Findagrave.com

One day, I was screwing around at school. I was on our school's home page, procrastinating some random power point I should finish. On the side of our school's home page it shows links for our classes that we use when we go to the computers. One of the websites was called "www.findagrave.com"



I thought about it for a second, then clicked on it. But before I did, I felt uneasy. Like, why is this here? It's not like we were doing some ancestry project or anything. It made me feel, odd. It made me think of all the stories of things that happened on the internet. But I'm just paranoid, right?

The website was rather simple, the owner obviously did not care what so ever about how they werer putting things together. It was a mostly white page, layed out evenly with many links. To the average person, it seemed like a site you'd come across if you mistyped a url in.

One of the many links layed out was "Search 87 Million grave records." I felt a chill run down my spine. This was not right. I nudged my friend Alivia to look at this site with me. She laughed a bit, and logged onto it as well. We started to type in names of dead people we know, which their biographies and photos actually showed up. Another odd thing is, someone has gone around and taken photos of their grave. Nearly every deceased family member I searched, a picture of their headstone came up.

The period soon came to an end and I went on with the rest of the school day not thinking about it. That night I got home and I told my mother about it. She just laughed and told me how weird it was. I still didn't feel quite right about it. Who in their right mind would go around and take photos of random people's graves? I asked my mother who the person who added the photo of my great grandmother's tombstone was (The name was listed) and she had no idea.

In my best interest, I decided to prod around the website a bit more. I started typing in names of famous dead people, such as Kurt Cobain. There was a feature on the site where you could leave virtual flowers on the grave, which was kinda thoughtful in my mind. But the entire concept of this is still unsettling.

It was well into the night, all of my internet friends had gone to sleep but I had drank an entire liter of coke before I thought I should sleep so, I was awake and curious. Going through the site, I started to type in random names of alive celebrities to see if they have anyone of the same name that is dead. Then I started to type in people's names who I knew. And myself.

That was a bad mistake.

I typed in my name, a grin spreading across my face when I saw people of the same. I don't know why I was so pleased by this, but I was. I clicked on all four of the results, looking at where they're from and what years they died. The more I kept looking at those two contributions, the more scared I grew. I should've just shut the laptop as soon as I realized that all the dead with the same name as myself were in states surrounding my own. The birth dates and death dates were slowly increasing to mine.

Clicking the back button, it said "showing 4 of 5 results." Had I missed one? I could've sworn that I went through them already. I scrolled down further to see the newest entry. I clicked on it. It said my birth year. And the date of the next day.

The photo included was me with someone standing behind me.

At that exact time.