Is the Web's most ghoulish site cursed?

Death comes to us all. But for members of MyDeathSpace.com, a website that archives the profile pages of dead MySpacers, death comes with a heavy dose of the creeps.

Danielle Toal, 23, was the first. A regular on the MyDeathSpace forums, Toal posted on topics ranging from Saddam Hussein's execution ("Yay! Finally") and decapitation ("a job I could NOT do") to her desire to be buried in a mausoleum.

In a thread titled "Ouija Board—Anyone Ever Played?" Toal shared her own experience with the game at age 12. The board told her she would die in a car accident in her 20s. "Now I'm in my 20s," she wrote, "and kinda scared to drive."

She died in a car crash four months later.

The driver was Gary Nelson, a bearded man who appears in Danielle's MySpace photo gallery above the caption, "My Favorite Old Guy Gary." On January 18, 2007, with a revoked driver's license, allegedly too much alcohol in his system, and Danielle as his passenger, Nelson crossed over the center line of Illinois Route 173 and collided with another vehicle. Danielle died in the hospital.

Elizabeth "Lizz" Seholm, 18, was next. According to friends, Seholm would spend hours reading and discussing the profiles of dead MySpacers. She even sported official MyDeathSpace merchandise—a black rubber wristband with the site's URL and a cartoon skull. She was particularly drawn to the overdoses. Before her death, she told her friend and fellow MyDeathSpace member Trish Gordon, "If anything happens to me, I want to be up there."

On January 25, Lizz, who Gordon says had been drug-free for the past six months, died of a heroin overdose.

And that's when things got a little weird on the MyDeathSpace forums.

"It's started," wrote a member who goes by the screen name of "Olivia" in a memorial thread for Lizz. "We've been given a few months' grace period and now we're all going to be killed off."

LivingDeadDoll, another member, agreed. "It's like Final Destination. We'll all die in the order we registered."

"We've been given a few months' grace period and now we're all going to be killed off"A user named Sarah came out from lurking to add, "I figured I should post here at least once before I die. I want it known that I was a member here."

Another swore she was going to log off and write an "In-case-I-die blog," but then changed her mind, putting the question to her fellow MyDeathSpacers, "What if I'm foreshadowing my death?"

With news of their deaths, Danielle and Lizz's posting histories took on a decidedly spooky cast, including a post in which Danielle, displaying the macabre humor of a true MyDeathSpace superfan, penned a mock suicide note. It read, "I shall fulfill my destiny. For you insolent pukes, I will shed my blood ... once again to open the gates of heaven." She signed her letter, "Jesus Christ III, aka Danielle."

Death had officially come to MyDeathSpace, with rumors of a curse and all the makings of a dynamite urban legend.

Currently, the combined threads for Danielle and Lizz stretch to more than 40 pages.

Sheila Cisneros, Danielle Toal's sister, is dismayed. Over e-mail, she quoted posts from Danielle's thread in which RIPs and condolences are mixed with scatological jokes, porn references, and suggestions to contact Toal via Ouija board. Some posts included what Cisneros refers to as garbage:

"Double fisting ... sorta like all Heathers [another MySpacer] dates have to do ... you know ... the elephant man loving whore over there ..."

"He wants to poop on my chest and then boob sex it. he also wants to sodomize me with a shovel!"

"Some people don't ... Like Heathers last date whom was sucked into a vortex of loose vagina meat on an unpleasant "cop a feel" experiment, costed him his arms ..."

One member, accused of being disrespectful, shot back, "Since Danielle was into this site, don't you think she understood (and probably apprectiated [sic]) the dark humor?"

"A grieving family should never have to deal with this awful stuff," writes Cisneros. "Danielle had an easy sense of humor, but I think even Danielle would have been hurt if she had read everything in that thread today."

Cisneros acknowledges that her sister enjoyed MyDeathSpace because it was uncensored and members could speak freely about taboo subjects. But, she counters, "With my freedom of speech, I would like to say that MyDeathSpace is currently a mockery of our lost loved ones, and I wish the site moderators would delete the thread on my sister, as I have already requested."

Mike Patterson, the site's owner and co-creator, has not complied with Cisneros's request. "Apparently, she didn't realize how much her sister enjoyed the website," he wrote in an e-mail. Patterson pointed out that among her many pro-DeathSpace posts, Danielle had written that she would haunt anyone who messed with her profile posthumously. Reason enough to stay the course.

For Trish Gordon, who personally submitted her friend Lizz to the site, the tragedy provided a surprising sense of camaraderie with her fellow MyDeathSpacers. She even detected a sense of reverence in their responses, unusual for a site where overdoses haven't received the kindest treatment. (Comments about other drug deaths include "just another dumb ass dead from drugs sorry don't feel bad for her" and "American youth continues to become more and more stupid by the day.") When it came to Lizz, Gordon says the MyDeathSpace peanut gallery was softer, gentler. "It was some sort of, let's all stand behind one of our own."

"MyDeathSpace is currently a mockery of our lost loved ones, and I wish the site moderators would delete the thread on my sister""I know that Lizz wouldn't want to be another faceless name. When you go to her site you get a sense of who she was, her tongue-in-cheek humor," says Gordon of her decision to honor Seholm's wishes even as she braced herself for off-color comments. "I think it's ignorant of people to think that we die and we don't talk about it."

Patterson, who started his site as a small LiveJournal community, admits that the recent demise of two members is a little "freaky," but death at MyDeathSpace is just a statistical probability. "Now we're pushing 5,000 members. It's only a matter of time."

In addition to its large membership, the site gets between 10,000 and 20,000 unique visitors a day, according to Patterson, and has been covered by dozens of news organizations, many of which seem to mischaracterize MyDeathSpace. The New York Times equated it with Legacy.com, a typically well-mannered "in memory of" site, apparently overlooking the prevalence of poop jokes, cartoon skulls, and bikini model dating advertisements on MyDeathSpace. Other outlets describe it as a horrifying example of soullessness at the Internet's margins. A pointed headline in The New York Sun reads, "Morbid Website Makes Amusement of Online Profiles Left Behind By The Dead."

But for all the interest in the site and its membership, no one seemed to foresee the obvious—that some MyDeathSpacers, like the objects of their fascination, would inevitability forget to buckle up, drink too much, neglect to look both ways, or simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They, too, would leave behind unfortunate background designs, dated profile songs, unapproved comments, and creepy coincidences.

The MyDeathspace forums in particular provide an eerie artifact unique to the Internet age—a brutally honest public record of young people's preoccupation with death, there for the living to pore over once the poster is gone.

Patterson isn't concerned about a MyDeathSpace curse. After all, he says, most of the deaths on the site, including the deaths of Toal and Seholm—were completely preventable. No dates with destiny, just poor decision-making.

Says Patterson, displaying his site's trademark sensitivity: "It's not that I'm unsympathetic, but it's—you know—duh. You're asking for it."

On the plus side, MyDeathSpace has now graduated from macabre entertainment to public service vehicle. After hearing of the deaths, at least one scared-straight member wrote, "Ever since I've been on MDS I won't even drive after having one beer, and I've totally stopped hanging out on train tracks, huffing keyboard cleaner, doing heroin, and hanging out with emos."

And one of the site's regular users, appropriately named "Morbid Curiosity," dispensed what might be the best advice: "Don't write anything that could foreshadow your death on MySpace."