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.
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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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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Months later, Ellis dreamed of the child again. This time, another entity told him the ghost child’s name.
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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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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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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.”
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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.
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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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He shared a video of his cat in action. “What is going on?” is right, dude.
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“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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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.
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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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“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.”
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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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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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“He was smaller this time. Almost shrunken.” Ellis wrote.
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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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.
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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.
“I went to get coffee, which I do every weekend.”
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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.
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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.
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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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“Usually if it’s an automated thing, if you answer once, they quit calling. So I picked up.”
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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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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.
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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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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.”
“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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“Especially because of the next video.”
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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,
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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.”
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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 face oddly resembled Dear David.
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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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“But last night the backlight was flickering on and off by itself.” It continued to flicker for a while before eventually just going dead.
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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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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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“But something else happened last night. It was around 11 or so, and I was watching TV on the couch.”
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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.”
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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.
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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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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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Dear David was real. And he clearly wasn’t just in the dream.
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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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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.
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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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“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.””
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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.
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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.
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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.
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He then disappeared for a few photos. But then returned.
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After disappearing once more, Ellis was left with this final photo. Yup. That’s hair.
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“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.
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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.”
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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.
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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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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.”
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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.
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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.
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.
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