History Main / DeadAllAlong

* In the episode "Enigma" Gibbs gets a call from his former Marine CO, Colonel Ryan. Ryan claims that he's found out some horrible secret that the government is willing to kill him over, and that he's working with his and Gibbs' old XO, Lt. Cameron, to expose it before it's too late. Gibbs meets with them, only to reveal that the ''real'' Lt. Cameron died in Gibbs' arms years ago in Iraq. The "Cameron" we see interacting with Ryan is a hallucination brought on by Ryan's undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia.
* The episode "Swan Song" starts out with a body bag being loaded into the van in a [[DramaticThunder thunderstorm]], hinting that someone important has been KilledOffForReal. The episode continues through flashbacks interspersed with Gibbs standing by the body in the autopsy room, while Mike Franks is standing behind him. It is foreshadowed a few times (notably when Gibbs sees Franks sitting on his couch before he actually arrives, or when Franks enigmatically tells him that he hears ghosts), but the big reveal comes near the end: The dead guy, of course, is Franks.

* The ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' episode "Swan Song" starts out with a body bag being loaded into the van in a [[DramaticThunder thunderstorm]], hinting that someone important has been KilledOffForReal. The episode continues through flashbacks interspersed with Gibbs standing by the body in the autopsy room, while Mike Franks is standing behind him. It is foreshadowed a few times (notably when Gibbs sees Franks sitting on his couch before he actually arrives, or when Franks enigmatically tells him that he hears ghosts), but the big reveal comes near the end: The dead guy, of course, is Franks.

* In ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventureGoldenWind'', this happened to Bruno Bucciarati. He really died after his first confrontation with King Crimson. It's only Gold Experience and his own resolve that keep him going up to the end.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Chelsea}}'', Daniel turns out to be this.

* The first letter from each chapter of ''VideoGame/DeadSpace'' spell out "NICOLEISDEAD". Which she is. The person Isaac sees on the Ishimura is apparently a mental projection originating from the Marker. While her death is shown at the very end of ''VideoGame/DeadSpaceExtraction'' and she is eventually revealed to have the same fate in the ''VideoGame/DeadSpaceRemake'', the version of Nicole Isaac sees is later revealed to be doctor [[AscendedExtra Elizabeth Cross]] due to the Marker Dementia affecting his senses.

* The HGame ''Nanairo Reincarnation'' revolves around Kagomi Makoto moving into his late grandfather's estate that is populated by several Yokai, and he also meets Kotori Takigawa, who asks his help in finding her lost dog, and she moves in with him afterwards, not having memory of her recent past. He also meets Azusa Fushimi, a detective who used to work with his gradfather by consulting him with the use of his ability to see spirits to help them solve cases. After banishing a malevolent spirit from a local park, several young women go missing in the area, and both Fushimi and their spirits ask Makoto and the Yokai in his house to help them solve the case. Depending on the choices the player makes Makoto and his Yokai may or may not be joined by Fushimi when they figure out that there's a SerialKiller on the lose and plan to break into his house/lair and gather evidence of his wrong doing since they didn't have enough proof for a search warrant. Kotori stays outside and acts as a lookout while Makoto and the others investigate inside, where they discover several large freezers with the bodies of missing young women inside, [[OffWithHisHead beheaded]] and [[AnArmAndALeg dismembered]], with some of their body parts sewn into a single "ideal" body. When Kotori runs inside after she got nervous outside, the others try to get her to leave, [[DiscoveringYourOwnDeadBody but Kotori comes face to face with her severed head]], and remembers that on the day her dog went missing she was abducted by the killer and brutally murdered.

* In the film version of ''Manga/{{AKIRA}}'', the eponymous psychokineticist has been dead for a long time, his organs kept in cryopreservation.

* Three suicidal people in ''Anime/ParanoiaAgent'' decided to meet up after chatting online about how they wanted to end it all. They decided to form a suicide pact, meet up in real life, and discussed how they wanted to end it all. One of them didn't want to die through painfully violent means, like in a car crash or jumping off a building. One of them didn't want to kill himself directly, such as slitting his throat, and the last one wanted to make sure that their bodies would be discovered, so the world would know they existed at all. They soon went through ''numerous'' botched attempts, such as hiding in a condemned building while it was being torn down, and carbon monoxide poisoning by running a car inside a closed garage. Finally, they thought it would be great to get Little Slugger to kill them, after all the media attention this character was getting through the numerous deaths related to him. HilarityEnsues as Little Slugger ends up running away from ''them.'' By the end of the episode, the three become dejected and weigh their options again, while watching the sun set. In an especially ironic twist on this trope, the eldest of the three noticed that none of them had a shadow and slowly pieced it all together. For the audience watching, the point when they lose their shadows was just after the "failed" attempt at carbon monoxide poisoning.

** ''VideoGame/PokemonSwordAndShield'' also features a little girl NPC who asked you to bring a letter to her friend in Ballonlea Town. Her friend turns out to be an old guy who explained he has a sickly girl as friend in the past. Then, when you return to where the little girl was, she's nowhere to be found, but you found a Reaper's Cloth, an item used to evolve certain ''Ghost''-type Pokemon, and a thank-you voice out of nowhere.

* In ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13115527/1/Except-That-Little-Closet Except That Little Closet]]'' Harry is asked by Draco to investigate his mother's death, onlt to discover that Draco killed himself the day it happened because he was indirectly responsible. His ghost had forgotten most of the details by now and believed it was a case of murder.

** The episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E16TheHitchHiker The Hitch-Hiker]]" opens with a woman who's nearly lost her life in a car crash. Soon after, she starts seeing a mysterious hitchhiker who appears to her and only her, and she starts to think that Death [[BalancingDeathsBooks is coming for her]]. It's only when she stops to call her mother that she realizes that she didn't survive that car crash.
** Everyone in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E69ThePassersby The Passersby]]".
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E74DeathsHeadRevisited Deaths-Head Revisited]]", a former concentration camp commander pays a visit to his old camp, only to be confronted by one of his former inmates. It's only at the end that he remembers he killed the prisoner in question.
** The episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E84TheHunt The Hunt]]" is about an old man who goes out hunting at night with his dog and comes home to find that he died on the trip and is now a ghost.

** In an extremely disturbing way, "Kentucky Rye" ends on this note. After managing to walk away from a car crash, Bob Spindler (drunk at the time) wanders into a bar and, after befriending the patrons and the owner, winds up ''buying'' it (after getting a little help from a somber-looking man). The next morning, Bob wakes up in the bar... which is dusty and abandoned. The somber man is with him. And as they look outside, they see police and ambulance workers clean up a car crash outside the "Kentucky Rye". The victims? The somber man... and [[DiscoveringYourOwnDeadBody Bob (who hit him, then crashed)]].
** In "Nightsong", Andrea Fields is visited by her ex-boyfriend Simon Locke, whom she has not seen for five years. She later discovers that he is a ghost when he shows her his skeletal remains and crashed motorcycle at the bottom of a cliff. Simon tells her that he has returned in order to convince her to let go of her feelings for him and get on with her life.
** {{Implied|Trope}} in "Love is Blind". Jack Haines wonders how the BlindMusician could have survived getting shot in the head, which should have been fatal. However, the musician refuses to answer.

* In the ''Animation/Bread Barbershop'' episode "Ghost House", the actors Bread gives makeovers turn out to have already been dead after a car crash, to Bread and Choco's shock.

* According to ''Literature/TenSixtySixAndAllThat'', Queen Anne was dead for her entire reign, which ended when people finally noticed.
* In Washington Irving's ''The Adventure of the German Student'' a beautiful woman the title character sleeps with turns out to have been beheaded the day before.

* The curse of Class 3-3 in ''Literature/{{Another}}'' causes a dead person to be added to the class roster each school year. Because the "extra" is not aware they are dead and everyone else's memories are altered to accept their presence, it's nearly impossible to tell who in the class is the "extra" until they vanish following graduation. In the meantime, the members of the class suffer any number of {{Cruel and Unusual Death}}s as reality attempts to [[BalancingDeathsBooks correct itself]]. This has been going on for two and a half ''decades'' - in 1998, the year the story takes place, the "extra" is assistant homeroom teacher Ms. Mikami, aka Kouichi's aunt Reiko.
* In ''Literature/BlackLegion'', it turns out that Nefertari died years before the story began, but Khayon kept them alive through his sheer force of will and psychic powers. He also erased their memories of the death, for fear that if they remembered, they'd die.

* ''Film/{{Fall}}'': Everything that happened after Becky supposedly pulled Hunter up was a delusion Becky visualized due to her dehydration and hunger, as Hunter fell and hit the satellite below and bled out.

* ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague'': In the episode "Legends", it turns out all the members of the Justice Guild of America died decades ago saving the world from a nuclear holocaust. The heroes they'd been interacting with were sentient mental constructs created by their KidSidekick Ray, who had been horribly mutated by the radioactive fallout into an incredibly powerful psychic and recreated his idealized fantasy rather than face the true reality. Once Ray is killed, the Justice Guild accept their fate and die for a second time, and the entire world fades back to the post-apocalyptic wasteland it really was. All the townspeople were real though, and are very grateful to be freed from an unending, unchanging nightmare as living props.

* In ''WesternAnimation/ThunderCats2011'', the Tiger Clan was stricken with plague around the time Tygra was born. The more prideful members of the clan rejected Tygra's father Javan's suggestion to seek help from Thundera and convinced him to make a [[DealWithTheDevil deal with the Ancient Spirits of Evil]]. The Spirits agreed to save the clan but demanded that Javan sacrifice Tygra in exchange since Tygra was destined to become their enemy. Javan couldn't go through with it [[SelfFulfillingProphecy and sent Tygra away in a hot air balloon to Thundera]]. The Spirits punished the clan by sending the plague back to the village, killing them all. The Spirits then cursed them with undeath and nightly transformations into mindless horrors.

* The song "She Was Real" by Music/JonEnglish is about a man who takes a fancy to a lost girl named Susie and give her a ride home on his motorbike, only for him to lose her during the ride. When he later finds out that Susie had been dead for years, [[HeroicBSOD he does not take well]].

* A character is revealed to be such midway through Creator/LoisMcMasterBujold's ''Literature/PaladinOfSouls''. There are multiple hints both subtle and otherwise that something odd is going on, but the formal [[TheReveal reveal]] awaits Ista accepting her status as CosmicPlaything once more.
--> "You have no fever. You don't even sweat. Your skin is the same temperature as the air, and if it weren't so beastly hot in this climate more people would have noticed by now!"

* The protagonists in Creator/StephenKing's short story ''Willa'' from ''Literature/JustAfterSunset''.

* DemonicPossession:

* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones'': For about half of the game we're lead to believe that Emperor Vigarde of Grado was the one who started the war. When Ephraim reaches the imperial capital and seemingly slays him, his corpse crumbles into dust. Only then he learns from the shaman Knoll that Vigarde had been dead for over a year, and that his son, Prince Lyon, tried to resurrect him using Grado's Sacred Stone, [[CameBackWrong with the result that he just came back as an]] EmptyShell, with the populace [[ElCidPloy still kept in the dark about his death]]. This experimentation resulted in Lyon becoming manipulated by [[MauotheDemonKing The Demon King]] [[BigBad Fomortiis]]. As a result Fomortiis broke free of his prison within the Sacred Stone, and tricked Lyon into using the resurrected Emperor Vigarde as a soulless puppet, to invade Magvel beginning with longtime Grado ally Renais to destroy the other [[RestrainingBolt Sacred Stones]], allowing Fomortiis to be restored to full vitality.

* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones'': For about half of the game we're lead to believe that Emperor Vigarde of Grado was the one who started the war. When Ephraim reaches the imperial capital and seemingly slays him, his corpse crumbles into dust. Only then he learns from the shaman Knoll that Vigarde had been dead for over a year, and that his son, Prince Lyon, tried to resurrect him using Grado's Sacred Stone, [[CameBackWrong with the result that he just came back as an]] EmptyShell, with the populace [[ElCidPloy still kept in the dark about his death]]. This experimentation resulted in Lyon becoming manipulated by [[MuaotheDemonKing The Demon King]] [[BigBad Fomortiis]]. As a result Fomortiis broke free of his prison within the Sacred Stone, and tricked Lyon into using the resurrected Emperor Vigarde as a soulless puppet, to invade Magvel beginning with longtime Grado ally Renais to destroy the other [[RestrainingBolt Sacred Stones]], allowing Fomortiis to be restored to full vitality.

* ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones'': For about half of the game we're lead to believe that Emperor Vigarde of Grado was the one who started the war. When Ephraim reaches the imperial capital and seemingly slays him, his corpse crumbles into dust. Only then he learns from the shaman Knoll that Vigarde had been dead for over a year, and that his son, Prince Lyon, tried to resurrect him using Grado's Sacred Stone, [[CameBackWrong with the result that he just came back as an]] EmptyShell, with the populace [[ElCidPloy still kept in the dark about his death]].

** Mermaid Man passed away almost a decade ago ([[TheCharacterDiedWithHim implied to be in 2012, the same year as his voice actor]]) and Barnacle Boy followed suit soon after, thus explaining their ChuckCunninghamSyndrome. [=SpongeBob=] remains completely oblivious about their passing and has been told by the caretakers at Shady Sholes that the two old superheroes simply moved away to a [[DogGotSentToAFarm different retirement home]] but nobody wrote down the address. None of [=SpongeBob=]'s friends seem to have the heart to tell him the truth either.

* ''VideoGame/{{OMORI}}'': After the FirstEpisodeTwist that Omori and the Headspace are all a part of the dreams of a boy named Sunny, the player begins to get introduced to [[AndYouWereThere the real life counterparts of Omori's friends]]. Among them, the real world Mari is mentioned but never actually seen. One would assume that she's either moved away to college (as is established to be the case with the real world Hero) or that she's currently in the city helping her and Sunny's mom prepare their new home. That is, until near the end of the first real world segment, where it's revealed that Mari has been dead for the past four years.

* ''Film/ATaleOfTwoSisters'' reveals at the end that Su-mi's younger sister, Su-yeon, died when a fallen wardrobe crushed her and their WickedStepmother Eun-joo [[MurderByInaction knowingly let her perish]] to spite Su-mi for insulting her. The Su-yeon seen throughout the film was Su-mi's hallucination. (The ending ''also'' reveals that there really was a ghost in Su-mi's house, but [[AmbiguousSituation it's not clear]] if it had anything to do with Su-mi's hallucinating.)