I found an edit from 2023 on a private Google doc I shared with a friend who passed away in 2014.

This happened about three or four months ago, back in January, and I still think about it on random nights when I can’t sleep. It’s just one of those things that leaves a permanent, weird knot in your stomach because there’s no satisfying explanation for it.

Back in middle school, my best friend Leo and I had this running inside joke where we’d watch awful indie horror movies and write these incredibly sarcastic, detailed reviews in a shared Google doc. We did it for a couple of years, filling up dozens of pages with stupid 13 year old humor.

In the summer of 2014, right before we started high school, Leo passed away in an accident while visiting family out of state. It was devastating. Over the years, life kept moving, I finished school, moved away, got a job, but I always kept him in the back of my mind.

Anyway, a few months ago, I was doing a massive digital cleanup, moving old files from a high school Google drive account to an external hard drive and that’s when I stumbled across that old shared document. I hadn’t opened it in over ten years. Feeling a bit nostalgic, I clicked on it just to read through our old jokes.

While I was looking at it, I noticed the “Last edit was made…” timestamp at the top. I decided to click open the version history, mostly just to see the exact date of our last summer session together before he died.

But the history showed a modification date from November 14th, 2023.

I thought it was some weird Google server glitch, so I clicked on that specific 2023 version. Someone had scrolled all the way to the bottom, past all our old middle school stuff, and added a short, three paragraph review for Talk to Me, a horror movie that came out in 2023. Seeing the text typed out on the screen completely turned my stomach. It looked like this:

TALK TO ME (2023)

— okay so basically some australian teenagers find a ceramic embalmed hand and use it to get high off literal ghost possession. completely realistic, 10/10 premise.

— the main girl gets absolutely peer pressured into holding this thing and letting a dead guy take over her body. the vibe was similar to when mr. henderson made you present your solar system project alone because the projector broke, and you just stood there shaking and sweating for ten minutes.

— 3 out of 5 stars. clever concept, but trying to talk to the dead through a ceramic hand is stupid.

I completely froze, the mr. henderson thing couldn’t be a generic guess, that was our 7th grade science teacher, and that exact projector incident was an inside joke we brought up for months. Even the formatting, using triple hyphens instead of regular bullet points, and never capitalizing the start of a sentence, was Leo’s exact layout habit from 2012.

I checked the sharing settings immediately. The only two accounts with access were my old email and Leo’s old yahoo address.

A few days later, I actually called his mom. It was super awkward because we hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. I asked her as casually as I could if anyone still had access to Leo’s old laptop or email. She told me his computer was destroyed in a basement flood years ago, and she’d personally had his yahoo account deleted and shut down a year after his funeral because it was getting slammed with spam.

I ended up downloading the file and deleting the online doc because looking at it just made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I’ve tried to rationalize it in every way possible. Maybe a hacker got into his deleted email years later? Maybe Google recycled the old yahoo address handle and someone randomly inherited access to a private doc? But why write a movie review using our specific inside jokes?

It’s been a few months now, and the initial panic has worn off, but every now and then I’ll just be sitting on the couch and the thought will pop into my head. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything, but I genuinely don’t think I’m ever going to figure out who wrote that.