE AAAHH!!! How’d we get on the other side of the street Jodie!! AAAAAAAH!!”
Mike Patterson, a 26-year-old paralegal in San Francisco, created the site early last year after reading about teens that died and discovering their MySpace profiles. To date, about 2,600 deaths have been featured, and Patterson says the site gets about 20,000 unique visitors per day.
It’s no surprise that most of the deaths on MyDeathSpace were accidental or caused by homicide and suicide, the three leading causes of death among 15-to-24-year-olds. Patterson says he wants the site to be an educational tool for young people.
“Hopefully teens will curb their bad driving habits, to slow down and buckle up. I was always taught from a very young age to buckle up,” he says. “If someone dies in a way that could have been prevented, there are going to be some tongue-in-cheek comments on the forums, but people are taking it more seriously now.”
While it’s believable that Patterson isn’t making much money off the site, the site’s skull logo and merchandise—thongs, mugs, aprons and even shirts for dogs—seem to contradict Patterson’s claim that his goal is to educate youth.
Some, such as Jimmy Martinson of Las Vegas, find the site offensive.
Shortly after his best friend Aaron Seavey died of a prescription drug overdose in April, Martinson Googled Seavey’s name while sleepless and grieving, and discovered a thread on the site discussing his death.
Seavey didn’t hide his addiction. The heading on his MySpace profile is “Time-Released Nightmare” and in his blog he discussed his struggle—E.R. visits, withdrawal symptoms, chest pains.
In response, someone wrote in the forum: “He messed with pills and lost. End of story! I doubt the high was really worth it.”
Martinson said that while MyDeathSpace has a right to exist, “they should let the dead be dead and let them be in peace.”
Like many of the MySpace profiles of those who have died, Seavey’s has become a place for friends to leave messages for him as a way to grieve and process the loss. A message recently left for him reads: “You live on in my heart and I think of you every day! I’m stronger than ever because I feel you watching over me!”
Seeing how scraps of information can be spun by strangers into unflattering portrayals of the dead, some MyDeathSpace users have given much consideration to the information they will leave behind when they die. Farley has a blog and she says she hopes it will be posted on the site when she’s gone.
Other users of the site say they’ve given their MySpace passwords to friends and asked them to take down embarrassing photos of them.
But some MyDeathSpace regulars have bumped the planning up a notch, eager to accommodate those whom they hope will be digging through their MySpace profiles after they die.
A 44-year-old grandmother from Oregon called “Death Roe” wants to create a link on her MySpace page that her family could click on, automatically submitting her profile to MyDeathSpace.
“It’s a great idea. It could read, ‘in the event of my death, click here,’” she wrote on the message boards.
A California mom who goes by the moniker “blunt.force.trauma” is weaving an even more elaborate strategy.
“My MySpace page is maintained solely for the purpose of my eventual demise and subsequent posting on MyDeathSpace,” she wrote, “waiting to be fodder for speculation and supposition.”