MySpace’s Virtual Morgue

Unlike Facebook.com, MySpace.com does not delete profiles of the deceased. In fact, another site called MyDeathSpace.com exists solely to catalog them.

Launched in December of 2005, MyDeathSpace.com displays a MySpace.com user’s cause of death and any related news articles alongside a picture of the deceased linked to their MySpace.com profile.

Because MySpace.com is most popular amongst people college-aged and younger, the deaths are usually tragic (suicides, automobile accidents, and murders) or completely abnormal (a kid killed by a rare cancer, two teens found dead with their heads inside an 8-foot helium balloon).

According to the site’s founder, Mike Patterson, there are more than a thousand deceased listed. “It’s supposed to be an eye opening experience,” Patterson says. “You’re supposed to be shocked by what you see.”

The site, he adds, receives about 20,000 unique visitors a day, and each visitor clicks on average between 10 and 15 times.

In his spare hours, Patterson enters into the site the new deaths, 99 percent of which he says are submitted to him through his website.

“It just seems that’s where everything in life is going—online,” Patterson says. “If a friend dies, you’re not going to be able to go to the cemetery and leave flowers for him or her. It’s a lot easier to do it online, whether it be going to their MySpace account and leaving comments or creating a memorial profile.”

When asked about Facebook.com’s policy to delete profiles of the deceased, Patterson says, “The friends of the deceased obviously want the deceased person’s profile up so they can remember them and leave comments on the profile to mourn them. I’d be pissed if my friend died and didn’t have a MySpace profile. I’d be kind of sad.”