Life

The Way The "Dear David" Tweets Left Off Make The Upcoming Movie About It Even More Terrifying

Many of us have spent the last nine months or so enraptured by the story of "Dear David," a ghost tale spun on Twitter by writer and illustrator Adam Ellis about the young specter he believes haunts his apartment. Ellis began the story in August 2017, tweeting, "So, my apartment is currently being haunted by the ghost of a dead child and he's trying to kill me. (thread)." It is now June, and Dear David has netted Ellis a film deal, with Dan Lin (producer of ‘IT’). So how did "Dear David" end?

In short, it didn't, but before we get into that, some more information. Ellis has helpfully compiled all his tweets about Dear David on Wakelet, which document each weird phone call, each time his cats panicked over an invisible stressor, and each time a green chair in his living room inexplicably rocked. (Bustle has also compiled the entire narrative, along with theories, here.) The saga was, to say the least, totally fascinating, and absolutely terrifying. Ellis posted photos of dark corners that appeared to have the face of a kid with a dented head floating in them (and he spotted a statue in Japan that looked like Dear David, too). His electricity would waver. His television would turn on and off. He'd hear scratching and spot floating ears and eyes through his door peephole. David would visit him in corporeal form in his dreams. And one horrifying night, after Ellis dreamed of David, he woke up to find pitch black photos on his camera roll that he did not recall taking. Here's what he saw:

OH GOD I AM SCREAMING.

Ellis tried to stave off David's spirit with salt, and other ghost-fighting techniques, but no matter how hard he tried to rid his home of whatever haunted it, David hung around. David's prowess stuck through August, September, October, and November, and winded its way into the beginning of 2018. In January, "Dear David" started appearing in Ellis's Instagram stories, prompting fans to worry that David was possessing him. One night in January, Ellis even dreamed that David crashed down on him from the ceiling, and woke up feeling out of breath. SO SPOOKY.

Ellis eventually quit his job at BuzzFeed (MORE POSSESSION?) but by February, the Dear David stories started to drop off. Ellis gave us an update in February, noting that things had quieted down quite a bit:

Obviously, Ellis's fans were clamoring for more Dear David content, but Ellis claimed he had no new information to share.

It's now June, and we've had no new Dear David content since February, save for the news that we'll get a Dear David film soon enough. Of course, that doesn't mean that David's ghost has fled Ellis's apartment, and indeed, there's a good chance the upcoming film will dig a little deeper into David's story, and perhaps include a more fitting conclusion to the tale (then again, unless David's ghost crossed over, there's a good chance his story will never end).

On the other hand, a lot of people think Dear David is a hoax, or at the very least, a rather compelling and intricate piece of fiction. And since the story is getting made into a movie (and Ellis's Dear David tweets dropped off around the time that deal started coming into fruition), that's probably a more plausible explanation than that Ellis's apartment really was haunted by a ghost.

Then again, more than one person, this blogger included, has woken in the middle of the night feeling a shadow hovering over their bed, and though the brain plays many tricks on a half-conscious mind, who is to say ghosts aren't real?