MySpace, DeathSpace

Behold a community spawned from twin American obsessions: Memorializing the dead and peering into strangers' lives. Anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits per day.

The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. Here, death roams cyberspace in all its spectral forms: senseless and indiscriminate, sometimes premeditated, often brutally graphic. It's also a place where the living - those who knew the deceased and those who didn't - discuss this world and the next.

There's a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There's a 20-year-old whose body was discovered burned to death on a hiking trail; and woman, 21, who overdosed on drugs and was found dead in a portable toilet, authorities say.

Their fates have been sealed, but their spirits remain very much alive - frozen in time, for all the world to see.