The deceased of MySpace

Somewhere deep in cyberspace, where reality blurs into fiction and the living greet the dead, there are ghosts.

They live in a virtual graveyard.

Allison Bauer left rainbows: reds, yellows and blues, festooned across her MySpace profile in a collage of color. Before her corpse was pulled from the depths of an Oregon gorge May 9, where police say she leapt to her death, she unwittingly wrote her own epitaph.

"I love color, Pure Color in rainbow form, And I love My friends," the 20-year-old wrote under "Interests" on her profile.

Now, her page fills a plot on the Web site www. MyDeathSpace.com, which archives the pages of deceased MySpace members.

Anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits a day.

There's a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There's a 20-year-old whose body was discovered burned to death on a hiking trail; and a woman, 21, who overdosed on drugs and was found dead in a portable toilet, authorities say.

Their MySpace pages were abandoned hastily, without warning.

"This site does kind of let you look into the heart of darkness," said Bob Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. "We see those kinds of things that we try not to think about, which is how we are all dancing on the edge - how quickly mortality can . . . claim us."

"I do not fear what the future holds for me," Navy Hospitalman Geovani Padilla-Aleman, 20, blogged months before he was killed in Iraq. "I will stand and fight. I am not afraid to die."

Each profile "wall" - a feature MySpace members typically use to post messages to one another - becomes a conduit for one-way communications with the departed.

"I made that B in Statistics. and I certainly missed you sittin next to me during the final," a friend wrote to Casey Hastings, 19, a cheerleader who was killed in a traffic accident.

MyDeathSpace grew out of one person's morbid curiosity in December 2005, when two teenage daughters were slain by their father. Mike Patterson, 26, a paralegal from San Francisco, tracked down their MySpace pages one day when he was bored. His voyeurism grew into a live journal that later became MyDeathSpace.

"I'd come across these stories where teens would be ending up dead or killing themselves, or killing others," he said. "And more often than not, . . . they had [MySpace] profiles."

Permission to use the profiles is not requested from MySpace, which is not affiliated with the site and did not respond to requests for comment on it. MySpace said in a statement that it handled deceased members' pages on a "case-by-case basis" and did not "allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile." Profiles can be deleted if family members request it.

In a digital twist on vigilante justice, MyDeathSpace also posts the profiles of homicide victims alongside those of their alleged killers, whose faces loom on the screen like wanted posters.

Patterson said the alleged killers generated the most discussion on the site. "If they're accused, we'll put accused," he said. "We're not going to label somebody a murderer who isn't one."

But some submissions slip through the cracks.

There was the case of Christine Hutchinson, a woman from Pittsburgh who was accused of hiding her miscarried fetus in her freezer. She happened to bear the same name as a high school student from Philadelphia - and the latter's MySpace profile was mistakenly attached to the creepy news story on MyDeathSpace.

Ugly names began filling her inbox: Baby killer, they called her. Murderer. Then death threats.

Patterson removed her profile when he was notified of the case of mistaken identity hours later. But the damage was done. Hutchinson's face was already out there. She has no plans to sue Patterson, but says she rarely leaves her house alone now, afraid of being attacked.

For some users, death is just a starting point for discussions of their own lives.

"I just enjoy talking with other members," Brittany Oliver, 18, of Tucson, Ariz., writes in an e-mail. "I occasionally still read about the deaths, but more so, I enjoy chatting with fellow MDSers about life."

A subset of newspaper readers who turn first to the obituary page has long existed, explains Thompson, but sites like MyDeathSpace allow such people to interact with one another.