Elizabeth’s Instagram page is mainly selfies: Elizabeth in pyjamas, staring at a dog; Elizabeth grinning with a cocktail in one hand; Elizabeth wearing a swimsuit, licking an ice-cream, laughing. The pictures are captioned simply with long lists of hashtags: ‘#dayoff #selfie #sunshine #lovemylove #happiness’. Each photo has hundreds of likes and comments beneath them. ‘Gorgeous’, ‘Miss you hunni’, ‘RIP beautiful lady’.
There are thousands of photos; we don’t have time to scroll down through them all.
—Elizabeth posted a lot of photos of herself.
—Yeah?
—Was that normal?
—Yeah, of course! She was so inspiring – so body-positive and so encouraging. She was, like, someone everyone looked up to. Everyone wanted to be around her. She brought such, joy to people.
—How did she do that?
—She was so kind, so giving. Everyone felt like they knew her.
—So, she built her following with videos and photographs?
—That was all part of it. You want to get likes don’t you? I mean, like, that’s what it’s for. Elizabeth deserved it all, though: she was beautiful. She always got thousands and thousands of likes for each photo. That’s why she started the vlog – and she was making a living out of it just before she died.
—Really? How?
I feel like Amirah’s slightly amused at my ignorance. She’s patient with me and explains that people can make an actual living from uploading videos onto YouTube. Advertisers send them free products and pay them to feature their products in the videos. Elizabeth had make-up companies and clothing brands constantly sending her stuff. She never wanted for anything.
On each of the six days before Elizabeth was killed, she had uploaded a record of her participation in the Dead in Six Days challenge to her YouTube channel. They still reappear occasionally on YouTube, despite the protestations and appeals from Elizabeth Barton’s friends and family. Elizabeth’s channel is dormant of course. Her old unboxing and shopping-haul videos are still available to view, though.
The Dead in Six Days videos document each of her challenges, and between each one are additional vlogs where Elizabeth discusses each challenge and answers questions from the comments sections.
—Her usual stuff was shopping hauls, unboxing some stuff she got sent, things like that.
—I’m wondering if Elizabeth’s videos were popular for the content, or for Elizabeth herself. Was it Elizabeth people were into or was it her content? Or a bit of both?
—Not gonna lie, she got a lot of attention for her. So it’s fifty-fifty. Like, why are lads watching what some girl bought from the River Island in Ergarth, right? Anyway, she’d built up a huge following, so when she started doing the Dead in Six Days challenge, she just blew up, you know? In Ergarth, everyone and their nana watched it. Like, everyone was just obsessed with it. That’s why no one wants to talk. Like, we all watched the build-up to … to what happened.
—But it was slightly different for you, wasn’t it?
Amirah nods. She looks around again, slumps into her seat. I feel for her and I wish we could be somewhere less public.
The reason for Amirah’s caginess is complex. She tells me that like everyone in Ergarth, she was in awe of Elizabeth Barton, so her participation in Elizabeth’s first challenge, ‘Play Lurky in the Dene’, felt like a privilege. We’re going to address later what Amirah saw down in the Dene, but right now I want to skip forwards in time to Elizabeth’s second task.
—It was called ‘Snowball Fight in Choudhury’s’.
Amirah says this in barely a whisper. She can’t meet my eye.
Choudhury’s is still run by Amirah’s father; it’s a newsagent on a street corner in an Ergarth housing estate called Primrose Villas. People in Ergarth know it as ‘the Prim’. Rob Karl from last episode told me it wasn’t a place I wanted to visit – at any time of day. Seeing as more than one person has told me to avoid going anywhere in Ergarth after dark, I think I’ll take that advice. George Meldby’s family home was right in the middle of the estate.
—Like, it wasn’t a racial thing. My dad thought it was though. He thought we were being terrorised by all the bad ’uns off the Prim. At the time it didn’t seem so bad but after…
—What happened?
—Elizabeth asked for volunteers online to do it – the snowball fight. Hundreds of people volunteered. That’s what made me really sad afterwards, seeing how many people wanted to do it.
—It must have felt like a bit of a pile-on?
—The thing was, Elizabeth never said exactly where the snowball fight was going to be, not online. That was good of her, I suppose. She only told people when they were all assembled ready to go.
—How did you find out about it?
Amirah drops her head again. Her eyes are wet with tears and she begins vigorously stirring at the dregs of her coffee. Eventually, in a choked little voice, she answers.
—Because I signed up. I was a part of it.
—Really?
—Yeah. She told us to meet on the edge of the Prim. There was a great big crowd, loads more than she’d actually picked. The snow was coming down really heavy – heavy but silent, you know? It got in your eyes, in your mouth; it just wouldn’t stop. You could hardly see who was who or where anyone was, just these lights from people’s phones. Everyone was filming; everyone had their phones out. Some people had their torch apps on. Then Elizabeth pulled up in that little red car. I don’t know how she got it through the snow. Most of the roads were closed. But that was just Elizabeth, I guess. She never gave up! Anyway, she leaned out the window and read out the challenge. Elizabeth didn’t let on where the snowball fight was going to be until right at the end. I just remember suddenly understanding what she’d just said … and it was like the bottom of my belly just dropped. But this big cheer went up and everyone just swarmed towards the shop…
There’s a long and terrible pause. I think of the ‘spice zombies’ I’ve seen in the town, and the warnings to stay out of Ergarth after dark.
—…me included.
Amirah and the rest of Elizabeth’s followers made great piles of snowballs and surged into Amirah’s father’s shop. The video of it has long since gone from YouTube, but Amirah says it was chaos: screaming, shouting, kids with their faces covered by scarves and balaclavas. She said it only lasted for five minutes or so, but it felt, to her, like hours. What puzzles me most is why Amirah joined in, why she didn’t try and stop it.
—Like, you just don’t do that. It would have ruined everything. I felt so bad. But I couldn’t have done a thing. Afterwards, though, that night, it was weird: I was in the bath and I just couldn’t get warm. I couldn’t feel my fingers, they were so cold. And the wind was making this horrible whistling sound, like it was crying along with me. And I could hear my mum and dad arguing downstairs; it was awful.
The coffee shop door opens and a blast of autumn chill swirls into our booth, Amirah stops talking until she has seen who has walked in. I can feel the air tauten: two lads in tracksuits – they bring with them the thick reek of something that smells burned, almost fish-like. Their eyes are red and swollen, and one of their phones belts out tinny music; the staccato heartbeat of a terrified animal. They stand around for a while, rubbing their hands, before leaving. Eventually Amirah carries on.
—I was now in two Lizzie B videos, and I wasn’t going to jeopardise that. Not even for my family. Like, the Dead in Six Days Challenge was really serious at the time. If I’d have ruined it…
—What would have happened, Amirah, if you’d questioned what was happening, if you’d tried to stop it? It was a rather childish prank, don’t you think?
Amirah is quiet again, she scrolls absently through her phone before answering with a shrug.
—Like, I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk what would have happened to me.
—This ‘vampire’ who set the challenges would have got you?
Amirah laughs, but the
re’s no humour in it – she shakes her head and I feel like I’m missing something, like there’s something about all this that I’m just not getting.
—It was the Dead in Six Days challenge. It was more than some school kids’ thing, You had to be careful.
What immediately comes to my mind when Amirah talks about this challenge is a couple of other nefarious Internet memes that gained notoriety in the past: Blue Whale and Momo.
Blue Whale was an internet ‘game’ from 2016 that apparently originated in Russia. Similar in essence to Dead in Six Days, players were assigned fifty tasks via social media channels. These began innocently enough – the tasks were innocuous but challenging: staying up all night or watching a certain horror film. However, the tasks became more and more extreme and culminated in participants self-harming and even committing suicide. Apparently more than a hundred deaths worldwide have been attributed to this game. There is no current official corroboration of these figures – it’s simply what you can read online.
But why would anyone want to play such a game? I’m not sure exactly what the lure was to play Blue Whale. Unlike Dead in Six Days, which has a prank-like aspect to it, Blue Whale participants were coerced into continuing to participate by administrators who threatened to post something personal if the player did not do as they were told. The players – teenage girls mainly, reportedly with low self-esteem – would then be targeted on social media and other forums by the game’s ‘admins’. Exactly how these girls were convinced to continue playing Blue Whale is currently open to speculation.
In fact, a lot of claims about Blue Whale are just speculation. The counter claim is that Blue Whale does not and has not ever actually existed. It has become one of those Chinese-whisper style Internet rumours. According to some, the whole story came from the misinterpretation of a piece on Russian political and social-affairs website Novaya Gazeta. And in an example of how rumour and the idea of a ‘good story’ get in the way of fact, there were claims that a teenage suicide group known as the ‘Sea of Whales’ was spreading across Russian social media. There were two significant deaths attributed to online suicide groups, yet there was no evidence of any challenge.
November 2016 saw an arrest: twenty-one-year-old Philip Budeikin, a psychology student who admitted to inciting teenage girls to commit suicide online – describing them as ‘biological waste’. According to the BBC, Budeikin admitted creating the game in 2013 under a different name. He pleaded guilty to ‘inciting teenagers to suicide’ and was sentenced to three years in prison.
More recently, a similar game, called Momo, has emerged from South America, where several teenage deaths are attributed to the ‘Momo challenge’.
Momo also has similarities to Dead in Six Days; it involves sending a message on WhatsApp to an unknown number, which will reply with challenges and threats, culminating in suicide. Momo is probably best known for the unnerving image connected with it: a bulging-eyed, black-haired woman with bird-like legs. This image was in fact created by a Japanese artist and has no relation to the game itself. Like Blue Whale, young and impressionable teenagers have said to have been threatened and coerced into harming themselves while playing this game.
Yet there is no evidence, anywhere, that Momo has been responsible for anything of the sort.
We could do a whole series about the psychological intricacies of how and why people obey these tasks, if of course they actually do. I feel, however, that I’ve had my fill of diving deep into internet games while making this podcast. But it seems what happened to Elizabeth Barton is closely linked to the Dead in Six Days challenge.
—Who was behind the Dead in Six Days Challenge, Amirah? Who was this vampire giving out the tasks?
Amirah sighs and stirs, a look of pained confusion comes over her face.
—I don’t think, you know, that there ever really was a person behind it. People used to say it was someone called Vladlena – and there were fake Vladlena accounts all over the place. But it wasn’t really about meeting the vampire at the end, it was just about, like, the content.
—The challenges.
—Yeah, it was all everyone trying to outdo each other, getting more likes and shares. That was what it was about really. It was a competition.
—It was Solomon Meer who messaged Elizabeth and told her to come to Tankerville Tower, wasn’t it? Could he have been behind the Dead in Six Days thing?
—He could have been. I doubt it, though. He probably just made another fake Vladlena account to send Elizabeth that message. I don’t know who it was who started it or anything. It just, like, started…
—You and Elizabeth had nothing to do with Solomon, is that right?
—I certainly didn’t. I’d forgotten about him pretty much, after school. It was only when everyone started doing the Dead in Six Days challenge that he popped up again.
—Really?
—Yeah, Solomon Meer did one of the first big Dead in Six Days videos. It was, like, amazing. It sounds horrible to say that after what he did to Elizabeth – it’s like I’m giving him a compliment. It’s true though. I can’t deny it. That’s what got everyone going with the challenge.
—What was his challenge?
—He got a really good one to be fair: ‘Shopping Trolley Sledge’. Everyone in Ergarth probably has that video on their phone still. They’ll not show you though.
—Do you have it?
—No comment. ‘Shopping Trolley Sledge’ was the first one that went viral. He had all these dogs; I dunno if they were his or what, but he had them on leads fastened to this ASDA trolley. It was night, in a car park and he was setting off bangers, like, fireworks. All the dogs were going mental, trying to run away and they were pulling his shopping trolley around after them. He’d edited the video and put, like, this silly music behind it. Like a Russian polka or something? And he messed with the speed, so it looked almost professional. It was properly funny.
All the videos that pertain to this case have slowly but surely disappeared from the Internet. They occasionally sprout up again like weeds through the bricks of a driveway. Amirah tells me that it’s impossible for these things to ever really go away. Occasionally someone will post Solomon’s challenge video; there’ll be a flurry of attention, and then it’ll be taken down. So far, Amirah says, no one’s matched it for likes, not even Elizabeth Barton herself.
—You see, that was the video that got everyone doing the Dead in Six Days thing. Solomon Meer passed on the task to someone else, and it went from there.
—So he essentially started it?
—I guess. Maybe. I mean, not really.
—Would you agree, though, that what you’ve told me does suggest it was Solomon Meer who came up with the whole thing?
—Yeah, like maybe. I dunno. There were other people doing it before him. He just did the first big one. Even he was too much of a coward to keep it going for six days, though. It was Elizabeth who did that. She won in the end. She became so much more popular than him.
As unpleasant as it is to say, could it be thanks to Solomon Meer that Elizabeth Barton moved on to another level of popularity? I suggest this to Amirah, but she disagrees, tells me that Elizabeth was way more popular than Solomon Meer. I don’t think I’m going to convince her otherwise.
—Like he was just this local oddity. He looked like he was homeless and worked in that weird little bookshop, and loads of people reckoned he slept in the Vampire Tower or in the Dene. I think he was trying to get sympathy a lot of the time, to be perfectly honest. That was the sort of person he was.
While it was definitely Solomon Meer who asked Elizabeth to come to Tankerville Tower on the third of March 2018, it has never been officially suggested that it was him who orchestrated any of the other Dead in Six Days challenges.
I decide to change tack, and take Amirah back to what it was that compelled her to join in with Elizabeth’s second challenge, ‘Snowball Fight in Choudhury’s’. Fear of a vampire … or something else?
> —There never was a vampire – it wasn’t that I was worried about. It was … it was Elizabeth’s followers. Her flying monkeys. They could take people down instantly. They could destroy her haters. It was amazing really. Imagine having people who loved you like that? The challenges were her most popular videos. If I’d have tried to stop that, I would have been annihilated. Not by her – she wouldn’t have done it…
—What do you mean?
—It would have been her fans, her followers, her orbiters. I saw it happen, we all did, so many times. If you crossed her, if you did something against her, honestly, they could tear you to pieces, kill your reputation online. I couldn’t have that. You wonder why there were barely any negative comments on her YouTube channel? That’s why. So I couldn’t. It was just a bit of snow, a bit of water. I paid my dad back for it all, you know? I worked there for a whole summer for free to pay back the damaged stock. I said nothing. I said absolutely nothing about the whole thing because at the end of the day, it was funny, I suppose.
I just want to clarify some of the terminology here. ‘Orbiters’ are loosely similar to online followers. The majority of orbiters are male and ‘follow’ a female either online or in person, commenting and interacting in a needy way, showering them with compliments and defending them from attacks in the vain hope that the female may one day sleep with them. ‘Flying monkeys’ is a recent term, used in popular psychology to describe those who abuse others on behalf of someone else.
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