Dear David - A Very Real Ghost Story

Ghosts & Hauntings

Dear David – A Very Real Ghost Story

The Origin Of This Terrifying Real Ghost Story

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Dear David is a real ghost story that started life as a twitter post. And gathered traction from there. A lot of traction. And with good reason. It was absolutely terrifying and had seemingly no explanation.

Back in 2017, professional illustrator, Adam Ellis, began posting that he had a blood-thirsty ghost in his flat.

I mean. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by such a claim?

He then follows it up with a cute little illustration and admits that he was suffering from sleep paralysis at the time. And that’s the point when he nearly lost me. Sleep paralysis is often accompanied by night terrors and it’s horrifying, but it’s just your brain lagging slightly as you’re trying to wake up.

But I did carry on reading. Adam said that he saw the child sitting in a green rocking chair in a corner of his bedroom. His head was caved in at one side and he looked like this…

He Found Out Who the Ghost was

Adam then went on to say that he had had several dreams about this child and learned more about him.

He claimed that in one dream, he was approached by a girl who said: “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”

To which Adam replied: “Who?”

And the girl said: “Dear David”

The deformed creature, who Adam now knew was called David, had died when a shelf collapsed on his head in a department store, crushing his skull.

But David didn’t stay in dreamland. Like Freddy, he became a part of Adam’s everyday life. After waking from each dream, Dear David would be sitting on the green rocking chair in the corner of the room. And then he would get up and shamble towards Adam, who lay helpless in bed. At this stage, scary as it was, Adam had to consider that it was just a freakishly real night terror / sleep paralysis combination. He had suffered from both sleep issues for years. However, the frequency and the visceral nature of the scene was causing Adam to wonder if it really was a dream.

A Fresh Start

However rationally Adam looked at the state of affairs, this was starting to have an effect on his mental health and when the flat upstairs became vacant, he took the opportunity to move into it. Because of the move, he forgot about David for a while and figured that the change of scenery had shaken things up a bit. Things seemed to be back to normal.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. I promised you a real ghost story and you’re going to get one.

After a couple of weeks, Adam’s cats start to behave oddly. At exactly midnight each night, the cats would head over to the door to his flat and stare at it, poking around underneath and generally acting like there was someone or something on the other side.

Adam went back to Twitter.

After a few nights of this, Adam plucked up the courage to look out of the peep hole and was taken aback to see movement out there. So he took a photo.

On the left hand side of the photo, a misty shape hovered, obscuring the sign on the wall behind it.

So, in a fit of bravery, he wrenched the door open… and there was nobody there. The cats, however, were scared and went into defence mode, with bushy tails and arched backs.

In a panic, Adam scooted back into the flat, poured a line of salt in front of the door and hid in bed. That night, he downloaded an app that picks up sound and in the morning discovered that it had registered over 30 recordings of different sounds happening in his flat and the room he was sleeping in.

I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I’d have been sleeping in that place after all of this! Sceptic that I am, I have my limits.

The Real Ghost Story Gets a Whole Lot Realer

A few days later, David bought a polaroid camera. Unrelated to the David story – just for fun. He spent some time snapping shots of his flat. All was fine – nothing out of the ordinary at all. Until he took a photo of his fully lit hallway. And the photo came out entirely black. He wondered if he’d covered the lens by accident, so intentionally put his finger over it and took another shot. Rather than being black, the photo came out blurry. So he broke into a fresh pack of polaroid papers to see how they looked before they developed. They were all white.

He then took a photo of the hallway with his phone, and another with the polaroid. This was the result…

The hall light was on for both of these photographs, apparently. And Adam couldn’t understand why every time he tried with the polaroid, the doorway was black.

Which is when the people of twitter decided to lend a helping hand.

This Terrifyingly Real Ghost Story Just Gets Weirder and Weirder

Adam was very freaked out by this point. Understandably. He had tried salt, he’d tried sage and now the dreams were getting really scary. He dreamt that Dear David had dragged him out of bed. When he woke up, he was covered in bruises.

This was a bridge too far for him and he got a pet cam to see if he could figure out what was going on. He wasn’t disappointed. Although he was a lot more terrified than ever before. The green rocking chair where he usually saw David in his sleep paralysis incidents, was clearly moving on its own.

Watch the chair. pic.twitter.com/jXtIxpkVxD
— Adam Ellis (@adamtotscomix) August 29, 2017

You Couldn’t Make this Shit Up

After the incident with the pet cam, Adam started to see a small child with a dented head outside his window. It had to be Dear David. The by now petrified Adan tried to take a photo, but by the time he’d snapped it, the figure had gone.

Or had it…?

Again, the Twitterverse took matters into their own hands and lightened the photo he’d taken.

The result is eerie.

This Bonkers Real Ghost Story Reaches Fever Pitch

Not long after this exchange, Adam found a crawl space above his new flat and when he went to investigate, he found a small, leather child’s shoe.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, Adam’s new pet cam took a shot of this…

Has anyone done this yet? DAVID MOVED THE CAMERA. pic.twitter.com/tdDelaKWHY
— CD Reiss 🌻 (@CDReisswriter) December 13, 2017

Then Just Like That the Sorry Tale Comes to a Close

After several months, Adam suddenly up and left his job. He announced his departure on twitter and people started to wonder if he’d been possessed by the clearly evil spirit that was Dear David.

How does it end?! I hear you cry.

With a film, dear reader.

FFS. Of course it did.

I worked in advertising and marketing for 15+ years and that is one of the single best marketing campaigns I’ve ever heard of. It has intrigue, suspense, storytelling. There are multiple people involved. People with lovely blue ticks, so you know they’re real accounts. It gained traction because of mob mentality, and took on a life of its own. My only issue with it is that it got a bit much. There was a creepiness to not knowing if Adam was imagining it or whether it was real. But once David appears on camera as a child, it’s just a bit too far fetched for my liking. It’s like when you finally see the monster in a film and it’s not as scary as the monster in your head.

This real ghost story was not so real after all. As with most things, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Good tale, though, right?

People fake these kinds of things all the time. For money, for fame, for any kind of limelight, however brief the attention lasts. Be discerning. Be incredulous. Be sceptical. And don’t get carried along with the tide.

If you have any questions, or you’d like to add anything, please feel free to reach out to us at any time.

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