Dear David

There is a ghost on twitter. Or at least that’s what Adam Ellis Tweeted. In those tweets he has decided to share the story of a little boy’s ghost that has been haunting his apartment since 2017.

Are you ready to jump down the Rabbit Hole?



Adam Ellis is a New York cartoonist and illustrator who started documenting his encounters with this creepy ghost on his twitter account @moby_dickhead. He gained quite a following and some notoriety because of his tweets. Oh and did I forget to mention that Adam thinks this dead boy’s ghost is trying to kill him?

On this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 2 questions:

1. What is the story behind David?
2. Is it real?

What is the story behind David?

At 8:35 AM on Aug 7 2017 Adam described the Dear David incident in a series of tweets. This is what he said:

(Jeff Voice Over)

Here are some of the more intriguing highlights from Adam’s twitter account:

• He claims that his cats will go to his door that leads to the hallway outside his apartment and just sit there, looking underneath the doorway. As if something or someone is there.
• A brand new Polaroid type camera he bought cannot take pictures of his hallway. They just come out black. But the camera works everywhere else.
  • There is a video posted on this timeline tweet that shows Adam taking a picture with the camera of the hallway and it developing black in real time.
• For some reason static electricity plays a significant role in many tweets
  • Here is a recording he made of the Static sounds he mentions
• Adam has a dream that he was dragged by David through an empty warehouse by his arm. He wakes up to find his arm bruised.
  • He then finds that a food cart repair depot to be closed on his way to get coffee. The warehouse that housed this shop is now empty. Or so he thinks. There is one solitary green chair in the middle of the warehouse. The first time Adam saw David he was sitting in a green rocking chair in his room.
• A video taken from a security camera from inside the apartment appears to show the Green Rocking chair start to rock on its own.
• Adam recounts another dream he had. This time he says in his dream he wakes up to find a severed head and a bloody spine snaking down the bed towards him. The head then look him directly in the face, and smiles.
• On three different occasions Adams purports to have taken photos of David. Once in November of 2017, then again in December 2017, and finally in Jan 2018
  • The first set of pictures in November are pretty grainy but you can make out something
  • The pictures in December are quite clearer. And you can see David on a chair in Adam’s room. Then you can clearly see David standing over Adam as he sleeps.
  • The one lone picture in January of 2018 appears to show David lying in bed with Adam. David appears above the sheets and seems to be almost hovering, arm outstretched and touching Adam.
• The last tweet from Adam about David comes in March, 2018 where he says that he is focusing on work and that things have been quite as of late.

Is It Real?

There are convincing moments throughout the twitter story line. I personally love the origin story of David and the 3 questions aspect of it. It harkens back to being a kid and believing ghost stories and the games that accompanied them.

I personally want to completely believe in the tweets. I love a good ghost story. Who doesn’t? 

I do believe something happened. I just don’t believe everything that was tweeted out was true. I think Adam has embellished some of the story here.

Here’s one of the problems I had. If you go through the tweets it sometimes reads like a story. Sometimes too conveniently like a story. The tweets sometimes come off as if he is trying to hard at keeping the tweets coming. Once it started to go viral there must have been an immense amount of pressure to keep going. And so he did. At the expense of what really happened.

The second problem I have is with the photographic evidence. Now I do not know what a real ghost would like like if it were caught on camera. But I do know what a doll in a transparent filter would look like. And unfortunately the pictures look like a doll to me.

News broke in June of 2018 that Buzzfeed Studios and It producer Dan Lin's production company Rideback would be adapting the tweets into a film. In November of that same year New Line Cinema acquired the rights to the film.

Ellis has always maintained that everything he tweeted was true. And that may ultimately be true. And we here at the Clouded podcast most definitely do not want to upset David, that’s why there are only 2 questions not 3 this episode. David doesn’t like 3 questions.

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