The "Dear David" saga, a chilling tale that unfolded on Twitter in 2017, remains a potent example of how internet culture can amplify and transform a ghost story. Web cartoonist Adam Ellis's tweets chronicling his alleged encounters with a malevolent ghostly child captivated millions, blurring the lines between reality and fiction and sparking a wave of online discussion and speculation. Let's delve into the details of this modern-day ghost story.
The narrative begins with a simple, attention-grabbing tweet: "My apartment is currently being haunted by the ghost of a dead child, and he's trying to kill me." This declaration wasn't a one-off; it was the opening salvo in a series of tweets that detailed Adam's increasingly terrifying experiences.
The initial encounters revolved around sleep paralysis. Adam described waking up unable to move, a common and often frightening experience in itself. However, his sleep paralysis was accompanied by the chilling vision of a child with a grotesquely deformed, dented head sitting in a green rocking chair at the foot of his bed. The figure simply stared, its silent presence more terrifying than any scream. Adam, paralyzed with fear, could only watch, his heart pounding in his chest. He even attempted to draw the figure, a sketch that, while crudely rendered, captured the essence of the apparition's disturbing appearance.
These waking nightmares soon seeped into Adam's dreams. In one particularly memorable dream, he found himself in a library where a young girl approached him with a cryptic warning. She spoke of "Dear David," revealing that he was dead, appeared at midnight, and would answer two questions if invoked correctly. The crucial caveat: a third question would be fatal.
Another dream saw Adam directly interacting with the ghostly child. He found himself whispering, "Dear David, how did you die?" The chilling response, a mumbled groan, was: "An accident in a store. A shelf was pushed on my head." Overcome by a morbid curiosity, Adam broke the cardinal rule. He asked, "Who pushed the shelf?" David remained silent, and Adam awoke in terror, the weight of his transgression pressing down on him.
Despite the fear and unsettling dreams, Adam tried to find a rational explanation for what he was experiencing. He diligently searched local records for any mention of a child named David who had died in a store, even exploring similar names like Daniel, Dylan, and Devon. His search yielded nothing. Weeks passed without incident, and a fragile sense of normalcy began to return.
Hoping for a fresh start, Adam moved to the apartment directly above his previous one. However, the change of address did not bring respite. Instead, the haunting intensified. His cats, who previously gathered at his door at midnight, began their vigil earlier and earlier each night, staring intently as if something was on the other side. This shift in their behavior, from midnight to 10 PM and even earlier, created a growing sense of unease, as if the unseen presence was drawing closer.
Adding to the unsettling atmosphere, Adam began receiving phone calls from an unknown number. The calls were filled with static, disturbingly similar to the static picked up by his sleep recording app every night. Then, just as he was about to hang up, a small, chilling voice whispered, "Hello," sending shivers down his spine.
Adam began using a sleep recording app to capture any unusual activity during the night. The recordings revealed a collection of unsettling sounds: snaps, a single, deliberate footstep, the ever-present static, and a low, guttural groan. He even resorted to saging his apartment, a ritual that seemed to provide temporary relief.
One particularly terrifying dream involved a severed head with a bloody spine, staring at him and groaning, "It feels great." The dream was so vivid and disturbing that Adam woke up with a large, unexplained bruise on his arm, a physical manifestation of the horror he had experienced in his sleep.
Adding another layer of strangeness to the narrative, Adam discovered that a bustling warehouse he passed every weekend was now completely empty, save for a single green chair – the same kind of chair where he first encountered Dear David. The sight of the chair in the desolate warehouse was a chilling reminder of the entity that haunted him.
The haunting reached a new level of intensity when Adam set up a pet camera to monitor his cats while he was away. The camera captured something truly unsettling: the rocking chair moving on its own. This visual evidence, coupled with the increasingly frequent phone calls and the cats' erratic behavior, seemed to validate the terrifying reality of Adam's claims.
The "Dear David" saga is a compelling blend of personal experience, internet folklore, and the power of social media. Whether the story is true or a carefully constructed work of fiction, it serves as a chilling example of how a narrative can capture the collective imagination and blur the lines between reality and the supernatural. Adam's real-time updates on Twitter created a sense of immediacy and suspense, drawing in a captivated audience that followed his every tweet with bated breath. The story's ambiguity – is it real, or a cleverly crafted piece of fiction? – only adds to its enduring appeal and allows each reader to draw their own conclusions.
For the full story check out episode 42 of Wyrd Wessex here