My Death Space

Is the Web's most ghoulish site cursed?

images/2007/02/lizz.jpg
THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE The tragic death of Elizabeth Seholm, seen here in photos from her MyDeathSpace page, has left the morbid Web community shaken

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.

images/2007/02/toal.jpg
FINAL DESTINATION Danielle Toal predicted that she would die in a car accident in her 20s.

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."

Continue >>

 


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