We’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: if it exists, people will eventually try to contact the dead with it. People have been trying to chat with the afterlife for thousands upon thousands of years, using everything from apple peel to toilets (yes, really) to try to contact spirits. So it should come as no surprise that social media has also been co-opted for the odd bit of necromancy. With…mixed results.
Here, we’re going to take a quick look at some of the most notorious digital dates with the deceased, starting with the ‘Tweance’ of 2009. (Which is where our “I tweet dead people” title came from.)
The 2009 ‘Tweance’ (Twitter seance)
Remember how Twitter used to be, before it became ‘X’? It wasn’t great, sure, but it was better than it is now (admittedly a low bar). Many would now argue that X needs a good, thorough exorcism to clear out the edgelords and dudebros that are currently haunting it. But back in 2009, Andrew Tate had yet to learn the word ‘podcast’ and the incels were still busy yelling at one another in gaming forums. Twitter, while not exactly wholesome, was not yet a total hellscape. So, one London fancy dress shop decided to add a little supernatural spice to the platform and held a Twitter Seance (quickly dubbed a ‘Tweance’ by the media).
The shop in question was Angels Fancy Dress – which seems like an unfortuitous name for a place trying to contact unquiet spirits but hey, what do we know? Angels brought in medium Jayne Wallace, who was then best known for contacting the spirit of Jade Goody (who had recently died aged 27) and supposedly relaying that Jade had postmortem regrets about her marriage to Jack Tweed. The public was split between disgust at exploitation of Jade’s death, and intrigue. Angels was quick to capitalise on the attention, and invited Jayne to hold a seance 140 characters at a time in their shop on 30th October.
There are no photos of the event – the whole thing was conducted over Twitter – but we are assured that Jayne did go to the shop and do ‘the whole seance thing’ there. Twitter users were invited to tweet their questions to deceased celebs, and Jayne would convey their replies via the Angels Fancy Dress account (within the 140 character limit, of course). This being the internet, people quickly flooded the account with requests for Jayne to contact people like That Austrian Dictator, Spongebob Squarepants, and Paul McCartney (who was not dead). But amongst the trolls there were a few ‘genuine’ questions for the likes of River Phoenix, Michael Jackson, William Shakespeare, and Kurt Cobain.
William Shakespeare failed to show, which was DEFINITELY because he’s getting bored with people trying to contact him via seance, and DEFINITELY not because Jayne doesn’t have the literary skill to imitate Shakespeare over Twitter. However, Kurt Cobain did turn up, as did River Phoenix and Michael Jackson.
What did the illustrious deceased have to say? Well, Kurt somewhat sulkily delivered an anti-drugs lecture and praised the drum stylings of Dave Grohl before stomping back to the afterlife. River gave a remarkably similar anti-drugs message, and said that he’d posthumously enjoyed ‘Interview with the Vampire’. Michael Jackson – whom Wallace described as ‘lighter and purer and more innocent than most’ – said that he regretted not finishing his UK tour, and revealed that he’d found lots of fans in the afterlife. Riveting stuff.
Did the 2009 Tweance open the doors for an ongoing trend for Twitter seances? Surprisingly not. While people did (and still do) use Twitter for musing about the dead and occasionally experimenting with the platform for supernatural purposes, a full Tweance subculture didn’t develop. Maybe the dead saw what was to become of Twitter, and refused to associate with it. But they weren’t so reluctant with other social media platforms…
R/AskOuija
R/AskOuija is a Reddit sub which imitates a Ouija board by inviting redditers to comment answers to questions in the form of a single letter. The most upvoted letters get featured in the answer thread, and eventually spell out a coherent(ish) answer. This vid takes a humorous look at the results:
The principle is surprisingly similar to that of a ‘real’ ouija board: a number of people get together and watch while a word is spelled out – in theory each letter is ‘picked’ by elements of chance (which can be manipulated by spirits), but in reality the people ‘present’ are influencing the result. In the case of a ouija board, this influence comes via the ideomotor effect (involuntary – or more voluntary but very subtle) movements that manipulate the planchette. In the case of the reddit sub, it comes via upvotes.
Usually, to be fair to the sub, it works as a humorous diversion for people who want to play a kind of very slow Cards Against Humanity game. But some people do take it seriously, and try to get answers from their dead relatives. Our writer says that if she dies and finds herself talking via the medium of upvotes in a reddit sub then we should somehow unalive her all over again, because that is a fate worse than hell.
TikTok spirit boxing
‘Spirit boxing’ isn’t like beatboxing, nor does it involve fisticuffs with ghosts. It involves users submitting questions to a paranormal Tiktokker, and that Tiktokker using a ‘spirit box’ to get answers from the deceased.
What is a ‘spirit box’? Well, our writer describes it as ‘The most annoying effing noisemaker since the vuvuzela’ and ‘Almost the stupidest way to part fools and their money’, but she’s a bitter old lady with no romance in her soul so we’ll ignore her. Technologically speaking, a spirit box is a specialised radio scanner which rapidly sweeps AM/FM frequencies. As it does so, users will hear the white noise of radio waves being parsed interspersed with fragments of radio chatter. According to believers, spirits can manipulate the radio waves to form words and sentences from that chatter.
Tiktok spirit boxing is big business. Popular spirit box channels regularly pull in hundreds of thousands of viewers, and get A LOT of engagement as people ask questions and add their own interpretation of what the box is ‘saying’. The algorithm LOVES that kind of high-view, high-engagement content, so spirit boxers tend to do very well on Tiktok. Not that we’re suggesting that any of you set up as spirit boxers if the whole ‘entrepreneur’ thing doesn’t work out…but it is a good illustration of how a high-engagement format can get social media results.