Season 3 Episode 1 - Dead Man's Email

In 2011 Tim Hart received an email from his close friend Jack Froese, asking him to clean his attic. The only problem was, Jack had died 6 months earlier.


Episode Begins Here
​In November of 2011 Tim Hart received an email from his childhood friend Jack Froese. The Subject line of the email read “I’m watching” and in the body of the email it said “Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your f—ing attic!!!”. To be fair, Tim Hart had spoken to Jack about his attic being in disarray earlier that year. The unsettling part was that the author of the email, Jack Froese, had died 6 months before this email had been sent.

Are you Ready to Jump Down the Rabbit Hole?





Tim hart admitted to the BBC in an interview that he turned Ghost White when he first read the email. And who could blame him? I think all of us would be taken aback at receiving an email from a close friend months after he had died.

In this episode of Clouded we will try and answer 3 questions:

Were there any more emails sent from jack’s email account?
What are some plausible explanations?
Were these emails sent from beyond the grave?






Were There Any More Emails Sent From Jack’s Email Account?

Jack Froese died of a Heart arrhythmia in June 2011. As mentioned earlier in the podcast, in November of that same year, Jack’s childhood friend Tim Hart received and email from his now deceased friend. But he wasn’t the only one.

Jacks cousin Jimmy McGraw also received a chilling email from the same account. And this one is even harder to explain, it read: “Hey Jim, how ya doing? I knew you were going to break your ankle. Tried to warn you. Gotta be careful.”

McGraw suffered a broken ankle after Jack had already passed.

Jimmy had this to say about the email he received “I’d like to say Jack sent it, just because I look at it as he’s gone, but he’s still trying to connect with me. Trying to tell me to move along, to feel better,”





What are some plausible explanations?

One possible answer is that Jack used a service called “Dead Man’s Switch”. This service allows anyone to send emails out to pre-selected recipients after they pass away.

Here is how the creators of “Dead Man’s Switch” describe how the service works:
“ You write a few e-mails and choose the recipients. These emails are stored privately until they're sent. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to... happen... to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an "electronic will", one could say.”

The problem with this explanation is that the second email sent to Jimmy talks about an event that occured after Jack’s passing. The email’s written using the dead man’s switch would all have been written before Jack passed away. Making this explanation impossible.

The next possibility, and probably the most obvious one, is that either a friend or family member has hacked the email account. But to this date Jack's family members and friends have said that nobody knows the password to get into the email. And that there have been no other signs that show it has been hacked.

That by no means shows that this isn’t an inside job. I cannot speculate as to why someone close to the family would want to play such an insensitive joke. But human beings have consistently surprised me in what they are capable of doing.





Were these emails sent from beyond the grave?

The first email sent to Tim Hart seemed innocuous enough. But was it sent from the grave or by someone else privy to that information?here’s my problem with someone else send such a boring email that’s trying to play a prank:  A private conversation between two friends could have leaked out to others around them. But such a mundane comment, I think, would be hard pressed to be passed along to someone else afterwards. It’s just not something most people would bring up in a conversation outside of the person they initially talked to.

The second email is in a whole other category.

Does this mean that these emails were sent from Jack as a way of communicating with those he left behind? I don’t believe so. But I also haven’t completely ruled it out.

Tim also revealed that he had replied to the email he received from jack, but never got an answer back.