That Time a Spooky Ghost Haunting Went Down on Twitter (Dear David)

welcome back to wish for death Island's population me and if you'll recall I mentioned a little while ago that Twitter has a lot of weird stories unfolding on it right now I've seen a few things like creepy Twitter accounts and cursed images and we had voicemails over Twitter for the past few years but the one that I actually followed for quite a while was the dear David saga that ran from August 2017 to around June 2018 I didn't follow the entire thing but I recently just kind of remembered it and decided to revisit I think that this might be the first major Twitter based story that blew up the way it did in terms of horror Arg content so it's interesting to come back to in this way now before we start I understand that even though Adam Ellis the author of this says it's all real it does come across as an Arg to me if you're familiar with those I'll just say it's like an interactive story that hinges on staying in character and immersion so it basically looks like it's real when it obviously isn't kind of like role-playing I guess they're fun but I wanted to say that because even though they're fake you always get stupid people saying oh my god do you guys know it's fake and trying to interrupt everyone else is fun to let everyone else know how smart they are so in the interest of immersion I'm going to be pretending that it's real to discuss it in the most fun way possible I present the timeline but then towards the end I'll just be talking about some of the ways that I think things were pulled off like FX and one up because I think it's fun to talk about the production so our story begins with Adam Ellis he used to work for BuzzFeed but now he does his own thing at the time of the story he works for BuzzFeed so this is also not about him as a person but purely about the story so I'm not going to delve into any of my personal opinions about any of his hot takes or political views we're just going to enjoy the ghost story on August 7th of 2017 he tweets that he thinks that there is a ghost in his new apartment and decides to make a thread explaining what happened to make him believe this there's a green chair that you should become familiar with in his bedroom that the entity seems to gravitate towards because the entity will sit there and rock in it while Adam has his nightmares Adam had a dream once where he was in the library and a girl comes up to him saying dear David is a dead boy who appears at midnight and if you ask him two questions he will give you the answers but if you try to ask him a third he will kill you I guess he's just one of those girls on Facebook who posts about how she has such a bad day but gets mad when you ask her about it he shows us the boy as a caved-in head and that was most likely something to with the cause of his death either that or he's just a galaxy brain of the highest order Adam then confirms this by saying he had a dream where David was sitting on the chair and Adam asked two questions David explains he died in a store and the Shelf fell on his head Adam despite being warned not to asks a third question which isn't answered he wakes up scared and realizes his mistake but nothing really happened then because he remembers what David had said he googles for any deaths involving stores or just in general for any kids that had something collapsed on them he even uses variations of the name David because he just doesn't find anything there is nothing about a David who died in a store a few weeks later after nothing happens the apartment above Adam is vacated so he decides to move up there the layout of his building is a duplex with a business on the side and you can see the roof of that business when you look out on the kitchen and dining room windows on the second floor of the duplex a month or two goes by again and nothing happens and Adam just assumes that because he moved David won't bother him anymore that is until it comes back Adam has two cats the one with the white in particular is the one that seems to be the most sensitive to this kind of activity and his name is Maxwell for reference the cat stopped at the front door at exactly midnight and stare at the bottom gap as if there is something on the other side this has been happening for around 4 night and on the night of August 6 Adam looks through the peephole and he thinks he sees something he doesn't know what but when he goes out into the hallway and puts the lights on there's nothing there so he decides to leave it alone he does note that when he closes the door the cats are even more freaked out on August 8th he also makes an update on the next few nights then when I look at this I think that the cats are backed up further away from the door in the first picture they were very close they were trying to get as close as to the gap underneath the door as possible but in this one they look like they're just watching the door in general I think this comes across is whatever is out there coming further towards the door so they're starting to view the door and as is the thing that's wrong because the thing is like right outside of it if that makes any sense that's the way that it comes across he provides a video of this and the cats are sniffing around the sides of the door as well as the bottom so I I definitely think that there's something much closer there than there was before so Adam decides to take a picture through the people this time because he again thinks he saw something but he wasn't able to quite catch it this is a picture taken with his phone later on you'll see pictures taken with that up hope Polaroids but I'm making the distinction now in this picture we can see some black smoke sort of hovering around by the banister he also understands this might look like the smudge on the peephole so he takes another picture to clearly show that this isn't the case there is a big blob in this one that isn't in the next one so something is outside in the hallway he finally decides that he's going to go out but sees nothing and deadbolts the door and goes to sleep even though his cats are still out there by the front door watching it on August 9th he posts an update thread and says that he's alive and he tested his apartment for things like carbon monoxide so he can make sure it's not something that he's hallucinating he's confirmed that it's not from him he also assures us that it's not viral marketing because he did have a book coming out around the time but says that it isn't anything that's to do with that he says later on that the night is very quiet so he decides to download an app that records noises in your sleep for people who sleep talk and stuff like that he decides to use it to see how it'll go but he isn't really expecting to see much and says that this is the routine for them at this point sitting and looking at the door luckily on the 11th of August we do get those recordings that have apparently gotten some very interesting things there are around 30 of them total but only three of them have things that he can't explain the rest of them are the noises that the cats make and him in his sleep and just things that you would expect so for the first recording we get snapping and a small stepping noise he says he didn't get up that night either so it's not him it's either a ghost or the crackhead down the street one at abba visit the second recording was a strange electricity noise that is like a rumbling static and this is the only time that if that is heard in any of their recordings the third recording directly follows this one and it's just another snapping noise this all happens between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. he promises to post more if anything else happens and says that he's buying ghost stuff like stage in a Ouija board and he's leaving for the day tomorrow I just this is this is me interjecting but that [ __ ] on Amazon looks really [ __ ] cheap but it still looks better than the [ __ ] that zak bagans uses it's like this guy might just go buy a shitty plastic flashlight but zak bagans will show up with a light bulb taped to a crack pipe and act like that's like a professional thing to use to the 12th of august we get a selfie and him saying that he's leaving to go out nothing big here August 13th rolls around and weird things have apparently started to happen again this is when he says the phrase take it with a grain of salt which alludes to the fact that strange things are getting more and more far-fetched and he isn't entirely sure if it's him I think it's more of a comment on his mental state as well because even though he double-checked that there's nothing making him hallucinate he's starting to unravel at this point and towards the end of the series he does just wonder whether or not it's all in his head so some of it is starting to come through at this point he says that he ended up buying a Polaroid camera and when he was out because they're fun and decided to take pictures not really seriously he just thought it was going to be entertaining and he didn't really expect to find anything however he did the pictures in the house all fine but when he took a picture of the whole way it's completely black he then wonders whether or not his finger covered the lens or something along those lines so he takes a picture doing that and it comes out completely different there isn't really a way for him to take a picture that is just black it's just wrong it doesn't look right he opens a fresh pack to see if maybe it just developed wrong or it didn't develop at all but everything is white it doesn't start off black so it's obviously not something that's wrong with the camera or any of the refills for that matter with all of this in mind he decides that he is going to film himself taking a picture of the whole way so really show you what's happening and watch everything develop he takes a picture of inside his house and leaves that to develop he shows us taking a picture out in the hallway he steps into the frame of the door he then watches the thing he watches it develops so we can see that it just comes out this way someone else suggests 'iz suggests that instead of standing in the doorway he should have the doorway in frame so that he can really see what's going on and see if this affects whether or not the hallway is still black so he decides to step back and take one picture with his phone one picture with the camera in the picture with his phone it's normal but the Polaroid shows this big solid wall of blackness out in the hallway it's just cuts off like a void so he comes away from this realizing that the Polaroids are obviously getting something that the iPhone and had him himself on on the 14th he says that he was burning sage in his apartment and in the hallway but it doesn't really seem to be working he can't help but think that something is wrong the next day on the 15th he has another dream about Dave there was a lot of smoke in his dream but he could just see you David sitting on the chair across the room David looks shrunken and when Adam woke up he was thinking about it as a bad omen because the [ __ ] hallway turning into a void of hell isn't enough of a bad Oldman for you I guess it's just the usual that looks like my [ __ ] mental state on the 16th he discovers that a few people on Twitter pointed out something he hadn't seen before in the Polaroid there's a face just at the bottom he also realizes that there might have been a face in the selfie that he took on the 12th of August specifically in the back where the door is reflecting here but it could easily be a reflection I don't see the one in the selfie it's just kind of a blur on the afternoon of August 21st Adams says that some stuff just happened that have made him feel like he really isn't unsafe at his home everything else was kind of just odd but this time it's dangerous on Friday there was a storm he fell asleep pretty early and had a dream where David was dragging him down an old abandoned warehouse by the arm David was really strong and Adam wasn't sure he why he didn't fight back but dream logic he tried to brush it off when he woke up but noticed that there was a bizarre bruise on his arm he says that there could be a logical explanation he could have bruised it yesterday and not really noticed it and when he was asleep it could have come out in a dream but he thinks that it's weird anyway he also explains that when he goes out to get coffee every morning there are a bunch of food carts that are really busy all the time but when he went out this time it was as if they'd never been there everything was empty and gutted the only thing that was there was a green chair in the warehouse on his way back from coffee the warehouse had been shuttered on the 25th there was another thread by a very scared Adam the cats are now gathering earlier by the door they started gathering at 10:00 p.m. now instead of midnight and crying at the door they cry for about 15 minutes and then leave one of these 10 p.m. sessions went for around half an hour and afterwards Adam started getting a number of unmarked phone call in the screenshot he shows there about six or seven he answered one of them because he thought that maybe it was a telemarketing BOTS and when you answer they usually stop calling you but it didn't stop when he did pick up he says that he heard a strange static noise like in the second recording it went for around a minute and then they might have been breathing afterwards but it was too soft to really be sure he heard a small voice say hello not as a greeting or a question but as a flat statement this freaked him out and he hung up he put on all of the lights in his apartment to close all the curtains and stayed up all night watching TV because he was too scared to do anything else he feels like he's losing his mind if you look at everything that has happened as individual events they don't look too weird each of them could probably have logical explanations but he says that putting them all together in the way that they've been these past couple months it's too freaky to ignore and he can't just brush it off the only thing he can do is write it down on the 28th of August he moved the green chair out of his bedroom and has been moving it around the living room ever since he doesn't really think that getting rid of it is gonna do anything to help so he decides to just keep it in three weeks he's going to Japan on vacation and thinks that the vacation might help because when he first moved up here David couldn't find him for a while so maybe the vacation will trick David into thinking Adam has just moved away he doesn't sound convinced but something they'll make him feel better he also gets a pet monitoring camera it's like a nanny cam to check on the cat it gives him a lots over Wi-Fi and can be accessed 24/7 he shows an example but he blows out the company name because he doesn't think that they want to be associated with this mess he tested it out during the weekend while he was away for the night and he got alert to battle his cats but otherwise it was fine normal things that is until around 11:00 p.m. he got an alert and nothing was on the feet at first so he just brushed it off but then when he watched it back two more times he realized what was wrong the green share rocks for while but the thing is the windows weren't open at all he has the air conditioning on but that wouldn't randomly have a gust strong enough to move the chair this freaked him out and he then got another alert there's a turtle shell above the bookcase right here he picked it up when he was visiting his family in Montana and hung it on the wall he sees it being knocked down behind the bookcase seemingly out of nowhere he also thinks that this blue chair over here had disappeared but people told him that it's just the shadows and it's actually still there and when he went over to check in his apartment when he got home he was just losing his mind over it so he decided that it was too late for him he took a xanax and he went to bed on September 5th it started happening again he was going over the camera feed from the weekend this is now a routine because he wants to catch everything in his apartment something weird happened on Saturday specifically something with the cats Maxwell seems to jump over something invisible and then stares at it startled according to Adam Adam also clarifies that they want any bugs in the house so it can't be that and even if it was Maxwell doesn't react that way to bugs he eats them he also shows another video of Maxwell repeatedly going up on his hind legs and watching something and then he swats it whatever the something is and just stares out at it tensely Adam thinks that something made its way into his apartments and can't really explain how he's feeling but he knows something is wrong on the 11th of September he explains that he has three locks on his door and doesn't really know why but it's become part of his routine to lock all three of them he feeds the cat's brushes his teeth and then goes to bed after doing so the oneis way to the pantry one night he heard a loud crack and says that it's better to watch the feed to really understand what happened it shows this knitted cactus in a terra cotta pot falling down in the same way that the turtle shell did just out of nowhere it's now broken he says after this he checked the locks about four times and the cats were all in the bedroom anyway so they couldn't have done it plus the feed would have showed if they were interfering somehow he then adds that he leaves with Japan in two weeks and tries to brush it off saying that he lives next to the subway line and maybe that's why it's happening on September 16th he's been plagued by nightmares they're way more vivid than any other said he's had and he can't explain how strange they are he took a nap in the afternoon and in the dream he was in bed he rolls over to see it the pillow next to him a severed head in a bloody spine occupying it after he woke up it was dark outside and quiet the other dreams mostly involved things like dark figures in the windows even though that's strange because Adam lives on the second floor he is also confused because they don't relate to the stuff that's happening in his real life at the moment they're just ominous he went out to get a snack from the bodega after feeling uneasy and he noticed on his way back there was a thud on the warehouse shutter from the inside he got curious but he can't exactly open it so he finds that there's they great that he can't reach and decides to find a way to look inside he can raise his phone above his head and snap a picture and then look at it afterwards putting the flash on so he can see in the darkness and he's too scared to check the photo until after he calms down and eats when he goes home it's just some old insulation a filing cabinet and another desk chair he sees a face there that looks like it could be David but he feels like he's going crazy again because it could easily be a blur like on that selfie on the 22nd he says that he's leaving for Japan in a couple days and things have been quiet recently he's going to have to go and have a good time and he thanks everyone for making him not feel alone then he was wandering around in Japan and found the statue taking pictures of it from different angles because he found it interesting and found this a kid with a dent in his head and it makes him feel anxious then we skip ahead to October 14th where he is back home and now having electricity issues in his house in the hallway there are two lightbulbs and both have gone out he decides to leave it alone because he doesn't really gonna get the ladder and interfere but in his apartment he has a TV that has a backlight the backlight is activated by a u.s. it only works when that thing that it's plugged into is on so he is surprised when it starts flickering when the TV is clearly off he noticed it in person when he was getting water he got back to bed and then noticed again and went out to watch it it went off and on for a while before it just burned out and if stopped working entirely he finds the strange because it was only a couple months old he couldn't sleep so he goes out to the only diner nearby that's open at 4:00 a.m. and when he gets back home he takes a shower and sights to go to work early the Sun is up at this point so it's not as bad yet when he comes out of the shower he thinks he hears a faint scratching noise at the door he took a picture instead of going out there himself and says nothing is in it but then goes back and think he sees David he thinks that now he should get someone else involved on the 26th of October he apologizes for the radio silence it says a lot of strangers Ghost Hunters mediums have been asking him if they could come in and investigate he doesn't want strangers in his house and he decides to bring a friend over to Sage the apartment it only really worked for about a week until he passes the warehouse once again the shutter was open and there was a hearse on the inside the warehouse has been closed for two months now and no one is around why is it open and that was when everything started escalating again on the night of October 25th he was watching TV on the couch around 11:00 p.m. and then decided to go to the dining rooms get a drink noticing that the cats were staring out the window if you recall while the kitchen and the dining room look out onto the roof of the business next to it he didn't see anything out there but when he went to the kitchen he looked out again and saw a figure standing on the roof he ducked down and turned the light off but the picture he took was too blurry by the time he actually went to get another proper picture the figure was already gone he's pretty sure it's David on November 6 Adam notes that it had been four months since the entire thing started since the first dream but now he has the dream again although with some minor changes the green share has moved out of the room so David now sits in an old recliner and he's watching at him as usual but this time Adam is not completely immobile he can move his hand David glares at him and struggles off the recliner like it's some huge effort but decides to come forward anyway Adam figures that he's about to die but decides that he's going to take some pictures David was mumbling something Adam couldn't hear and then crawled up on the bed when Adam woke up he tried to brush this off and went to work but later noticed that he had photos from last night on his phone November 17th Adam explains that he has been quiet because he's trying to investigate things and doesn't really know what else to do he recently found a secret part of his building that he had no idea was there it began when he heard bangs and scrapes from above which made no sense because there's no real way to get onto the roof and it did sound like it was coming from the roof it sounded like it was coming from right above his ceiling it also wasn't a pipe or old building noises these were alien deliberate they were thumps he went out into the hallway and then remembered there's always been a hatch there and it also doesn't really make sense because the stay away makes it so that you can't access it and unless you have a ladder he does some maths and realizes that there's a 3-foot gap between the roof and the ceiling meaning there's some sort of space up there and he can't get to the hatch because of the stairs he initially brushes it off as insulated space but he keeps hearing more noises from up there so he assumes that there's something strange going on one thing to note in particular is when he's in the kitchen he hears a thump and then something drops onto the floor and rolls about 6 feet on the 28th of November he's away for Thanksgiving so he finally has time to update us and what's been happening he kept hearing the crashing sounds from the roof he heard it about 15 times in a row and then he heard something from the whole way that he registered as a footstep but he wasn't sure he heard another crash and decided that he was going to run out of there but then stopped and realized that he had to pass underneath the hatch to get out of the building and decides to just stay inside instead he doesn't remember falling asleep but he wakes up to a massive crash above him and feels a strange energy he places his phone on the Wardrobe in the hallway so that he can film himself poking the hatch open with the pole he also notices when he goes down the stairs that there's a bunch of debris right under the where the hatches there's something sticking out of the Hat he had to poke it to find outs and and the thing fell out it was an old leather shoe it looks very small like it belonged to a child and also very old he decides that he's going to call the landlord to explain everything and hours later the landlord shows up with the ladder to check it out the landlord pokes a flashlight in there and says that there isn't anything up there but then pauses and finds a green marble costing it to Adam he thinks that there's nothing wrong with this and leaves and Adam just takes the marble and goes to his office inside he says that it could be really old because in the 1900s they were made with big metal scissors by hand on December 12th he says that he wants to update everyone because he's not feeling good and hasn't been feeling good for a while he thinks get his ears checked because he feels dizzy all the time and he sleeps the days away he woke up on Wednesday thinking someone was watching him but he was alone he also had a really bad feeling and says that this is the feeling that he associates with David being Yin he initially thought that maybe David was a spirit that needed help but all he feels is malice he feels like he woke up just missing something when he wakes up the second time like as if a candle had just gone out and he just missed it but he can still smell it so he decides to get a nap that takes a photo every 60 seconds because he can't really get the nanny cam in there because of the cable he goes to sleep after setting up his phone and he wakes up to 350 photos first 100 are fine but suddenly David is in there David collapses onto the chair and stays there for several photos looking at the ceiling then he's gone but then 15 photos later he's next to the bed staring at Adam then looking at the camera Adam is really scared at this point but forces himself to look through the rest of them there's nothing else after this but then in the last photo David is right next to the camera just below it January 2nd 2018 is our next update Adam says that he has been out of the city because he's been staying with his family in Montana for the holiday initially he didn't think moving out with help because David would just follow him or that's what he assumed but as soon as he was out of that place he started feeling really good he felt peaceful he felt like he could figure this out and he even started looking for a new apartment anyway however he went to the bathroom one night and thought that he felt someone watching him through the window it was too dark outside but he figured since it's Montana there are animals everywhere so that's probably what it was the next morning he saw some animal tracks and just decided that he was right but the next night he caught movement out of the corner of his eye when he experienced the same thing he was staring out for a bit and didn't notice anything but then he saw something to the right tip out of sight he came back to look in the morning and saw up small footprints that he followed all the way to where they disappeared in the ditch back he started feeling nervous and feels like he's at square one again nothing is really working he says that he feels David at night he's watching from different corners of the room in on the ceiling coming closer but Adam wakes up before anything bad happens Adam has also been using the app again for photos but nothing has really been turning up until last night when he dreamed of David crashing down on him from above when Adam looks at the photos in the morning the last one is of a blue crashing down on him we jumped to January 16th of 2018 where he says that he has been feeling good for a while besides a few things just missing time like he zones out and then he realizes the now hour has gone by but he can't account for it and says that sometimes he'll ask someone to repeat what they've said but they just tell him they've never said anything but lately he started feeling like something was wrong he posted three pictures to Instagram of him and his friend getting lunch completely innocuous photos but when he went on Twitter he realized that he had many more notifications than usual the vast majority of them are people saying that they found something really strange on the third photo this picture appears to be corrupted he has no idea how this happened and swore that it wasn't like that when he posted but he then notices that his face has what appears to be David glitched over the top of it he thinks it's weird but he's too tired to really care anymore we don't hear from him again until the 28th of January where we get an odd post see so far Adam posts with full sentences commas capitalization it's pretty readable he also adds lengthy captions when he posts things that are other types of media he doesn't just post something without context this time however he has a video of Maxwell from a very odd angle with no explanation like Adam was lying on the floor watching the cat it just looks odd there is also something by the door which is later revealed to be a drawstring bag Maxwell is staring at the door again he goes silent until February 3rd where he posts and everything is fine tweet in lowercase completely unlike how he usually types and there's an audible spacing between fine and is on February 16 or Mille thread announcing he's leaving BuzzFeed but then he follows this up on the 13 saying that everything will go back to where it was before in the same strange way that he doesn't post like usually on the 13th we also have a video of his cat again doing the same thing keep in mind that both of these videos were posted just after midnight and then we get to June 6th and he says that he has to work on other projects and that's the ending of the story we don't we don't get anything else okay so I was initially waiting to see what would happen and I figured that it's been more than a year at this point and it seems like it's it's just done since we're at the ending I just wanted to mention a couple things firstly a lot of people have been speculating on the way that he tried to manipulate the pictures I just know that there's been some photoshopping going on and I don't really care too much about how it was done that just seems like it's a pretty easy thing to do but the thing that I thought about was when he went out into the hallway to take a picture we never saw the front of the camera so I just assumed I wanted to mention that I think he put something at the front of the camera so he couldn't show it to us and that's how the picture developed is black because it's not all in the same video it's very choppy and that's easy to just replace some the lens with something else again just a production thing but I wanted to talk a bit about this as the first real big Twitter ghost story for us because there was in some other story that I can't remember the name of where you know someone found something in a picture and then they were like haunted by someone I can't remember the [ __ ] name of it this is like the first one to get really popular from what I remember I understand that this might just have been started as something fun I feel like if it was around Halloween or something I would definitely probably [ __ ] with people in that way because it is a fun thing to do there are a couple cardinal sins of a RGS that I wanted to bring up because it kind of annoyed me as someone who was kind of following this when it started and it just so come back to wouldn't have it Peter out this way if you start doing a story like this you kind of need to find a way to end it I think that because of how long these stories take oftentimes it'll take months to update because it's trying to emulate something that's happening in real life and you also have to realize that it's a side project that is worked on in between real-life things it reminds me of when the Ben drowned saga which is like I came in creepypasta if you haven't seen that was going on the creator ended up coming out saying they did have enough funding and they needed to get more of it to continue so they broke character to ask for help and stuff like that happens from time to time but I just find it a bit sucky that he didn't actually come up with a an ending because he announced that dia David was gonna be made into a movie or something I don't know where that's going but there's no real ending besides that I think that here's a way of saying he's moving on to other projects means that he's just kind of putting it away because he doesn't have anything else to say about it it was kind of frustrating just to follow it for so long and then have that happen another thing is that the rules of it didn't really go anywhere I assumed that perhaps there was something leading up to the fact that he asked David three questions at the beginning and David didn't kill him so maybe he was playing to do something with that but it didn't go anywhere so I'm left wondering what the significance of those rules were whether or not it was just random contrived ghost rules that you'd get in like a conjuring movie or something just was strange to me I assumed that that was the place that David died somehow but I didn't really understand the significance of the green share either I thought that those things would be explained in the way that he died but I don't expect everything to be explained in a story I think that it's better in a horror story to have things that are just left because they'd be more terrifying that way instead of explaining it but that doesn't mean that everything should just be abandoned at the end of the day I still enjoyed myself reading through all of these things even if it had a shitty ending the good thing is that there are a lot more popular stories going on at the moment that will actually have a conclusion I hope to take a look at those at some points but I think I'll need a break from looking at these after I hope that you enjoyed a little visit to wish for death Islands archives but I'm going to close them for now so I'll see you next time

Channel: ProcrastiTara

Views: 21,287

Rating: 4.9533405 out of 5

Keywords: dear david, adam ellos dear david, twitter haunting, dear david explained, ghost haunting explained, ProcrastiTara, arg explained, haunting explained, creepy twitter accounts, commentary

Id: kP_jTBdquqk

Length: 31min 33sec (1893 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020