I never forwarded those chain emails 10 years ago so now I’m prepared to die
Forward this to 15 of your closest friends in the next 7 minutes and your crush will ask you out. If you don’t forward this a ghost will take your soul 10 years from now.
When I was 12, in the height of the AOL Instant Messenger days, I gave up on chain emails very soon. Sure, when Allison first emailed me a message that said if I forwarded it to ten of my closest friends that in the next 24 hours my crush would ask me out, I was very excited that I could win the heart of someone who was probably disgusted with my existence so easily. So I sent it out and lo and behold, 24 hours passed and my crush didn’t even make eye contact with me. 24 days, 24 months and nothing. I concluded that these emails were fake, as if there was any sense of them being true in the first place.
So even though I became jaded about chain emails, the rest of my 7th grade peers were not, and every few days a new one would show up in my inbox, letting me know by the extremely loud male voice saying, “You got mail,” from one of like eight minimized windows because tabs weren’t really a thing yet. Most of them were positive friendship ones like, “Share to your bffs to let them know that they’re great!” but some of them got real dark, telling stories about little kids who got murdered by their dads and their ghosts will haunt you forever if you don’t let everyone know about it.
“This stuff’s bullshit,” I say to myself as I put these emails in the trash. I was very certain that no matter what I did, nothing would change my fate. Hell, I don’t think I even had 12 friends to email some of those chain letters to! But now, as most of those messages said that I’d die in ten years, and the height of AOL email was in 2007 for my friends and me, this year might be the time that I meet my fate. Nobody knows if these chain emails are for real or not, because if someone dies unexpectedly nobody’s going to go look through their ancient AOL account and see they never forwarded something. If that’s the case, then a lot of exes were probably wrongly accused of murder. But we’ll never know. While it seems almost impossible for an internet ghost to enact decade-old vengeance, it is foolish to completely rule out that possibility. So if that’s the case then I’m ready to fight a ghost.
