hALLOWEEN sCARINESS

It's Halloween time and I've been reading and searching for scary ghost stories from all over the internet and watching scary movies but none of that traditional spookiness scares me. You know what REALLY scares me (besides when I leave the capslock on and I have to retype whole paragraphs because I wasn't paying attention)? MyDeathSpace.com scares me.

MyDeathSpace.com is a site that keeps a rolling tally of people who use MySpace that have died in the recent past. Usually a short article is written explaining how the person died along with a link to their MySpace account. It's fascinating and it's currently my favorite internet site. Usually the only obituaries I read are all of the old people in the newspaper. MyDeathSpace is an obituary column featuring the younger internet crowd. As I write this they're up to 867 deaths and the site is not yet a year old.

What really makes my mind melt is MyDeathSpace's Death Map. It plots on a map all of the dead people that have been collected at the site. Apparently young people don't die in North Dakota?

Seeing how random and pointless death is in its choice of victims scares me. Seeing all those young people's lives cut short by random acts of violence, religion or other assorted stupidity is really scary. Happy Halloween!