web page Cyberspace spawns a virtual graveyard
Somewhere deep in cyberspace, where reality blurs into fiction and the living greet the dead, there are ghosts.
They live in a virtual graveyard without tombstones or flowers. They drift among the shadows of the people they used to be, and the pieces they left behind.
Allison Bauer left rainbows: Reds, yellows and blues, festooned across her MySpace profile in a collage of colour. Before her corpse was pulled from the depths of an Oregon gorge on May 9, where police say she leapt to her death, she unwittingly wrote her own epitaph.
"I love colour, Pure Colour in rainbow form, And I love My friends," the 20-year-old wrote under "Interests" on her profile. "And I love to Love, I care about everyone so much you have no idea."
Now her page fills a plot on
www.MyDeathSpace.com, a website that archives the pages of deceased MySpace members.
Behold a community spawned from twin American obsessions: Memorialising the dead and peering into strangers' lives. 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 per day.
The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. It's also a place where the living - those who knew the deceased and those who didn't - discuss this world and the next.
Scrolling down a dead person's MySpace profile wall is like journeying into the past. The pages were abandoned hastily, without warning.
"This site does kind of let you look into the heart of darkness," says 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 come in and claim us."
Many families of the deceased leave the profiles up as memorials. Each profile "wall" - a feature MySpace members typically use to post messages to each other - becomes a conduit for one-way communications with the departed.
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 says. "And more often than not, when I looked them up on MySpace, they had 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 it handles deceased members' pages on a "case-by-case basis" and does not "allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile." Profiles can be deleted if that's requested by family members.
As the traditionally private rites of death and grieving go public, what do families of the dead on sites like MyDeathSpace think?
Army Cpl Matthew Creed was killed in Baghdad on October 22. His MySpace profile keeps watch without him, counting down the time - days, hours, minutes - until he would've returned home.
His father, Rick, visits the page from time to time, but he was unaware that it had been archived on MyDeathSpace.
"What MyDeathSpace is doing seems respectful, though at this time I'm not sure what I think about it," he wrote in an email. What's most important, he believes, is that the link between his son and this world be preserved.
"We all say, you're never gone as long as you're remembered," Creed says. "And he's still remembered by everybody."
Go On...be a voyeur. 
