Ghosts of cyberspace

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 leaped 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 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 is a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There is 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 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 — a month before she was strangled and stabbed on Halloween night last year. Her frivolous teenage profile pales against the terrible facts of her death.

“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 as memorials. Each profile “wall” — a feature MySpace members typically use to post messages to one another — 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 homicide 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 family members request it.

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 United States, using black skulls to signify victims.

In a digital twist on vigilante justice, MyDeathSpace also posts the profiles of homicide victims alongside those of their accused killers, whose faces loom on the screen like wanted posters.

A 23-year-old accused of pushing a homeless woman into a river appears as a muscular young man in a sleeveless gray shirt, staring coldly into the camera. A 16-year-old girl charged in the shooting death of a 9-year-old shows up striking a sexy bikini-clad pose in her MySpace photo.

Mr. Patterson says the reputed killers generate the most discussion threads on the site. “If they’re accused, we’ll put accused,” he says. “We’re not gonna label somebody a murderer who isn’t one.”

MyDeathSpace veers into the dark underbelly of memorializing, says Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, author of “Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death.”

“Some people rejoice in steamy details,” Mrs. Cullen says. “The unpleasant thing is that it’s not fictional, it’s not like watching CSI. These aren’t concocted by some scriptwriters in Hollywood who wanted to get a thrill of seeing prostitutes get murdered on the strip.”

For some users, death is just a starting point for discussions of their own lives.

“I just enjoy talking with other members,” Brittany Oliver, 18, of Tucson, Ariz., writes in an e-mail. “I occasionally still read about the deaths, but more so, I enjoy chatting with fellow MDSers about life.”