A Different Kind of Ghosting

Non-fiction essay

My grandma’s hairdresser Claire used to make house calls. She’d always arrive on time for an appointment, with her multi-functional tool belt and a smile on her face. But one day, Claire was late. Ten minutes past three she turned up, a bit pale, shaking. “I’ve just seen a dead body” gasped Claire. My grandma was thrilled. “Oh how awful. Where?”. My grandpa joined in. “On the street? Is it Derek?”. Claire shook her head solemnly. She’d been with a client that morning, a woman named Julie, who loved to complain. As Claire had cut her hair in the kitchen, Julie’s husband sat at the far end of the room, in an armchair watching the telly. “The neighbours keep putting out the bins on a Tuesday, can you believe it?” grumbled Julie "and have you seen there’s a new gallery in town? I would go but its run by a Spanish family”. As Claire chopped away, Julie became more animated, moving her head this way and that. “They’ve made these self-checkouts at the ASDA in town. What happened to being served by real people? Everyone’s lazy now. I mean look at him”. She pointed with an accusing finger at her innocent husband with his back to her. “Just look at him. He sits in that chair day after day doing nothing”. Her husband didn’t flinch. In fact for the next forty five minutes he didn’t move an inch. They would have called the ambulance right away but Julie made sure that Claire had evened out her haircut first. She didn’t want to look bad when the young paramedics came to rule her husband dead on site. I’ve never experienced the thrill of being in a room with a dead body. But recently I did had have an experience with someone from beyond the grave. 

Five years ago, I knew a woman named Marie who died. She was in her sixties, a family friend and a very kind loving person. Even before she died I hadn’t seen her for a long time. Our communication was reduced to the occasional like on Facebook or a “hope you’re well” comment here or there. Now if you’ve had the pleasure of receiving a virus on social media recently, you’ll know hackers have decided to take a new approach towards cyber warfare. They try and shame you into clicking on a mysterious link. Sometime’s its like “stop everyone criticising your penis length behind your back with these five tricks”. Or “we know the dirty websites you visit, click here and give us $5000 or we tell the world”. But the new one, the most ominous one is this: “Hey, I found this video of you online you’re really going to want to see”. Link attached. This gains another level of jump scare when you receive it from Marie at 21:17pm, half a decade after she’s passed.

Obviously the video is a trick. But what if, in death, Marie has managed to uncover all of my worst secrets. Maybe my sex tape that I’ve never filmed is being posted on “forums”. Or a video of me going through a list of everyone I know and love and slagging them off individually is floating around on the web. Perhaps on YouTube there’s a cinematic marathon of me cartwheeling naked through the streets whilst simultaneously peeing and throwing up on myself? Marie! Did God send you to do this? Is he trying to mass-share a link to my Tumblr blog from when I was thirteen years old? After I’d got through the initial shock of seeing a message from someone I’d never thought I’d hear from again, I began to think how sad and strange it is that someone, probably with the username PenisEnlarger69, was exploiting this older woman’s community. Using their dead friend as a puppet to get into computers, which probably have nothing more valuable on them than just pictures of their grandchildren. I wonder how many people felt like they’d seen a ghost that evening. 

The thing is, I’m pointing the finger at PenisEnlarger69 but I’ve done a similar sort of crime in the past. When I was eighteen, I had a friend called Ed who died. Since then, I’ve made a couple of other friends called Ed along the way. Not long ago I was on my way to dinner at an alive friend called Ed’s house. I’d been invited through someone else but out of politeness I wanted to ask him whether he needed anything from the shops. Standing in front of the alcohol aisle, I messaged him, with one eye on the discounted Cava bottles. I waited for a response, wandering around the shop absent-mindedly. Realising I was going to be late, I went back to my message to see if he was active online when I realised I had messaged the wrong Ed. I’d messaged the Ed whose mum I can still remember exactly what passage she read at his memorial. I stared at the message. How strange that I still had the ability to text him. To see that my message had sent, even though I knew it would never be delivered, but somehow it was still half way on his way to him. That’s halfway more than I thought was possible. Our messages before were from 2016. Us talking about politics revision and dreading A Levels. It feels so strange to have sabotaged that final conversation together. To look like I was trying to resuscitate something which was long gone. 

I don’t like being friends with dead people online. The button on their Facebook profile which says “poke” feels particularly worrying. I think because we’re so haunted by everything in reality, we think the internet is a space clear of these things. In the real world, you can walk down a street and suddenly remember that was where you went on a bad date, where you almost got hit by a car, where you cracked your phone screen. But the internet is a realm in which you can create fresh memories or experiences and then erase them. It’s like the pristine new notebook you always want to buy when your real practical notebook doesn’t look as pretty because its actually functional. But in contrast to the real world, we can’t bury people on the internet. That’s the one of the superior parts of reality, you can put someone to rest. Online they continue to float around like eternal beings, suspended in a digital universe, like Damian Hirst livestock in formaldehyde. They’re fossilised, waiting for you to bump into them, and they’ll only increase. When I look at Ed’s profile page, I see a brighter side to this phenomenon. Over the years people have left fun photos and memories on “his wall”. Sharing nice things and reaching out to others, to digitally hold hands and reminisce together. But looking at Marie’s page is a different experience. To my surprise, two people had recently posted on her wall. Both from 18th December 2022. Naively wishing her a happy birthday. One apologised for it being belated. 

*All names have been changed

Writing Details:

This essay is a second draft. It almost entirely changed from the first draft I wrote on Monday. Both drafts took around two hours to write. Between versions I watched David Sedaris’s Masterclass and he has excellent advice about walking the tricky tightrope between sorrow and humour when writing. His story ‘The Spirit World’ is a brilliant mediation on the suicide of his sister, his guilt and how whack astrology can be, I can only recommend enough!