Ah catfishing. For those of you who don’t have any idea what catfishing is then here is the word catfish as described by the urban dictionary, ‘A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.’ It came about because of a documentary someone made about someone on the internet and has spawned a successful TV show, although so far in season three it must be said it has been darker than the previous two season’s.
Last night we saw an episode where someone created a fake profile and promptly killed them off and it took me back to something that happened 18 months ago to me and having done some digging today I think it is time to write about it freely and openly.
There is a TV show called The Newsroom which is pretty fantastic. I would tweet about it whilst watching it and a friend of mine (who definitely does exist for I have met her despite her living in the US of A) also watched the show. She then introduced me to one of the characters on twitter, for fans of the show actually created twitter handles of characters of the show and would commentate on the show and real world events as these characters. Bit weird but all a bit of fun.
Anyway I was then introduced by both my friend and one of the characters to another women and we started to communicate. I wouldn’t say anything romantic but we just talked about each others lives. She was portraying a character from the show (albeit one that was never seen on screen) but we weren’t communicating with her in that character. Reading that back it sounds weird but heck, even at the time I found it weird but I have communicated with many a random person on the interwebs in the past 15 odd years so I just rolled with it.
Over the next few months we’d communicate more and started to move away from twitter to e-mail. Then suddenly everything went silent and that as they say was that. I thought it was strange but I suspected that real life events had become more interesting and thus she had decided to neglect random people on the interwebs. Makes sense to me and her account just stopped tweeting. Several weeks later she DM’ed me and told me that she had been in hospital. She had suffered from complications of the flu outbreak that had hit Florida. We picked up our communications again for another few weeks and then once more everything went silent.
As this had happened before I didn’t think too much of it and then one day I noticed her DM’s had disappeared from my TweetDeck. Her account had been deleted and that was that. Again I didn’t actually think too much of it and the year carried on before suddenly on Christmas Day I got a DM from the character from the TV show that had introduced us informing me that she had died due to complications from her initial bout of the flu. I was confused but something didn’t add up so I did some investigating.
I had her e-mail address and decided to do a google search the username in her e-mail and I found another twitter account, girl with the same name, looked very similar, so I looked through the people she followed and followed her and I found the same mutual character from the TV show. Weird I thought. Very weird. At this point I suspected that she had not in fact passed on so I did a search for death records in her state for her name – no-one of that name had passed away in 2013. At this point I heavily suspected that she was still alive but was trying to work out who or why I was informed of her ‘death’
Well I just consigned it to history in my head until last night’s episode of Catfish re-awoke my intrigue in the story. I saw her second twitter account had disappeared so I went on to the character’s following list and searched for her name and bingo – I found another account with a new twitter handle and this time it wasn’t locked. I could see that whilst it was quiet – it was certainly active.
Whilst writing this I just did a google for her name and the state she lived in and I found another twitter handle, which is her, this time the twitter header is a photo of her/someone is high heels and handcuffs dangling off her/someone’s ankle – surely I’m the kind of guy she’d want to know if that is what she is into? Having just read the tweets on that account and seen photos – I can confirm I am exactly the type of guy she’d want to know, makes this all the more bizarre.
So yeah, I have no idea who this person actually is. I think the name is accurate and the state she lives in. If she decided that our friendship wasn’t something she wanted to continue with that disappearing without a trace was fine but what was with the message that she died from our mutual contact, what the hell was that all about? Unless she has created several new accounts since she passed on then she is most certainly still living. I haven’t decided to message any of these accounts for answers and just thought I’d write a blog about it, it is weird and makes very little sense, but on the other hand it is both interesting and perplexing.
If she ever reads this and wants to rise from the dead and tell me the story then I’d be fascinated to hear all about it. If not, well, it has given a few people an interesting story to read.
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