If you’re a frequent flyer of Twitter, there’s a strong chance you heard about the story of a ghost baby called Dear David. In August 2017, comic artist and author Adam Ellis told his followers that he believed he was being haunted by “the ghost of a dead child,” and that said ghost child was trying to kill him. For the days and weeks following, Ellis documented the alleged haunting on Twitter and scared the wits out of the entire platform in the process.
Even though the Twitter thread started back in 2017, we are still scared by the story of Dear David (whether it’s real or fake, we will let you decide).
Below are the events that Ellis claims transpired in his home, and – though they are unverifiable – it’s still a particularly spooky tale to be told.
Ellis’s Twitter thread began on August 7th at 11:35 a.m. He wrote, “So, my apartment is currently being haunted by the ghost of a dead child and he’s trying to kill me. (thread),” and this initial tweet received over 81,000 likes and 53,000 retweets.
Minutes later, Ellis added, “He started appearing in dreams, but I think he’s crossed over into the real world now.”
He explained that the first time Dear David appeared, Ellis was experiencing sleep paralysis — a phenomenon that causes a person to believe they’re awake and conscious, but they are unable to move or speak. During his state of paralysis, Ellis said that the ghost child was sitting in the green rocking chair at the end of his bed.
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As if that isn’t creepy enough, the child also is said to have had a massive dent in his head.
Ellis tried to replicate what he saw in cartoon form.
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“For a while he just stared at me, but then he got out of the chair and started shambling toward the bed,” Ellis continued. “Shambling” is never a good thing.
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So, clearly this was just a nightmare, right?
Months later, Ellis dreamed of the child again. This time, another entity told him the ghost child’s name.
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“I was like, “Who?” And she said, ‘Dear David. You saw him.'”
She continued, “He’s dead. He only appears at midnight, and you can ask him two questions if you said ‘Dear David’ first.””
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Oh. Oh hell no.
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Again, nights later, Ellis dreamed of David. “Same situation—I was in bed, and he was sitting in the rocking chair near the window, staring at me,” he tweeted.
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“I say, “Dear David, what happened in the store?”
He groans, “A shelf was pushed on my head,”” Ellis wrote. “I’m frozen with fear,” he added. “I ask, “Who pushed the shelf?” David doesn’t answer.”
Ellis looked for answers.
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The next day, Ellis said he did some research into child deaths in his city. He looked into if any kids died from shelves falling on them to no avail, and even tried looking into child deaths with similar-sounding names to David — Dylan, Daniel, Devon, etc. Yet, he came up with nothing.
In the following weeks, Ellis moved into the larger apartment above his own, and completely forgot about Dear David.
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“But lately,” he followed up, “something strange is happening.” The happenings began when his cats started acting a little ‘off.’
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“Last night I got a weird feeling and looked out the peephole, and I’m dead certain I saw movement on the other side,” Ellis wrote. “When I opened the door and turned on the hall light, nothing was there, but my cats seemed unnerved. Bushy tails, etc.”
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For two days after this tweet, we were left on the edge of our seats. Finally, on August 9th, Twitter received an update.
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He shared a video of his cat in action. “What is going on?” is right, dude.
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Then, there were the photos.
“Ok, so I took a photo through the peephole cuz I’m too scared to open the door,” Ellis wrote. “I feel like I saw something.”
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“I deadbolted the lock and got in bed because I don’t know what else to do,” he added. “I can still hear my cat meowing at the door.”
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Ellis again logged off for a few hours, only to return on August 10th.
He let his followers know that he was going to try out a sleep talk app to see if he can catch any odd activity during the night.
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In order to protect himself from whatever dark energy was on the other side of his bedroom door, Ellis sprinkled a line of salt in front of the doorframe.
Salt is to demons as garlic to vampires, FYI.
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“I used a sound app to record my apartment last night,” Ellis wrote on August 11th at about noon. “It makes individual recordings each time it hears something. There were 33 recordings.”
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One of the recordings Ellis captured also has a strange electronic noise throughout it. And yeah, it’s creepy AF.
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“These happened between 2-3 AM,” Ellis followed up. “I have no explanation for them. I’ll keep recording and share if I find anything curious.”
He then went on vacation, so the Dear David saga went on pause.
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When Ellis returned to Twitter on August 14th, he had major updates. “I bought a Polaroid camera this weekend, because they’re fun and dorky,” he wrote. “I decided to take a few photos around my apartment.”
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But then, he decided to take his new Polaroid out into the hallway.
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Trying to search for a reasonable explanation, Ellis experimented with covering the lens to see if the black photos were just a result of user error. That didn’t seem to be the case, unfortunately.
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All his experiments resulted in the hallway showing up as pitch blackness. Um…demon portal? We think yes.
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After using sage to cleanse his entire abode — as suggested by several of his followers — Ellis reported bluntly, “Sage did not work.” David had returned.
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“He was smaller this time. Almost shrunken.” Ellis wrote.
“He didn’t do or say anything except look at me.”
Ellis said the dream felt like a bad omen. And he was totally right.
By August 18th, nothing had really changed. The cats were still up to their old games by the door and Ellis was still capturing strange static sounds on his audio recording app.
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“It’s just a whole bunch of small things happening at once,” he added. “I feel so uneasy, like right before a thunderstorm comes.”
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On August 21st, the uneasy feeling turned into Ellis feeling straight up unsafe in his own home. “I fell asleep pretty early,” he updated his followers.
“I was incredibly tired for some reason.”
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“It was a creepy dream, but I didn’t think much of it when I woke up,” he wrote. “I took a shower, and then I noticed something.”
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Ellis pondered that he may have injured himself during the day and forgot, and the dull pain may have manifested in the dream.
“There could be a totally logical explanation for it, so I brushed it off,” he added.
“I went to get coffee, which I do every weekend.”
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But that day, the place was totally empty. It had seemingly been abandoned over night.
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The only thing left in the place was a green chair. “If you recall, David first appeared in my green rocking chair,” Ellis wrote.
“It could be nothing, but it’s weird that it was the only thing left behind.”
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The series of events left Ellis feeling frightened. “Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that night,” he wrote. And this lineup of oddities was honestly just the calm before the storm.
On August 25th, Ellis returned to Twitter.
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His cats had started doing their bedroom door routine earlier and earlier every night. And then, their routine was followed by something stranger.
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“Since this has been happening for days on end, I thought it might be an automated telemarketer or something,” he wrote.
“Usually if it’s an automated thing, if you answer once, they quit calling. So I picked up.”
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“After about a minute, the static stopped, and there was silence,” Ellis continued. He then thought he heard faint breathing.
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“I panicked and hung up,” Ellis said. “I closed all the curtains in my apartment and turned on every single light.” We would have straight up died, TBH.
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On August 28th, Ellis turned his attention to his green rocking chair — the one that Dear David first appeared in.
He reported that he moved the chair out of his bedroom and into the living room. He then wrote that he bought a surveillance pet camera to keep track of his cats while on his upcoming trip to Japan.
The pet cam runs 24/7 and is connected to an app that alerts the user any time motion is detected.
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The cats were the source of most of the alerts he received during this trial run. However, at around 11 p.m., he was alerted to activity, but didn’t see his cats in the frame. Upon watching the footage again, Ellis saw this:
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Not being able to do anything about the odd activity, Ellis tried to stay calm for the rest of the evening.
But he received yet another alert. This time, a decoration fell off the wall.
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“Since I’ve been back home, I’ve been too nervous to turn the camera back on, and today has been pretty quiet,” he wrote. “That said, I feel really uneasy. I put the chair in the hall.”
By September 5th, though, Ellis started using the pet cam again to see what he could capture.
“During the night on Saturday, while I slept, it recorded the cats in the living room. It seemed pretty unremarkable at first,” he said.
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And the next night, Maxwell was engaged with an invisible something yet again. For hours.
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“This is odd behavior for him, and I can’t come up with an explanation for it,” Ellis wrote.
“Especially because of the next video.”
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“I just can’t shake the feeling that something has made its way into the apartment,” he continued. Um, same.
By September 16th, Ellis reported that he was starting to have nightmares — nightmares that were much more intense than usual. One dream specifically left him rattled.
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“On the pillow next to me was a severed head with a bloody spine attached, snaking down the bed,” he wrote. “Horrified, I screamed,
“What happened to you?!” The head smiled even bigger.”
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“After that dream about the head, I’ve been feeling uneasy all night,” Ellis wrote. Understandable. “I decided to go for a walk, if for no other reason then to get out of my apartment. I went to a bodega a few blocks away to get a snack.”
On the way, he passed the boarded-up warehouse.
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He decided to investigate by using his phone to take a photo through the windows that were too high for him to peek through. He tweeted, “I made sure my flash was on, positioned my camera lens through one of the [window] grates, and snapped a photo.”
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The closer he looked, Ellis thought he recognized a face in the upper corner.
The face oddly resembled Dear David.
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Ellis then left for Japan. And Dear David seemingly tagged along for the ride. He appeared in a statue in the center of Sapporo.
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Upon Ellis’s return to his apartment, he noticed the electricity was on the fritz. “First, 2 bulbs have burned out in the hallway in less than a week,” he tweeted.
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“The TV has to be on in order for the backlight to be on,” Ellis explained.
“But last night the backlight was flickering on and off by itself.” It continued to flicker for a while before eventually just going dead.
Later that morning, Ellis heard scratches coming from behind the front door. He was too afraid to look through the peephole.
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The photo taken through the peephole revealed a distorted face. Ellis saw an eye and an ear pressed against the hole.
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He then went silent for the next few weeks. The internet thought Dear David had offed him.
Ellis came back to Twitter and explained that a friend had come over and cleansed his apartment, and the ritual seemingly worked. The only strange occurrence was that Ellis walked past the empty warehouse one day and found this:
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“I tried to put it out of my mind, and the the next several days were uneventful,” he wrote.
“But something else happened last night. It was around 11 or so, and I was watching TV on the couch.”
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The window looks out onto the roof of a neighboring business. And someone was out there on the roof.
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“I immediately ducked down. I reached up and flicked off the light switch,” Ellis tweeted. “I peered over the window sill but couldn’t see much.”
He took a picture, and if you up the brightness on your phone or computer, you can clearly see the figure standing on the roof.
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By the beginning of November, Ellis started dreaming about Dear David again. “In the dream, I saw him in a chair again. I don’t have the green chair in my room anymore—this time it was a recliner I’ve had for years,” he said.
Again, he was paralyzed, except for his hands. Knowing what David was about to do, Ellis reached for his phone in the dream.
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Sure enough, David began to “shamble” toward Ellis, eventually reaching his bedside. “He started muttering something, too quiet for me to understand,” Ellis wrote. “I watched as his eyes rolled back in his head, until they were all white.”
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But then Ellis realized something.
He went into his phone hours after waking up and noticed he had taken dozens of photos, all of which were seemingly pitch black. “It’s better to just show you,” he tweeted. “Turn up your brightness, because they’re pretty dark.”
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Something was clearly there. Ellis wasn’t alone.
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Dear David was real. And he clearly wasn’t just in the dream.
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After sharing these photos, Ellis went quiet on Twitter again.
He only returned to report that he discovered an odd “secret” area in his apartment. He thought he heard someone drop something upstairs, but this would be impossible because not only does Ellis live on the top floor of the apartment building, but there’s also no access to the roof — or so he thought.
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“[The hatch] can’t lead to the roof, because it’s actually below the roof,” Ellis tweeted. “I’m about to spring some simple math on you, so I apologize in advance.”
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Basically, there’s definitely a crawlspace above Ellis’s apartment. And he had been hearing movement up there for the past few days. He decided to buy a pole on Amazon to open the door and check out what the heck is up there.
By November 28th, we had some answers.
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“The crash happened again, and then again—probably 15 times in a row, followed by a long silence,” Ellis tweeted. “Then I heard a smaller, creaky sound from the hallway.”
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He then noticed that someone was seemingly caught in the hatch. The pole was put to work.
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Gird your loins. It was a child’s shoe.
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“A few hours later my landlord was on a ladder, shining a flashlight into the crawlspace,” Ellis tweeted. “He angled his flashlight all around and finally saying, “There’s nothing up here.””
But then, the landlord found a marble.
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Again, without much else to go on, Ellis went quiet until December. Not much had happened in the prior weeks. “I sort of fooled myself into thinking that finding those items in the attic somehow ended all this,” Ellis wrote.
“Not that that would make much sense.”
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“It was a feeling I’m used to—it always accompanies David,” he added. Not being able to do much, Ellis left it alone. The next night, the same feeling crept in.
He felt the need to monitor what exactly was going on around him.
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When the feeling hit again, Ellis checked the app. “There were probably 350 photos to scroll through,” he said. Many of them just showed him sleeping in his bed.
“Then, suddenly, he was there. Standing on the chair at the foot of the bed staring at me,” he prefaced.
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David appeared to look up at the ceiling. And then, he just dropped.
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He then disappeared for a few photos. But then returned.
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And then…Chilling.
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After disappearing once more, Ellis was left with this final photo. Yup. That’s hair.
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“I’m at a loss for words,” he tweeted.
“That malformed ear, that stringy hair. I didn’t even know what to think.” Ellis decided to visit family for the holidays and get out of the apartment for a while.
And although he began to feel better once he was out of the city, Ellis realized that he had been followed.
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“If it had been David out there in the snow, it meant that he could follow me anywhere,” he tweeted in January. “No matter where I moved, he could find me. I felt helpless.”
Once back at his apartment, Ellis felt like he was at square one. The nightmares returned, David returned, and this time, he attacked.
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By mid-January, the mood had lightened a bit in Ellis’s apartment, he said. Weird things were still happening, such as Ellis feeling like he was losing time, but for the most part, everything was okay.
Just weird.
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However, David was obviously still afoot. Ellis’s Instagram followers notified him of a glitch in one of his Instagram Story photos.
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“I have no clue what happened,” he wrote.
He added, “I know what it looks like. What it probably is. But I don’t know if I care anymore. I really just want things to be normal again and things feel normal enough right now.”
Then, more silence until January 28th.
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Again, silence. This time, until February 3rd.
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On February 14th, Ellis wrote, “please dont worry about me. I’m ok and everything will be like it was before :)” Followers got the feeling something was very off.
And finally, the saga ended with this suspicious log off:
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Fortunately, we know Ellis is okay because he got a movie deal for his Dear David saga. Many folks have asked if this was a work of fiction, and Ellis stands by his claim that all of this truly happened to him.
But after those mysterious last tweets, some are convinced Ellis isn’t really Ellis anymore.
Honestly, we’re not even sure. The only thing we’re certain of is that we’re 100% still afraid of Dear David and hope he never decides to pay us a visit.
