Emails from the Dead - The Jack Froese Story
Jack Froese died unexpectedly at the age of 32, his family and friends were equally shocked and comforted when it appeared that he was communicating with them through his email address.
It certainly sounds like the work of a troll or hacker, but whoever was behind the email seemed to know intimate details regarding his friends and family. All of the messages Froese sent after his passing were incredibly strange and very personal, which means the person sending them had to have knowledge of his personal conversations. One message was sent to Froese's buddy Tim Hart, and it included an inside joke that the two had about cleaning Hart's attic.
Hart explained that one night he was just scrolling through his phone when he received a message from Froese. The subject line was "I'm Watching," and it read: "Did you hear me? I'm at your house. Clean your f***ing attic!!!"
Hart said that before, the two had joked about how dirty his attic was, with Froese saying that he was going to clean it. Hart insists that they were the only people who knew about the conversation.
After his cousin Jimmy McGraw broke his ankle, McGraw was laid up for a week when he received an email from Froese. Normally this wouldn't be weird, but Froese's funerary services had been months prior.
The November email read: "Hey Jim, How ya doing? I knew you were gonna break your ankle, tried to warn you. Gotta be careful." While it's possible that someone could have sent this from Froese's account, it doesn't make sense why someone would do so.
One of the possible explanations for this email haunting is that someone logged into Froese's email and began sending messages to his friends and family. Everyone who received a message claims that no one knew his passwords because if they did, they wouldn't have sent the messages. Friends and family couldn't determine a motivation for why a stranger might hack into Froese's email.
Not all of Froese's emails were able to get through to his friends and family. McGraw claims that in an email that Froese - or someone pretending to be Froese - sent him about his ankle, that the correspondent asked him to pass along a message to Froese's cousin, "Rock." The email from Froese said that he couldn't get through and that the "email didn't work."
One theory about the identity of the sender of the emails is that it's actually Froese's mother. In interviews, Patty has noted that she believes that the mysterious emails are "fantastic" and "great." She went so far as to say: "They made some people happy, they upset some people - but to me, that's keeping people talking about him." Froese's mother also claims that she never had any of her son's passwords.
Outside of Froese's circle of friends and family, everyone believes the emails from beyond the grave are a hoax. The most common thought on the emails is that one of his friends hacked Froese's email and began reaching out to everyone. If this isn't the case, then it's possible that the emails have been "spoofed," although it takes a lot of work to set up an email that looks like it's coming from someone you know, and there's not much payoff.
