Messages
to the Dead

The Signal That Started It

In the early 2000s, I was the digital guy for a residential school on Chicago's northwest side: internet, web, IT support. The campus had started as an orphanage in the late 1800s and, over the decades, quietly became a residential treatment and behavioral health facility for kids with serious problems. Some very serious problems. The kind of place that accumulates history in its walls.

My partner Ron and I were called out to troubleshoot their fiber WAN, the line connecting the buildings back to the IT room. Routine work. We disconnected every device on the run. Every server, every switch, every computer. Nothing attached. Then we tested the line with a high-end Fluke cable tester.

Data packets. Intermittent and irregular, but real. We spent hours checking and rechecking. Everything was disconnected. The signal was still there.

One of the staff mentioned, almost offhandedly, that some bad things had happened on those grounds over the years.

We didn't have an explanation. We still don't.

That moment started something. I kept thinking about what happens to a message sent electronically. It travels through miles of copper and glass fiber. It bounces off satellites. It threads through microwave towers across the country and into space and back. All that signal, moving through everything.

What if something on the other side of all that infrastructure could perceive it? What if the act of putting words into the wire, encoding a thought and sending it into the network, was more than just transmission to a server? What if a message addressed to someone could find them, somehow, somewhere?

Around that same time, I'd finished helping a producer friend complete a documentary about Día de los Muertos. I was also going through my own quiet existential stretch.

The idea arrived. It stayed.

I registered the domain in 2009. The idea lived with me for years. A place where people could send messages to anyone they wanted. Loved ones, heroes, strangers who had mattered. The messages held here, securely and privately. But also, maybe, traveling somewhere along all those cables and wavelengths we've strung across the world.

I think the time is finally right.

Write your message. It will travel the same wires and wavelengths everything else does. Where it goes from there, I don't know.

But I think that might be exactly the point.

Privacy Policy

This site exists for one reason: to give people a place to say what they never got to say. That's it. There is no product here. You are not the product here.

What we collect. Almost nothing. When you submit a message, it is stored in a secure database. Private messages are encrypted in your browser before they leave. The encryption key is generated locally, used once, and immediately discarded. No one can read them. Not us. Not anyone. Public messages are stored as plain text because that's the point: you chose to share them.

Google Analytics. We use Google Analytics to understand basic things: how many people visit, roughly where they're from, what device they're on. We do not use this to identify you personally. We do not run retargeting. We do not share this data with anyone. It simply helps us know the signal is reaching people. If you have a browser extension that blocks Analytics, it will work here without issue.

What we do not do. We do not sell your data. We do not share it. We do not run ads. We do not have investors to answer to. We do not use your message content for any purpose other than storing it. We do not even read private messages. Not technically, not in any other way.

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Your message. If you submitted something and want it removed, reach out. We'll find it and delete it.

This policy will only ever change if we do less. We won't do more.