One of the regular posters writing here died six years ago. He died a most painful death too, was murdered as he rolled his trash out into the alleyway behind his house in suburbia. The fatal blow came from behind and he was killed instantly. The murderer has never been found. And the poster's body was only discovered the next morning by children on their way to school. The poster was an irascible sort with extreme and incendiary views. He liked to bait others, and used whatever information he could gather to tease and taunt and piss people off. He had just left the site the very night he was killed. He had been in a heated discussion about some inane political issue and needed a breather. That's when he remembered the trash, went outside, pulled the bin backwards onto its wheels and began rolling it towards the back wall in the alley. He never knew what hit him. His last conscious thought was of his next reply to whomever he was baiting.

As I say, this poster has been dead for six years now. Yet he continues to haunt this place. He is confident nobody will ever know the difference between living words, or words emanating from allegedly living posters, and his own words which come from beyond the grave. He's also certain he will never be discovered [since there is nothing to discover] and that those with whom he feuds will never be discriminating enough to discern the dearth of those tacit cues which seem to inform the utterances of most of the other participants. He is correct in this conjecture or was until recently, and he would have continued thus were it not for a routine check of ISP's, and some cross-referencing by an astute editor/moderator, who had been informed of the poster's murder by his widow, and who had been asked that her loss be withheld; otherwise, this would never have come to light.

The same editor had paid very close attention to the deceased poster's style while he lived, because he'd received many complaints about him and wanted to learn all he could about what he wrote [and how], and why it aggrieved his many targets. The editor had come up with a theory, which isn't important here, but he did manage to pinpoint certain recurring phrases and constructions and deduced from them the ruling he planned to implement to eventually curb the poster's flaunting of the rules. He was readying himself to pounce when, lo and behold, he received the email from the widow and that finally put the matter to bed ... or so he thought?

He noticed recently, only in the past few months, that this poster used many of the same idiosyncratic locutions of the other, deceased poster. And like his predecessor, this one was really making cyber-life impossible for a slew of others. He intended to investigate further, and that's when he found this new poster's ISP was precisely the same one the older poster had been using. The editor wrote to the email he had on file, issued a few warnings. Nothing. Not a single response. Fair enough. Next step would be to ban him and freeze that particular ISP. He did this. Or he thought he did this. No sooner had he banned and frozen it but the dead poster immediately posted a new response, and this time an even more vicious and egregious one. This made no sense. He called in the tech guys. They did everything in their power to investigate, but they too were flabbergasted. They informed the editor that the ISP didn't or, rather, couldn't exist, that no trace could be found, no trail could be pursued since there were no log-ins or outs, no activity at the other end, not even a computer. It was all a very strange mystery. This only piqued the editor's curiosity.

He wrote a very cautious letter to the widow, diplomatically circumvented the matter, and the reason for it, then came right out with it and asked for some explanation as to why so much acerbity was still emanating from her dead husband's computer. She grew exceedingly angry, and afraid, accused the man of trying to spook and harass her, said she had discarded that computer shortly after his death, because 'he spent too much damn time on it', and 'if she never saw a damn computer again it would be too soon'. The editor was convinced she was telling the truth. She was in fact telling the truth. She had taken a mallet to the computer some weeks after her husband's funeral and, in a fit of wild rage, had smashed it into smithereens. The editor apologized for his call and expressed his regret for any discomfort he might have brought on the poor woman.

But the mystery continues. The editor informed his superiors that their servers were being 'haunted by a phantom poster' and that this dead person had somehow broken into their system, had bypassed all their protocols and firewalls, had skirted every barrier they'd put in place, and was even able to post when the servers were completely shut down. Once during a regular maintenance, when all posting had discontinued, this ghost was able to continue posting as if nothing had been shut down. In fact, when the systems were rebooted, the first page on at least three forums sported top-posts by this wraith, and the times of those posts indicated times when there couldn't possibly have been any activity. How could that be? None of the other posters noticed it, though it was patently obvious, they couldn't put 2 and 2 together, but then who would possibly think to question? Answer: no one would, of course. But the editor had. He proposed a few drastic measures which his bosses scoffed at at first, but then they agreed to hear him out when their programmers corroborated the story.

Nothing whatever has worked. This dead poster could not and cannot be stopped. Nothing can be put in place to prevent him from posting. But where this posting activity comes from is an inscrutable mystery. The ISP address remains exactly the same as before, yet it has no fixed location and it's not subscribed to any existing carrier. Truth be told it comes from nowhere. And still here it is, day-in, day-out, a steady stream of words manifesting themselves in cyberspace, without before or after, simply showing up, words writing themselves across the screen at all hours and always with the same tone, in the same style, with that dead man's peculiar penchant for harassing others. He cannot be stopped precisely because he is dead. Dead to all the world except these fora.

Everybody assumes he's alive, that it's a living, breathing person with whom they're engaging, but it's not so. Only this one question remains for all you posters out there still chatting and mostly arguing with this deceased anonymn: Can you tell which poster among you is dead? Do you know who the ghost is in your midst? Are you able to tell living words from dead ones? Are you that astute? literate? attuned? I'd say not, emphatically not. Actually, I can safely say here and now that there's not one single poster among you who will ever be able to identify the dead words you read. Isn't that extraordinary? You cannot put the right dead face on the words you read here every single day ... Maybe you yourselves are the dead ones. Who knows, maybe the ghost is the only live one here ... If we only knew. The only way to know for sure is to see if you can stop posting altogether ... See. Told you so.