The lights are low, the phone is clutched tight, and the endless scroll begins. In the summer of 2017, the mundane feed of internet chatter was shattered by the chilling, self-documented possession of a digital space. This was not folklore whispered around a campfire, but a living, breathing horror story told in real-time, one viral tweet at a time: The haunting of Dear David.
Buzzfeed writer Adam Ellis, began his descent into a waking nightmare with the sudden appearance of a child-sized entity during an episode of sleep paralysis. The image was specific, gruesome, and utterly unforgettable: a small, dead boy with a severely misshapen head, as if one side had been brutally crushed, seated silently in an antique green rocking chair.
The haunting soon moved beyond the prison of dreams. Ellis learned the entity's name was David, and through terrifying dream-state interrogations—limited to two questions asked at precisely midnight—he extracted the boy’s dark history: David had died in an accident, his skull crushed by a falling shelf in a store. The rules, delivered by a sinister girl in a subsequent dream, were explicit: never ask a third question, or David would kill him. Of course, the third question was asked, and the true terror began.
The haunting escalated into the physical realm, and Ellis documented every chilling detail for his hundreds of thousands of followers. His two cats would gather at the front door precisely at midnight, staring, growling, and snarling at an unseen presence on the other side. A sleep recorder app on his phone captured dozens of strange sounds, including one eerie, unmistakable single footstep.
The visual evidence was the most disturbing hook. A fully lit hallway would produce a completely black photograph from a Polaroid camera, a phenomenon Ellis claimed he could not replicate. Later, after being dragged from his bed in a dream and waking up with fresh bruises on his arm, he installed a motion-triggered pet camera. The footage was grainy, but undeniable: a green rocking chair in the corner of his living room, seen only through the camera's sinister night vision, began to rock on its own, slowly, rhythmically, without an occupant or a visible push.
The saga continued for months, a digital breadcrumb trail of growing dread that saw the entity follow Ellis to a new apartment upstairs and even across the country. The story, a meticulous blend of modern media and ancient horror tropes, left readers with a cold, inescapable dread. Was it a masterful piece of fiction, a brilliant, serialized work of art? Or was it a genuine documentation of a soul so spiteful, so stubbornly attached to this world, that it used the most modern tool—a simple, public tweet—to announce its malevolent presence?
You can read the original tweets to this day. They are preserved, a timeline of escalating fear. And as you scroll through the evidence, looking at the dark photos and the swaying chair, you have to wonder: is David still watching, waiting for his audience, and is the real haunting not in the apartment, but in the digital space where he was given eternal life? The terrifying part of the Dear David story is not the monster at the foot of the bed, but the thought that a ghost found a way to become truly viral, forever feeding off the attention of the millions who dared to click 'Read More.'
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