One day, I was screwing around at school. I was on our school's home page, procrastinating on some random PowerPoint I should've been finishing. On the side of our school's home page, it shows links for our classes that we use when we go on the computers. One of the websites was called "www.findagrave.com".
I thought about it for a second, then clicked on it. But before I did, I felt uneasy. Like, why is this here? It wasn't like we were doing some ancestry project or anything. It made me feel odd. It made me think of all those stories of things that happen on the internet. But I'm just paranoid, right?
The website was rather simple; the owner obviously did not care whatsoever about how they were putting things together. It was a mostly white page, laid out evenly with many links. To the average person, it seemed like a site you'd come across if you mistyped a URL in.
One of the many visible links was "Search 87 Million grave records." I felt a chill run down my spine. This was not right. I nudged my friend Alivia to look at this site with me. She laughed a bit and logged onto it as well. We started to type in the names of dead people we knew, and their biographies and photos actually showed up. Another odd thing was that someone had gone around and taken photos of the graves. For nearly every deceased family member I searched, a picture of their headstone came up.
The period soon came to an end, and I went on with the rest of the school day not thinking about it. That night, I got home and told my mother about the whole thing. She just laughed and said how weird it was. I still didn't feel quite right about it. Who in their right mind would go around and take photos of random people's graves? I asked my mother who the person who added the photo of my great grandmother's tombstone was and she had no idea.
In my best interest, I decided to prod around the website a bit more. I started typing in names of famous dead people such as Kurt Cobain. There was a feature on the site where you could leave virtual flowers on the grave, which was kinda thoughtful in my mind. But the entire concept of it was still unsettling.
It was well into the night. All of my internet friends had gone to sleep, but I had drank an entire liter of coke, so I was awake and curious. Going through the site, I started to randomly type in names of alive celebrities to see if there was anyone with the same name that was dead. Then I started to type in people's names who I knew. Then myself.
That was a bad mistake.
I typed in my name, a grin spreading across my face when I saw other people. I don't know why I was so pleased by this, but I was. I clicked on all four of the results, looking at where they were from and what years they died. The more I looked at those two contributions, the more scared I grew. I should've just shut the laptop as soon as I realized that all the dead with the same name as myself were in states surrounding my own. The birth dates and death dates were slowly getting closer to mine.
Clicking the back button, it said "showing 4 of 5 results." Had I missed one? I could've sworn that I went through them all.
I scrolled down further to see the newest entry and clicked on it. It said my birth year. And the date of the next day.
The photo included was me with someone standing behind me.
At 11:59, just before midnight...
Original author unknown
Originally uploaded on October 6th, 2012