The Mystery of the Jack Froese Emails: Contact From Beyond the Grave?

Most of us are no strangers to pulling pranks on friends and family, no matter how small the prank may be. My little sister was a prime target for this, and my brother and I enjoyed playing pranks on her. Most of them were harmless, though when she was 4 or 5 and was given access to a kids account on AOL, my brother sent her an email from TheMonsterThatLivesUnderYourBed@yahoo.com. That wasn’t quite so harmless, and it took quite a bit of effort to explain to her that her room wasn’t filled with tech savvy monsters.

A few years later, she started going through her occult/Wiccan phase, a staple for every girl that grows up in proximity of Salem, Massachusetts, despite extensive and graphic education on just how well that worked out for the alleged witches in colonial times. Once that phase began, all she wanted was a Ouija board. Actually, she wanted lots of stuff, and thanks to being 10 years younger than me, 12 years younger than my brother, and being the only girl, she was spoiled and got pretty much everything she wanted.

Not bitter at all. One Christmas, her wish came true, and she got her long awaited Ouija board. She couldn’t wait to try it out, so that night, my brother, my sister, and I broke open the box and attempted to make contact with spirits from the other side.

No sooner had we placed our fingertips on the planchette than it began to move. My sister, shocked that the present she wanted was doing the thing it was designed to do, immediately ran off to her room, never to touch the Ouija board again. Obviously my brother and I had been messing with her because there’s no such thing as ghosts, but ghastly wails and crying could be heard emitting from my sister’s bedroom for the next hour or so.

In the words of Australian comedy musician Tim Minchin during a nine minute beat poem, “Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be…not magic!” But who knows, maybe Tim, Simon, and I are the ones that are wrong. Not bloody likely, but despite all evidence to the contrary and the total lack of verifiable encounters with otherworldly spirits, maybe they really do exist. Maybe modern day ghost sightings aren’t just people’s lizard brains taking over in an instant of fear, thus rendering them incapable of rational thought, and they would still have seen what they saw in a completely calm state.

Still, we are living in the information age. Long past are the days when ghosts had to resort to rapping on windows or writing messages on the walls in blood to get your attention. A new age of mankind calls for a new age of ghostly encounters. So, just like with the monster under my sister’s bed, if you want to communicate with a 21st century ghost, you had best check your email.

Who Was Jack Froese?

No, we’re not talking about His Worship Jack Froese (pronounced freece), the mayor of Langley, British Columbia in Canada. We’re not even talking about why on earth the Commonwealth realms use the honorific “His Worship” for mayors, though I would really love an answer for that at some point. Today we’re talking about American Jack Froese, born on December 15, 1978 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He earned his degree in sound recording from Luzerne County Community College. Jack loved music and even had founded and played in three local bands. He built and rode motorcycles, loved animals, and was really into tattoos. He also enjoyed holding hands and long walks on the beach (citation needed).

The most important thing to Jack was probably his wife and two kids, but the most important thing about Jack was his larger than life personality. He had a sarcastic comeback for anything someone could say, and it was said that he could always make someone laugh, even on their worst day.

On June 10, 2011, at age 32, Jack died suddenly in his home from a fatal heart arrhythmia, also referred to as sudden cardiac death. Unlike a heart attack, in which the sufferer has time to take action, someone who suffers sudden cardiac death only has a window of about one to five minutes to receive emergency medical treatment to have any chance of survival.

The Emails

On November 21, five months and 21 days after Jack had died, his friend Tim received an email from Jack’s account. The subject line read “I’m Watching”. The message simply read “Did you hear me? I’m at your house.

Clean your fucking attic!!!” One of the last times Tim had seen Jack, they went up to his attic to see how much work it would take to finish it and make it a usable room. Jack teased Tim for how dirty and dusty the attic was, a conversation that no one else heard and they likely didn’t mention to anyone else, because it would make for an extremely boring anecdote.

The same night, Jack’s cousin Jim also received an email while he was recovering from having broken his ankle about a week earlier. “How ya doing? I knew you were gonna break your ankle, tried to warn you.

Gotta be careful. Tell Rock for me, Great song, huh? Your welcome.

Couldn’t get threw to him. His fucking email didn’t work.” A user on YouTube going by the name “Frank Froese” commented on a number of YouTube videos about the case, claiming to be Jack’s cousin.

He said “Jack comes to me in my dreams a lot. I’m his cousin Frank… My family calls me ‘Rock’. Look on Jimmy’s phone and you’ll see a message for me from Jack.

I wrote a song for him months after his death, I was having trouble with a guitar part, and Jack came to me in a dream with his guitar and a bottle of whiskey, and helped me finish the song. That’s what the second part of Jimmy’s email meant.” I can’t verify with absolute certainty that these posts were by Jack’s cousin, but it seems reasonably likely enough that I’ll assume they were.

So over five months after his death, Jack sent emails to his friends and family about events that happened after he died. These were the only two emails that were shared publicly, but supposedly there could be more. After all, it seems unlikely to me that his wife would not have received one before his cousins, unless she was too faint of heart to communicate to the dead. The messages were all short, but with one being a reference to a conversation only he and Tim would have known about, and the other referencing posthumous events, the most logical conclusion surely must be that Jack’s ghost was sending friends and family pithy emails while he patiently waited for them to join him in the afterlife, right?

Theories

The first theory is that it was Jack’s ghost sending those emails. Ghosts aren’t real and I’m not even going to entertain a discussion on the matter, other than to say why did he only send emails once and then never again? Were those emails the unfinished business he needed to complete to move onto the afterlife proper? Did he go to a spirit realm cocktail party and get so wasted he forgot his email password for the rest of eternity?

I can’t even with you people. If you believe in ghosts and take exception to my curt dismissal of your beliefs, be sure to GET IN THE COMMENTS and let me know.

The next theory is that it wasn’t Jack’s ghost sending those emails. Specifically, either his account was hacked, or it was a prank being pulled by someone else. There does not seem to be any evidence of his account being hacked, however, and writing those would be pretty bizarre behaviour for a hacker. While Jack’s friends insist that no one knew his passwords, if any of them or his wife were responsible for the emails, then it seems unlikely they would come out and say it. I believe the most likely candidate for this theory would in fact be his wife. She would be the person most likely to know his passwords, may have had a similar sense of humour, and would be privy to the mundane banality of his everyday conversations. Going into your friend’s attic and noting that it was extremely dirty might not make for a riveting movie, other than of course Jumanji, but it would be suitable as part of the answer to “So how was your day, honey?”

Finally, we come to my preferred explanation for this mystery. I identify with this story quite a bit, because, barring sudden death, I intend to deliver my own eulogy posthumously. Honestly, who could properly memorialize what an absolute fucking legend I was better than me? Plus, I want my funeral to basically be a big party with lots of fun and laughing, not the morbid snoozefest of a traditional funeral.

At this point you might be thinking, “Wow, Kevin, you sound like a really fun guy!” Thank you, yes I am. But you also might be thinking “Wait a minute, but didn’t Jack Froese suffer sudden cardiac death?” Also yes, but perhaps it’s more complicated than that.

To put it plainly, Jack Froese was a big guy. Not big enough to appear on a TLC reality show, but still big, even by American standards. While his death was sudden, that doesn’t mean that it was unpredictable. There are a number of factors that can increase the risk of heart arrhythmia, including obesity, and there’s no way for us to know if he had an irregular heartbeat or any other increased risk factors prior to his death.

It is absolutely possible that he knew this was a possibility, regardless of how likely he thought it was, and he wrote the emails in advance, scheduling them to send. It’s even possibly that he had been doing this for years, periodically altering and rescheduling the emails.

The biggest clue that points to this possibility is when the emails arrived: 5 months and 21 days after his death. That sounds an awful lot to me like someone had scheduled the emails to send 6 months later. If they were written 9 days before he died, it explains how he knew about the state of Tim’s attic as well.

But how could he have known about Jim’s ankle breaking or the song Frank wrote? Simple: he didn’t. The ankle would have just been a guess, but the email references having warned him in the past, so it seems like this injury was an inevitability and Jack shot his shot, hoping to get lucky.

Even if Jim hadn’t actually broken the ankle, simply twisting or injuring it at all, again, something that sounds like it was a long time coming, would have been enough for him to read something into it. As for Frank’s song, we can’t be sure what the email was actually meant to be referring to. It could be something as simple as a song that Jack had recommended Frank listen to in their last encounter, or he could have assumed that Frank would use him as inspiration to write a song after his death.

Remember, these are friends and cousins that Jack knew for most of his life, it’s hardly a stretch to think that he had some idea how their minds worked, and how they might have responded to his death and these messages.

Wrap Up

Ultimately, the true origin of Jack Froese’s emails will remain a mystery forever. If someone with his password sent them, they aren’t talking. If they were scheduled emails, there may be no way to identify it. While I believe this is a mystery the family could probably solve if they wanted to, that’s not going to happen.

Tim had spoken to Jack’s mother about the emails and she told him, “Think what you want about it, or just accept it as a gift.” He went on to say “If someone’s messing around, I don’t care because I take it whatever way I want.” The overwhelming response from the parties involved has been that these emails, while shocking at first, are a blessing. They provided comfort, and the mystery around them keeps people talking about Jack, long after his death.

While I have my theory, perhaps this is a mystery that is best left unsolved. But it wasn’t ghosts.

Bonus Facts

Too lazy to schedule posthumous emails yourself? There’s an app for that! There is a wide range of apps and companies that allow you to write and schedule emails to be sent after your death. They work by either having a second person inform the company of your death, or by automatically sending them if the subscriber fails to check in within a specified period of time.

While devices similar to the Ouija board can be found in historical writings dating as far back as 1100 AD, the modern board was designed by businessman Elijah Bond on July 1, 1890. According to The Smithsonian, the creator asked the board what to name it, and the word Ouija was what came out. When asked what it meant, the board replied “good luck”.

The mechanism responsible for moving the planchette on a Ouija board, or any talking board, is called the ideomotor effect. The ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon resulting in a subject making motions unconsciously. Every time a talking board has been used under laboratory conditions, it has been demonstrable that the subjects were unconsciously moving the planchette. To date, zero ghosts have ever communicated through the use of a Ouija board, not even the one that allegedly named it.

Defying all logic and reason, a belief in ghosts and the supernatural has increased dramatically in the United States over the past several decades. When Gallup surveyed adults in 2005 asking if they believe in “ghosts or that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations”, 32% did. When Gallup had asked the same question in 1990, the result was only 25%.

Depending on the sample size that may be within a margin of error, but in the late 1970’s it was barely above 10%. Compare that with polls from the past few years, and the number of Americans that believe in ghosts has risen to anywhere from 43%-57%, depending on the poll. This roughly corresponds to the percentage of American adults that did not wear masks despite the pandemic, so I guess that percentage of the population just hates science.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Jack Froese?

Jack Froese was an American born on December 15, 1978, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He earned a degree in sound recording, loved music, founded and played in local bands, enjoyed motorcycles, animals, and tattoos. He was married with two kids and was known for his larger-than-life personality.

How did Jack Froese die?

Jack Froese died suddenly on June 10, 2011, at age 32, from a fatal heart arrhythmia, also known as sudden cardiac death.

What were the contents of the emails sent from Jack Froese’s account?

The emails sent from Jack Froese’s account included one to his friend Tim with the subject ‘I’m Watching’ and the message ‘Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your fucking attic!!!’ and another to his cousin Jim about Jim’s broken ankle and a song Frank wrote.

What are the theories about the Jack Froese emails?

Theories about the Jack Froese emails include: it was Jack’s ghost sending the emails, someone hacked his account or it was a prank, or Jack scheduled the emails to be sent posthumously.

What is the ideomotor effect?

The ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon resulting in a subject making motions unconsciously, which is responsible for moving the planchette on a Ouija board.

What is the author’s preferred explanation for the Jack Froese emails?

The author’s preferred explanation is that Jack Froese scheduled the emails to be sent posthumously, knowing he had a risk of sudden cardiac death.

What was the reaction of Jack Froese’s family to the emails?

The reaction from Jack Froese’s family was that the emails, while shocking at first, are a blessing. They provided comfort and kept people talking about Jack.

What is the author’s stance on the existence of ghosts?

The author does not believe in ghosts and dismisses the idea that the emails were sent by Jack Froese’s ghost.

What is the significance of the date the emails were sent?

The emails were sent 5 months and 21 days after Jack Froese’s death, which the author suggests sounds like they were scheduled to send 6 months later.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Mystery of the Jack Froese Emails: Contact From Beyond the Grave?
• Hero image source by Tawhid Sadman / openverse, cc0.